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The BBC reports: A meteorite that crashed into a home in the U.S. is older than planet Earth, scientists have said... Researchers at the University of Georgia examined a fragment of the rock that pierced the roof of a home in the city of McDonough [30 miles south of Georgia, on June 26]. They found that, based on the type of meteorite, it is expected to have formed 4.56 billion years ago, making it roughly 20 million years older than Earth... The rock quickly diminished in size and speed, but still travelled at least 1 km per second, going through a man's roof in Henry County... Using optical and electron microscopy, Scott Harris [a Univeristy of Georgia geologist] and his team determined the rock was a chondrite — the most abundant type of stony meteorite, according to NASA — which meant that it was approximately 4.56 billion years old. "The home's resident said he is still finding pieces of space dust around his home from the hit."

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Plasma 6.4.5 is coming September 9th, reports Neowin. But they also report that the KDE team is already focusing on other upcoming release: Starting with KDE Frameworks, KDE's collection of foundational libraries, version 6.18 promises to let you do something with that "dumb" Microsoft Copilot key found on many new laptops. The developers will soon allow you to set up keyboard shortcuts using this new key, and the team plans to let you remap it to another key in the future. If you're curious, one user on KDE's bug tracker noted that on GNOME, the key combination shows up as "Meta+Shift+Touchpad Disable" and is fully remappable... When you try to install a Flatpak from a website like Flathub in Plasma 6.5 [coming in October], Discover now has proper support for flatpak+https:// URLs, so it opens automatically. 6.5 is also bringing a much stricter window activation policy on Wayland to stop applications from rudely stealing your focus. And now, when you mute your microphone with a shortcut, the "Mute Microphone" button will mute all input sources, not just the active one. Since Firefox does not block the system from sleeping during a download, the Plasma Browser Integration extension for Firefox has gotten an update to handle that job itself.

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One of America's largest solar + battery storage projects "is now fully online in Mojave, California," reports Electrek: Arevon Energy's Eland Solar-plus-Storage Project combines 758 megawatts (MWdc) of solar with 300 MW/1,200 megawatt hours of battery storage. Eland 1 reached commercial operation in December 2024, and Eland 2 recently commenced full operation. The two combined comprise 1.36 million solar panels and 172 lithium iron phosphate batteries (LFP). Combined, the Eland 1 & 2 projects will be able to power more than 266,000 homes annually, and overall, can provide 7% of the total electricity requirements for the city of Los Angeles. "Arevon's Eland Solar-plus-Storage Project alone will ... push the city's clean energy share above 60%, a major milestone in LA's transition to being powered by 100% clean energy by 2035," said Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. Eland 1 & 2 created around 1,000 jobs to construct the project, and it's expected to disburse more than $36 million in local government payments throughout its lifetime. The article points out that Arevon Energy "has more than 4,500 MW of solar and battery storage projects operating across 17 states — and more than 6 GW of new projects in its pipeline."

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Thursday saw the release of Rust 1.89.0 But this week the Rust Foundation also released its second comprehensive annual technology report. A Rust Foundation announcement shares some highlights: - Trusted Publishing [GitHub Actions authentication using cryptographically signed tokens] fully launched on crates.io, enhancing supply chain security and streamlining workflows for maintainers. - Major progress on crate signing infrastructure using The Update Framework (TUF), including three full repository implementations and stakeholder consensus. - Integration of the Ferrocene Language Specification (FLS) into the Rust Project, marking a critical step toward a formal Rust language specification [and "laying the groundwork for broader safety certification and formal tooling."] - 75% reduction in CI infrastructure costs while maintaining contributor workflow stability. ["All Rust repositories are now managed through Infrastructure-as-Code, improving maintainability and security."] - Expansion of the Safety-Critical Rust Consortium, with multiple international meetings and advances on coding guidelines aligned with safety standards like MISRA. ["The consortium is developing practical coding guidelines, aligned tooling, and reference materials to support regulated industries — including automotive, aerospace, and medical devices — adopting Rust."] - Direct engagement with ISO C++ standards bodies and collaborative Rust-C++ exploration... The Foundation finalized its strategic roadmap, participated in ISO WG21 meetings, and initiated cross-language tooling and documentation planning. These efforts aim to unlock Rust adoption across legacy C++ environments without sacrificing safety. The Rust Foundation also acknowledges continued funding from OpenSSF's Alpha-Omega Project and "generous infrastructure donations from organizations like AWS, GitHub, and Mullvad VPN" to the Foundation's Security Initiative, which enabled advances like including GitHub Secret Scanning and automated incident response to "Trusted Publishing" and the integration of vulnerability-surfacing capabilities into crates.io. There was another announcement this week. In November AWS and the Rust Foundation crowdsourced "an effort to verify the Rust standard library" — and it's now resulted in a new formal verification tool called "Efficient SMT-based Context-Bounded Model Checker" (or ESBMCESBMC) This winning contribution adds ESBMC — a state-of-the-art bounded model checker — to the suite of tools used to analyze and verify Rust's standard library. By integrating through Goto-Transcoder, they enabled ESBMC to operate seamlessly in the Rust verification workflow, significantly expanding the scope and flexibility of verification efforts... This achievement builds on years of ongoing collaboration across the Rust and formal verification communities... The collaboration has since expanded. In addition to verifying the Rust standard library, the team is exploring the use of formal methods to validate automated C-to-Rust translations, with support from AWS. This direction, highlighted by AWS Senior Principal Scientist Baris Coskun and celebrated by the ESBMC team in a recent LinkedIn post, represents an exciting new frontier for Rust safety and verification tooling.

