TechTarget notes it was Linkerd's original developers who coined the term "service mesh" — describing their infrastructure layer for communication between microservices. But "There has to be some way of connecting the businesses that are being built on top of Linkerd back to funding the project," argues Buoyant CEO William Morgan. "If we don't do that, then there's no way for us to evolve this project and to grow it in the way that I think we all want." And so, TechTarget reports... Beginning May 21, 2024, any company with more than 50 employees running Linkerd in production must pay Buoyant $2,000 per Kubernetes cluster per month to access stable releases of the project... The project's overall source code will remain available in GitHub, and edge, or experimental early releases of code, will continue to be committed to open source. But the additional work done by Buoyant developers to backport minimal changes so that they're compatible with existing versions of Linkerd and to fix bugs, with reliability guarantees, to create stable releases will only be available behind a paywall, Morgan said... Morgan said he is prepared for backlash from the community about this change. In the last section of a company blog post FAQ about the update, Morgan included a question that reads, in part, "Who can I yell at...?" But industry watchers flatly pronounced the change a departure from open source. "By saying, 'Sorry but we can no longer afford to hand out a production-ready product as free open source code,' Buoyant has removed the open source character of this project," said Torsten Volk, an analyst at Enterprise Management Associates. "This goes far beyond the popular approach of offering a managed version of a product that may include some additional premium features for a fee while still providing customers with the option to use the more basic open source version in production." Open source developers outside Buoyant won't want to contribute to the project — and Buoyant's bottom line — without receiving production-ready code in return, Volk predicted. Morgan conceded that these are potentially valid concerns and said he's open to finding a way to resolve them with contributors... "I don't think there's a legal argument there, but there's an unresolved tension there, similar to testing edge releases — that's labor just as much as contributing is. I don't have a great answer to that, but it's not unique to Buoyant or Linkerd." And so, "Starting in May, if you want the latest stable version of the open source Linkerd to download and run, you will have to go with Buoyant's commercial distribution," according to another report (though "there are discounts for non-profits, high-volume use cases, and other unique needs.") The Cloud Native Computing Foundation manages the open source project. The copyright is held by the Linkerd authors themselves. Linkerd is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. Buoyant CEO William Morgan explained in an interview with TNS that the changes in licensing are necessary to continue to ensure that Linkerd runs smoothly for enterprise users. Packaging the releases has also been demanding a lot of resources, perhaps even more than maintaining and advancing the core software itself, Morgan explained. He likened the approach to how Red Hat operates with Linux, which offers Fedora as an early release and maintains its core Linux offering, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for commercial clients. "If you want the work that we put into the stable releases, which is predominantly around, not just testing, but also minimizing the changes in subsequent releases, that's hard hard work" requiring input from "world-leading experts in distributed systems," Morgan said. "Well, that's kind of the dark, proprietary side of things."

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The Guardian reports: The Covid death toll in the U.S. is likely at least 16% higher than the official tally, according to a new study, and researchers believe the cause of the undercounting goes beyond overloaded health systems to a lack of awareness of Covid and low levels of testing. The second year of the pandemic also had nearly as many uncounted excess deaths as the first, the study found. More than 1.1 million Americans have died from Covid, according to official records. But the actual number is assuredly higher, given the high rates of excess deaths. Demographers wanted to know how many could be attributed to Covid, and they drilled down to data at the county level to discover patterns in geography and time. There were 1.2 million excess deaths from natural causes — excluding deaths from accidents, firearms, suicide and overdoses — between March 2020 and August 2022, the researchers estimated, and about 163,000 of those deaths were not attributed to Covid in any way — but most of them should have been, the researchers say... "The mortality that's not considered Covid starts a little bit before the Covid surges officially start and crests a little bit sooner," said Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, associate professor in the department of sociology and the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota and one of the study's authors. That indicates some people didn't realize their illness was Covid, due to a lack of awareness about its prevalence and low levels of testing. There was also a rise in out-of-hospital deaths — in homes and nursing homes, for instance — which makes ascertaining the cause of death more difficult... "[W]e find over the first 30 months of the pandemic that serious gaps remained in surveillance," said Andrew Stokes, associate professor of global health and sociology at Boston University and one of the study's authors. "Even though we got a lot better at testing for Covid, we were still missing a lot of official Covid deaths" in the U.S., said Jennifer Dowd, professor of demography and population health at University of Oxford, who was not involved in this research. The phenomenon "underscores how badly the U.S. fared as the pandemic continued," Wrigley-Field said. "It does profoundly reflect failures in the public health system." One of the study's authors told the Guardian that the hardest-hit areas were non-metropolitan counties, especially in the west and the south, with fewer resources for investigating deaths (and lower testing levels) — as well as different methodologies for assembling the official numbers.

