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Submission + - The Cult in Google (medium.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I first joined Google in 2017 as part of Google Developer Studio (GDS), a production company within the heart of Google, making advertisements, instructional content, and produced events, all for different teams within Google itself.

I was fired from my team there in February of 2021 because I raised alarm about a cult within Google, a group called the Fellowship of Friends. The group is well-documented: There are allegations of child abuse, human trafficking, forced abortions, and rape within the group, which has some 1,500 members worldwide and makes frequent prophecies of an imminent apocalypse.

The cult’s members dominate my former team at Google through favoritism and cronyism, not to mention direct payments back to the cult (thus funding its activities). I believe that as a result of my complaints about the Fellowship, I lost my job at Google. I have filed a lawsuit and my story is out today in the New York Times. But I also wanted to tell my story in my own words, so here it goes.

Submission + - KDE Plasma 5.25 released (kde.org)

Submitted by jrepin
jrepin writes: Plasma is a popular desktop environment, which is also powering the desktop mode on the Steam Deck portable gaming console. The KDE Community announced release of KDE Plasma 5.25 . This new version brings many improvements: the accent colour can now be set based on the prominent colour from the current desktop background image (it updates if you use slide-show wallpapers) and it applies to more graphical elements, Floating Panels add a margin all around the panel to make it float while no window is maximised. Touch-screen mode can now be activated by detaching the screen, rotating it 360, or enabling it manually. The Overview effect can be activated by gestures on touchpad or touchscreen. The Global Theme settings page lets you pick and choose which parts to apply. The Application page for Discover has been redesigned and gives you links to the application’s documentation and website, and shows what system resources it has access to. Panels can now be navigated with the keyboard, and you can assign custom shortcuts to focus individual panels.

Submission + - Apple faces anti-trust probe into App Tracking Transparency (macrumors.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Germany's Federal Cartel Office, the Bundeskartellamt, is investigating to see if Apple's App Tracking Transparency feature is anti-competitive and self-serving. The primary complaint is that they want a fair marketplace with business models that allow fair use of data, but Apple must ensure the rules of its marketplace are pro-competitive.

App Tracking Transparency is a feature that allows users to block access to the tracking ID of the phone, which is unique per app and per installation of the app.

Submission + - Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: A decade ago, particle physicists thrilled the world. On 4 July 2012, 6000 researchers working with the world’s biggest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, announced they had discovered the Higgs boson, a massive, fleeting particle key to their abstruse explanation of how other fundamental particles get their mass. The discovery fulfilled a 45-year-old prediction, completed a theory called the standard model, and thrust physicists into the spotlight.

Then came a long hangover. Before the 27-kilometer-long ring-shaped LHC started to take data in 2010, physicists fretted that it might produce the Higgs and nothing else, leaving no clue to what lies beyond the standard model. So far, that nightmare scenario is coming true. “It’s a bit disappointing,” allows Barry Barish, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology. “I thought we would discover supersymmetry,” the leading extension of the standard model.

It’s too early to despair, many physicists say. After 3 years of upgrades, the LHC is now powering up for the third of six planned runs, and some new particle could emerge in the billions of proton-proton collisions it will produce every second. In fact, the LHC should run for another 15 years, and with further upgrades should collect 17 times as much data as it already has. All those data could reveal subtle signs of novel particles and phenomena.

Still, some researchers say the writing is on the wall for collider physics. “If they don’t find anything, this field is dead,” says Juan Collar, a physicist at the University of Chicago who hunts dark matter in smaller experiments. John Ellis, a theorist at King’s College London, says hopes of a sudden breakthrough have given way to the prospect of a long, uncertain grind toward discovery. “It’s going to be like pulling teeth, not like teeth falling out.”

Submission + - MIT researchers uncover 'unpatchable' flaw in Apple M1 chips (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by waspleg
waspleg writes: The vulnerability lies in a hardware-level security mechanism utilized in Apple M1 chips called pointer authentication codes, or PAC. This feature makes it much harder for an attacker to inject malicious code into a device’s memory and provides a level of defense against buffer overflow exploits, a type of attack that forces memory to spill out to other locations on the chip.

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, however, have created a novel hardware attack, which combines memory corruption and speculative execution attacks to sidestep the security feature. The attack shows that pointer authentication can be defeated without leaving a trace, and as it utilizes a hardware mechanism, no software patch can fix it.

