Efforts to add Rust code to the Linux kernel has suffered a setback as one of the maintainers of the Rust for Linux project has stepped down -- citing frustration with "nontechnical nonsense," according to The Register: Wedson Almeida Filho, a software engineer at Microsoft who has overseen the Rust for Linux project, announced his resignation in a message to the Linux kernel development mailing list. "I am retiring from the project," Filho declared. "After almost four years, I find myself lacking the energy and enthusiasm I once had to respond to some of the nontechnical nonsense, so it's best to leave it up to those who still have it in them."

[...] Memory safety bugs are regularly cited as the major source of serious software vulnerabilities by organizations overseeing large projects written in C and C++. So in recent years there's been a concerted push from large developers like Microsoft and Google, as well as from government entities like the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, to use memory-safe programming languages -- among them Rust. Discussions about adding Rust to Linux date back to 2020 and were realized in late 2022 with the release of Linux 6.1. "I truly believe the future of kernels is with memory-safe languages," Filho's note continued. "I am no visionary but if Linux doesn't internalize this, I'm afraid some other kernel will do to it what it did to Unix."

Notorious for a hardworking culture, Japan launched an initiative to help people cut back. But three years into the effort, the country is having a hard time coaxing people to take a four-day workweek. From a report: Japanese lawmakers first proposed a shorter work week in 2021. The guidelines aimed to encourage staff retention and cut the number of workers falling ill or dying from overwork in an economy already suffering from a huge labor shortage. The guidelines also included overtime limits and paid annual leave. However, the initiative has had a slow start: According to the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare, only about 8% of companies in Japan allow employees to take three or more days off a week.

It's not just companies -- employees are hesitant, too. Electronics manufacturer Panasonic, one of Japan's largest companies, opted into the effort in early 2022. Over two years in, only 150 of its 63,000 eligible employees have chosen to take up four-day schedules, a representative of the company told the Associated Press. Other major companies to introduce a four-day workweek include Uniqlo parent Fast Retailing, electronics giant Hitachi, and financial firm Mizuho. About 85% of employers report giving workers the usual two days off a week. Much of the reluctance to take an extra day off boils down to a culture of workers putting companies before themselves, including pressure to appear like team players and hard workers. This intense culture stems from Japan's postwar era, where, in an effort to boost the economy, then-Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida enlisted major corporations to offer their employees lifelong job security, asking only that workers repay them with loyalty.

Google executive James Manyika has warned that AI's impact on productivity is not guaranteed [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled], despite predictions of trillion-dollar economic potential. From the report: "Right now, everyone from my old colleagues at McKinsey Global Institute to Goldman Sachs are putting out these extraordinary economic potential numbers -- in the trillions -- [but] it's going to take a whole bunch of actions, innovations, investments, even enabling policy ...The productivity gains are not guaranteed. They're going to take a lot of work." In 1987 economist Robert Solow remarked that the computer age was visible everywhere except in the productivity statistics. "We could have a version of that -- where we see this technology everywhere, on our phones, in all these chatbots, but it's done nothing to transform the economy in that real fundamental way."

The use of generative AI to draft software code is not enough. "In the US, the tech sector is about 4 per cent of the labour force. Even if the entire tech sector adopted it 100 per cent, it doesn't matter from a labour productivity standpoint." Instead the answer lies with "very large sectors" such as healthcare and retail. Former British prime minister Sir Tony Blair has said that people "will have an AI nurse, probably an AI doctor, just as you'll have an AI tutor." Manyika is less dramatic: "In most of those cases, those professions will be assisted by AI. I don't think any of those occupations are going to be replaced by AI, not in any conceivable future."

schwit1 shares a report: If you are reading this and live in America, or used to live in America, or maybe just went to America one time many years ago, then you are almost certainly performing unpaid labor for the U.S. government and have been for years. How? By storing some of the billions of pennies the U.S. Mint makes every year that virtually no one uses.

Why are we still making tons (many thousands of tons) of pennies if no one uses them? That's a sensible question with a psychotic answer: We have to keep making all these pennies -- over $45 million worth last year -- because no one uses them. In fact, it could be very bad if we did.

