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In Jakarta, Indonesia, "the land is sinking nearly a foot a year because of collapsing aquifers," reports Wired. "Accordingly, within the next three decades, 95 percent of North Jakarta could be underwater." "Subsidence" is caused by over-extracting groundwater, or the settling of sediments — and it's not just happening in Indonesia. "In California's agriculturally intensive San Joaquin Valley, elevations have plummeted not by inches, but by dozens of feet." Last year, scientists reported that the US Atlantic Coast is dropping by several millimeters annually, with some areas, like Delaware, notching figures several times that rate. So just as the seas are rising, the land along the eastern seaboard is sinking, greatly compounding the hazard for coastal communities. In a follow-up study just published in the journal PNAS Nexus, the researchers tally up the mounting costs of subsidence — due to settling, groundwater extraction, and other factors — for those communities and their infrastructure... [O]ver 3,700 square kilometers [1,428 square miles] along the Atlantic Coast are sinking more than 5 millimeters annually. That's an even faster change than sea-level rise, currently at 4 millimeters a year... A few millimeters of annual subsidence may not sound like much, but these forces are relentless: Unless coastal areas stop extracting groundwater, the land will keep sinking deeper and deeper... The researchers selected 10 levees on the Atlantic Coast and found that all were impacted by subsidence of at least 1 millimeter a year. That puts at risk something like 46,000 people, 27,000 buildings, and $12 billion worth of property. But they note that the actual population and property at risk of exposure behind the 116 East Coast levees vulnerable to subsidence could be two to three times greater. "Levees are heavy, and when they're set on land that's already subsiding, it can accelerate that subsidence," says independent scientist Natalie Snider, who studies coastal resilience but wasn't involved in the new research. "It definitely can impact the integrity of the protection system and lead to failures that can be catastrophic...." The study finds that subsidence is highly variable along the Atlantic Coast, both regionally and locally, as different stretches have different geology and topography, and different rates of groundwater extraction. It's looking particularly problematic for several communities, like Virginia Beach, where 451,000 people and 177,000 properties are at risk. In Baltimore, Maryland, it's 826,000 people and 335,000 properties, while in NYC — in Queens, Bronx, and Nassau — that leaps to 5 million people and 1.8 million properties. Highways, airports, and even railway tracks could also be affected....

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An anonymous reader shared this report from The Hacker News: Three new malicious packages have been discovered in the Python Package Index (PyPI) open-source repository with capabilities to deploy a cryptocurrency miner on affected Linux devices. The three harmful packages, named modularseven, driftme, and catme, attracted a total of 431 downloads over the past month before they were taken down... The malicious code resides in the __init__.py file, which decodes and retrieves the first stage from a remote server, a shell script ("unmi.sh") that fetches a configuration file for the mining activity as well as the CoinMiner file hosted on GitLab. The ELF binary file is then executed in the background using the nohup command, thus ensuring that the process continues to run even after exiting the session. "Echoing the approach of the earlier 'culturestreak' package, these packages conceal their payload, effectively reducing the detectability of their malicious code by hosting it on a remote URL," said Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researcher Gabby Xiong. "The payload is then incrementally released in various stages to execute its malicious activities."

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"The famed and mysterious disappearance of D.B. Cooper has puzzled investigators for over half a century," writes a Seattle TV station. Now new evidence is coming to light in the supposed "skyjacking," after a microscopic piece of metal found on D. B. Cooper's tie could help reveal his true identity. "Considering the totality of all that has been uncovered in the last year with respect to DB Cooper's tie, I can say with a very high degree of certainty that DB Cooper worked for Crucible Steel," said independent investigator Eric Ulis. "I would not be surprised at all if 2024 was the year we figure out who this guy was," lis told another local Seattle news station: This particle is part stainless steel, part titanium... 18 months ago, Ulis used U.S. patents to trace three of these fragments from the same very tie to a specific plant in Pennsylvania, Crucible Steel. "Headquartered in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, a significant subcontractor all throughout the 1960s," said Ulis. "It supplied the lion's share of titanium and stainless steel for Boeing's aircraft...." Ulis claims evidence points to Cooper having in-depth knowledge of the 727 he hijacked, and of the Seattle area. Workers at Crucible Steel were known to travel and visit their contractor, Boeing. "This is also the time, 1971, when Boeing had this significant downturn, the big depression, with 'The last person leaving Seattle, please turn out the lights' [billboard sign]," said Ulis. "It's reasonable to deduce that D. B. Cooper may well have been part of that downturn." Ulis admits his findings are not yet concrete. He's not crossing any suspects off the list. However, he believes from what he's seen, all roads lead to titanium research engineer Vince Peterson from Pittsburgh. It all reminds me of that episode of Prison Break where they suspect one of the prisoner's is secretly D.B. Cooper...