The attack, appropriately called “Pacman,” works by “guessing” a pointer authentication code (PAC), a cryptographic signature that confirms that an app hasn’t been maliciously altered. This is done using speculative execution — a technique used by modern computer processors to speed up performance by speculatively guessing various lines of computation — to leak PAC verification results, while a hardware side-channel reveals whether or not the guess was correct.

Submission + - AMD Details RDNA 3 Graphics, Zen 4 Performance And Phoenix Point Laptop Products (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: AMD unveiled new details of its technology roadmap yesterday at its 2022 Financial Analyst Day. Chief among them were disclosures on the company's next-gen RDNA 3 GPU architecture, Zen 4 CPU architecture and Phoenix Point laptop SoC. AMD's new RDNA 3 GPU architecture for Radeon graphic cards and mobile will be a chiplet-based design, much like the company's Ryzen CPU offering. AMD also confirmed that RDNA 3 GPUs would be fabricated on a 5nm process, likely TSMC N5. The company continued to note that an "optimized graphics pipeline" will enable yet higher clock rates, while the GPU's "rearchitected compute unit" will have ray-tracing performance improvements over RDNA 2 as well. AMD says that RDNA 3 GPUs are coming later this year, with RDNA 4 arriving likely in late 2023. Meanwhile, AMD's Zen 4 is set to be the "world's first 5nm CPU," arriving later this year with a 10 percent IPC lift and greater than 15 percent single-threaded performance gain. Zen 4 will also support DDR5, AVX-512 extensions for AI workloads and a massive 125 percent increase in memory bandwidth. AMD is claiming a 35% multithreaded performance lift for Zen 4, and its Phoenix Point laptop platform SoC will be both Zen 4 and RNDA 3 infused. This is a first for AMD, since typically its laptop product's integrated graphics trail the company's current-gen GPU architecture by at least a generation. Phoenix point is set to arrive likely in the first half of 2023.

Submission + - 'I Love the Linux Desktop, But That Doesn't Mean I Don't See Its Problems' (theregister.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Recently, The Register's Liam Proven wrote tongue in cheek about the most annoying desktop Linux distros. He inspired me to do another take. Proven pointed out that Distrowatch currently lists 270 – count 'em – Linux distros. Of course, no one can look at all of those. But, having covered the Linux desktop since the big interface debate was between Bash and zsh rather than GNOME vs KDE, and being the editor-in-chief of a now-departed publication called Linux Desktop, I think I've used more of them than anyone else who also has a life beyond the PC. In short, I love the Linux desktop. Many Linux desktop distros are great. I've been a big Linux Mint fan for years now. I'm also fond, in no particular order, of Fedora, openSUSE, Ubuntu, and MX Linux. But you know what? That's a problem right there. We have many excellent Linux desktop distros, which means none of them can gain enough market share to make any real dent in the overall market.
[...]
Besides over 200 distros, there are 21 different desktop interfaces and over half-a-dozen different major ways to install software such as the Debian Package Management System (DPKG), Red Hat Package Manager (RPM), Pacman, Zypper, and all too many others. Then there are all the newer containerized ways to install programs including Flatpak, Snap, and AppImage. I can barely keep them all straight and that's part of my job! How can you expect ordinary users to make sense of it all? You can't. None of the major Linux distributors – Canonical, Red Hat, and SUSE – really care about the Linux desktop. Sure, they have them. They're also major desktop influencers. But their cash comes from servers, containers, the cloud, and the Internet of Things (IoT). The desktop? Please. We should just be glad they spend as many resources as they do on them.

Now, all this said, I don't want you to get the impression that I don't think the conventional Linux desktop is important. I do. In fact, I think it's critical. Microsoft, you see, is abandoning the traditional PC-based desktop. In its crystal ball, Microsoft sees Azure-based Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) as its future. [...] That means that the future of a true desktop operating system will lie in the hands of Apple with macOS and us with Linux. As someone who remembers the transition from centrally controlled mainframes and minicomputers to individually empowered PCs, I do not want to return to a world where all power belongs to Microsoft or any other company.

Submission + - Microplastics Found In Freshly Fallen Antarctic Snow For First Time (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Microplastics have been found in freshly fallen snow in Antarctica for the first time, which could accelerate snow and ice melting and pose a threat to the health of the continent’s unique ecosystems. The tiny plastics — smaller than a grain of rice — have previously been found in Antarctic sea ice and surface water but this is the first time it has been reported in fresh snowfall, the researchers say. The research, conducted by University of Canterbury PhD student, Alex Aves, and supervised by Dr Laura Revell has been published in the scientific journal The Cryosphere.