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Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In 2012, Microsoft President Brad Smith unveiled Microsoft's National Talent Strategy, which called for K-12 Computer Science education for U.S. schoolchildren to address a "talent crisis [that] endangers long-term growth and prosperity". The following year, tech-backed nonprofit Code.org burst onto the scene to deliver that education to schoolchildren, with Smith and execs from tech giants Google and Amazon on its Board of Directors (and Code.org donors Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg as lead K-12 CS instructors). Using a mix of paid individuals, universities and other organizations that it helped to fund, along with online self-paced courses, Code.org boasts it quickly "prepared more than 106,000 new teachers to teach CS across grades K-12" through its professional learning programs. "No computer science experience required," Code.org teases prospective K-12 teachers (as does Code.org partner Amazon Future Engineer). Code.org organized K-12 CS teacher workforce expansion workshops. However, at least one state is taking steps to put an end to the practice of rebranding individuals as K-12 CS teachers in as little as a day, albeit with a generous 10-year loophole for currently uncertified K-12 CS teachers. "At the start of the 2024-2025 academic year," reports GovTech, "the New York State Education Department (NYSED) is honing its credential requirements for computer science teachers, though the state has yet to join the growing list of those mandating computer science instruction for high school graduation. According to the department's website, as of Sept. 1, 2024, educators who teach computer science will need either a Computer Science Certificate issued by the state Board of Regents or a Computer Science Statement of Continued Eligibility (SOCE), which may be given to instructors who don't have the specific certificate but have nonetheless taught computer science since Sept. 1, 2017.... "The NYSED website says the SOCE is a temporary measure that will be phased out after 10 years, at which point all computer science instructors will need a Computer Science Certificate."

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On Wednesday Boeing "removed executive Ed Clark, the head of its 737 Max passenger jet program," reports CNN, "after a dramatic — and terrifying — midair blowout in January underscored ongoing problems with the jet." A preliminary report by the National Transportation Safety Board found that the four bolts that should have held the door plug in place were missing when the plane left Boeing's factory. The NTSB report did not assess blame for the missing bolts and the accident but in a statement to investors before the findings were released, Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun assumed responsibility for the incident. "We caused the problem, and we understand that," he told investors during a call after reporting the latest quarterly loss at the company. "Whatever conclusions are reached, Boeing is accountable for what happened." Clark, who had been at Boeing for 18 years, had only been in charge of the Max program since March of 2021, assuming that title after the jets had been returned to service following the crashes. But he had previously held roles related to the 737 Max, including as chief engineer and chief 737 mechanic. With the news of Clark's departure, Boeing also announced a shuffling of a number of executives in its Boeing Commercial Airplanes unit. It created a new executive position, Senior Vice President for BCA Quality, and named Elizabeth Lund to that position.

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"If you drive a car in California, you may be in for a payday thanks to a lawsuit alleging privacy violations by a Texas company," report SFGate: The 2021 lawsuit, given class-action status in September, alleges that Digital Recognition Network is breaking a California law meant to regulate the use of automatic license plate readers. DRN, a Fort Worth-based company, uses plate-scanning cameras to create location data for people's vehicles, then sells that data to marketers, car repossessors and insurers. What's particularly notable about the case is the size of the class. The court has established that if you're a California resident whose license plate data was collected by DRN at least 15 times since June 2017, you're a class member. The plaintiff's legal team estimates that the tally includes about 23 million people, alleging that DRN cameras were mounted to cars on public roads. The case website lets Californians check whether their plates were scanned. Barring a settlement or delay, the trial to decide whether DRN must pay a penalty to those class members will begin on May 17 in San Diego County Superior Court... The company's cameras scan 220 million plates a month, its website says, and customers can use plate data to "create comprehensive vehicle stories." A lawyer for the firm representing class members told SFGATE Friday that his team will try to show DRN's business is a "mass surveillance program."