When you insert a quarter into a soda machine, that quarter eventually finds its way back to a bank, from which it can be redistributed to a store's cash register and handed out as change -- maybe even to you, who can put it into a soda machine again and start the whole process over. That's beautiful. (Please be mindful of your soft drink consumption.)

But few of us ever spend pennies. We mostly just store them. The 1-cent coins are wherever you've left them: a glass jar, a winter purse, a RAV4 cup holder, a five-gallon water cooler dispenser, the couch. Many of them are simply on the ground. But take it from me, a former cashier: Cashiers don't have time to scrounge on the sidewalk every time they need to make change. That is where the Mint comes in. Every year it makes a few billion more pennies to replace the ones everyone is thoughtlessly, indefinitely storing and scatters them like kudzu seeds across the nation.

You -- a scientist of some kind, possibly -- might think an obvious solution now presents itself: Why not encourage people to use the pennies they have lying around instead of manufacturing new ones every year? We can't! Or, anyway, we'd better not. According to a Mint report, if even a modest share of our neglected pennies suddenly returned to circulation, the result would be a "logistically unmanageable" dilemma for Earth's wealthiest nation. As in, the penny tsunami could overwhelm government vaults.

That's not great, but at the end of the day we're talking only about pennies. How much could a penny cost to make? A penny? If only we lived in such a paradise. Unfortunately, one penny costs more than three pennies (3.07 cents at last count) to make and distribute! When I learned this, I lost my mind.

Microsoft's Windows 11 operating system has surpassed Windows 10 usage for Steam users for the first time since its launch in 2021. From a report: Windows 10 has been holding strong in recent years, despite Microsoft's plans to end support for Windows 10 in October 2025. There are now signs that Windows 11 adoption is finally heading in the right direction for Microsoft. Steam hardware survey data for August puts Windows 11 usage at 49 percent, an increase of more than 3 percent over the previous figure in July of nearly 46 percent. Windows 10 usage has dipped by around 3 percent to 47 percent, while macOS and Linux Steam usage has largely remained the same during August.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger and key executives are expected to present a plan later this month to the company's board of directors to slice off unnecessary businesses and revamp capital spending, according to a source familiar with the matter, as they try to revive the once-dominant chipmaker's fortunes. The plan will include ideas on how to shave overall costs by selling businesses, including its programmable chip unit Altera, that Intel can no longer afford to fund from the company's once-sizeable profit.

Gelsinger and other high-ranking executives at Intel are expected to present the plan at a mid-September board meeting, the same source said. The proposal does not yet include plans to split Intel and sell off its contract manufacturing operation, or foundry, to a buyer such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., according to the source and another person familiar with the matter. The presentation, including the plans around its manufacturing operations, are not yet finalized and could change ahead of the meeting.

"Let's get one thing out of the way," writes the Verge's transportation editor. Contrary to what you may have heard about U.S. sales of electric vehicles — sales are up. [Consumer insights company] JD Power is projecting that 1.2 million EVs will be sold in the US by the end of 2024, an increase over 1 million sold last year. That's 9 percent of total vehicles sold, which has been revised down from a previous prediction of 12 percent... Overall, an additional 35,000 battery-electric vehicles were sold in the first seven months of 2024 as compared to last year, JD Power says.

That includes hybrids and PHEVs, which I think gets at the root of the problem. Those who were expecting an even swap — battery-electric for internal combustion — didn't anticipate the popularity of hybrids in the market. If anything, hybrids are cannibalizing EV sales, giving the pure-battery electric vehicles more competition than anticipated. But in retrospect, it makes sense. What better response to "range anxiety" than a vehicle that, in a sense, operates as an electric vehicle until the battery runs out, and then switches over to gas...?

EVs are still too expensive, giving potential buyers sticker shock. According to data from Kelley Blue Book, the average transaction price for an electric car in July 2024 was $56,520. Meanwhile, the average gas-powered vehicle is selling at $48,401. There's also a depreciation problem. New research out of George Washington University finds that older EVs depreciate in value faster than conventional gas cars. Some even lost 50 percent of their resale value in a single year. The upside is that newer models with longer driving ranges are holding their value better and approaching the retention rates of many gas cars.

