In Raleigh, North Carolina — the home of Red Hat — local newspaper the News & Observer takes an in-depth look at the “announcement that split the open source software community.” (Alternate URL here.)

[M]any saw Red Hat’s decision to essentially paywall Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or RHEL, as sacrilegious… Red Hat employees were also conflicted about the new policy, [Red Hat Vice President Mike] McGrath acknowledged. “I think a lot of even internal associates didn’t fully understand what we had announced and why,” he said…

At issue, he wrote, were emerging competitors who copied Red Hat Enterprise Linux, down to even the code’s mistakes, and then offered these Red Hat-replicas to customers for free. These weren’t community members adding value, he contended, but undercutting rivals. And in a year when Red Hat laid off 4% of its total workforce, McGrath said, the company could not justify allowing this to continue. “I feel that while this was a difficult decision between community and business, we’re still on the right side of it,” he told the News & Observer. Not everyone agrees…

McGrath offered little consolation to customers who were relying on one-for-one versions of RHEL. They could stay with the downstream distributions, find another provider, or pay for Red Hat. “I think (people) were just so used to the way things work,” he said. “There’s a vocal group of people that probably need Red Hat’s level of support, but simply don’t want to pay for it. And I don’t really have… there’s not much we can tell them.”

Since its RHEL decision, Red Hat has secured several prominent partnerships. In September, the cloud-based software company Salesforce moved 200,000 of its systems from the free CentOS Linux to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The same month, Red Hat announced RHEL would begin to support Oracle’s cloud infrastructure. Oracle was one of the few major companies this summer to publicly criticize Red Hat for essentially paywalling its most popular code. On Oct. 24, Red Hat notched another win when the data security firm Cohesity said it would also ditch CentOS Linux for RHEL.

The article delves into the history of Red Hat — and of Linux — before culminating with this quote from McGrath. “I think long gone are the times of that sort of romantic view of hobbyists working in their spare time to build open source. I think there’s still room for that — we still have that — but quite a lot of open source is now built from people that are paid full time.”

Red Hat likes to point out that 90% of Fortune 500 companies use its services, according to the article. But it also quotes Jonathan Wright, infrastructure team lead at the nonprofit AlmaLinux, as saying that Red Hat played “fast and loose” with the GPL. The newspaper then adds that “For many open source believers, such a threat to its hallowed text isn’t forgivable.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – How Red Hat Divided the Open Source Community

The state of Maine is “poised to vote on an unprecedented plan to rid themselves of the state’s two largest electric utilities and start with a clean slate,” reports the Associated Press:

The proposed takeover of two investor-owned utilities that distribute 97% of electricity in the state would mark the first time a U.S. state’s utilities were forcibly removed at the same time. The referendum calls for dismantling Central Maine Power and Versant Power and replacing them with a nonprofit utility called Pine Tree Power to operate 28,000 miles (45,000 kilometers) of transmission lines…

The referendum calls for creation of a nonprofit utility with a board made up of mostly elected members and a few appointed ones. A primary selling point is that the new utility would be beholden only to ratepayers, not corporate shareholders, allowing lower costs, greater investments in the grid and improved performance, supporters said. Interest rates for long-term borrowing for capital improvements also would be less costly for Pine Tree Power. Supporters say there’s little to lose: Both investor-owned utilities rank near the bottom in customer satisfaction, with longer-than-average response to power outages and higher-than-average electricity rates.
But critics, including Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, worry about the power grid becoming politicized. They also question savings projections because of the billions of dollars needed to buy out the utilities, and worry about the prospect of lengthy litigation. Maine Public Advocate William Harwood contends legal disputes could postpone the new utility’s implementation by five to 10 years.
The American Public Power Association estimates that investor-owned utilities serve 66% of America’s electricity consumers, according to the article. So the Associated Press notes that “Across the country, ratepayers who are unhappy with their utilities are watching what happens,” citing this quote from energy-related research firm Clear View Energy Partners.

“What we say about state policy and trends is that it could become contagious.”

