Linux fréttir

An anonymous reader shares some free streaming media options: There's over 10,000 public domain audiobooks at LibriVox.org, created by volunteers reading public domain works. (If you've got time, why not record yourself reading your own favorite public domain poem or novel?) And there's also a lot of free audiobooks (and ebooks) available through Hoopla, a free "digital media" service that's partnering with many public libraries across North America. They're not just offering books; there's also movies, music, TV shows, and even comic books. As always, Amazon's audiobook service Audible offers a free one-month trial. But they've now also announced a new free service for "as long as the schools are closed... Kids everywhere can instantly stream an incredible collection of stories..." You can also stream over 6,500 full-length movies over at archive.org, including Night of the Living Dead and The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz. They've even got a collection of classic cartoons, like Tom and Jerry, Betty Boop, the Pink Panther, and lots of Popeye (including one where Popeye runs for president against Bluto.) And an archive.org blog post explains that that's just the beginning: If gaming is more your speed, then check out the MS-DOS Games in our Software Library. This collection includes dozens of classic favorites such as Pac-Man, Sim City, The Oregon Trail, Doom, Prince of Persia, Donkey Kong, and Tetris, as well as many more lesser-known titles such as Aliens Ate My Baby Sitter! and Freddy Pharkas, Frontier Pharmacist. Enjoy simulations of popular board and card games such as Monopoly [press F1 to begin], Stratego, Hearts, or Mah Jong, as well as flight simulators, sports games, and this treat for Monty Python fans. They also have recordings of old-time radio shows -- as well as an archive of live music. ("Our most popular collection by far is The Grateful Dead, but you could also explore Smashing Pumpkins, Robert Randolph (and the Family Band), Disco Biscuits, Death Cab for Cutie, John Mayer, or Grace Potter and the Nocturnals...") And then there's this: Relive the 80's and 90's (and learn how to style your scarf) with the Ephemeral VHS collection, or roam the cosmos with the NASA Image of the Day gallery. Learn about the history of advertising with this collection of retro TV ads or enjoy some psychedelic screensavers. No matter how long you're stuck indoors, the Internet Archive will have something new to offer you — so happy hunting! Share your reactions -- and your own finds and suggestions -- in the comments! And in these days of social distancing, what are the best free entertain sites that you've found?

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"Just had a long engineering discussion with Medtronic about state-of-the-art ventilators," Elon Musk tweeted on Saturday. Medtronic tweeted that the talks also involved Tesla. And TechCrunch notes that Musk tweeted on Friday that both Tesla and SpaceX employees are "working on ventilators...": His confirmation on Twitter that both of the companies he leads are working on ventilators comes a day after New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio made a direct plea to Musk to help alleviate a shortage at hospitals gearing up to combat COVID-19. It's unclear how many employees are working on the ventilators and which Tesla factory -- it could be Buffalo, N.Y., Fremont, Calif., Sparks, Nev. or even Shanghai -- has dedicated space to the project... Whatever Musk decides, his project still faces specific obstacles. Certified medical personnel will need to be involved in such an operation and ventilator hardware used in clinical settings still must be approved by the FDA, which could delay production... GM, Volkswagen and Ford have all reportedly either talked to the White House or committed to looking at the problem. Volkswagen said Friday it has created a task force to look into using 3D printing to make hospital ventilators.

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ZDNet reports that Singapore is fighting the coronavirus with a new smartphone app named "TraceTogether". The app is able to estimate the distance between TraceTogether smartphones as well as the duration of such interactions. The data then is captured, encrypted, and stored locally on the user's phone for 21 days, which spans the incubation period of the virus. When needed in contact tracing, users will have to authorise the uploading of their TraceTogether data to Singapore's Ministry of Health, which then will assess the information and retrieve the mobile numbers of close contacts within that period of time. Developed by Government Technology Agency (GovTech), alongside the health ministry, the app was designed to help speed up the contact tracing process and stem the spread of COVID-19, the government IT office said. GovTech said the current processed depended heavily on the memory of patients, who might not be ale to remember all close contacts or have the contact details and information of these individuals. The mobile app can plug the gaps and more quickly identify potential carriers, who then can monitor their health and take the necessary action sooner... Data logs were stored locally on the mobile phone and contained only cryptographically generated temporary IDs. The data logs would be extracted only when needed by the authorities for contact tracing, it said.

