Fedora project leader Matthew Miller spoke to TechRepublic’s Jack Wallen this week, sharing some thoughts on the future of Linux — and on open source in general:
Matthew Miller: I think it’s a lost cause to try to “sell” our quirky technology interest to people who don’t see it already. We need to take a different approach…. I think our message, at its root, has to be around open source…. [W]ith Linux, when you install an open-source distro, you’re not just part of a fan community. You’re part of a colossal, global effort that makes software more available to everyone, makes that software better and better, and makes the whole world better through sharing… Just by using it you’re sharing in this amazing undertaking, part of a move away from scarcity to an economy based on abundance….
Jack Wallen: What’s the biggest difference in Linux today vs. Linux of 10 years ago?

Matthew Miller: I think first we have to start with just the amazing ubiquity of it. Ten years ago, it was cute to find a TV that ran Linux. Now, not only is it definitely powering your TV, you’ve probably got Linux running on your lightbulbs! It’s everywhere. And while Linux had pushed proprietary Unix from the server room, ten years ago Windows-based servers were pushing back. The cloud changed that — now, the cloud is Linux, almost completely. (Anything that isn’t is a legacy app that it was too much trouble to port!) From tiny devices to the most powerful mainframes and supercomputers: Linux, Linux, Linux….

Jack Wallen: If Linux has an Achilles’ heel, what is it?

Matthew Miller: Linux and the whole free and open-source software movement grew up with the rise of the internet as an open communication platform. We absolutely need that to continue in order to realize our vision, and I don’t think we can take it for granted.

That’s more general than an Achilles’ heel, though, so right now let me highlight one thing that I think is troubling: Chrome becoming the dominant browser to the point where it’s often the only way to make sites work. Chromium (the associated upstream project) is open source, but isn’t really run as a community project, and, pointedly, very very few people run Chromium itself. I’d love to see that change, but I’d also like to see Firefox regain a meaningful presence.
Miller also said Fedora’s next release is focused on simplicity. (“When the OS gets in the way, it drops from the conversation I want to have about big ideas to … well, the boring technical details that people never want to deal with”)
And he also shared his thoughts on what Linux needs most. “What I’d really like to see more of are more non-technical contributors. I mean, yes, we can always benefit from more packagers and coders and engineers, but I think what we really need desperately are writers, designers, artists, videographers, communicators, organizers and planners. I don’t think big companies are likely to provide those things, at least, not for the parts of the Linux world which aren’t their products.”
“We need people who think the whole grand project I’ve been talking about is important, and who have the skills and interests to help make it real.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Fedora’s Lead Speaks on the Popularity of Linux and the Importance of Open Source

In 1972 — half a century ago — Charles Moss Duke walked on the moon.
Now 86 years old, he’s ready for America to get back to exploring the moon, reports the Associated Press:
Duke said he does not begrudge NASA for ending the Apollo program to focus on space shuttles, the international space station and other missions in more remote parts of space. But he looks forward to future missions that build off of what he and others have learned from their time on the moon, which called “a great platform for science.”

Duke also noted that he’s encouraged by the commercial partnerships that have developed around space exploration, like Space X and Blue Origin [and the companies he describes in their video as “the others”]. Those options, he said, “make space available for more people and more science and engineering and unmanned stuff.”

“That compliment is going to be really important in the future,” Duke went on.

The article notes the first of NASA’s huge Space Launch System rockets is scheduled to blast off later this year, “with crewed flights planned subsequently.” In the video interview, Duke adds that “With Artemis, NASA is going to be focused on deep space, to the moon and beyond, and I’m excited about that…”

“The more people we get into space, and can see the beauty of the earth — and the incredible emotion that you [feel] when you see the earth hung in the blackness of space — it’s going to affect a lot of people.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – 50 Years After Walking on the Moon, an Astronaut Anticipates Our Return

“As a response to recent coverage of software being purged from the App Store, Apple is sharing its criteria for how it chooses to remove abandoned apps,” reports 9to5Mac.

Apple’s announcement say it’s only flagging apps for possible removal “that

Developers will also have more time to comply after being notified.” (90 days instead of 30 days). And 9to5Mac adds that Apple “is also reiterating that the practice is not new but instead part of an initiative that started six years ago.

But the Verge took a different message from “Apple to developers: if we deleted your old app, it deserved it.”

[T]he company has responded — by issuing a press release effectively saying that nobody was downloading the apps anyways….

Apple’s explanation does clear up why it, as some developers noted, seemed to apply the rules inconsistently. For example, one developer noted that Pocket God, a popular game from the iPhone’s early days, hasn’t been updated for seven years but is still on the App Store. Apple is basically saying it’s still up because it’s still popular.
From one angle, this reasoning doesn’t necessarily gel with the first half of Apple’s post, where it says it removes old apps to ensure “user trust in quality apps,” and to improve discoverability, security and privacy, and user experience. After all — if an app is problematic because it’s outdated, more downloads would make a bad app a bigger issue. Who’s being harmed if there’s an outdated app almost no one is downloading?