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"As Microsoft stock rises and Apple's falls over analysts expectation of slowing iPhone demand, the two firms are once more within $100 billion of each other — the smallest gap in over two years..." writes the blog Apple Insider: In August 2020, Apple became the first publicly-traded US company to reach a $2 trillion market cap, and Microsoft became the second one in June 2021. Later in October 2021, Microsoft took over the top spot, and for a time was move valuable than Apple by $100 billion. While the values of the two firms have continually changed, Microsoft is now worth just $100 billion less than Apple, according to MarketWatch. Microsoft is valued at $2.73 trillion, while Apple — fallen from its recent $3 trillion high — is currently at $2.83 trillion. MarketWatch notes that Microsoft's stock rose 57% in 2023, compared to Apple's which rose 48%. Microsoft shares have also reportedly seen what are described as slimmer losses at the start of 2024. Apple, on the other hand, has seen its shares take a considerable drop in recent days. The first hit was taken following a claim by Barclays that iPhone demand is weakening and that the iPhone 16 range will not offer any compelling new features to tempt upgraders. The analyst view that Apple is dependent on iPhone sales is part of why Microsoft is doing better. Analysts see Microsoft has being less attached to any hardware, and more attached to subscription software such as Office 365, and so therefore less attached to any falling demand for phones or computers. And, Microsoft has launched an AI tool in Copilot, while Apple has not unveiled any similar ChatGPT-style app or service.

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If you're starting the new year with a new Linux distro, ZDNet just ran an enthusiastic profile of Rhino Linux, calling it "beautiful" with "one of the more useful command-line package managers on the market." Rhino uses a modern take on the highly efficient and customizable Xfce desktop (dubbed "Unicorn") to help make the interface immediately familiar to anyone who logs in. You'll find a dock on the left edge of the screen that contains launchers for common applications, access to the Application Grid (where you can find all of your installed software), and a handy Search Bar (Ulauncher) that allows you to quickly search for and launch any installed app (or even the app settings) you need... Thanks to myriad configuration options, Xfce can be a bit daunting. At the same time, the array of settings makes Xfce highly customizable, which is exactly what the Rhino developers did when they designed this desktop. For those who want a desktop that makes short work of accessing files, the Rhino developers have added a really nifty tool to the top bar. You'll find a listing of some folders you have in your Home directory (Files, Documents, Music, Pictures, Video). If you click on one of those entries, you'll see a list of the most recently accessed files within the directory. Click on the file you want to open with the default, associated application... Rhino opts for the Pacstall package manager over the traditional apt-get. That's not to say apt-get isn't on the system — it is. But with Rhino Linux, there's a much easier path to getting the software you want installed... [W]hen you first run the installed OS, you are greeted with a window that allows you to select what package managers you want to use. You can select from Snap, Flatpak, and AppImages (or all three). Next, the developers added a handy tool (rhino-pkg) that makes installing from the command line very simple. When the distro launched in August, 9to5Linux described it as "a unique distribution for Ubuntu fans who wanted a rolling-release system where they install once and receive updates forever." The theming looks gorgeous and it's provided by the Elementary Xfce Darker icon theme, Xubuntu's Greybird GTK theme, and Ubuntu's Yaru Dark WM theme. It also comes with some cool features, such as a dedicated and full-screen desktop switcher provided by Xfdashboard...