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Five pilot deployments are just a drop in the bucket, so it's time to turbo scale

def con A DEF CON hacker walks into a small-town water facility…no, this is not the setup for a joke or a (super-geeky) odd-couple rom-com. It's a true story that happened at five utilities across four states.…

xA California man sued Microsoft Thursday over its plan to stop supporting Windows 10 on October 14th, reports Courthouse News Though Windows 11 was launched nearly four years ago, many of its billion or so worldwide users are clinging to the decade-old Windows 10... According to StatCounter, nearly 43% of Windows users still use the old version on their desktop computers.... "With only three months until support ends for Windows 10, it is likely that many millions of users will not buy new devices or pay for extended support," Klein writes in his complaint. "These users — some of whom are businesses storing sensitive consumer data — will be at a heightened risk of a cyberattack or other data security incident, a reality of which Microsoft is well aware...." According to one market analyst writing in 2023, Microsoft's shift away from Windows 10 will lead millions of customers to buy new devices and thrown out their old ones, consigning as many as 240 million PCs to the landfill.... Klein is asking a judge to order Microsoft to continue supporting Windows 10 without additional charge, until the number of devices running the older operating system falls bellow 10% of total Windows users. He says nothing about any money he seeking for himself, though it does ask for attorneys' fees. Microsoft did not respond to an email requesting a comment. The complaint also requests an order requiring Microsoft's advertising "to disclose clearly and prominently the approximate end-of-support date for the Windows operating system purchased with the device at the time of purchase" or at least "disclose that support is only guaranteed for a certain delineated period of time without additional cost, and to disclose the potential consequences of such end-of-support for device security and functionality."

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Decision to use MXFP4 makes models smaller, faster, and more importantly, cheaper for everyone involved

Analysis Whether or not OpenAI's new open weights models are any good is still up for debate, but their use of a relatively new data type called MXFP4 is arguably more important, especially if it catches on among OpenAI's rivals.…

