An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When should you be concerned about a NAS hard drive failing? Multiple factors are at play, so many might turn to various SMART (self-monitoring, analysis, and reporting technology) data. When it comes to how long the drive has been active, there are backup companies like Backblaze using hard drives that are nearly 8 years old. That may be why some customers have been panicked, confused, and/or angered to see their Western Digital NAS hard drive automatically given a warning label in Synology's DiskStation Manager (DSM) after they were powered on for three years. With no other factors considered for these automatic flags, Western Digital is accused of age-shaming drives to push people to buy new HDDs prematurely. The practice's revelation is the last straw for some users. Western Digital already had a steep climb to win back NAS customers' trust after shipping NAS drives with SMR (shingled magnetic recording) instead of CMR (conventional magnetic recording). Now, some are saying they won't use or recommend the company's hard drives anymore.

As users have reported online, including on Synology-focused and Synology's own forums, as well as on Reddit and YouTube, Western Digital drives using Western Device Digital Analytics (WDDA) are getting a "warning" stamp in Synology DSM once their power-on hours count hits the three-year mark. WDDA is similar to SMART monitoring and rival offerings, like Seagate's IronWolf, and is supposed to provide analytics and actionable items. The recommended action says: "The drive has accumulated a large number of power on hours [throughout] the entire life of the drive. Please consider to replace the drive soon." There seem to be no discernible problems with the hard drives otherwise.

Synology confirmed this to Ars Technica and noted that the labels come from Western Digital, not Synology. A spokesperson said the "WDDA monitoring and testing subsystem is developed by Western Digital, including the warning after they reach a certain number of power-on-hours." The practice has caused some, like YouTuber SpaceRex, to stop recommending Western Digital drives for the foreseeable future. In May, the YouTuber and tech consultant described his outrage, saying three years is "absolutely nothing" for a NAS drive and lamenting the flags having nothing to do with anything besides whether or not a drive has been in use for three years. A user on SynoForum discussed their "panic" upon seeing the label. And SpaceRex said one of its clients also panicked and quickly replaced the "warning" drives out of fear of losing business-critical data. "It is clearly predatory tactics by Western Digital trying to sell more hard drives," SpaceRex said in a June 10 video. "Users are also concerned that this could prevent people from noticing serious problems with their drive," adds Ars. "Further, you can't repair a pool with a drive marked with a warning label."

Some of the affected products with WDDA include the WD Red Pro, WD Red Plus, and WD Purple. A discussion post about how to disable WDDA via SSH can be found here.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: AWS offered A Look Inside the Making of an NFL Football Schedule in conjunction with Thursday's release of the 2023 NFL Schedule Powered by AWS. AWS notes that producing the schedule required the use of 4,000+ AWS EC2 Spot Instances. An AWS promotional video claims they "saved the NFL an estimated $2 million each season" by leveraging AWS Spot Instances for a discount of up to 90% off compared to AWS On-Demand pricing..

"In just three months," AWS explains, "National Football League (NFL) schedule makers methodically build an exciting 18 week 272-game schedule spanning 576 possible game windows." Up until 10 years ago, AWS notes in an accompanying infographic, the NFL used a white-boarding process to manually craft its schedule.

Not to diminish the NFL's and AWS's 2023 scheduling achievement, but the 2013 documentary The Schedule Makers told the remarkable tale of the husband-and-wife duo of Henry and Holly Stephenson, who for almost a quarter of a century in the pre-Cloud era managed the scheduling for 30 Major League Baseball (MLB) teams who each played 162 regular season games a year. According to the May 1985 Atari Compendium (pg. 38), the Stephensons were using a self-written program running on a 64K IMS-8000 to help schedule games for the MLB (2,106 games over a 6-month season), NBA, and NASL/MISL (defunct soccer leagues). So perhaps the NFL's claim that "There's no way the NFL could deliver the quality of schedule that we put out every year for our fans and television partners without the contributions of our friends at AWS" should be taken with a grain of salt.

An anonymous reader shares a report: We recently covered a study by Secure Data Recovery, an HDD, SSD, and RAID data recovery company, of 2,007 defective hard disk drives it received. It found the average time before failure among those drives to be 2 years and 10 months. That seemed like a short life span, but considering the limited sample size and analysis in Secure Data Recovery's report, there was room for skepticism. Today, Backblaze, a backup and cloud storage company with a reputation for detailed HDD and SSD failure analysis, followed up Secure Data Recovery's report with its own research using a much larger data set. Among the 17,155 failed HDDs Backblaze examined, the average age at which the drives failed was 2 years and 6 months.