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Long-time Slashdot reader xetdog shared this report from IEEE Spectrum: High in the Andes mountains where the borders of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile intersect, white expanses of salt stretch for thousands of kilometers. Under these flats lie reservoirs of brine that contain upwards of 58% of the world's lithium. For decades, producers have extracted that lithium by pumping the water up to the surface and letting it evaporate until the lithium salts become concentrated enough to filter out. The process takes 12 to 18 months, leaving behind piles of waste containing other metals. It also evaporates nearly 2 million liters of local water resources, harming indigenous communities. To keep up, many companies are now developing processes to chemically or physically filter out lithium from brines and inject the brine back underground. These direct lithium extraction (DLE) technologies take hours instead of months and could double the production of lithium from existing brine operations. Much as shale extraction did for oil, DLE is a "potential game-changing technology for lithium supply," because it could unlock new sources of lithium, according to a recent report by Goldman Sachs. But in contrast to shale's fracking risks, DLE brings environmental benefits, reducing land and water use, and waste... In China, a handful of commercial projects already use Chinese DLE innovator Sunresin's technology. More than 12 startups are pursuing new DLE processes, according to the article, "with the intent of commercial production as early as 2025." And America's Department of Energy is also investing millions of dollars in new DLE tech "to extract lithium from geothermal brines in the U.S., such as the Salton Sea in California, which the National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates could provide over 24,000 metric tons of lithium a year."

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23 years ago, Slashdot interviewed Chris Montgomery about his team's new Ogg Vorbis audio format. But Slashdot reader joshuark admits when he first heard the name, it reminded him of the mushroom underworld in The Secret World of Og. I've downloaded videos from the Internet Archive, and one format is the OGG or Ogg Vorbis player format. I just was wondering with other formats, is Ogg still used anymore after approximately 20-years? I'm not commenting on good/bad/whatever about the format, just is it still in use, relevant anymore? The nonprofit Xiph.Org Foundation (which develops Orbis Vogg) started work in 2007 on the high-quality/low-delay format Opus, which their FAQ argues "theoretically" makes other lossy codecs obsolete. "From technical point of view (loss, delay, bitrates...) it can replace both Vorbis and Speex, and the common proprietary codecs too." But elsewhere Xiph.org points out that "The bitstream format for Vorbis I was frozen Monday, May 8th 2000. All bitstreams encoded since will remain compatible with all future releases of Vorbis." So how is that playing out in 2024? Share your own thoughts in the comments. Does anyone still use Ogg Vorbis format?

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Elvis Presley "will be stepping into his blue suede shoes once again..." according to an article in TheStreet, "thanks to the power of artificial intelligence." The legendary singer from Tupelo, Mississippi, is set to thrill audiences in "Elvis Evolution," an "immersive concert experience" that uses AI and holographic projection. The show will debut in London in November. But if you can't make it to England, that's all right, mama, that's all right for you, because additional shows are slated for Berlin, Tokyo and Las Vegas, where Presley had a seven-year residency from 1969 to 1976. "Man, I really like Vegas," he once reportedly said. The British immersive entertainment company Layered Reality partnered with Authentic Brands Group, which owns the rights to Elvis' image, to create the event. "The show peaks with a concert experience that will recreate the seismic impact of seeing Elvis live for a whole new generation of fans, blurring the lines between reality and fantasy," Layered Reality said on its website. "A life-sized digital Elvis will share his most iconic songs and moves for the very first time on a UK stage." The company previously made immersive experiences based on the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and "The War of The Worlds."

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The BBC checks in on "the pioneers of space exploration — the 24 Nasa astronauts who travelled to the Moon in the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s." Ken Mattingly and Frank Borman died within a few days of each other late last year. Now only eight people who have voyaged beyond the Earth's orbit remain. Who are they, and what are their stories...? There are only four people still alive who have walked on the Moon — Charlie Duke is one of them. He did it aged 36, making him the youngest person to set foot on the lunar surface... Charlie Duke now lives outside San Antonio, Texas, with Dorothy, to whom he has been married for 60 years.... Jim Lovell is one of only three men to have travelled to the Moon twice, and following Frank Borman's death in November 2023, he became the oldest living astronaut.... After leaving Nasa in 1975, [Harrison Schmitt] was elected to the U.S. Senate from his home state of New Mexico, but only served one term. Since then he has worked as a consultant in various industries as well as continuing in academia. And when confronted by a man claiming Apollo 11 was an elaborate lie, 72-year-old Buzz Aldrin "punched him on the jaw." Despite struggles in later life, he never lost his thirst for adventure and joined expeditions to both the North and South Poles, the latter at the age of 86. While embracing his celebrity, he has remained an advocate for the space programme, especially the need to explore Mars. "I don't think we should just go there and come back — we did that with Apollo," he says. Last 93-year-old Buzz Aldrin got married — and thanked his fans for remembering his birthday. "It means a lot and I hope to continue serving a greater cause for many more revolutions around the sun."