AOL (now a Yahoo subsidiary) just announced its dial-up internet service will be discontinued at the end of September. "The change also means the retirement of the AOL Dialer software and the AOL Shield browser, both designed for older operating systems and slow connections that relied on the familiar screech of a modem handshake," remembers Slashdot reader BrianFagioli (noting that dial-up Internet "was once the gateway to the web for millions of households, back when speeds were measured in kilobits and waiting for a picture to load could feel like an eternity.") AOL's dial-up service "has been publicly available for 34 years," writes Tom's Hardware. But AppleInsider notes the move comes more than 40 years after AOL started "as a very early Apple service." AOL itself started back in 1983 under the name Control Video Corporation, offering online services for the Atari 2600 console. After failing, it became Quantum Computer Services in 1985, eventually launching AppleLink in 1988 to connect Macintosh computers together... With the launch of PC Link for IBM-compatible PCs in 1988 and parting from Apple in October 1989, the company rebranded itself as America Online, or AOL... Even at its height, dial-up connections could get up to 56 kilobits per second under ideal conditions, while modern connections are measured in megabits and gigabits. Most of the service was also what's considered a "walled garden," with features that were only available through AOL itself and that it wasn't the actual, untamed Internet. In the 1990s AOL "was how millions of people were introduced to the Internet," the article remembers, adding that "Even after the AOL Time Warner acquisition and the 2015 acquisition by Verizon, AOL was still a popular service. Astoundingly, it counted about two million dial-up subscribers at the time." In the 2021 acquisition of assets from Verizon by Apollo Global Management, AOL was said to have 1.5 million people paying for services. However, this was more for technical support and software, rather than for actual Internet access. A CNBC report at the time reports that the dial-up user count was "in the low thousands".... While it dies off, not with a bang but a whimper, AOL's dial-up is still remembered as one of the most transformative services in the Internet age. "This change does not impact the numerous other valued products and services that these subscribers are able to access and enjoy as part of their plans," a Yahoo spokesperson told PC Magazine this week. "There is also no impact to our users' free AOL email accounts." AOL's disastrous 2001 merger with Time Warner and ongoing inability to deliver broadband to its customers... left it on a path to decline that acquiring such widely read sites as Engadget [2005] and TechCrunch [2010] did not stem. By 2014, the number of dial-up AOL customers had collapsed to 2.34 million. A year later, Verizon bought the company for $4.4 billion in an internet-content play that turned out to be as doomed as the Time Warner transaction. In 2021, Verizon unloaded both AOL and Yahoo, which it had separately purchased in 2017, to the private-equity firm Apollo Global Management.... The demise of AOL's dial-up service does not mean the extinction of the oldest form of consumer online access. Estimates from the Census Bureau's 2023 American Community Survey show 163,401 Americans connected to the internet via dial-up that year. That was by far the smallest segment of the internet-using population, dwarfed by 100,166,949 subscribing to such forms of broadband as "cable, fiber optic, or DSL"; 8,628,648 using satellite; 3,318,901 using "Internet access without a subscription" (which suggests Wi-Fi from coffee shops or public libraries); and 1,445,135 via "other service." The remaining AOL dial-up subscribers will need to find some sort of replacement, which in rural areas may be limited to fixed wireless or SpaceX's considerably more expensive Starlink. Or they may wind up joining the ranks of Americans with no internet access: 6,866,059, in those 2023 estimates.

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Acting Administrator has selected a lucky orbiter, but won't say which one

The NASA acting Administrator has picked a Space Shuttle to move to Houston, and the lucky vehicle is... NASA's not telling.…

Last month Microsoft pledged $4 billion (in cash and AI/cloud technology) to "advance" AI education in K-12 schools, community and technical colleges, and nonprofits (according to a blog post by Microsoft President Brad Smith). But in the launch event video, Smith also says it's time to "switch hats" from coding to AI, adding that "the last 12 years have been about the Hour of Code, but the future involves the Hour of AI." Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: This sets the stage for Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi's announcement that his tech-backed nonprofit's [annual educational event] Hour of Code is being renamed to the Hour of AI... Explaining the pivot, Partovi says: "Computer science for the last 50 years has had a focal point around coding that's been — sort of like you learn computer science so that you create code. There's other things you learn, like data science and algorithms and cybersecurity, but the focal point has been coding. "And we're now in a world where the focal point of computer science is shifting to AI... We all know that AI can write much of the code. You don't need to worry about where did the semicolons go, or did I close the parentheses or whatnot. The busy work of computer science is going to be done by the computer itself. "The creativity, the thinking, the systems design, the engineering, the algorithm planning, the security concerns, privacy concerns, ethical concerns — those parts of computer science are going to be what remains with a focal point around AI. And what's going to be important is to make sure in education we give students the tools so they don't just become passive users of AI, but so that they learn how AI works." Speaking to Microsoft's Smith, Partovi vows to redouble the nonprofit's policy work to "make this [AI literacy] a high school graduation requirement so that no student graduates school without at least a basic understanding of what's going to be part of the new liberal arts background [...] As you showed with your hat, we are renaming the Hour of Code to an Hour of AI."