Backblaze arrived at this age by examining all of its failed drives and their respective power-on hours. The company recorded each drive's failure date, model, serial number, capacity, failure, and SMART raw value. The 17,155 drives examined include 72 different models and does not include failed boot drives, drives that had no SMART raw attribute data, or drives with out-of-bounds data. If Backblaze only looked at drives that it didn't use in its data centers anymore, there would be 3,379 drives across 35 models, and the average age of failure would be a bit longer at 2 years and 7 months. Backblaze said its results thus far "are consistent" with Secure Data Recovery's March findings. This is despite Backblaze currently using HDDs that are older than 2 years and 7 months.

Thelasko writes: Renowned data journalist, Nate Silver, announced he will be leaving the company as soon as his contract expires. Although Disney owns the FiveThirtyEight brand, it is believed that Silver retains ownership of the site's algorithms. "ABC News remains dedicated to data journalism with a core focus on politics, the economy and enterprise reporting -- this streamlined structure will allow us to be more closely aligned with our priorities for the 2024 election and beyond," an ABC News spokesperson said in a statement. "We are grateful for the invaluable contributions of the team members who will be departing the organization and know they will continue to make an important impact on the future of journalism."

YouTube TV just won its first Technical Emmy award for its "Views" suite of features, which lets users access sports highlights, key plays, player stats and game scores. TechCrunch reports: At the 74th annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards last night, YouTube TV was declared the winner for the category "AI-ML Curation of Sports Highlights." The tech company also announced today that Key Plays reached a notable milestone -- the feature was used in over 10 million watch sessions on the platform. Last year, viewers used key plays the most during the World Cup, regular season NFL games and Premier League matches.

The Key Plays view tracks important plays in a game. Users can tap on the plays to rewatch when it occurs in the game. This is helpful for users that missed a live game and want to catch up on key moments. When YouTube TV launched Views in 2018, it was only available for baseball, basketball, football and hockey. Soccer and golf were added later on. The suite of features was also initially limited to phones and tablets. Today, the feature is available within the YouTube TV app across smart TVs and mobile devices.

In addition to Stats, Key Plays and Scores View, there's also Fantasy Football View, which is a mobile-only feature and lets users link their existing fantasy football account. That way, when a user is watching NFL games on YouTube TV, the feature allows them to see how their team is performing in real time. Plus, there's a "Jump to" function for users to quickly access a segment they want to view, which is especially handy for tennis fans and for users watching the Olympics. "Views came out of a team brainstorm about five years ago and launched about a year after YouTube TV," said Kathryn Cochrane, YouTube TV's group project manager, in a company blog post. "A lot of our viewers are devoted sports fans, and we found that when they watch sports, they aren't just looking at what's on the big screen. They were also actively on their phones, finding more details such as stats for their fantasy football league, updates from other games, and more, all to enhance what they were already watching."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The leader of a small online gaming chat group where a trove of classified U.S. intelligence documents leaked over the last few months is a 21-year-old member of the intelligence wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The New York Times. The National Guardsman, whose name is Jack Teixeira, oversaw a private online group called Thug Shaker Central, where about 20 to 30 people, mostly young men and teenagers, came together over a shared love of guns, racist online memes and video games. On Thursday afternoon, about a half-dozen F.B.I. agents pushed into a residence in North Dighton, Mass. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland later said in a short statement that Airman Teixeira had been arrested "without incident." Federal investigators had been searching for days for the person who leaked the top secret documents online.

Starting months ago, one of the users uploaded hundreds of pages of intelligence briefings into the small chat group, lecturing its members, who had bonded during the isolation of the pandemic, on the importance of staying abreast of world events. [...] The Times spoke with four members of Thug Shaker Central, one of whom said he had known the person who leaked for at least three years, had met him in person and referred to him as the O.G. The friends described him as older than most of the group members, who were in their teens, and the undisputed leader. One of the friends said the O.G. had access to intelligence documents through his job. While the gaming friends would not identify the group's leader by name, a trail of digital evidence compiled by The Times leads to Airman Teixeira. The Times has been able to link Airman Teixeira to other members of Thug Shaker Central through his online gaming profile and other records. Details of the interior of Airman Teixeira's childhood home -- posted on social media in family photographs -- also match details on the margins of some of the photographs of the leaked secret documents.