Thanks to Slashdot reader jenningsthecat for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Maine Considers Giving the Boot To Corporate Electric Utilities

“Slabs of material from an ancient extraterrestrial planet are hidden deep within the Earth,” argues a new scientific theory (as described by CNN).

“Scientists widely agree that an ancient planet likely smashed into Earth as it was forming billions of years ago, spewing debris that coalesced into the moon that decorates our night sky today.” But then whatever happened to that planet? No leftover fragments from a hypothetical planet “Theia” have ever been found in our solar system.

But the new theory “suggests that remnants of the ancient planet remain partially intact, buried beneath our feet.”
If the theory is correct, it would not only provide additional details to fill out the giant-impact hypothesis but also answer a lingering question for geophysicists. They were already aware that there are two massive, distinct blobs that are embedded deep within the Earth. The masses — called large low-velocity provinces, or LLVPs — were first detected in the 1980s. One lies beneath Africa and another below the Pacific Ocean.

The study’s lead author (Dr. Qian Yuan, a geophysicist and postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology) first proposed the idea for a paper three times in 2021 — and was rejected each time. But “then he came across scientists who did just the type of research Yuan needed.”

Their work, which assigned a certain size to Theia and speed of impact in the modeling, suggested that the ancient planet’s collision likely did not entirely melt Earth’s mantle, allowing the remnants of Theia to cool and form solid structures instead of blending together in Earth’s inner stew… If Theia were a certain size and consistency, and struck the Earth at a specific speed, the models showed it could, in fact, leave behind massive hunks of its guts within Earth’s mantle and also spawn the debris that would go on to create our moon…

The study Yuan published this week includes coauthors from a variety of disciplines across a range of institutions, including Arizona State, Caltech, the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory and NASA’s Ames Research Center.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Scientists Think They’ve Found ‘Blobs’ From Planet that Collided with Earth to Form the Moon

With programmers in high demand, InfoWorld asks if it’s really worthwhile for software developers to pursue certifications? “Based on input from those in the field, company executives, and recruiters, the answer is a resounding yes,”
“The primary benefit of certifications is to verify your skill sets,” says Archie Payne, president of the recruiting firm CalTek Staffing… Certifications can be used to “reinforce the experience on your resume or demonstrate competencies beyond what you’ve done in the workplace in a prior role.” Certifications show that you are committed to your field, invested in career growth, and connected to the broader technology landscape, Payne says. “Obtaining certification indicates that you are interested in learning new skills and continuing your learning throughout your career,” he says…

In cases where multiple candidates are equally qualified, having a relevant certification can give one candidate an edge over others, says Aleksa Krstic, CTO at Localizely, a provider of a cloud-based translation platform. “When it comes to certifications in general, when we see a junior to mid-level developer armed with programming certifications, it’s a big green light for our hiring team,” says MichaÅ Kierul, who is CEO of software company INTechHouse.

“It’s not just about the knowledge they have gained,” Kierul says. “It speaks volumes about their passion, their drive to excel, and their commitment to continuous learning outside their regular work domain. It underscores a key trait we highly value: the desire to grow, learn, and elevate oneself in the world of technology.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Do Programming Certifications Still Matter?

Smartphones and electric cars are both powered by lithium-ion batteries, notes the Economist. These “Li-ion” batteries “form the guts of a growing number of grid-storage systems that smooth the flow of electricity from wind and solar power stations. Without them, the electrification needed to avoid the worst effects of global warming would be unimaginable.” But unfortunately, building them requires scarce metals.
“A clutch of companies, though, think they have an alternative: making batteries with sodium instead…” And the idea of building “Na-ion” batteries at scale is “gaining traction.”