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After five months on the International Space Station, four astronauts splashed down in the Pacific Ocean in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule named Endurance, reports Space.com. It was NASA's 10th commercial crew rotation mission: The flight launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on March 14 and arrived at the orbiting lab two days later. Crew-10's four astronauts soon set to conducting science work, which consumed much of their time over the ensuing months... The wheels for Crew-10's departure began turning last Saturday (Aug. 2), when SpaceX's four-person Crew-11 mission arrived at the International Space Station. The Crew-10 astronauts spent a few days advising their replacements, then set their minds to gearing up for the return to Earth — and reflecting on their orbital experience. "We got to accomplish a lot of really amazing operational things," Ayers said during a farewell ceremony on Tuesday (Aug. 5). "We got to see some amazing views, and we have had some really big belly laughs and a wonderful time together," she added. "I think that [we're] leaving with a heart full of gratitude, and [we're] excited to see where the International Space Station goes after we get home." The hatches between Endurance and the ISS closed on Friday (Aug. 8) at 4:20 p.m. EDT (2020 GMT), and the capsule undocked about two hours later, at 6:15 p.m. EDT (2205 GMT). Endurance then began maneuvering its way back to Earth, setting up its splashdown today. It was the first Pacific Ocean return for a SpaceX CCP mission; all previous such flights have come down off the Florida coast. SpaceX recently shifted to West Coast reentries for all of its Dragon missions, both crewed and uncrewed, to minimize the chance that falling space debris could damage property or injure people. "During their mission, crew members traveled nearly 62,795,205 million miles," NASA announced, "and completed 2,368 orbits around Earth..." Along the way, Crew-10 contributed hundreds of hours to scientific research, maintenance activities, and technology demonstrations. McClain, Ayers, and Onishi completed investigations on plant and microalgae growth, examined how space radiation affects DNA sequences in plants, observed how microgravity changes human eye structure and cells in the body, and more. The research conducted aboard the orbiting laboratory advances scientific knowledge and demonstrates new technologies that enable us to prepare for human exploration of the Moon and Mars. McClain and Ayers also completed a spacewalk on May 1, relocating a communications antenna, beginning the installation of a mounting bracket for a future International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Array, and other tasks.

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It turns out no one was clean on OPSEC

DEF CON On Saturday at DEF CON, security boffin Micah Lee explained just how he hacked into TeleMessage, the supposedly secure messaging app used by White House officials, which in turn led to a massive database dump of their communications.…

"Linus Torvalds has used his authority to reject the RISC-V architecture changes for the Linux 6.17 kernel," reports Phoronix: Only on Friday were the RISC-V code updates submitted for the Linux 6.17 merge window. The Linux 6.17 merge window is expected to wrap up on Sunday with the Linux 6.17-rc1 release... [T]his pull request has been rejected by Linus Torvalds for Linux 6.17 on the basis of being late in the merge window especially with his international travels this week being known. And he's unhappy with some of the code included as part of this merge request. . Here's the text of Torvalds' response... > RISC-V Patches for the 6.17 Merge Window, Part 1 No. This is garbage and it came in too late. I asked for early pull requests because I'm traveling, and if you can't follow that rule, at least make the pull requests *good*. This adds various garbage that isn't RISC-V specific to generic header files. And by "garbage" I really mean it. This is stuff that nobody should ever send me, never mind late in a merge window. Like this crazy and pointless make_u32_from_two_u16() "helper". That thing makes the world actively a worse place to live. It's useless garbage that makes any user incomprehensible, and actively *WORSE* than not using that stupid "helper". If you write the code out as "(a In contrast, if you write make_u32_from_two_u16(a,b) you have not a f%^5ing clue what the word order is. IOW, you just made things *WORSE*, and you added that "helper" to a generic non-RISC-V file where people are apparently supposed to use it to make *other* code worse too. So no. Things like this need to get bent. It does not go into generic header files, and it damn well does not happen late in the merge window. You're on notice: no more late pull requests, and no more garbage outside the RISC-V tree. Now, I would *hope* there's no garbage inside the RISC-V parts, but that's your choice. But things in generic headers do not get polluted by crazy stuff. And sending a big pull request the day before the merge window closes in the hope that I'm too busy to care is not a winning strategy. So you get to try again in 6.18. EARLY in the that merge window. And without the garbage. Torvalds' message drew a conciliatory response from the submitter of the patches. "I'll stop being late, and hopefully that helps with the quality issues."

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