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"The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which selects Nobel laureates in chemistry and physics, last week awarded Dr. Wu its Sjöberg Prize in honor of 'decisive contributions' to cancer research," reports CNN. Their profile of the oncologist from Boston's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute notes Dr. Wu's research "has laid the scientific foundation for the development of cancer vaccines tailored to the genetic makeup of an individual's tumor." It's a strategy looking increasingly promising for some hard-to-treat cancers such as melanoma and pancreatic cancer, according to the results of early-stage trials, and may ultimately be widely applicable to many of the 200 or so forms of cancer... The most common treatments for cancer — radiation therapy and chemotherapy — are like sledgehammers, striking all cells and often damaging healthy tissue. Since the 1950s, cancer researchers have been seeking a way to dial up the body's immune system, which naturally tries to fight cancer but is outsmarted by it, to attack tumor cells. Progress on that front was middling until about 2011 with the arrival of a class of drugs called checkpoint inhibitors, which boost the anti-tumor activity of T cells, an important part of the immune system... These drugs have helped some people with cancer who would have been given months to live survive for decades, but they don't work for all cancer patients, and researchers continue to look for ways to turbocharge the body's immune system against cancer... Wu's research focused on small mutations in cancer tumor cells. These mutations, which occur as the tumor grows, create proteins that are slightly different to those in healthy cells. The altered protein generates what's called a tumor neoantigen that can be recognized by the immune system's T cells as foreign, and therefore susceptible to attack. With thousands of potential neoantigen candidates, Wu used "tour de force lab work" to identify the neoantigens that are on the cell surface, making them a potential target for a vaccine, said Urban Lendahl, professor of genetics at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and the secretary of the committee that awarded the prize. "If the immune system is to have a chance to attack the tumor, this difference must be manifested on the surface of the tumor cells. Otherwise, it's pretty pointless," Lendahl added... By sequencing DNA from healthy and cancer cells, Wu and her team identified a cancer patient's unique tumor neoantigens. Synthetic copies of these unique neoantigens could be used as a personalized vaccine to activate the immune system to target the cancer cells... Once it had FDA approval, the team vaccinated six patients with advanced melanoma with a seven-shot course of patient-specific neoantigens vaccines. The breakthrough results were published in an 2017 article in Nature. For some patients, this treatment resulted in the immune system's cells being activated and targeting the tumor cells. The results, along with another paper published the same year led by the founders of mRNA vaccine company BioNTech, provided "proof of principle" that a vaccine can be targeted to a person's specific tumor, Lendahl said. A follow-up by Wu's team four years after the patients received the vaccines published in 2021, showed that the immune responses were effective in keeping cancer cells under control... Since then, Wu's team, other groups of medical researchers and pharmaceutical companies, including Merck, Moderna and BioNTech, have further developed this field of research, with trials underway for vaccines that treat pancreatic and lung cancer as well as melanoma. "All the trials underway are small-scale, typically involving a handful of patients with later-stage disease and a high tolerance for safety risks," adds CNN. "To show that these type of cancer vaccines work, much larger randomized control trials are needed."

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"One London resident watched on CCTV as a thief walked up to his £40,000 car and drove away," reports the Observer. "Now manufacturers say they are being drawn in to a hi-tech 'arms race' with criminals." [H]i-tech devices disguised as handheld games consoles are being traded online for thousands of pounds and are used by organised crime gangs to mimic the electronic key on an Ioniq 5, opening the doors and starting the engine. The device, known as an "emulator", works by intercepting a signal from the car, which is scanning for the presence of a legitimate key, and sending back a signal to gain access to the vehicle... Hyundai says it is looking at measures to prevent the use of emulators "as a priority". But it is not the only carmaker whose vehicles appear to be vulnerable. An Observer investigation found that models by Toyota, Lexus and Kia have also been targeted... British motorists now face an increase in the number of thefts and rising insurance premiums... Car thefts are at their highest level for a decade in England and Wales, rising from 85,803 vehicles in the year to March 2012 to 130,270 in the year to March 2023 — an increase of more than 50%. Part of the reason, say experts, is the rise of keyless entry... Kia did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Toyota, which owns Lexus, said: "Toyota and Lexus are continuously working on developing technical solutions to make vehicles more secure. Since introducing enhanced security hardware on the latest versions of a number of models, we have seen a significant drop-off in thefts. For older models we are currently developing solutions." Another common attack requires entry to the vehicle first, according to the article, but then uses the vehicle's onboard diagnostic port to program "a new key linked to the vehicle..." "Many owners of Ioniq 5s, which sell from around £42,000, now use steering locks to deter thieves."