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"For the last few years, Mozilla has started to look beyond Firefox," writes TechCrunch, citing startup investments like Mastodon's client Mammoth and the Fakespot browser extension that helps identify fake reviews. But Mozilla has also launched Mozilla.ai (added a bunch of new AI-focused members to its board). In an interview with TechCrunch, Mozilla's president and executive director Mark Surman clarifies their plans, saying that Mozilla.ai "had a broad mandate around finding open source, trustworthy AI opportunities and build a business around them." "Quickly, Moez [Draief], who runs it, made it about how do we leverage the growing snowball of open source large language models and find a way to both accelerate that snowball but also make sure it rolls in a direction that matches our goals and matches our wallet belt...." Right now, Surman argued, it remains hard to for most developers — and even more so for most consumers — to run their own models, even as more open source models seemingly launch every day. "What Mozilla.ai is focused on really is almost building a wrapper that you can put around any open source large language model to fine-tune it, to build data pipelines for it, to make it highly performant." While much work is in stealth mode, TechCrunch predicts "we'll hear quite a bit more in the coming months." Meanwhile, the open source and AI communities are still figuring out what exactly open source AI is going to look like. Surman believes that no matter the details of that, though, the overall principles of transparency and freedom to study the code, modify it and redistribute it will remain key... "We probably lean towards that everything should be open source — at least in a spiritual sense. The licenses aren't perfect and we are going to do a bunch of work in the first half of next year with some of the other open source projects around clarifying some of those definitions and giving people some mental models...." With a small group of very well-funded players currently dominating the AI market, he believes that the various open source groups will need to band together to collectively create alternatives. He likened it to the early era of open source — and especially the Linux movement — which aimed to create an alternative to Microsoft... Surman seems to be optimistic about Mozilla's positioning in this new era of AI, though, and its ability to both use it to further its mission and create a sustainable business model around it. "All this that we are going to do is in the kind of service of our mission. And some of that, I think, will just have to be purely a public good," he said. "And you can pay for public goods in different kinds of way, from our own resources, from philanthropy, from people pooling resources. [...] It's a kind of a business model but it's not commercial, per se. And then, the stuff we're building around communal AI hopefully has a real enterprise value if we can help people take advantage of open source large language models, effectively and quickly, in a way that is valuable to them and is cheaper than using open AI. That's our hope." And what about Firefox? "I think you'll see the browser evolve," says Mozilla's president. "In our case, that's to be more protective of you and more helpful to you. "I think it's more that you use the predictive and synthesizing capabilities of those tools to make it easier and safer to move through the internet."

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It'll also cost billions, but perhaps a price worth paying?

Let's say that you and your political leaders are committed to reducing the effects of the "greenhouse gasses" such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) that are indisputably toasting our Earth.…