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A senior Russian official says an upcoming digital assets bill will ban the issuing and selling of cryptocurrencies. Forbes reports: "We believe there are big risks of legalizing the operations with the cryptocurrencies, from the standpoint of financial stability, money laundering prevention and consumer protection," Russia's central bank head of legal, Alexey Guznov, told Russia news agency Interfax this week in comments translated to English via Google. "We are opposed to the fact that there are institutions that organize the release of cryptocurrency and facilitate its circulation," Guznov said, adding the coming bill "directly formulates a ban on the issue, as well as on the organization of circulation of cryptocurrency, and introduces liability for violation of this ban...." However, Guznov admitted that Russia would not be able to completely ban bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. "Nobody is going to ban owning cryptocurrencies," Guznov said, adding people will not be punished for owning crypto "if they made their deal in a jurisdiction that does not prohibit that."

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America's Food and Drug Administration has approved a coronavirus test from a company called Cepheid. It can deliver its results in about 45 minutes, "much faster than current tests that require a sample to be sent to a centralized lab, where results can take days," reports The Hill: The test has been designed to operate on any of Cepheid's more than 23,000 automated GeneXpert Systems worldwide, of which 5,000 are in the U.S., the company said. The systems are already being used to test for conditions such as HIV and tuberculosis. The systems do not require users to have specialty training to perform testing and are capable of running around the clock. "An accurate test delivered close to the patient can be transformative" and can "help alleviate the pressure" that the COVID-19 outbreak has put on health facilities, David Persing, Cepheid's chief medical and technology officer, said in a statement.

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"The dramatic expansion of teleworking by U.S. schools, businesses and government agencies in response to the coronavirus is raising fresh questions about the capacity and security of the tools many Americans use to connect to vital workplace systems and data," reports CNN: As of last week the Air Force's virtual private networking software could only support 72,000 people at once, according to a federal contractor who was also not authorized to speak on the record, and telework briefing materials viewed by CNN. The Air Force employs over 145,000 in-house civilian workers, and over 130,000 full-time contractors. As they increasingly log on from home, Americans are having to meld their personal technology with professional tools at unprecedented scale. For employers, the concern isn't just about capacity, but also about workers introducing new potential vulnerabilities into their routine — whether that's weak passwords on personal computers, poorly secured home WiFi routers, or a family member's device passing along a computer virus. Long-time Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein also worries about a world where "doctors switch to heavy use of video office visits, and in general more critical information than ever is suddenly being thrust onto the Internet..." For example, the U.S. federal government is suspending key aspects of medical privacy laws to permit use of "telemedicine" via commercial services that have never been certified to be in compliance with the strict security and privacy rules associated with HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). The rush to provide more remote access to medical professionals is understandable, but we must also understand the risks of data breaches that once having occurred can never be reversed.

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Linus Torvalds himself "changed around the kernel's pipe code to use exclusive waits when reading or writing," reports Phoronix. "While this doesn't mean much for traditional/common piping of data, the GNU Make job-server is a big benefactor as it relies upon a pipe for limiting the parallelism" -- especially on high-core-count CPUs. This drew an interesting follow-up from Slashdot reader rockyb, who was wondering if anyone could verify that GNU Make 4.3 speeds up build times: I updated and released a fork of that called remake which includes hooks to profile a build, and has a complete debugger in it (although most of the time the better tracing that is in there is enough). The most recent version has a feature though that I really like and use a lot which is adding an option to look in parent directories for a Makefile if none is found in the current directory. You can download the source code from either github or sourceforge. Both have a full list of the release notes. Sorry, at the time of this writing no packagers have picked up the newest release. Repology has a list of packages for older versions though.