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Since 2010, billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel has offered to pay about 20 students $100,000 to drop out of school each year "to start companies or nonprofits," reports the Wall Street Journal. His program has now backed 271 people, and this year the applicant pool "is bigger than ever." So how's it going? Some big successes include Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, the blockchain network; Laura Deming, a key figure in venture investing in aging and longevity; Austin Russell, who runs self-driving technologies company Luminar Technologies; and Paul Gu, co-founder of consumer lending company Upstart... Thiel and executives of the fellowship acknowledge they have learned painful lessons along the way. Some applicants pursued ambitious ideas that turned out to be unrealistic, for example. "Asteroid mining is great for press releases but maybe we should have pushed back early on," he says. Others were better at applying to be Thiel fellows than they were starting businesses, it turned out... They've also learned that lone geniuses with brilliant ideas aren't usually the kinds of people who can build organizations. "It's a team sport to get something going and build on it, you can't just be a mad genius, you have to have some social skills and emotional intelligence," says Michael Gibson, an early leader of the organization who is co-founder of a venture fund that invests primarily in those who don't have a college degree... Thiel hasn't attempted to build a better education system, which program officials acknowledge has made it harder to develop talent in the program... Thiel fellows say they don't receive much more than funding from the program and have limited contact with Thiel, though access to a network of former Thiel fellows can be useful. "Meeting some of the other members inspires you to think bigger," says Boyan Slat, a 2016 Thiel fellow who is chief executive of The Ocean Cleanup, a Netherlands-based nonprofit developing technologies to remove plastic from oceans. Slat says he has spoken to Thiel "three or four times." As a result, Thiel and other staffers have concluded they can't grow beyond the 20 or so young people chosen as fellows each year. "If you scale the program," Thiel says, "you will have a lot more people who aren't quite ready, you would then have to be super-confident you can develop them" — which Thiel and his colleagues say they aren't skilled at doing... About a quarter of the Thiel fellows eventually returned to college to finish their degrees, suggesting that even the dropouts see enduring value in higher education. Thiel says they "got way more out of it by going back" after launching their businesses. "The other 75% didn't need a college degree," he says.

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In 2019 a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched an Israeli spacecraft carrying a 30-million page archive of human civilization to the moon. Unfortunately, that spacecraft crashed. But thanks to this week's moon landing by the Odysseus, there's now a 30-million page "Lunar Library" on the moon — according to a Medium post by the Arch Mission Foundation. "This historic moment secures humanity's cultural heritage and knowledge in an indestructible archive built to last for up to billions of years." Etched onto thin sheets of nickel, called NanoFiche, the Lunar Library is practically indestructible and can withstand the harsh conditions of space... Some of the notable content includes: The Wikipedia. The entire English Wikipedia containing over 6 million articles on every branch of knowledge. Project Gutenberg. Portions of Project Gutenberg's library of over 70,000 free eBooks containing some of our most treasured literature. The Long Now Foundation's Rosetta Project archive of over 7,000 human languages and The Panlex datasets. Selections from the Internet Archive's collections of books and important documents and data sets. The SETI Institute's Earthling Project, featuring a musical compilation of 10,000 vocal submissions representing humanity united The Arch Lunar Art Archive containing a collection of works from global contemporary and digital artists in 2022, recorded as NFTs. David Copperfield's Magic Secrets — the secrets to all his greatest illusions — including how he will make the Moon disappear in the near future. The Arch Mission Primer — which teaches a million concepts with images and words in 5 languages. The Arch Mission Private Library — containing millions of pages as well as books, documents and articles on every subject, including a broad range of fiction and non-fiction, textbooks, periodicals, audio recordings, videos, historical documents, software sourcecode, data sets, and more. The Arch Mission Vaults — private collections, including collections from our advisors and partners, and a collection of important texts and images from all the world's religions including the great religions and indigenous religions from around the world, collections of books, photos, and a collection of music by leading recording artists, and much more content that may be revealed in the future... We also want to recognize our esteemed advisors, and our many content partners and collections including the Wikimedia Foundation, the Long Now Foundation, The SETI Institute Earthling Project, the Arch Lunar Art Archive project, Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, and the many donors who helped make the Lunar Library possible through their generous contributions. This accomplishment would not have happened without the collaborative support of so many... We will continue to send backups of our important knowledge and cultural heritage — placing them on the surface of the Earth, in caves and deep underground bunkers and mines, and around the solar system as well. This is a mission that continues as long as humanity endures, and perhaps even long after we are gone, as a gift for whoever comes next. Space.com has a nice rundown of the other new payloads that just landed on the moon. Some highlights: "Cloud computing startup Lonestar's Independence payload is a lunar data center test mission for data storage and transmission from the lunar surface." LRA is a small hemisphere of light-reflectors built to servce as a precision landmark to "allow spacecraft to ping it with lasers to help them determine their precise distance..." ROLSES is a radio spectrometer for measuring the electron density near the lunar surface, "and how it may affect radio observatories, as well as observing solar and planetary radio waves and other phenomena." "Artist Jeff Koons is sending 125 miniature stainless steel Moon Phase sculptures, each honoring significant human achievements across cultures and history, to be displayed on the moon in a cube. "