The charging experience is still wildly out-of-sync for most people. Either it's the single most satisfying thing about owning an EV or it's the worst. And the distinction is usually between people who live in houses and can install a home charger in their garage and those who live in an apartment building or multi-unit housing and have to rely on unreliable public chargers... But JD Power is optimistic about where that's heading, especially as public satisfaction is growing in both Level 2 and DC fast charging over two consecutive quarters. The Biden administration also continues to make massive investments in public charging, which should slowly ease the experience of public charging from "soul-sucking" to "honestly whatever."
The article concludes that the EV industry needs patience and flexibility. But more than that, it "needs to slow it down with the six-figure, luxury pickups and SUVs and start offering more low-cost compact cars and sedans."

"Houston resident Brandy Deason put an Apple AirTag in her recycling to see where her plastic trash was going," writes Tom's Hardware.

"While many might expect the city would drop the recyclables off at a recycling center, Deason instead found her trash sitting in an open-air lot alongside millions of other pieces of trash at Wright Waste Management." Wright Waste Management did not allow CBS News to enter and inspect its premises. Still, the news team's drone camera discovered that all the trash picked up from the Houston Recycling Collaboration (HRC) was apparently just sitting there on its premises, stacked more than 10 feet high. This came as a shock, as the HRC was meant to revolutionize the city's recycling program, allowing it to process all kinds of plastic. Instead, we see all the collected waste sitting idle in open-air lots waiting for the right technology to appear.

That's because [Exxon-funded] Cyclix International, one of the partners in the HRC, has yet to open its massive factory to scale up its plastic recycling operation. The company said that it recycles all kinds of plastic and has even already set aside a sprawling space big enough to accommodate nine football fields. However, the current facility is just an empty husk without a single piece of machinery in sight.
Deason included 12 airtags in bags of recycling — and nine of them ended up at the HRC facility (with another one going to the local dump). In a video report, CBS News asked Deason what they thought about household recycling ended up in massive piles of plastic. "I thought it was kind of strange, because if you store plastic outside in the heat, it's a fire problem." In fact, that facility has already failed three fire-safety inspections by the county, according to CBS News. And while the facility has "applied" for approval to store plastic waste, that application has not yet been approved.

CBS asked a Cyclix project manager about the piles of unprocessed plastic sitting in the sun. "We need a huge supply of plastics to get ready for startup here," a spokesperson answered, "And we want to start that now in order to get ahead of it."

CBS's interviewer also raised another issue: the facility's plan is to recycle some of the plastic products into fuel. "So if you turn plastic waste into fuel that is then burned and creates greenhouse gas emissions, that's just another environmental problem."

Cyclix Project Manager: "Plastic waste is the challenge. So if we have the ability to take plastic waste and convert it to new products — that's what we're trying to do!"

CBS News points out that turning plastics into burn-able fuel is considered "recycling" by 25 states...

Slashdot covered shrinkwrap licenses on software back in 2000 and 2002. But now ewhac (Slashdot reader #5,844) writes: The user Wraithe on the Mastodon network is reporting that a bottle of Vital Proteins(TM) collagen peptides purchased at Costco came with a shrinkwrap contract. Collagen peptides are often used as an anti-aging nutritional supplement. The top of the Vital Proteins bottle has a pull-to-open seal. Printed on the seal is the following: "Read This: By opening and using this product, you agree to be bound by our Terms and Conditions, fully set forth at vitalproteins.com/tc, which includes a mandatory arbitration agreement. If you do not agree to be bound, please return this product immediately."

So-called "shrinkwrap contracts" have been the subject of controversy and derision for decades since their first widespread appearance in the 1970's, attempting to alter the terms of sale after the fact, impose unethical and onerous restrictions on the purchaser, and absolving the vendor of all liability. Most such contracts appear on items involving copyrighted works (computer software, or any item containing computer software). The alleged "validity" of such contracts supposedly proceeds from the (alleged) need that the item requires a copyright license from the vendor to use (because the right to use/read/listen/view/execute is somehow not concomitant with purchase), and that the shrinkwrap contract furnishes such license.