Engineers are tweaking designs. Factories, particularly in China, are springing up. For the first time since the Li-ion revolution began, lithium’s place on the electrochemical pedestal is being challenged… [A]ccording to Rory McNulty, a research analyst at Benchmark, Chinese firms have 34 Na-ion-battery factories built, being built or announced inside the country, and one planned in Malaysia. Established battery-makers in other places, by contrast, are not yet showing much interest. Even without a five-year plan to guide them, though, some non-Chinese startups are seeking to steal a march by developing alternatives to layered oxides, in the hope of improving the technology, reducing its cost, or both.
One of the most intriguing of these neophytes is Natron Energy, of Santa Clara, California… Natron claims that its cells can endure 50,000 cycles of charging and discharging — between ten and 100 times more than commercial Li-ion batteries can manage. The firm has built a factory in Michigan, which it says will begin production later this year. Other non-Chinese firms are less far advanced, but full of hope. Altris, in Sweden, which is also building a factory, employs a material called Prussian white that substitutes some of the iron in Prussian blue with sodium. Tiamat, in France, uses a polyanionic design involving vanadium. And Faradion, in Britain (now owned by Reliance, an Indian firm), intends to stick with a layered-metal-oxide system.

Thanks to Slashdot reader echo123 for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Will Sodium Batteries Become an Alternative To Lithium?

“xAI, Elon Musk’s new AI venture, launched its first AI chatbot technology named Grok,” reports CNBC.

Two months into its “early beta” training phase, it’s “only available to a select group of users before a wider release” — though users can sign up for a waitlist. Elon Musk posted that the chatbot “will be provided as part of X Premium+, so I recommend signing up for that. Just $16/month via web.”

More details from CNBC:
Grok, the company said, is modeled on “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” It is supposed to have “a bit of wit,” “a rebellious streak” and it should answer the “spicy questions” that other AI might dodge, according to a Saturday statement from xAI… Grok also has access to data from X, which xAI said will give it a leg-up. Musk, on Sunday, posted a side-by-side comparison of Grok answering a question versus another AI bot, which he said had less current information.

Still, xAI hedged in its statement, as with any Large Language Model, or LLM, Grok “can still generate false or contradictory information….” On an initial round of tests based on middle school math problems and Python coding tasks, the company said that Grok surpassed “all other models in its compute class, including ChatGPT-3.5 and Inflection-1.” It was outperformed by bots with larger data troves…

Musk has previously said that he believes today’s AI makers are bending too far toward “politically correct” systems. xAI’s mission, it said, is to create AI for people of all backgrounds and political views. Grok is said to be a means of testing that AI approach “in public.”

SpaceX security engineer Christopher Stanley shared some interesting results. After reading Grok’s explanation for why scaling API requests is difficult, Stanley added the prompt “be more vulgar” — then posted his reaction on X. “Today I learned scaling API requests is like trying to keep up with a never-ending orgy.”
Reacting to Stanley’s experiment, Elon Musk posted, “Oh this is gonna be fun.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Elon Musk Debuts ‘Grok’ AI Bot to Challenge ChatGPT

Bill Gates, noted billionaire philanthropist, discussed the need for “impatient optimism” about both climate change and global development last month during an interview at an international affairs think tank:
Q: If you go back a decade, are you more or less optimistic about where we are on climate change now, or then?
Bill Gates: I’m certainly more optimistic because in 2015, when the Paris Agreement was signed, there were so many areas of emission where there wasn’t any activity…
Q: if you go back a decade, solar and wind were the most expensive energy sources we had. Since then, the price of solar has dropped 90%, and the price of wind has dropped 70%, and electric vehicles are now economically viable… I know you get excited about innovation. What are some of the areas that you’re most excited about for innovation?
Bill Gates: Across this portfolio of 100 companies it’s hard to pick my favorite. Some are kind of straightforward, like a company that makes windows where the temperature doesn’t cross over, but instead, it blocks getting cold in the winter or hot in the summer, which is very cheap. Or there is a company where you leave your home, and you pump this air through, but it’s got a chemical in it. When it sees cracks, it actually seals those cracks. You don’t have to find the cracks; you just pump the air in. You can reduce the amount of heat loss between the windows and getting rid of those cracks. You can reduce the energy bill by a factor of two, which then means less load on the overall energy system…
The cement and steel ones are the ones, in a way, I’m most impressed by, because I wasn’t sure we’d find anything in those spaces…
Q: The problem, I guess, with cement is that you are taking basically limestone, and then you are converting it to calcium oxide. But the byproduct you get in that conversion process is CO2. Basically, you need a way to capture that CO2….
Bill Gates: As you heat the limestone, that releases CO2. It’s exactly as you say, it’s an equal number amount of emissions. One of our companies doesn’t use limestone. They actually go and find another source of calcium, which fortunately turns out to be quite abundant and cheap. They make exactly the same cement that we make today, but not using limestone as the input. I was stunned that you could do that.