Members of Thug Shaker Central who spoke to The Times said that the documents they discussed online were meant to be purely informative. While many pertained to the war in Ukraine, the members said they took no side in the conflict. The documents, they said, started to get wider attention only when one of the teenage members of the group took a few dozen of them and posted them to a public online forum. From there they were picked up by Russian-language Telegram channels and then The Times, which first reported on them. The person who leaked, they said, was no whistle-blower, and the secret documents were never meant to leave their small corner of the internet. "This guy was a Christian, antiwar, just wanted to inform some of his friends about what's going on," said one of the person's friends from the community, a 17-year-old recent high school graduate. "We have some people in our group who are in Ukraine. We like fighting games; we like war games."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Over the past month, classified Pentagon documents have circulated on 4chan, Telegram, and various Discord servers. The documents contain daily intelligence briefings, sensitive information about Ukrainian military positions, and a handwritten character sheet for a table-top roleplaying game. No one knows who leaked the Pentagon documents or how. They appeared online as photographs of printed pages, implying someone printed them out and removed them from a secure location, similar to how NSA translator Reality Winner leaked documents. The earliest documents Motherboard has seen are dated February 23, though the New York Times and Bellingcat reported that some are dated as early as January. According to Bellingcat, the earliest known instances of the leaks appearing online can be traced back to a Discord server.

At some point, a Discord user uploaded a zip file of 32 images from the leak onto a Minecraft Discord server. Included in this pack alongside highly sensitive, Top Secret and other classified documents about the Pentagon's strategy and assessment of the war in Ukraine, was a handwritten piece of paper that appeared to be a character sheet for a roleplaying game. It's written on a standard piece of notebook paper, three holes punched out on the side, blue lines crisscrossing the page. The character's name is Doctor "Izmer Trotzky," his character class is "Professor Scientist." They've got a strength of 5, a charisma of 4, and 19 rubles to their name. Doctor Trotzky has 10 points in first aid and occult skills, and 24 in spot hidden. He's carrying a magnifying glass, a fountain pen, a sword cane, and a deringer. [...]

But what game is it from? Motherboard reached out to game designer Jacqueline Bryk to find out. Bryk is an award-winning designer of roleplaying games who has worked on Kult: Divinity Lost, Changeling: the Lost, Fading Suns: Pax Alexius, and Vampire: the Masquerade. "I strongly suspect this is Call Of Cthulhu," Bryk said when first looking at the sheet. Call of Cthulhu (COC) is an RPG based on the work of H.P. Lovecraft where players attempt to stave off madness while investigating eldritch horrors. "This is a pretty classic Professor build. The sword cane really clinches it for me. I notice he's currently carrying a derringer and a dagger but took no points in firearms or fighting. I'm not sure which edition this is but it seems like the most he could do with his weapons is throw them." "After some research, Bryk concluded that the game is a homebrewed combination of COC and the Fallout tabletop game based on the popular video game franchise," adds Motherboard. "My best guest here is Fallout: Cthulhu the Homebrew," Bryk said, giving the home designed game a name.

InfoWorld reports: Zig, a general purpose programming language that interacts with C/C++ programs and promises to be a modern alternative to C, has made an appearance in the Tiobe index of programming language popularity. Zig entered the top 50 in the April edition of the Tiobe Programming Community Index, ranking 46th, albeit with a rating of just 0.19%. By contrast, the Google-promoted Carbon language, positioned as an experimental successor to C++, ranked just 168th.
Tiobe CEO Paul Jansen argues that high-performance languages "are booming due to the vast amounts of data that needs to be processed nowadays. As a result, C and C++ are doing well in the top 10 and Rust seems to be a keeper in the top 20." Zig has all the nice features of C and C++ (such as explicit memory management enhanced with option types) and has abandoned the not-so-nice features (such as the dreadful preprocessing). Entering the top 50 is no guarantee to become a success, but it is at least a first noteworthy step. Good luck Zig!
Tiobe bases its monthly ranking of programming language popularity on search engine results for courses, third party vendors, and engineers. Here's what they's calculated for the most popular programming languages in April of 2023:

• Python
• C
• Java
• C++
• C#
• Visual Basic
• JavaScript
• SQL
• PHP
• Go

April's top 10 was nearly identical to the rankings a year ago, but assembly language fell from 2022's #8 position to #12 in 2023. SQL and PHP rose one rank (into 2023's #8 and #9 positions) — and as in March, the rankings now shows Go as the 10th most popular programming language.