The application of such a contract to a good where copyright has no scope, however, is something new. The alleged contract itself governs consumers' use of, "the VitalProteins.com website and any other applications, content, products, and services (collectively, the "Service")...," contains the usual we're-not-responsible-for-anything indemnification paragraph, and unilaterally removes your right to seek redress in court of law and imposes binding arbitration involving any disputes that may arise between the consumer and the company. Indeed, the arbitration clause is the first numbered section in the alleged contract.
The same contract has been spotted by numerous others — including someone who posted about it on Reddit two years ago. ("When I opened it, encountered a vacuum seal with the following 'READ THIS: by opening and using this product, you agree to...'") But the same verbiage still appears in online listings today for the product from Albertsons, Walgreens, and CVS.

Shrinkwrap contracts. They're not just for software any more...

1.9 million solar panels began operating this year in California — at a Mortenson facility with 120,000 installed batteries that give it a storage capacity of 3,280 megawatts. An article in El Pais notes that this helped California pass 10,000 megawatts of photovoltaic storage in April — enough to meet 20% of demand — for the first time ever. (In 2019, the state had just 770 megawatts of storage capacity.)

Mark Rothleder, the vice president of the independent grid operator, California ISO (CAISO), said earlier this year that they will add another 1,134 megawatts in the first eight months of 2024. This is growth on top of the leap made last year. "In 2023 alone, the ISO successfully onboarded 5,660 megawatts of new power to the grid," Rothleder said at a conference in San Diego...

Renewable production was enough to supply the grid on 40 out of 48 days this spring, compared to seven days in the whole of last year. Lithium batteries appear to be undercutting the use of fossil fuels. Gas accounts for 40% of California's grid. However, its use in April registered its lowest proportion in seven years. "The data clearly shows that batteries are displacing natural gas when solar generation is ramping up and down each day in CAISO," notes an analysis by Grid Status, a firm specializing in energy issues. Natural gas was king on the grid in April 2021, 2022 and 2023. CAISO was sending between 9,000 and 10,000 megawatts produced from gas to the grid once solar ran out. Last April, however, it amounted to only 5,000 megawatts... [California's goal: run on 100% renewable energy by 2045.]

Arizona and Georgia have followed California's lead. But it is Texas, the other major U.S. giant in this industry, that is snapping at its heels. At the end of April, batteries supplied 4% of the grid's electricity, enough to power several million homes. Batteries are beginning to look like an alternative to a system heavily dependent on gas and coal.

Pundits aggregate results from multiple pollsters to minimize biases. So ZDNet tried the same approach, but aggregating rankings for the popularity of 19 top programming languages. Senior contributing editor David Gewirtz combined results from nine popularity rankings, including PYPL, the Tiobe index, GitHub's Usage 2023 summary report, and several rankings from Stack Overflow and from IEEE Spectrum.

The results? The top cluster contains Python, JavaScript, and Java. These are all very representative in the world of AI coding...

The next cluster contains the classic C-based languages [C++, C#, C], plus TypeScript (which is a more robust JavaScript variant) and SQL.

Below that are languages that were dominant a while ago, the web languages used to build and operate websites [HTML/CSS, PHP, Shell], followed by a range of other languages that are either growing in popularity (R, Dart) or dropping in popularity (Ruby). [Just above Ruby are Go, Rust, Kotlin, and Lua.]

Finally, at the bottom is Swift, Apple's language of choice. Objective-C, the previous language of Apple programming, has all but dropped off the list since Apple launched Swift. But while Apple boasts many developers, Swift is clearly not a standout in programmer interest... [T]here aren't a huge number of companies hiring Apple app developers, at least primarily. That's why Swift is relatively far down the chart. Objective-C is being replaced by Swift, and we can see it dropping right before our eyes.
"With the exception of Java, the C-family of languages still dominates," the article concludes, before adding that if you're only going to learn one language, "I'd recommend Python, Java, and JavaScript instead." But it also advises aspiring programmers to learn "multiple languages and multiple frameworks. Build things in the languages. Programming is not just an intellectual exercise. You have to actually make stuff....

"[L]earning how to learn languages is as important as learning a language — and the best way to do that is to learn more than one."

Politico reports U.S. states have no uniform way of policing the use of overseas subcontractors in election technology, "let alone to understand which individual software components make up a piece of code."