Gates also hopes to see nuclear power in an economically viable form. “The nuclear industry basically failed, because their product was too expensive. It wasn’t because of the waste or safety-type issues, which we can get into those, but it was economics.”
Bill Gates: First and foremost, you must have a much different economic proposition. The nuclear reactor I’m involved in, TerraPower, we only generate electricity when the renewable sources that have very little marginal costs aren’t generating. We just make heat all day, and then only when the bid price of electricity is high enough, do we actually generate electricity, because otherwise, you have all this capital cost that half the time, the solar bid into that market is going to be very low.
I think fission, we shouldn’t give up on it. I’m involved in that company only because it may be able to make a significant contribution to [fighting] climate change… I can’t overstate how much easier it is to solve the problem if you can mix in some degree of fission or fusion that are there to fill in the periods where renewables are not generating. Cold snaps or where you have these cold fronts just sitting there, that’s when houses need the most heating. That’s when neither wind nor solar are generating.

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Source: Slashdot – Bill Gates Urges ‘Impatient Optimism’ on Climate Change Innovations

Friday the U.K.’s competition regulator made an announcement. Amazon and Meta agreed they wouldn’t use data collected their marketplaces for an unfair advantage against competitors.

The Register explains:
In Amazon’s case, the e-commerce giant used vendors’ sales figures to decide which items it should sell, and how much to price products to get an edge over everyone else. The internet behemoth also promoted its own products with its Buy Box feature and it further cut into retailers’ margins by charging extra costs if they wanted to use Amazon’s Prime delivery services, the CMA said. Now Amazon has committed to doing less of that.
The Competition and Markets Authority said [Amazon] will be prevented from using third-party seller data that gives it an unfair commercial advantage, and will allow rivals to negotiate rates with independent delivery contractors working on behalf of Amazon. Merchants’ items will also be better supported by the Buy Box too, according to the CMA, instead of Amazon-led products or those from sellers that have bought into the company’s packing and delivery services…

[Facebook] was accused of exploiting advertisers hawking wares on Facebook Marketplace, and using competitors’ data to improve its own products or services. “Going forward, competitors of Facebook Marketplace that advertise on Meta platforms can ‘opt out’ of their data being used to improve Facebook Marketplace,” the CMA said.
The CMA also has specific plans for enforcement, reports TechCrunch. for Meta the UK agency “has said it will set up a monitoring trustee to oversee its adherence, including its new technical system rollout and employee training,” while Amazon will also get an “independent trustee” overseeing their compliance.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Amazon and Meta Promise UK Regulators to Stop Unfairly Undercutting Rivals

Scientists recently noticed that the chemical fingerprint of meteor particles was starting to change.

And last month Purdue University announced that “The Space Age is leaving fingerprints on one of the most remote parts of the planet — the stratosphere — which has potential implications for climate, the ozone layer and the continued habitability of Earth.”