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A U.S. government auction site was breached by an Oklahoma man, reports NBC News. So when it came time to pay up on his winning bids, he "falsified the true auction price to $1," according to the U.S. attorney's office. He defrauded the government out of more than $150,000 between Jan. 31 and March 21, 2019, the indictment alleges. Included in the $1-buys were a 2010 Ford Escape Hybrid, for which Coker submitted a bid of $8,327; a Ford F550 pickup, with a bid of $9,000; and a Chevrolet C4500 box truck, bid $22,700; the U.S. attorney's office said... Nineteen items in all were bought through the auctions, according to prosecutors. Coker used eight accounts and pre-paid debit cards with very little balances to make the purchases, the indictment says. "Coker was indicted on three counts of wire fraud in March 2023 and pleaded guilty to one count Wednesday, according to court records." Thanks to Slashdot reader Thelasko for sharing the news.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from Electrek: Renewable developer Clearway Energy Group has completed a 452-megawatt (MW) solar farm in West Texas — and it's huge... It's built on around 5,000 acres of land and features over 1.1 million solar panels... Texas Solar Nova will generate enough electricity to power over 190,000 homes annually. It's got an offtake agreement with telecoms giant Verizon, and agreements with auto component maker Toyota Boshoku and Swedish bearing and seal maker SKF to purchase renewable energy certificates (RECs). Both Toyota Boshoku and SKF have 12-year agreements for RECs. The $660 million facility will "contribute significantly to the local tax base," the company said in a statement, "starting with an estimated $5.4 million in property taxes and wages to be paid in the first year."

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Netflix's new sci-fi drama Spaceman centers on Czech astronaut Jakub Procházk, described by Polygon as "painfully introverted, emotionally repressed, and above all, quiet... so muted and compressed, he seems like a trauma victim." The film, adapted from the 2017 novel Spaceman of Bohemia written by Czech author Jaroslav KalfaÅ(TM), is a solemn drama in the mold of Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris, or to some degree, Christopher Nolan's Interstellar. The story revolves around Jakub's disintegrating frame of mind after eight months alone in space as he investigates a glowing cosmic phenomenon that's become visible from Earth. Meanwhile, his wife Lenka (Carey Mulligan), heavily pregnant and going through her own breakdown back home, decides to leave Jakub, and his handlers (Isabella Rossellini among them) work to keep him from finding out. And then the giant spider appears, and Jakub worries that he's losing his mind. CNN says Sandler's deal with Netflix "means pretty much doing whatever he wants, which, in the case of Spaceman, means traveling to the furthest reaches of space as the near-solitary star of a pretentious, message-heavy drama." You can watch a trailer here. The movie enjoys a "limited theatrical release" this weekend, and will stream on Netflix starting March 1.

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jd (Slashdot reader #1,658) writes: The Register has been running a series of articles about the evolution of Unix, from humble beginnings to the transition to Plan9. There is a short discussion of why Plan9 and its successors never really took off (despite being vastly superior to microkernels), along with the ongoing development of 9Front. From the article: Plan 9 was in some way a second implementation of the core concepts of Unix and C, but reconsidered for a world of networked graphical workstations. It took many of the trendy ideas of late-1980s computing, both of academic theories and of the computer industry of the time, and it reinterpreted them through the jaded eyes of two great gurus, Kenneth Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (and their students) — arguably, design geniuses who saw their previous good ideas misunderstood and misinterpreted. In Plan 9, networking is front and center. There are good reasons why this wasn't the case with Unix — it was being designed and built at the same time as local area networking was being invented. UNIX Fourth Edition, the first version written in C, was released in 1973 — the same year as the first version of Ethernet. Plan 9 puts networking right into the heart of the design. While Unix was later used as the most common OS for standalone workstations, Plan 9 was designed for clusters of computers, some being graphical desktops and some shared servers... Because everything really is a file, displaying a window on another machine can be as simple as making a directory and populating it with some files. You can start programs on other computers, but display the results on yours — all without any need for X11 or any visible networking at all. This means all the Unixy stuff about telnet and rsh and ssh and X forwarding and so on just goes away. It makes X11 look very overcomplicated, and it makes Wayland look like it was invented by Microsoft.