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"Former astronaut Alfred M. Worden, command module pilot on the Apollo 15 lunar landing, passed away March 18, 2020, in Texas," reports NASA.gov. His son-in-law told the New York Times Worden apparently died of a stroke. "Al was an American hero whose achievements in space and on Earth will never be forgotten," tweeted NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. Slashdot reader Iwastheone shares NASA's remembrance: As command module pilot, Worden stayed in orbit while commander David Scott and lunar module pilot James B. Irwin explored the Moon's Hadley Rille and Appennine Mountains. Apollo 15's command module, dubbed Endeavour, was the first to have its own module of scientific instruments. During the flight back from the Moon, Worden retrieved film from cameras in the module during a spacewalk. Altogether, Worden logged more than 295 hours in space. "The thing that was most interesting to me was taking photographs of very faint objects with a special camera that I had on board," Worden told Smithsonian Magazine in 2011. "These objects reflect sunlight, but it's very, very weak and you can't see it from [Earth]. There are several places between the Earth and the moon that are stable equilibrium points. And if that's the case, there has to be a dust cloud there. I got pictures of that." Like other command module pilots, Worden stayed as busy as his colleagues on the surface. But he also took some time to enjoy the view. "Every time I came around the moon I went to a window and watched the Earth rise and that was pretty unique." In 1972 Worden appeared twice on Mister Rogers Neighborhood. And Mister Rogers also filmed segments at Cape Canaveral, with Worden demonstrating his space suit and later supplying answers to a list of questions from children while standing in the mission's launch room. "I asked Fred to let me take the list into space," Worden wrote in his autobiography. "I would think about them during the flight, I promised, and then answer when I returned."

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Linus Torvalds tells ZDNet what he's learned about working remotely: Torvalds admits that when he started, "I worried about missing human interaction -- not just talking to people in the office and hallways, but going out to lunch etc. It turns out I never really missed it." Of course, just saying "'don't be social' isn't much of a great tip, is it?" Nor, as many extroverts are now finding out, is working from home necessarily at all comfortable. So, Torvalds suggests that you take "advantage of the 'real' upside of working from home: flexibility... Torvalds says, "if you make your new life a '9-5, but from home' kind of thing, I think you're just going to hate your home, yourself and your life. All the downsides, none of the upsides...." He believes that instead of using "video conferencing instead to recreate exactly what we used to do before, you should" try to really change how you work. Use asynchronous communication models: messaging, email, shared calendars, whatever. Torvalds also recommends carefully tracking the things that you need to do, but argues that if you're spending hours in online meetings from home instead of hours in real-world meetings, "you've just taken the worst part of office life, and brought it home, and made it even worse..." And the article also includes some tips from James Bottomley, an IBM Research Distinguished Engineer and senior Linux kernel developer who works closely with Torvald. For videoconferencing Bottomley uses NextCloud Talk and Zoom, which he calls a "horrible proprietary app" -- but notes that it does have binaries for every Linux distro.

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Java "remains the world's most popular programming language," notes ZDNet, reporting on Oracle's release this week of Java Development Kit (JDK) 14, Oracle's "reference implementation of the Java 14 programming language spec." Rolling out in line with Oracle's six-monthly release schedule that began with Java 9 in 2017, JDK 14 includes enhancements that Oracle says will improve developer productivity... According to Georges Saab, Oracle vice president of development for the Java Platform, the faster six-monthly releases are helping developers adopt new features more rapidly due to regular expected changes. Java 9, for example, was released more than three years after Java 8... Saab notes that major improvements in JDK 14 include a Foreign-Memory Access API enhancement (JEP 370), and improvements from Project Amber, another OpenJDK project, including Pattern Matching (JEP 305) and a preview of Records (JEP 359). Oracle JDK 14 will receive at least two quarterly updates in line with Oracle's critical-patch update schedule before Java 15 is released in September 2020. Oracle is providing Java 14 as the Oracle OpenJDK release under an open-source GNU General Public License v2. It's also released under a commercial license using Oracle JDK. Most of the nearly 2,000 fixes in JDK 14 have been made by Oracle employees while 528 came from individual developers and other organizations. Some of the main contributors included Red Hat, SAP, Google, Arm, Intel, and NTT Data.