Using tools hitched to the nose cone of their research planes and sampling more than 11 miles above the planet’s surface, researchers have discovered significant amounts of metals in aerosols in the atmosphere, likely from increasingly frequent launches and returns of spacecraft and satellites. That mass of metal is changing atmospheric chemistry in ways that may impact Earth’s atmosphere and ozone layer…

Led by Dan Murphy, an adjunct professor in Purdue’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences and a researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the team detected more than 20 elements in ratios that mirror those used in spacecraft alloys. They found that the mass of lithium, aluminum, copper and lead from spacecraft reentry far exceeded those metals found in natural cosmic dust. Nearly 10% of large sulfuric acid particles — the particles that help protect and buffer the ozone layer — contained aluminum and other spacecraft metals.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Spacecraft Metals Left In the Wake of Humanity’s Path To the Stars

“Home schooling has become — by a wide margin — America’s fastest-growing form of education,” according to a new analysis by the Washington Post. (Alternate URL here):

The analysis — based on data The Post collected for thousands of school districts across the country — reveals that a dramatic rise in home schooling at the onset of the pandemic has largely sustained itself through the 2022-23 academic year, defying predictions that most families would return to schools that have dispensed with mask mandates and other covid-19 restrictions…

In states with comparable enrollment figures, the number of home-schooled students increased 51% over the past six school years, far outpacing the 7% growth in private school enrollment. Public school enrollment dropped 4% in those states over the same period, a decline partly attributable to home schooling…

In 390 districts included in The Post’s analysis, there was at least one home-schooled child for every 10 in public schools during the 2021-2022 academic year, the most recent for which district-level federal enrollment data are available. That’s roughly quadruple the number of districts that had rates that high in 2017-2018, signifying a sea change in how many communities educate their children and an urgent challenge for a public education system that faced dwindling enrollment even before the pandemic… The National Center for Education Statistics reported that in 2019 — before home schooling’s dramatic expansion — there were 1.5 million kids being home-schooled in the United States, the last official federal estimate. Based on that figure and the growth since then in states that track home schooling, The Post estimates that there are now between 1.9 million and 2.7 million home-schooled children in the United States, depending on the rate of increase in areas without reliable data…

It is a remarkable expansion for a form of instruction that 40 years ago was still considered illegal in much of the country.

Other interesting facts from their analysis:

“Home schooling’s surging popularity crosses every measurable line of politics, geography and demographics.”
“Despite claims that the home-schooling boom is a result of failing public schools, The Post found no correlation between school district quality, as measured by standardized test scores, and home-schooling growth. In fact, high-scoring districts had some of the biggest spikes in home schooling early in the pandemic, though by the fall of 2022 increases were similar regardless of school performance.”
“Many of America’s new home-schooled children have entered a world where no government official will ever check on what, or how well, they are being taught.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – America is Seeing a ‘Dramatic Rise’ in Home Schooling

“Microsoft Exchange is impacted by four zero-day vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit remotely to execute arbitrary code or disclose sensitive information on affected installations,” reports Bleeping Computer, citing disclosures Thursday from Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative, who reported them to Microsoft on September 7th and 8th, 2023.

In an email to the site, a Microsoft spokesperson said customers who applied the August Security Updates are already protected from the first vulnerability, while the other three require attackers to have prior access to email credentials. (And for two of them no evidence was presented that it can be leveraged to gain elevation of privilege.)
“We’ve reviewed these reports and have found that they have either already been addressed, or do not meet the bar for immediate servicing under our severity classification guidelines and we will evaluate addressing them in future product versions and updates as appropriate.”

From Bleeping Computer’s report:

ZDI disagreed with this response and decided to publish the flaws under its own tracking IDs to warn Exchange admins about the security risks… All these vulnerabilities require authentication for exploitation, which reduces their severity CVSS rating to between 7.1 and 7.5… It should be noted, though, that cybercriminals have many ways to obtain Exchange credentials, including brute-forcing weak passwords, performing phishing attacks, purchasing them, or acquiring them from info-stealer logs…

ZDI suggests that the only salient mitigation strategy is to restrict interaction with Exchange apps. However, this can be unacceptably disruptive for many businesses and organizations using the product. We also suggest implementing multi-factor authentication to prevent cybercriminals from accessing Exchange instances even when account credentials have been compromised.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Microsoft Disputes Severity of Four Zero-Day Vulnerabilities Found in Exchange by Trend Micro