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CNN reports: AT&T is reimbursing customers for the nearly 12-hour network outage on Thursday, the company announced in a news release. The mobile network will issue a $5 credit to "potentially impacted" AT&T Wireless customers, which it says is the "average cost of a full day of service." The credit will be applied automatically "within 2 bill cycles," according to an announcement at the URL att.com/makeitright. "We recognize the frustration this outage has caused and know we let many of our customers down." In a much smaller font, they note that the credit "does not apply to AT&T Business, AT&T Prepaid or Cricket. More from CNN: AT&T had encountered sporadic service interruptions in the days leading up to the outage, including a temporary 911 outage in some parts of the southeast. While regional disruptions to wireless service happen occasionally, prolonged nationwide outages are rare. The Federal Communications Commission confirmed Thursday it was investigating the incident... Several hours after service was restored, AT&T released an update stating the outage seemed to be the result of an internal issue, not a cybersecurity threat. "Based on our initial review, we believe that today's outage was caused by the application and execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network," the company said. On Saturday, AT&T reiterated it was taking steps "to prevent this from happening again in the future," but did not elaborate.

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Fast Company notes that "the deadly impacts of Pegasus and other cyberweapons — wielded by governments from Spain to Saudi Arabia against human rights defenders, journalists, lawyers and others — is by now well documented. A wave of scrutiny and sanctions have helped expose the secretive, quasi-legal industry behind these tools, and put financial strain on firms like Israel's NSO Group, which builds Pegasus. "And yet business is booming." New research published this month by Google and Meta suggest that despite new restrictions, the cyberattack market is growing, and growing more dangerous, aiding government violence and repression and eroding democracy around the globe. "The industry is thriving," says Maddie Stone, a researcher at Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) who hunts zero-day exploits, the software bugs that have yet to be fixed and are worth potentially hundreds of millions to spyware sellers. "More companies keep popping up, and their government customers are determined to buy from them, and want these capabilities, and are using them." For the first time, half of known zero-days against Google and Android products now come from private companies, according to a report published this month by Stone's team at Google. Beyond prominent firms like NSO and Candiru, Google's researchers say they are tracking about 40 companies involved in the creation of hacking tools that have been deployed against "high risk individuals." Of the 72 zero-day exploits Google discovered in the wild between 2014 and last year, 35 were attributed to these and other industry players, as opposed to state-backed actors. "If governments ever had a monopoly on the most sophisticated capabilities, that era is certainly over," reads the report. The Google findings and a spyware-focused threat report published by Meta a week later reflect an increasingly tough response by Big Tech to an industry that profits from breaking into its systems. The reports also put new pressure on the US and others to take action against the mostly unregulated industry. "In its report, Google describes a 'rise in turnkey espionage solutions' offered by dozens of shady companies..." Thanks to Slashdot reader tedlistens for sharing the article.

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Popular Science points out that for encoding data, "optical disks almost always offer just a single, 2D layer — that reflective, silver underside." "If you could boost a disk's number of available, encodable layers, however, you could hypothetically gain a massive amount of extra space..." Researchers at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology recently set out to do just that, and published the results earlier this week in the journal, Nature. Using a 54-nanometer laser, the team managed to record a 100 layers of data onto an optical disk, with each tier separated by just 1 micrometer. The final result is an optical disk with a three-dimensional stack of data layers capable of holding a whopping 1 petabit (Pb) of information — that's equivalent to 125,000 gigabytes of data... As Gizmodo offers for reference, that same petabit of information would require roughly a six-and-a-half foot tall stack of HHD drives — if you tried to encode the same amount of data onto Blu-rays, you'd need around 10,000 blank ones to complete your (extremely inefficient) challenge. To pull off their accomplishment, engineers needed to create an entirely new material for their optical disk's film... AIE-DDPR film utilizes a combination of specialized, photosensitive molecules capable of absorbing photonic data at a nanoscale level, which is then encoded using a high-tech dual-laser array. Because AIE-DDPR is so incredibly transparent, designers could apply layer-upon-layer to an optical disk without worrying about degrading the overall data. This basically generated a 3D "box" for digitized information, thus exponentially raising the normal-sized disk's capacity. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader hackingbear for sharing the news.