Anti-piracy group CODA is reporting the shutdown of B9Good, a pirate manga site that targeted Japan but was operated from China. In response to a criminal complaint filed by CODA on behalf of six Japanese companies, which were backed by 21 others during the investigation, Chinese authorities arrested four people and seized one house worth $580,000. TorrentFreak reports: Manga piracy site B9Good initially appeared in 2008 and established itself under B9DM branding. SimilarWeb stats show that the site was enjoying around 15 million visits each month, with CODA noting that in the two-year period leading to February 2023, the site was accessed more than 300 million times Around 95% of the site's visitors came from Japan. B9Good had been featured in an MPA submission to the USTR's notorious markets report in 2019. Traffic was reported as almost 16 million visits per month back then, meaning that site visitor numbers remained stable for the next three years. The MPA said the site was possibly hosted in Canada, but domain records since then show a wider spread, including Hong Kong, China, United States, Bulgaria, and Japan.

Wherever the site ended up, the location of its operator was more important. In 2021, CODA launched its International Enforcement Project (CBEP), which aimed to personally identify the operators of pirate sites, including those behind B9Good who were eventually traced to China. Pursuing copyright cases from outside China is reportedly difficult, but CODA had a plan. In January 2022, CODA's Beijing office was recognized as an NGO with legitimate standing to protect the rights of its member companies. Working on behalf of Aniplex, TV Tokyo, Toei Animation, Toho, Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK), and Bandai Namco Film Works, CODA filed a criminal complaint in China, and starting February 14, 2023, local authorities began rounding up the B9Good team.

williamyf writes: The fine folks at Backblaze have published their first ever report that includes their SSD fleet. To the surprise of no one, SSDs are more more reliable (0.98% AFR) than HDDs (1.64% AFR). The surprising thing thing was how small the difference is (0.66% AFR).

A TL;DR article by well regarded storage reporter Chris Mellor is here. Also worthy of note: S.M.A.R.T. attribute usage among SSD makers is neither standardized, nor very smart:

"Klein notes that the SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) used for drive state reporting is applied inconsistently by manufacturers. "Terms like wear leveling, endurance, lifetime used, life used, LBAs [Logical Block Address] written, LBAs read, and so on are used inconsistently between manufacturers, often using different SMART attributes, and sometimes they are not recorded at all."

That means you can't use such SMART statistics to make valid comparisons between the drives. "Come on, manufacturers. Standardize your SMART numbers."

Artifact, the personalized news reader built by Instagram's co-founders, is now open to the public, no sign-up required. TechCrunch reports: With today's launch, Artifact is dropping its waitlist and phone number requirements, introducing the app's first social feature and adding feedback controls to better personalize the news reading experience, among other changes. [...] With today's launch, Artifact will now give users more visibility into their news reading habits with a newly added stats feature that shows you the categories you've read as well as the recent articles you read within those categories, plus the publishers you've been reading the most. But it will also group your reading more narrowly by specific topics. In other words, instead of just "tech" or "AI," you might find you've read a lot about the topic "ChatGPT," specifically.

In time, Artifact's goal is to provide tools that would allow readers to click a button to show more or less from a given topic to better control, personalize and diversify their feed. In the meantime, however, users can delve into settings to manage their interests by blocking or pausing publishers or selecting and unselecting general interest categories. Also new today is a feature that allows you to upload your contacts in order to see a signal that a particular article is popular in your network. This is slightly different from Twitter's Top Articles feature, which shows you articles popular with the people you follow, because Artifact's feature is more privacy-focused.

"It doesn't tell you who read it. It doesn't tell you how many of them read it, so it keeps privacy -- and we clearly don't do it with just one read. So you can't have one contact and like figure out what that one contact is reading ... it has to meet a certain minimum threshold," notes [Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom]. This way, he adds, the app isn't driven by what your friends are reading, but it can use that as a signal to highlight items that everyone was reading. In time, the broader goal is to expand the social experience to also include a way to discuss the news articles within Artifact itself. The beta version, limited to testers, offers a Discover feed where users can share articles and like and comment on those shared by others. There's a bit of a News Feed or even Instagram-like quality to engaging with news in this way, we found.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Hyundai and Kia are offering free software updates for millions of their cars in response to a rash of car thefts inspired by a viral social media challenge on TikTok. The so-called "Kia Challenge" on the social media platform has led to hundreds of car thefts nationwide, including at least 14 reported crashes and eight fatalities, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Thieves known as "the Kia Boyz" would post instructional videos about how to bypass the vehicles' security system using tools as simple as a USB cable.