For example, to replace New Hampshire's old voter registration database, state election officials "turned to one of the best — and only — choices on the market," Politico: "a small, Connecticut-based IT firm that was just getting into election software." But last fall, as the new company, WSD Digital, raced to complete the project, New Hampshire officials made an unsettling discovery: The firm had offshored part of the work. That meant unknown coders outside the U.S. had access to the software that would determine which New Hampshirites would be welcome at the polls this November.

The revelation prompted the state to take a precaution that is rare among election officials: It hired a forensic firm to scour the technology for signs that hackers had hidden malware deep inside the coding supply chain. The probe unearthed some unwelcome surprises: software misconfigured to connect to servers in Russia ["probably by accident," they write later] and the use of open-source code — which is freely available online — overseen by a Russian computer engineer convicted of manslaughter, according to a person familiar with the examination and granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about it... New Hampshire officials say the scan revealed another issue: A programmer had hard-coded the Ukrainian national anthem into the database, in an apparent gesture of solidarity with Kyiv.

None of the findings amounted to evidence of wrongdoing, the officials said, and the company resolved the issues before the new database came into use ahead of the presidential vote this spring. This was "a disaster averted," said the person familiar with the probe, citing the risk that hackers could have exploited the first two issues to surreptitiously edit the state's voter rolls, or use them and the presence of the Ukrainian national anthem to stoke election conspiracies. [Though WSD only maintains one other state's voter registration database — Vermont] the supply-chain scare in New Hampshire — which has not been reported before — underscores a broader vulnerability in the U.S. election system, POLITICO found during a six-month-long investigation: There is little oversight of the supply chain that produces crucial election software, leaving financially strapped state and county offices to do the best they can with scant resources and expertise.

The technology vendors who build software used on Election Day face razor-thin profit margins in a market that is unforgiving commercially and toxic politically. That provides little room for needed investments in security, POLITICO found. It also leaves states with minimal leverage over underperforming vendors, who provide them with everything from software to check in Americans at their polling stations to voting machines and election night reporting systems. Many states lack a uniform or rigorous system to verify what goes into software used on Election Day and whether it is secure.
The article also points out that many state and federal election officials "insist there has been significant progress" since 2016, with more regular state-federal communication. "The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, now the lead federal agency on election security, didn't even exist back then.

"Perhaps most importantly, more than 95% of U.S. voters now vote by hand or on machines that leave some type of paper trail, which officials can audit after Election Day."

renzema (Slashdot reader #84,617) wants suggestions for a point-to-point video conferencing system "to connect the kids to their grandparents... We live in Europe and they in the U.S., but we both have gigabit internet and can sustain upwards of 100mb between our houses." I've been spoiled at work with super high quality Cisco systems... Currently, we have Amazon Echos, but the video quality on these (at least for Sweden/U.S. calls) is really lacking.

We've tried Facetime as well, and while the video quality is much better, the inconvenience of needing to use it on an iPad or phone is quite high (or starting a call with them, then them needing to move to the computer...) Ideally I would love Facetime on an Apple TV with a camera that follows us. We have played a bit with the phone-as-a-camera thing with Facetime and Apple TV, but the sound was not great...

I'm willing to invest in hardware, up to a few hundred dollars per site, if this can really be bulletproof and give a consistently high quality video connection. Ideally it would be standalone hardware that does not need a computer to be running all the time.
There's one problem that can't be solved: calling the grandparents' phone when they're out of the house and not available to talk. But the dream solution involves using a TV to make and receive video calls. "When a call is received, it would power on the TV and 'ring'."

The wishlist?

• High quality picture
• No echo in large rooms. Handles people sitting a few meters away from the TV.
• "Would really prefer no monthly fees."

Any suggestions? Share your own thoughts and experience in the comments.

What's the best home videoconferencing system?

An anonymous reader shared this report from Ars Technica: On Saturday NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore noticed some strange noises emanating from a speaker inside the Starliner spacecraft.

"I've got a question about Starliner," Wilmore radioed down to Mission Control, at Johnson Space Center in Houston. "There's a strange noise coming through the speaker ... I don't know what's making it." [Ars Technica embeded a clip of the conversation including the rhythmic, sonar-like noise which was shared online by a Michigan-based meteorologist.] Wilmore said he was not sure if there was some oddity in the connection between the station and the spacecraft causing the noise, or something else. He asked the flight controllers in Houston to see if they could listen to the audio inside the spacecraft. A few minutes later, Mission Control radioed back that they were linked via "hardline" to listen to audio inside Starliner, which has now been docked to the International Space Station for nearly three months.