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An anonymous reader quotes the Dev newsletter from Inside.com: The U.S. Supreme Court has postponed hearing oral arguments in the Google vs. Oracle copyright case and all other cases because of the coronavirus. It is the first time the Supreme Court has done so since the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918. ["The Court also shortened its argument calendars in August 1793 and August 1798 in response to yellow fever outbreaks," the announcement points out.] "The court will examine the options for rescheduling those cases in due course in light of the developing circumstances," the announcement added. Justices on the U.S. Supreme Court were scheduled to hear oral arguments in the Google vs. Oracle case on Tuesday, March 24, 2020, before making a decision a few months later.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: As law firms urge attorneys to work from home during the global pandemic, their employees' confidential phone calls with clients run the risk of being heard by Amazon and Google. Mishcon de Reya LLP, the U.K. law firm that famously advised Princess Diana on her divorce and also does corporate law, issued advice to staff to mute or shut off listening devices like Amazon's Alexa or Google's voice assistant when they talk about client matters at home, according to a partner at the firm. It suggested not to have any of the devices near their work space at all. Mishcon's warning covers any kind of visual or voice enabled device, like Amazon and Google's speakers. But video products such as Ring, which is also owned by Amazon, and even baby monitors and closed-circuit TVs, are also a concern, said Mishcon de Reya partner Joe Hancock, who also heads the firm's cybersecurity efforts. The firm worries about the devices being compromised, less so with name-brand products like Alexa, but more so for a cheap knock-off devices, he added.

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Tips from El Reg hack with two decades of WFH experience

If you aren’t already, chances are that your home will soon become a prison of sorts as efforts to contain the spread of the coronavirus force, or at least encourage, us to “shelter in place” with only very occasional trips out for food, medicine, and fresh air.…

According to users on Reddit and ResetEra, Bethesda launched Doom Eternal with a DRM-free copy of the game's executable sitting in plain sight amid the download package. Ars Technica reports: Forum users on Reddit and ResetEra were among the first yesterday to report on the "official" DRM-free leak, which sat in a sub-folder titled "Original" for the Bethesda Launcher version of the game. That 67MB file can reportedly replace the 370MB, DRM-protected executable in the main game folder with minimal effort and no practical effect on playability. Ars has been unable to independently verify these reports, as a subsequent patch has apparently removed the DRM-free executable. But the trackers at CrackWatch and repackers in the cracking community have confirmed that the DRM-free version was distributed and working shortly after launch. And while the DRM-free version still requires a Bethesda account login the first time it's run, forum reports suggest crackers have already discovered a simple method to patch that check for a completely offline pirated experience.

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When science reality is more interesting than science fiction

Astronomers have discovered the universe’s most powerful winds: driven by supermassive black holes, they ripple across interstellar space bulldozing through material in galaxies, and are known as quasar tsunamis, we're told.…

A quantum sensor could give Soldiers a way to detect communication signals over the entire radio frequency spectrum, from 0 to 100 GHz, said researchers from the Army. Such wide spectral coverage by a single antenna is impossible with a traditional receiver system, and would require multiple systems of individual antennas, amplifiers and other components. Phys.Org reports: In 2018, Army scientists were the first in the world to create a quantum receiver that uses highly excited, super-sensitive atoms -- known as Rydberg atoms -- to detect communications signals, said David Meyer, a scientist at the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's Army Research Laboratory. The researchers calculated the receiver's channel capacity, or rate of data transmission, based on fundamental principles, and then achieved that performance experimentally in their lab -- improving on other groups' results by orders of magnitude, Meyer said. "These new sensors can be very small and virtually undetectable, giving Soldiers a disruptive advantage," Meyer said. "Rydberg-atom based sensors have only recently been considered for general electric field sensing applications, including as a communications receiver. While Rydberg atoms are known to be broadly sensitive, a quantitative description of the sensitivity over the entire operational range has never been done." To assess potential applications, Army scientists conducted an analysis of the Rydberg sensor's sensitivity to oscillating electric fields over an enormous range of frequencies -- from 0 to 1012 Hertz. The results show that the Rydberg sensor can reliably detect signals over the entire spectrum and compare favorably with other established electric field sensor technologies, such as electro-optic crystals and dipole antenna-coupled passive electronics. The findings have been published in the Journal of Physics B: Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Last year's summer was so warm that it helped trigger the loss of 600 billion tons of ice from Greenland -- enough to raise global sea levels by 2.2mm in just two months, new research has found. Unlike the retreat of sea ice, the loss of land-based glaciers directly causes the seas to rise, imperiling coastal cities and towns around the world. Scientists have calculated that Greenland's enormous ice sheet lost an average of 268 billion tons of ice between 2002 and 2019 -- less than half of what was shed last summer. By contrast, Los Angeles county, which has more than 10 million residents, consumes 1 billion tons of water a year. "We knew this past summer had been particularly warm in Greenland, melting every corner of the ice sheet, but the numbers are enormous," said Isabella Velicogna, a professor of Earth system science at University of California Irvine and lead author of the new study, which drew upon measurements taken by Nasa's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace) satellite mission and its upgraded successor, Grace Follow-On. "In Antarctica, the mass loss in the west proceeds unabated, which is very bad news for sea level rise," Velicogna said. "But we also observe a mass gain in the Atlantic sector of east Antarctica caused by an increase in snowfall, which helps mitigate the enormous increase in mass loss that we've seen in the last two decades in other parts of the continent."