The thefts are reportedly easy to pull off because many 2015-2019 Hyundai and Kia vehicles lack electronic immobilizers that prevent thieves from simply breaking in and bypassing the ignition. The feature is standard equipment on nearly all vehicles from the same period made by other manufacturers. Hyundai and its subsidiary Kia are offering to update the "theft alarm software logic" to extend the length of the alarm sound from 30 seconds to one minute. The vehicles will also be updated to require a key in the ignition switch to turn the vehicle on. The software upgrade modifies certain vehicle control modules on Hyundai vehicles equipped with standard "turn-key-to-start" ignition systems. As a result, locking the doors with the key fob will set the factory alarm and activate an "ignition kill" feature so the vehicles cannot be started when subjected to the popularized theft mode. Customers must use the key fob to unlock their vehicles to deactivate the "ignition kill" feature.

There hasn't been a nationwide accounting of how many Hyundai and Kia vehicles have been stolen, but stats from individual cities provide some sense of how viral the trend has become. In Milwaukee, for example, police report that 469 Kias and 426 Hyundais were stolen in 2020. Those numbers spiked the following year to 3,557 Kias and 3,406 Hyundais, according to NPR. Approximately 3.8 million Hyundais and 4.5 million Kias are eligible for the software update free of charge, for a total of 8.3 million cars. Vehicle owners are instructed to take their cars to a local dealership, where technicians will install the upgrades in less than an hour. The upgraded vehicles will also get a window decal indicating they've been equipped with anti-theft technology.

Podcasting has emerged out of years of rapid growth and a pandemic boom to face an identity crisis as its ecosystem contracts, advertisement slows and the medium eases into maturity. From a report: Podcasts changed the listening habits of millions of people over the last decade, but the once-groundbreaking format has settled into a more precarious middle age. Fewer people are creating new shows, networks are having difficulties recouping investments, and longtime podcasters are on the hunt for ways to keep their shows sustainable.

The podcast ad market has not grown as quickly as many hoped. Its $1.5 billion size in 2022 was minuscule compared to the nearly $70 billion spent on TV ads last year. Podcast search engine Listen Notes' updated 2022 stats showed an 80% drop in new podcasts created last year. A December report from Insider Intelligence also shows listener growth in 2022 shrank to only 5% after years of double-digit percentage growth. Additionally, data from Edison released in December found declines for the first time in monthly and weekly U.S. listening habits. These shrinking numbers can, in part, be chalked up to a rebound, after the pandemic inspired a boom in new shows and gave many people more time to listen.

According to a new report by Dean McCarron of Mercury Research, the x86 processor market has just endured "the largest on-quarter and on-year declines in our 30-year history." "Based on previously published third-party data, McCarron is also reasonably sure that the 2022 Q4 and full-year numbers represent the worst downturn in PC processor history," adds Tom's Hardware. From the report: The x86 processor downturn observed has been precipitated by the terrible twosome of lower demand and an inventory correction. This menacing pincer movement has resulted in 2022 unit shipments of 374 million processors (excluding ARM), a figure 21% lower than in 2021. Revenues were $65 billion, down 19 percent YoY. McCarron was keen to emphasize that Mercury's gloomy stats about x86 shipments through 2022 do not necessarily directly correlate with x86 PC (processors) shipments to end users. Earlier, we mentioned that the two downward driving forces were inventory adjustments and a slowing of sales -- but which played the most significant part in this x86 record slump?

The Mercury Research analyst explained, "Most of the downturn in shipments is blamed on excess inventory shipping in prior quarters impacting current sales." A perfect storm is thus brewing as "CPU suppliers are also deliberately limiting shipments to help increase the rate of inventory consumption... [and] PC demand for processors is lower, and weakening macroeconomic concerns are driving PC OEMs to reduce their inventory as well." Mercury also asserted that the trend is likely to continue through H1 2023. Its thoughts about the underlying inventory shenanigans should also be evidenced by upcoming financials from the major players in the next few months. [...]