Wilmore, apparently floating in Starliner, then put his microphone up to the speaker inside Starliner. Shortly thereafter, there was an audible pinging that was quite distinctive. "Alright Butch, that one came through," Mission control radioed up to Wilmore. "It was kind of like a pulsing noise, almost like a sonar ping."

"I'll do it one more time, and I'll let y'all scratch your heads and see if you can figure out what's going on," Wilmore replied. The odd, sonar-like audio then repeated itself. "Alright, over to you. Call us if you figure it out."

To make America the "crypto capital of the planet," former U.S. President Donald Trump promised crypto-friendly policies, writes Politico, which "could have a new beneficiary: his own family." Trump has vowed to enact an array of pro-crypto policies in a bid to win votes — and campaign cash — from digital asset enthusiasts in recent months. Now, he's weaving the overtures into his pitch for his sons' forthcoming startup... It remains unclear what the Trump sons' crypto venture will look like. They have been teasing their plans to launch it for weeks, in part by positioning it as an alternative to the use of big banks.... ["Be defiant," reads the tagline on their World Liberty Financial home page — with nothing more than its name and the words "Coming soon."]

Trump's sons took over control of their father's business, the Trump Organization, after he became president in 2017, but he retained ownership of the company... It is unclear whether the crypto startup would be launched as part of the Trump Organization or as a separate entity. Either way, ethics experts and watchdogs say the crypto business could create the appearance of a conflict of interest if Trump wins back the White House this fall... From an "optics perspective, it's terrible," said Richard Painter, who served as chief White House ethics lawyer under former President George W. Bush and later ran for Congress as a Democrat. But he said it wouldn't violate any ethics laws.

The family venture is the latest way Trump has embraced the digital asset industry, which is pouring more than $160 million into the 2024 elections as it seeks to help elect allies up and down the ballot. Trump has also marketed his own line of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, which are digital images of the former president that fans can purchase for $99... Trump's NFT sales could also raise ethics concerns, said Jordan Libowitz, vice president for communications at the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington....

"[P]rior conflicts and illegalities took advantage of preexisting loopholes," said Norman Eisen, an ethics lawyer who served in the Obama White House and later helped build the first impeachment case against Trump. "Here, Trump appears to be promising to create the loopholes while his family is simultaneously designing a business venture to exploit them."
The article notes that Trump promoted his son's crypto venture on X this week with audio from Trump's speech at a crypto conference in July. "He first revealed his pro-crypto leanings — after previously deriding digital currency — at a Mar-a-Lago event in May with supporters who bought his crypto-linked digital trading cards..."

"Trump is also facing new questions about what he would do with his stake in the parent company of the social media service Truth Social," the article adds. (Although this week the stock hit a new low. After losing 50% of its value in six weeks, it's dropped below $20 per share for the first time since it started publicly trading...)

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: The Contingency Contingent, is Leigh Claire La Berge's amazing tale of what she calls her "fake job in Y2K preparedness." La Berge offers an insider's view of the madness that ensued when Y2K panic gave rise to seemingly-limitless spending at mega-corporations for massive enterprise-wide Y2K remediation projects led by management consulting firms that left clients with little to show for their money. (La Berge was an analyst for consulting firm Arthur Andersen, where "the Andersen position was that 'Y2K is a documentation problem, not a technology problem'.... At a certain point all that had happened yesterday was our documenting, so then we documented that. Then, exponentially, we had to document ourselves documenting our own documentation."). In what reads like the story treatment for an Office Space sequel, La Berge writes that it was a fake job "because Andersen was faking it."
From the article: The firm spent the late 1990s certifying fraudulent financial statements from Enron, the Texas-based energy company that made financial derivatives a household phrase, until that company went bankrupt in a cloud of scandal and suicide and Andersen was convicted of obstruction of justice, surrendered its accounting licenses, and shuttered. But that was later.