Klaus Zimmermann (a self-described "friendly hacker") recently posted a "State of the Distro" post, choosing his favorite distributions for things like portable installation from a USB drive (Alpine Linux) and for a desktop OS (Debian Linux or Devuan). But when it comes to a distro fro the Raspberry Pi, (at least until the 4), Zimmerman argues that FreeBSD's performance is "unlike any other Linux distribution I've ever seen, even with cpupower activated and overclocking." Nope, no match — FreeBSD's performance on the Pi is still way better, even without overclocking. You can browse a modern web, have things scroll smoothly, watch videos and even play some 3D games like Quake with it! And if you overclock it a little (2GHz) you can even make it run that gargantua MS Teams. But what about all that lackluster driver support? WiFi drivers still on the 802.11g standard and all? Surely you can't be serious about it when Linux offers all that support out of the box, right? Wrong, actually. For starters, the drivers provided for the Pi's hardware are often half-assed proprietary blobs... I no longer think FreeBSD is really at fault if the driver support for the hardware is not helpful to begin with. Even drivers you find for Linux are shaky at best. So yes, I will keep using FreeBSD on the Pi. As a desktop. With USB WiFi and audio adapters for those services, because the existing hardware is sort of moot even otherwise. And with those USB adapters — and FreeBSD — the Pi works really well, truly desktop-like. I'd be curious to hear from Slashdot's readers about their own experiments with Linux (and FreeBSD) on a Raspberry Pi. Zimmerman's final winner, for the "Server" category, was Debian — though of his two servers, one is just an XMPP server set up on a Raspberry Pi. "I found that using Debian on the Pi is a real joy. Easy and simple to set up, familiar environment and all. So I'm keeping it. "This concept is about to be overshadowed, however, by my growing like of FreeBSD lately..." Thanks to Slashdot reader walterbyrd for sharing the article.

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Inc. reports that funding for Web3 startups in 2023 "declined 73% from 2022, according to new data from Crunchbase." In total, Web3 startups netted $7.8 billion in 2023, compared with the $21.5 billion raised in 2022. It's part of a broader and sobering comedown from the stratospheric highs of tech's pandemic boom time, in which investment flowed to startups at historic rates, valuations soared and unicorns emerged seemingly every week. Last year firmly belonged to AI, with $17.8 billion invested in the sector, according to Dealroom. Even as some remain convinced of Web3's future, uncertainty lingers over certain stumbling blocks, including how the technology can be farmed out to a massive user base on par with today's biggest tech firms. "I haven't seen [a company] that screams to me, 'this is what's going to get people on board,'" says Jillian Grennan, a business and law professor at UC Berkeley who studies Web3. Web3 startups are failing to net the investment indicative of revolutionary tech as AI steals the show and the dough. The reasons vary: Many have pointed out that defining Web3 is tricky, and Grennan mentions that appetites for navigating digital worlds may have been dented by pandemic-born Zoom fatigue. Beyond that, there's the question of how to regulate crypto — a marquee aspect of the Web3 universe--which may have given investors some pause. "In this next period, we're going to get some important regulatory clarity that we just haven't had," Richard Dulude, co-founder and partner at Underscore VC tells Inc. "A lot of people sit on the sidelines until they have that...." Interest rate hikes and the bloated startup valuations of 2021 have meant VCs can't throw their weight behind exciting ideas alone, Dulude says. The sector is undergoing "this transition from chasing growth, and trying to grow at all costs to actually investing behind the growth," he says.... All the investment couldn't compensate for one vulnerability: The technology is hard to use... Macroeconomic factors are of course important, but an industry resurgence depends first on whether Web3 can become easier to navigate for average people and provide them with a reason to hang around. "It's still pretty cumbersome to interact with the technology," Dulude explains. "Until it's made usable, it's really hard to break out of the current market environment we're in."

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Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In the January 2024 Communications of the ACM, Rice University professor and former CACM Editor-in-Chief Moshe Y. Vardi minces no words in Computing, You Have Blood on Your Hands!. He argues that the unintended consequences of the rise of social media and mobile computing include hate mongering on a global scale and a worldwide youth mental health crisis. "How did the technology that we considered 'cool' just a decade ago become an assault weapon used to hurt, traumatize, and even kill vulnerable people?" Vardi asks. "Looking back at my past columns, one can see the forewarnings. Our obsession with efficiency came at the expense of resilience. In the name of efficiency, we aimed at eliminating all friction. In the name of efficiency, it became desirable to move fast and break things, and we allowed the technology industry to become dominated by a very small number of mega corporations. It is time for all computing professionals to accept responsibility for computing's current state. To use Star Wars metaphors, we once considered computing as the 'Rebels,' but it turns out that computing is the 'Empire.' Admitting we have a problem is a necessary first step toward addressing the problems computing has created." Examples cited in the piece include: Amnesty International's 2022 accusation that Meta "substantially contributed" to human rights violations of Myanmar's Rohingya peopleInternal Meta documents saying "We are not actually doing what we say we do publicly" in policing harmful content. So far the ACM's piece has attracted one comment. "Deep thanks for your long-term commitment to ethics and how you articulate clearly its challenges."

