What happened after a developer intentionally corrupted two of their libraries which collectively had more than 20 million weekly downloads and thousands of dependent projects?

Mike Melanson’s “This Week in Programming” column reports:

In response to the corrupted libraries, Microsoft quickly suspended his GitHub access and reverted the projects on npm…. While this might seem like an open and shut case to some — the developer committed malicious code and GitHub and npm did what it had to do to protect its users — a debate broke out around a developer’s rights to do what they wish with their code, no matter how many projects and dependencies it may have.

“GitHub suspending someone’s account for modifying their own code in a project they own however they want spooks me a lot more than NPM reverting a package,” [tweeted one company’s Director of Engineering & Technology]. “I kind of love what Marak did to make a point and protest to be honest.”

An article on iProgrammer further outlines the dilemma present in what might otherwise seem like a clear-cut case…. “Yes, it is open source in that you can fork it and can contribute to it but does this mean that GitHub is justified in denying you the right to change or even destroy your own code?”

As of last night, however, it would appear that the entire affair is merely one for intellectual debate, as GitHub has indeed lived up to what some might view as its end of the bargain: the developer’s account is active, he has been allowed to remove his faker.js library on GitHub (depended upon as it might be), and has since offered an update that he does “not have Donkey Brains”.

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Source: Slashdot – GitHub Restores Account of Developer Who Intentionally Corrupted His Libraries

Long-time Slashdot reader cusco shares a fish story from the Guardian.

Apparently Israeli researchers created a robotic car and taught six fish to navigate it on land…

First, the team, led by Prof Ronen Segev, created a watery tank on wheels that moved in response to the movements and orientation of the fish. Then they set about teaching the goldfish (Carassius auratus) how to drive it — much like humans learn to ride a bike or drive a car.

The fish first had to connect their own swimming movements to the movements of the vehicle so they could navigate it. Then they were given a destination: a pink target board in a foreign room that elicited a food reward when the vehicle touched it. A computerised camera system attached to this “fish operated vehicle” recorded and translated the fish’s swimming directions.
After several days of training, the fish successfully navigated the vehicle to the target from different starting positions in the room — even if they faced obstacles like false targets or hitting a wall.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – To Study Navigation, Researchers Taught Six Goldfish How to Drive

Quartz reports:

For years, the student loan servicing company Navient allegedly encouraged student loan borrowers to enter costly long-term forbearance programs that pushed them further into debt, as well as take on private loans they couldn’t pay back, according to lawsuits filed by several states, and joined by 39 attorneys general.

Those claims were resolved through a settlement announced Thursday (January 13) affecting some 400,000 borrowers. Navient says it will cancel $1.7 billion in private student loan debt for 66,000 borrowers, as well as pay an additional $95 million in restitution to 350,000 people with federal loans. The former deal mostly focuses on students who took out loans to attend for-profit colleges between 2002 and 2014….

While Thursday’s settlement is significant for private student loan borrowers in debt, it extends to just a fraction of the estimated 12 million student loan borrowers Navient has served since 2014. Borrowers eligible for debt cancellation include those who took out private subprime student loans between 2002 and 2014 through the company’s predecessor, Sallie Mae.

Borrowers who were behind on payments for seven consecutive months prior to June 30, 2021 qualify to have their loans canceled, but those who are current on their loans do not.

Navient “expressly denies violating any law”, according to a statement from the company, in which their chief legal officer insists “these matters” were “based on unfounded claims,” but that settling them for $1.85 billion “allows us to avoid the additional burden, expense, time and distraction to prevail in court.”

But Mike Pierce, executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center, tells Quartz that “This is a really big day for people with student debt.”

“Borrowers that are still struggling more than a decade later with loans, with the worst terms, after going to the worst schools, are finally debt free.”

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Source: Slashdot – .7 Billion in Student Loan Debt Cancelled for 66,000 Borrowers

Microsoft announced a review of its sexual harassment and gender discrimination policies “after shareholders raised alarms about how Microsoft and Bill Gates, one of its founders, had treated employees, especially women,” reports the New York Times:
Shareholders passed a resolution during the company’s 2021 annual meeting to review the policies Microsoft has in place for its employees to protect them against abuse and unwanted sexual advances. The resolution passed with support from almost 78 percent of Microsoft’s shareholders. It was the only of five proposals on ethical issues put forth by shareholders to succeed. Others, like a call for a report on race- and gender-based pay gaps at the company and a pledge to prohibit sales of facial recognition to government entities, failed.

“Microsoft is under intense public scrutiny due to numerous claims of sexual harassment and an alleged failure to address them adequately and transparently,” the text of the resolution said. “Reports of Bill Gates’s inappropriate relationships and sexual advances toward Microsoft employees have only exacerbated concerns, putting in question the culture set by top leadership and the board’s role holding those culpable accountable.”

Mr. Gates solicited at least two employees while he was running Microsoft, according to reports in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. In one incident, in 2007, Mr. Gates sat through a presentation by a Microsoft employee, then immediately emailed her to ask for a date. Microsoft leaders later warned Mr. Gates not to do things like that. In 2019, Microsoft’s board received a letter from an engineer claiming to have had a sexual relationship with Mr. Gates in 2000. A spokeswoman for Mr. Gates confirmed that the two had had an affair that “ended amicably.”
More on the story from CNBC…

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Source: Slashdot – After Gates Allegations, Microsoft Opens a Review of Its Sexual Harassment Policies

Slashdot reader vikingo9 writes, “By smashing a piece of iron to insanely high pressures, using a laser the size of a football stadium, a team of scientists led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have discovered that exoplanets 4-6 times larger than Earth have an increase chance of harboring biological life.”

The thinking goes that a molten core “is probably required for life to develop on a planet,” Popular Science points out — and this experiment suggests that molten cores of larger rocky exoplanets “should stay hot longer than those within small worlds.”

“We’re finding so many planets, and [one of] the big questions people have are: are these planets potentially habitable?” says Rick Kraus, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who led the study… Kraus and his team wanted to find other ways to discern whether a planet is habitable. They explored a planet’s ability to form a magnetosphere — a magnetic field that protects it from solar radiation, like the one around Earth does for us — as a window into habitability, Kraus says. Life as we know it wouldn’t be possible without the Earth’s magnetic field.

Magnetic fields are a result of molten planetary cores. Earth has a core composed mostly of iron, split into a solid inner core and a liquid outer core. Earth’s magnetic field is caused by the convection of the liquid iron, meaning how it swirls: The cooler, denser liquid areas sink to the bottom, while the hotter ones rise like wax in a lava lamp. Studying an exoplanet’s core in a laboratory is difficult because there are few ways to recreate such intense pressures and temperatures.

This is the first experiment to use iron under pressures that exceed those in Earth’s core, Kraus says…

The team estimates that it will take a total of 6 billion years for Earth’s core to solidify, whereas cores in large exoplanets of similar composition to Earth should take up to 30 percent longer.

Of course, the article ends with a few caveats:

One issue with extrapolating these results to exoplanets is that those super-Earths can contain elements other than iron in their core, which would change their melting temperature by an unknown amount, Driscoll says. It will also be hard to predict how exoplanets cool because the mantle, the layer of hot rock surrounding the core, plays a huge role in how quickly the core can cool. And those exoplanet mantles could be made of “pretty much anything,” he says.

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Source: Slashdot – Giant Lasers Simulate Exoplanet Cores, Prove They’re More Likely to Have Life