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Longtime Slashdot reader dbart writes: With the near ubiquitous use of smartphones in America, it's sensible to seize upon this resource to help with the coronavirus pandemic. Here's my take on a way to use smartphones to deal with the pandemic: America does not currently have a good coronavirus test -- but they are in development. Once a test is available there should be a smartphone app ready to deploy immediately. The app should work like this: A person would be tested for the virus at a testing station and the results of the test would be entered into the app's database. The person could then go about their business, such as going back to work. Upon arriving at the place of work, the person would bring up the app on their smartphone. The app would display some information to identify the subject that was tested along with a barcode. The employer would then scan in the barcode with the app on the employer's phone which will check with the central database and report back the results of their coronavirus test and the recency of the test. The employer would decide whether to allow the person into the workplace. This could similarly be used to safely allow entry to a restaurant, airplane, theater, sporting event, etc. -- thus getting the economy functioning again. I've only presented a rough sketch of my idea about this above and there's many nuances to how this should work. It's obvious that everyone should be tested frequently for this to be effective. This would require testing on a massive scale, but considering the damage happening to the American economy, such massive testing could easily be justified. A capability as described above would get the American economy restarted at the soonest possible time and would allow society to function until a vaccine is available. It would also be a very valuable asset to epidemiological investigators. If an app was designed with enough forethought it could be deployed internationally. I'm hoping to get not just a Slashdot conversation but a larger conversation started about the use of technology to defeat this virus. Perhaps there's a Slashdotter with the skillsets to make this happen who would like to take this on. If anyone has a contact at the CDC please forward this post to them to insure that technological solutions such as this are being considered.

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In celebration of Windows 10 hitting 1 billion users, Microsoft's chief product officer Panos Panay teased Windows 10's next UI refresh. Gizmodo reports: In the video posted to Instagram, Microsoft starts by showing the evolution of its OS throughout the years going as far back as Windows 1.01 all the way to Windows 10. However, where things start to get interesting is around 12 seconds in when Microsoft shows off a new set of updated icons followed by a redesigned look for Windows 10's Start Menu and Live Tiles. Instead of a bunch of brightly color rectangles, Microsoft is implementing a more unified color scheme that can adjust automatically to match your desktop background and potentially other UI elements. Additionally, Microsoft also showed off a wide variety of accessibility options including a range of pointers in various sizes and colors, what looks like improved support for the Xbox Adaptive Controller, a tease for a new built-in snipping tool, and more. Then Microsoft capped everything off by showing light and dark themes for Windows 10 along with a bunch of windows resizing and snapping options, all designed to making multi-tasking just a bit faster and easier. Microsoft also made a point to mention support for both x86-based systems powered by chips from Intel and AMD and ARM-based systems like the Surface Pro X.

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You may want to check what you're actually teaching your neural networks in future

Boffins in Germany have devised a technique to subvert neural network frameworks so they misidentify images without any telltale signs of tampering.…