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The University of Massachusetts Amherst has an announcement. A team of computer scientists "recently announced a new method for automatically generating whole proofs that can be used to prevent software bugs and verify that the underlying code is correct." It leverages the AI power of Large Language Models, and the new method, called Baldur, "yields unprecedented efficacy of nearly 66%." The idea behind the machine-checking technique was "to generate a mathematical proof showing that the code does what it is expected to do," according to the announcement, "and then use a theorem prover to make sure that the proof is also correct. But manually writing these proofs is incredibly time-consuming and requires extensive expertise. "These proofs can be many times longer than the software code itself," says Emily First, the paper's lead author who completed this research as part of her doctoral dissertation at UMass Amherst... First, whose team performed its work at Google, used Minerva, an LLM trained on a large corpus of natural-language text, and then fine-tuned it on 118GB of mathematical scientific papers and webpages containing mathematical expressions. Next, she further fine-tuned the LLM on a language, called Isabelle/HOL, in which the mathematical proofs are written. Baldur then generated an entire proof and worked in tandem with the theorem prover to check its work. When the theorem prover caught an error, it fed the proof, as well as information about the error, back into the LLM, so that it can learn from its mistake and generate a new and hopefully error-free proof. This process yields a remarkable increase in accuracy. The state-of-the-art tool for automatically generating proofs is called Thor, which can generate proofs 57% of the time. When Baldur (Thor's brother, according to Norse mythology) is paired with Thor, the two can generate proofs 65.7% of the time. Though there is still a large degree of error, Baldur is by far the most effective and efficient way yet devised to verify software correctness, and as the capabilities of AI are increasingly extended and refined, so should Baldur's effectiveness grow. In addition to First and Brun, the team includes Markus Rabe, who was employed by Google at the time, and Talia Ringer, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois — Urbana Champaign. This work was performed at Google and supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation.

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A year ago the Washington Post reported "there are only seven working offshore wind turbines in the entire United States," adding that a massive wind project south of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts "is years behind schedule amid regulatory delays and litigation from opponents." But this week a local public radio station reported that electricity from America's first large-scale offshore wind project "is officially flowing into Massachusetts and helping to power the New England grid." The Vineyard Wind project achieved "first power" late Tuesday when one operating turbine near Martha's Vineyard delivered approximately five megawatts of electricity to the grid. The company said it expects to have five turbines operating at full capacity in early 2024... Once it's finished sometime in 2024, it will consist of 62 turbines spaced about a mile apart and rising more than 800 feet out of the water. The project will generate up to 800 megawatts of power, or about enough electricity for 400,000 homes in Massachusetts. Another smaller project near Long Island, South Fork Wind, also began producing electricity in early December. When that project is complete, its 12 turbines will generate about 132 megawatts of power... Massachusetts, in partnership with Rhode Island and Connecticut, is currently seeking bids for another 3,600 megawatts of offshore wind power... "This is a historic moment for the American offshore wind industry," wrote Gov. Maura Healey. "This is clean, affordable energy made possible by the many advocates, public servants, union workers, and business leaders who worked for decades to accomplish this achievement. Last year America's seven offshore wind turbines generated "a paltry 42 megawatts," according to the article, "far less than the average natural gas power plant." The CEO of one of the company's behind the project hailed the last 12 months as "a historic year defined by steel in the water and people at work."

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Long-time Slashdot readers necro81 writes: The popular vision of Neptune is azure blue. This comes mostly from the publicly released images from Voyager 2's flyby in 1989 — humanity's only visit to this icy giant at the edge of the solar system. But it turns out that view is a bit distorted — the result of color-enhancing choices made by NASA at the time. A new report from Oxford depicts Neptune's blue color as more muted, with a touch of green, not much different than Uranus. The truer-to-life view comes from re-analyzing the Voyager data, combined with ground-based observations going back decades. (Add'l links here, here, and here.) This is nothing new: most publicity images released by space agencies — of planets, nebulae, or the surface of Mars — have undergone some color-enhancement for visual effect. (They'll also release "true-color" images, which try to best mimic what the human eye would see.) Many images — such as those from the infrared-seeing JWST — need wholesale coloration of their otherwise invisible wavelengths. The new report is a good reminder, though, to remember that scientific cameras are pretty much always black and white; color images come from combining filters in various ways. Also thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Geoffrey.landis for sharing the story.