McCarron shines a glimmer of light in the wake of this gloom, reminding us that overall processor revenue was still higher in 2022 than any year before the 2020s began. Another ray of light shone on AMD, with its gains in server CPU share, one of the only segments which saw some growth in Q4 2022. Also, AMD gained market share in the shrinking desktop and laptop markets.

Hot Hardware reports: When it comes to mechanical hard disk drive (HDDs), you'd be very hard pressed to find any data on failure rates reported by any of the major players, such as Western Digital, Seagate, and the rest. Fortunately for us stat nerds and anyone else who is curious, the folks at cloud backup firm Backblaze frequently issue reliability reports that give insight into the how often various models and capacities give up the ghost. At a glance, Backblaze's latest report highlights that bigger capacity drives -- 12TB, 14TB, and 16TB -- fail less often than smaller capacity models. A closer examination, however, reveals that it's not so cut and dry.

[...] In a nutshell, Backblaze noted an overall rise in the annual failure rates (AFRs) for 2022. The cumulative AFR of all drives deployed rose to 1.37 percent, up from 1.01 percent in 2021. By the end of 2022, Backblaze had 236,608 HDDs in service, including 231,309 data drives and 4,299 boot drives. Its latest report focuses on the data drives. [...] Bigger drives are more reliable than smaller drives, case close, right? Not so fast. There's an important caveat to this data -- while the smaller drives failed more often last year, they are also older, as can be seen in the graph above. "The aging of our fleet of hard drives does appear to be the most logical reason for the increased AFR in 2022. We could dig in further, but that is probably moot at this point. You see, we spent 2022 building out our presence in two new data centers, the Nautilus facility in Stockton, California and the CoreSite facility in Reston, Virginia. In 2023, our focus is expected to be on replacing our older drives with 16TB and larger hard drives," Backblaze says.

Last summer GNOME invited people to voluntarily run the tool gnome-info-collect on their systems to send back (non-sensitive/non-identifiable) data about their system configurations. 2,560 people ran the tool, and they're now releasing the data.

Here's the distribution of distros for all 2,560 respondents:

Fedora: 1,376 (54.69%)
Arch: 469 (18.64%)
Ubuntu: 267 (10.61%)
Manjaro: 140 (5.56%)
EndeavourOS: 66 (2.62%)
Debian: 44 (1.75%)
openSUSE: 38 (1.51%)
Pop! 38 (1.51%)
Other: 78 (3.10%)


And the breakdown of hardware manufacturers (top four):

Lenovo: 516 (23.54%)
Dell: 329 (15.01%)
ASUS: 261 (11.91%)
HP: 223 (10.17%)


The site OMG! Linux pointed out that 90% of systems had Flatpak installed — (though it's enabled by default on Fedora, which was 54.69% of all the respondents). Some other interesting stats they noticed: - Most common default browser: Firefox (73.14%), Chrome (11.64%), Brave (4.76%). [Microsoft Edge was the default browser on 37 systems (1.51%) ]

- 83% of users have at least one (non-default) GNOME extension installed
- 'App Indicator' is the most popular extension (by 43% of those using extensions)

- GSConnect, User Themes, and Dash to Panel/Dock also widely used

- Most popular desktop apps: GIMP (58.48%), VLC (53.71%), Steam (53.40%)


[...] The popularity of GNOME extensions will surprise no-one. It is a solid indicator that the existing GNOME extension system is good at doing what it's there to: let users augment and extend their system in the ways they want.
GNOME's report adds that "it's exciting to see the popularity of new GNOME apps like Flatseal, To Do, Bottles, and Fragments."

One other interesting stat from their report: 55% of the participants were using Online Accounts, with Google the most common one added, followed by Nextcloud and Microsoft. But "Some of the account types had very little usage at all, with Foursquare, Facebook, Media Server, Flickr and Last.fm all being active on less than 1% of systems."