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Julia 1.0 was released in 2018 — after a six-year wait. And there's now another update. LWN.net gets you up to speed, calling Julia "a general-purpose, open-source programming language with a focus on high-performance scientific computing." Some of Julia's unusual features: - Lisp-inspired metaprogramming - The ability to examine compiled representations of code in the REPL or in a "reactive notebook" - An advanced type and dispatch system - A sophisticated, built-in package manager. Version 1.10 brings big increases in speed and developer convenience, especially improvements in code precompilation and loading times. It also features a new parser written in Julia... [I]t is faster, it produces more useful syntax-error messages, and it provides better source-code mapping, which associates locations in compiled code to their corresponding lines in the source. That last improvement also leads to better error messages and makes it possible to write more sophisticated debuggers and linters... Between the improvements in precompilation and loading times, and the progress in making small binaries, two major and perennial complaints, of beginners and seasoned Julia users alike, have been addressed... StaticCompiler and related WebAssembly tools will make it easier to write web applications in Julia for direct execution in the browser; it is already possible, but may become more convenient over the next few years. Thanks for sharing the article to long-time Slashdot reader lee1 — who also wrote No Starch Press's Practical Julia: A Hands-On Introduction for Scientific Minds . lee1 also reminds us that Gnuplot 6.0 was released in December: lee1 writes: This article surveys the new features, including filled contours in 3D, adaptive plotting resolution, watchpoints, clipping of surfaces, pie charts, and new syntax for conditionals.

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Long-time Slashdot reader BishopBerkeley writes: Though it does not come as much of a surprise, a new study highlighted in IEEE Spectrum delves into how corporate profit motives are preventing the upgrading and the expansion of the U.S. electrical grid. The full report can be downloaded here from the source [the nonprofit economic research group NBER]. Besides opening up the market to competition, utilities don't want to lose control over regional infrastructure, writes IEEE Spectrum. "[I]nterregional lines threaten utility companies' dominance over the nation's power supply. In the power industry, asset ownership provides control over rules that govern energy markets and transmission service and expansion. When upstart entities build power plants and transmission lines, they may be able to dilute utility companies' control over power-industry rules and prevent utilities from dictating decisions about transmission expansion." The article begins by noting that "The United States is not building enough transmission lines to connect regional power networks. The deficit is driving up electricity prices, reducing grid reliability, and hobbling renewable-energy deployment. " Utilities can stall transmission expansion because out-of-date laws sanction these companies' sweeping control over transmission development... One of the main values of connecting regional networks is that it enablesâ"and is in fact critical forâ"incorporating renewable energy... Plus, adding interregional transmission for renewables can significantly reduce costs for consumers. Such connections allow excess wind and solar power to flow to neighboring regions when weather conditions are favorable and allow the import of energy from elsewhere when renewables are less productive. Even without renewables, better integrated networks generally lower costs for consumers because they reduce the amount of generation capacity needed overall and decrease energy market prices. Interregional transmission also enhances reliability,particularly during extreme weather... Addressing the transmission shortage is on the agenda in Washington, but utility companies are lobbying against reforms. The article points out that now investors and entrepreneurs "are developing long-distance direct-current lines, which are more efficient at moving large amounts of energy over long distances, compared with AC," and also "sidestep the utility-dominated transmission-expansion planning processes." They're already in use in China, and are also becoming Europe's preferred choice...

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From a report: A team of drone enthusiasts have built a sub-$500 drone that uses a camera and Google Maps to provide itself with GPS co-ordinates, removing the need for a GPS satellite signal. And all of this was done in 24 hours during the El Segundo Defense Tech Hackathon. The drone the trio opted for is a custom designed and 3D printed fixed wing featuring a large single motor towards the rear and a downward facing camera used for geo-referencing... Doesn't Google Maps still require internet, you may ask? Google Maps allows users to download segments of maps ahead of time, usually for use when you are travelling or camping out in remote areas. In this instance, the team used this feature to their advantage, allowing the drone to continue operating... Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

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