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25 years ago, Slashdot's CmdrTaco posted an announcement from Slashdot reader #257. "Jabber is a new project I recently started to create a complete open-source platform for Instant Messaging with transparent communication to other Instant Messaging systems (ICQ, AIM, etc). "Most of the initial design and protocol work is done, as well as a working server and a few test clients." You can find the rest of the story on Wikipedia. "Its major outcome proved to be the development of the XMPP protocol." ("Based on XML, it enables the near-real-time exchange of structured data between two or more network entities.") Originally developed by the open-source community, the protocols were formalized as an approved instant messaging standard in 2004 and have been continuously developed with new extensions and features... In addition to these core protocols standardized at the IETF, the XMPP Standards Foundation (formerly the Jabber Software Foundation) is active in developing open XMPP extensions... XMPP features such as federation across domains, publish/subscribe, authentication and its security even for mobile endpoints are being used to implement the Internet of Things. "Designed to be extensible, the protocol offers a multitude of applications beyond traditional IM in the broader realm of message-oriented middleware, including signalling for VoIP, video, file transfer, gaming and other uses..." Slashdot reader #257 turned out to be Jeremie Miller (who at the time was just 23 years old). And according to his own page on Wikipedia, "Currently, Miller sits on the board of directors for Bluesky Social, a social media platform."

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Today America's Federal Aviation Administration "ordered the temporary grounding of Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft," reports CNN, identifying the aircraft as "the model involved in an Alaska Airlines emergency landing in Oregon on Friday after a section of the plane apparently blew out in midflight." A passenger's video posted to social media shows a side section of the fuselage, where a window would have been, missing — exposing passengers to the outside air. The video, which appears to have been taken from several rows behind the incident, shows oxygen masks deployed throughout the airplane, and least two people sitting near and just behind the missing section... The plane "landed safely back at Portland International Airport with 171 guests and six crew members," the airline said... According to FlightAware, the flight was airborne for about 20 minutes. "There was a really loud bang toward the rear of the plane and a whoosh noise," one passenger told a local news station — and then "all of the masks dropped." The FAA said the planes must be parked until emergency inspections are performed, which will "take around four to eight hours per aircraft." "The FAA is requiring immediate inspections of certain Boeing 737 MAX 9 planes before they can return to flight," FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker said Saturday in a statement. "Safety will continue to drive our decision-making as we assist the (National Transportation Safety Board's) investigation into Alaska Airlines Flight 1282." The order impacts 171 Boeing 737 Max 9 jets, the agency approximates.... Boeing said the company supported the FAA's grounding decision. "Safety is our top priority and we deeply regret the impact this event has had on our customers and their passengers," Boeing said in a statement Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader lsllll for sharing the news.

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CNN reports that some Verizon customers "might have found an unexpected surprise in the mail this week: An opportunity to receive a refund as part of a proposed $100 million settlement from a class-action lawsuit." Eligible customers are receiving postcards or emails alerting them to file a claim by April 15 to receive up to $100, which is the result of the lawsuit accusing Verizon of charging fees that were "unfair and not adequately disclosed." At issue is Verizon's "administrative charge," which the plaintiffs said were "misleading" because that fee wasn't disclosed in their plan's advertised monthly price and were charged in a "deceptive and unfair manner." Verizon has denied the claims and said in a statement that it "clearly identifies and describes its wireless consumer admin charge multiple times during the sales transaction, as well as in its marketing, contracts and billing." A company spokesperson said that the charge "helps our company recover certain regulatory compliance and network related costs." "The payout is at least $15," adds CNN, "and might be more depending on how long the customer used Verizon and the number of customers who file a claim."

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