According to the latest official Android distribution numbers from Google, Android 13 is running on 5.2% of all devices less than six months after launch. 9to5Google reports: According to Android Studio, devices running Android 13 now account for 5.2% of all devices. Meanwhile Android 12 and 12L now account for 18.9% of the total, a significant increase from August's 13.5% figure. Notably, while Google's chart does include details about Android 13, it doesn't make a distinction between Android 12 and 12L. Looking at the older versions, we see that usage of Android Oreo has finally dropped below 10%, with similar drops in percentage down the line. Android Jelly Bean, which previously weighed in at 0.3%, is no longer listed, while KitKat has dropped from 0.9% to 0.7%. Android 13's 5.2% distribution number "is better than it sounds," writes Ryan Whitwam via ExtremeTech: These numbers show an accelerating pickup for Google's new platform versions. If you look back at stats from the era of Android KitKat and Lollipop, the latest version would only have a fraction of this usage share after half a year. That's because the only phones running the new software would be Google's Nexus phones, plus maybe one or two new devices from OEMs that worked with Google to deploy the latest software as a marketing gimmick.

The improvements are thanks largely to structural changes in how Android is developed and deployed. For example, Project Treble was launched in 2017 to re-architect the platform, separating the OS framework from the low-level vendor code. This made it easier to update devices without waiting on vendors to provide updated drivers. We saw evidence of improvement that very year, and it's gotten better ever since.

Planet earth "has now warmed at least 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) compared with preindustrial levels," reports the Washington Post, "and nearly every year in the past decade ranks near the top."

"On Thursday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ranked 2022 as the sixth-hottest year on record and reported that the 10 warmest have all occurred since 2010...." Twenty-eight countries set national record-high annual averages last year, including Britain, Spain, France, Germany, China and New Zealand. Despite 2022 being slightly cooler than other recent years, Berkeley Earth reported that 850 million people experienced their warmest year ever. Humans' emissions of carbon dioxide and other planet-warming gases have driven this rapid warming, scientists say.

"This is a big change for the planet. And that activity has increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 50 percent compared to where it was for the last few million years," Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth, said in an interview. "There's often a debate between adapting to climate change and mitigating climate change. We don't have the luxury of choosing anymore. We're going to have to do both...."

"Even if we get our act together and reduce our emissions dramatically, and get our emissions all the way down to zero, the world isn't going to cool back down for many centuries, it's just going to stop warming," he said. "For better or worse, this is normal and it's our job to keep something worse from becoming the new normal past this."
Hausfather also told the Post that without La Niña cooling the Pacific ocean, 2022 would have been the second-warmest year on record, behind 2020.

Other stats from the article about 2022:

• Parts of Antarctica's ice sheet were as much as 70 degrees above normal.
• China suffered its worst recorded drought ever.
• Europe experienced its worst drought in 500 years.
• America had its third-driest year, and in late October 63% of America was experiencing drought conditions — a 10-year high.
• "Blistering temperatures in India and Pakistan spanning from March to May were so high that pavement buckled."

Phoronix checks systemd's Git activity in 2022 (and compares it to previous years): If measuring a open-source project's progress by the commity activity per year, while not the most practical indicator, systemd had a very good year. In 2022 there were 6,271 commits which is under 2021's all-time-high of 6,787 commits. But this year's activity count effectively ties 2018 for second place with the most commits in a given calendar year.

This year saw 201k lines of new code added to systemd and 110k lines removed, or just under one hundred thousand lines added in total to systemd in 2022....

Systemd continues to grow and is closing out 2022 at around 1,715,111 lines within its Git repository.
Also interesting: "[W]hen it comes to the most commits overall to systemd over its history, Lennart Poettering easily wins the race and there is no competition. As a reminder, this year Lennart joined Microsoft as one of the surprises for 2022."

Justin Garrison works at Amazon Web Services on the Kubernetes team (and was senior systems engineer on several animated films).

This week he spotted a new milestone for Linux in the 2022 StackOverflow developer survey: [Among the developers surveyed] Linux as a primary operating system had been steadily climbing for the past 5 years. 2018 through 2021 saw steady growth with 23.2%, 25.6%, 26.6%, 25.3%, and finally in 2022 the usage was 40.23%. Linux usage was more than macOS in 2021, but only by a small margin. 2022 it is now 9% more than macOS.
Their final stats for "professional use" operating system:

• Windows: 48.82%
• Linux-based: 39.89%
• MacOs: 32.97%

But Garrison's blog post notes that that doesn't include the million-plus people all the Linux-based cloud development environments (like GitHub Workspaces) — not to mention the 15% of WSL users on Windows and all the users of Docker (which uses a Linux VM).

"It's safe to say more people use Linux as part of their development workflow than any other operating system."