Finally, it was a fake job because the problem that the Conglomerate had hired Andersen to solve was not real, at least not in the sense that it needed to be solved or that Andersen could solve it. The problem was known variously as Y2K, or the Year 2000, or the Y2K Bug, and it prophesied that on January 1, 2000, computers the world over would be unable to process the thousandth-digit change from 19 to 20 as 1999 rolled into 2000 and would crash, taking with them whatever technology they were operating, from email to television to air-traffic control to, really, the entire technological infrastructure of global modernity. Hospitals might have emergency power generators to stave off the worst effects (unless the generators, too, succumbed to the Y2K Bug), but not advertising firms.

With a world-ending scenario on the horizon, employment standards were being relaxed. The end of the millennium had produced a tight labor market in knowledge workers, and new kinds of companies, called dot-coms, were angling to dominate the emergent world of e-commerce. Flush with cash, these companies were hoovering up any possessors of knowledge they could find. Friends from my gradeless college whose only experience in business had been parking-lot drug deals were talking stock options.
Looking back, the author remembers being "surprised by how quickly Y2K disappeared from office discourse as though censored..."

Their upcoming book is called Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism is a Joke.

An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this report from NBC News: A new approach to a routine blood test could predict a person's 30-year risk of heart disease, research published Saturday in the New England Journal of Medicine found.

Doctors have long assessed their patients' risk for cardiovascular disease by using a blood test to look at cholesterol levels, focusing particularly on LDL or "bad" cholesterol. But limiting blood testing to just cholesterol misses important — and usually silent — risk factors, experts say... Lead study author Dr. Paul Ridker, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and his team found that in addition to LDL cholesterol, two other markers — a type of fat in the blood called lipoprotein (a), or Lp(a), and an indicator of inflammation — are important predictors of a person's risk of heart attack, stroke and coronary heart disease...

In the study, the researchers analyzed data from nearly 30,000 U.S. women who were part of the Women's Health Study. On average, the women were 55 years old when they enrolled in the years 1992 through 1995. About 13% — roughly 3,600 participants — had either a heart attack or stroke, had surgery to fix a narrowed or blocked artery, or died from heart disease over the 30-year follow-up period... All of the women had blood tests done at the beginning of the study to measure their LDL cholesterol, Lp(a) and C-reactive protein levels, a marker of inflammation in the body. These measurements, individually as well as together, appeared to predict a woman's heart health over the next three decades, the study found.

Women with the highest levels of LDL cholesterol had a 36% higher risk for heart disease compared with those with the lowest levels. The highest levels of Lp(a) indicated a 33% elevated risk, and those with the highest levels of CRP were 70% more at risk for heart disease. When the three were looked at together, women who had the highest levels were 1.5 times more likely to have a stroke and over three times more likely to develop coronary heart disease over the next 30 years compared with women with the lowest levels.

All of the markers have been individually linked to higher risk of heart disease, but "all three represent different biological processes. They tell us why someone is actually at risk," Ridker said.

Casey Newton, former senior editor at the Verge, weighs in on Platformer about the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov.

"Fending off onerous speech regulations and overzealous prosecutors requires that platform builders act responsibly. Telegram never even pretended to." Officially, Telegram's terms of service prohibit users from posting illegal pornographic content or promotions of violence on public channels. But as the Stanford Internet Observatory noted last year in an analysis of how CSAM spreads online, these terms implicitly permit users who share CSAM in private channels as much as they want to. "There's illegal content on Telegram. How do I take it down?" asks a question on Telegram's FAQ page. The company declares that it will not intervene in any circumstances: "All Telegram chats and group chats are private amongst their participants," it states. "We do not process any requests related to them...."

Telegram can look at the contents of private messages, making it vulnerable to law enforcement requests for that data. Anticipating these requests, Telegram created a kind of jurisdictional obstacle course for law enforcement that (it says) none of them have successfully navigated so far. From the FAQ again:

To protect the data that is not covered by end-to-end encryption, Telegram uses a distributed infrastructure. Cloud chat data is stored in multiple data centers around the globe that are controlled by different legal entities spread across different jurisdictions. The relevant decryption keys are split into parts and are never kept in the same place as the data they protect. As a result, several court orders from different jurisdictions are required to force us to give up any data. [...] To this day, we have disclosed 0 bytes of user data to third parties, including governments.