But Apple says it doesn’t want the App Store cluttered up with apps that both developers and users have forgotten about. It has enough problems making it easy for users to find good apps as it is, and it’s easy to imagine Apple seeing deleting old, seemingly irrelevant apps as a good solution.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Apple Extends Its Grace Period for Deleting Old (and Unpopular) Apps from Its App Store

Slashdot reader schwit1 shares this report from an automotive blog called The Truth About Cars:
A group of German automakers, chemical concerns, and battery producers have announced the joint development of a “battery passport” designed to help government regulators trace the history of the cells. The consortium is funded by the German government and is supposed to work in tandem with new battery regulations that are being prepared by the European Union.

According to the German economic ministry, officially the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, the overarching plan is for the EU to mandate traceable hardware be installed in all batteries used in the continent by 2026. Those intended for use in electric vehicles are up first, with the passport scheme also serving to chronicle everything from the vehicle’s repair history to where the power cell’s raw materials were sourced.

Reuters reports that batteries “could carry a QR code linking to an online database where EV owners, businesses or regulators could access information on the battery’s composition.”
This digital tool should also make it easier to recycle raw materials inside batteries, the government statement said, which would cut dependence on foreign suppliers which control the vast majority of resources, like lithium and nickel, essential for battery production.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Consortium is Creating ‘Passports’ to Track Contents and Repair History of Europe’s EV Batteries

“The Biden administration has a plan to rob Vladimir Putin of some of his best innovators,” reports Bloomberg, “by waiving some visa requirements for highly educated Russians who want to come to the U.S., according to people familiar with the strategy.”

One proposal, which the White House included in its latest supplemental request to Congress, is to drop the rule that Russian professionals applying for an employment-based visa must have a current employer. It would apply to Russian citizens who have earned master’s or doctoral degrees in science, technology, engineering or mathematics in the U.S. or abroad, the proposal states.

A spokesman for the National Security Council confirmed that the effort is meant to weaken Putin’s high-tech resources in the near term and undercut Russia’s innovation base over the long run — as well as benefit the U.S. economy and national security. Specifically, the Biden administration wants to make it easier for top-tier Russians with experience with semiconductors, space technology, cybersecurity, advanced manufacturing, advanced computing, nuclear engineering, artificial intelligence, missile propulsion technologies and other specialized scientific areas to move to the U.S.

Biden administration officials have said they’ve seen significant numbers of high-skilled technology workers flee Russia because of limited financial opportunities from the sanctions the U.S. and allies have imposed after Putin’s invasion on Ukraine.

The provision would expire in four years.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – US Seeks to Steal Putin’s Top Scientists by Loosening Their Visa Requirements

Dr. Craig Hunter is a mechanical/aerospace engineer with over 25 years of experience in software development. And now Dixie_Flatline (Slashdot reader #5,077) describes Hunter’s latest experiment:

Craig Hunter has been running Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) benchmarks on Macs for years–he has results going back to 2010 with an Intel Xeon 5650, with the most recent being a 28-core Xeon W from 2019. He has this to say about why he thinks CFD benchmarks are a good test: “As shown above, we see a pretty typical trend where machines get less and less efficient as more and more cores join the computation. This happens because the computational work begins to saturate communications on the system as data and MPI instructions pass between the cores and memory, creating overhead. It’s what makes parallel CFD computations such a great real world benchmark. Unlike simpler benchmarks that tend to make CPUs look good, the CFD benchmark stresses the entire system and shows us how things hold up as conditions become more and more challenging.” With just 6 cores, the Mac Studio’s M1 Ultra surpasses the 2019 Xeon before literally going off the original chart. He had to double the x-axis just to fit the M1’s performance in. Unsurprisingly, he seems impressed: “We know from Apple’s specs and marketing materials that the M1 Ultra has an extremely high 800 GB/sec memory bandwidth and an even faster 2.5 TB/sec interface between the two M1 Max chips that make up the M1 Ultra, and it shows in the CFD benchmark. This leads to a level of CPU performance scaling that I don’t even see on supercomputers.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Mac Studio’s M1 Ultra Chip Outperforms on Computational Fluid Dynamics Benchmarks

Long-time Slashdot reader UnderAttack writes: After Microsoft patched and went public with CVE-2022-26809, the recent Remote Procedure Call vulnerability, the SANS Internet Storm Center set up a complete Windows 10 system exposing port 445/TCP “to the world.” The system is not patched for the RPC vulnerability. But so far, while it has seen thousands of attacks against SMB a day, nothing yet for the new RPC vulnerability….

But still, attackers are heavily hitting other vulnerabilities like of course still ETERNALBLUE

From the article:
Should you stop rushing out the April patch? Absolutely not. I hope you are already done applying the patch. But the April Windows patch had several additional gems, not just patches for RPC. Chatter about CVE-2022-26809 has died down, but as they say: Sometimes the quiet ones are the dangerous ones, and people able to exploit this vulnerability may not broadcast what they are doing on social media.

The article is credited to Johannes B. Ullrich, Ph.D. , Dean of Research at the security site SANS.edu.

Interestingly, Ullrich’s byline is hyperlinked to a Google+ profile which has been unavailable for nearly three years.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – After Microsoft Releases Patch for RPC Exploit: What the Honeypot Saw