As a result, investigation after investigation finds that Telegram is a significant vector for the spread of CSAM.... The company's refusal to answer almost any law enforcement request, no matter how dire, has enabled some truly vile behavior. "Telegram is another level," Brian Fishman, Meta's former anti-terrorism chief, wrote in a post on Threads. "It has been the key hub for ISIS for a decade. It tolerates CSAM. Its ignored reasonable [law enforcement] engagement for YEARS. It's not 'light' content moderation; it's a different approach entirely.
The article asks whether France's action "will embolden countries around the world to prosecute platform CEOs criminally for failing to turn over user data." On the other hand, Telegram really does seem to be actively enabling a staggering amount of abuse. And while it's disturbing to see state power used indiscriminately to snoop on private conversations, it's equally disturbing to see a private company declare itself to be above the law.

Given its behavior, a legal intervention into Telegram's business practices was inevitable. But the end of private conversation, and end-to-end encryption, need not be.

"Dirk Hohndel, a Linux kernel developer and long-time open source leader, wanted his audience at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + Open Source Summit China 2024 Summit China to know he's not a Valkey developer," writes Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. "He's a Valkey user and fan." [Hohndel] opened his speech by recalling how the open source, high-performance key/value datastore Valkey had been forked from Redis... Hohndel emphasized that "forks are good. Forks are one of the key things that open source licenses are for. So, if the maintainer starts doing things you don't like, you can fork the code under the same license and do better..." In this case, though, Redis had done a "bait-and-switch" with the Redis code, Hohndale argued. This was because they had made an all-too-common business failure: They hadn't realized that "open source is not a business model...."

While the licensing change is what prompted the fork, Hohndel sees leadership and technical reasons why the Valkey fork is likely to succeed. First, two-thirds of the formerly top Redis maintainers and developers have switched to Valkey. In addition, AWS, Google Cloud, and Oracle, under the Linux Foundation's auspices, all support Valkey. When both the technical and money people agree, good things can happen.

The other reason is that Valkey already looks like it will be the better technical choice. That's because the recently announced Valkey 8.0, which builds upon the last open source version of Redis, 7.2.4, introduces serious speed improvements and new features that Redis users have wanted for some time. As [AWS principal engineer Madelyn] Olson said at Open Source Summit North America earlier this year, "Redis really didn't want to break anything." Valkey wants to move a bit faster. How much faster? A lot. Valkey 8.0 overhauls Redis's single-threaded event loop threading model with a more sophisticated multithreaded approach to I/O operations. Hohndel reported that on his small Valkey-powered aircraft tracking system, "I see roughly a threefold improvement in performance, and I stream a lot of data, 60 million data points a day."
The article notes that Valkey is already being supported by major Linux distros including AlmaLinux, Fedora, and Alpine.

"The Big Bang may not have been the beginning of the universe," writes LiveScience, citing "a theory of cosmology that suggests the universe can 'bounce' between phases of contraction and expansion."

The recent study suggests that dark matter could be composed of black holes formed before the Big Bang, during a transition from the universe's last contraction to the current expansion phase... In the new study, researchers explored a scenario where dark matter consists of primordial black holes formed from density fluctuations that occurred during the universe's last contraction phase, not long before the period of expansion that we observe now. They published their findings in June in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics ... In this "bouncing" cosmology, the universe contracted to a size about 50 orders of magnitude smaller than it is today. After the rebound, photons and other particles were born, marking the Big Bang. Near the rebound, the matter density was so high that small black holes formed from quantum fluctuations in the matter's density, making them viable candidates for dark matter.

"Small primordial black holes can be produced during the very early stages of the universe, and if they are not too small, their decay due to Hawking radiation [a hypothetical phenomenon of black holes emitting particles due to quantum effects] will not be efficient enough to get rid of them, so they would still be around now," Patrick Peter, director of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email. "Weighing more or less the mass of an asteroid, they could contribute to dark matter, or even solve this issue altogether."

The scientists' calculations show that this universe mode's properties, such as the curvature of space and the microwave background, match current observations, supporting their hypothesis.
"If this hypothesis holds, the gravitational waves generated during the black hole formation process might be detectable by future gravitational wave observatories, providing a way to confirm this dark matter generation scenario..."