Aves collected snow samples from the Ross Ice Shelf in late 2019 to determine whether microplastics had been transferred from the atmosphere into the snow. Up until then, there had been few studies on this in Antarctica. “We were optimistic that she wouldn’t find any microplastics in such a pristine and remote location,” Revell said. She instructed Aves to also collect samples from Scott Base and the McMurdo Station roadways – where microplastics had previously been detected — so “she’d have at least some microplastics to study,” Revell said. But that was an unnecessary precaution – plastic particles were found in every one of the 19 samples from the Ross Ice Shelf. “It’s incredibly sad but finding microplastics in fresh Antarctic snow highlights the extent of plastic pollution into even the most remote regions of the world,” Aves said.

Aves found an average of 29 microplastic particles per litre of melted snow, which is higher than marine concentrations reported previously from the surrounding Ross Sea and in Antarctic sea ice. Samples taken from immediately next to the scientific bases on Ross Island, Scott Base and McMurdo Station threw up larger concentrations – nearly three times that of remote areas. There were 13 different types of plastic found, with the most common being PET – the plastic commonly used to make soft drink bottles and clothing. Atmospheric modelling suggested they may have travelled thousands of kilometres through the air, however it is equally likely the presence of humans in Antarctica has established a microplastic ‘footprint’, Revell said.

Submission + - Mozilla releases local machine translation tools (mozilla.org)

Submitted by Artem S. Tashkinov
Artem S. Tashkinov writes: In January of 2019, Mozilla joined the University of Edinburgh, Charles University, University of Sheffield and University of Tartu as part of a project funded by the European Union called Project Bergamot. The ultimate goal of this consortium was to build a set of neural machine translation tools that would enable Mozilla to develop a website translation add-on that operates locally, i.e. the engines, language models and in-page translation algorithms would need to reside and be executed entirely in the user’s computer, so none of the data would be sent to the cloud, making it entirely private.

The result of this work is the translations add-on that is now available in the Firefox Add-On store for installation on Firefox Nightly, Beta and in General Release. It currently supports 14 languages. You can test the translation engine without installing the add-on.

Comment Re:Honestly (Score 4, Informative) 38

by jrepin (#62251263) Attached to: KDE Plasma 5.24 Released
Absolutely. I use KDE Plasma on my work laptop computer and all my home computers. Simply the best desktop environment there is no matter which OS you look at. Beautiful, powerful, fast, very flexible/customizable. And it is very impressive it manages to offer al this while being one of the most lightweight DEs. It has lately become also the desktop environment I install and recommend by default when setting up computers for my family and friends.

Submission + - KDE Plasma 5.24 (kde.org)

Submitted by jrepin
jrepin writes: Plasma is a popular desktop environment, which will also be powering the desktop mode on Steam Deck hand-held gaming console. Today KDE Community announced release of KDE Plasma 5.24 , a Long Term Support (LTS) release that will receive updates and bugfixes until the final Plasma 5 version, before transition to Plasma 6. This new Plasma release focuses on smoothing out wrinkles, evolving the design, and improving the overall feel and usability of the environment. Highlights include: Overview effect for managing all your desktops and application windows, easy discovery of KRunner features with the help assistant, and unlocking screen and authentication using fingerprint reader. You will also notice a new Honeywave wallpaper, the ability to pick any color for accent, and critically important Plasma notifications now come with an orange strip on the side to visually distinguish them from less urgent messages.

Submission + - System76-Scheduler Is A New Pop!_OS Rust Effort To Improve Desktop Responsivenes (phoronix.com)

Submitted by slack_justyb
slack_justyb writes: Quietly making its v1.0 debut yesterday was system76-scheduler as a Rust-written daemon aiming to improve Linux desktop responsiveness and catering to their Pop!_OS distribution

The daemon will work with the kernel's CFS scheduler to give priority to components that System76 deems important for it's distro. Out of the box the scheduler will assign priority to the X.Org Server and desktop window managers / compositors, while pushing compilers and other background tasks lower. However, the scheduler will be configurable via Rusty Object Notation (RON) files found in /etc/system76-scheduler/assignments/ and /usr/share/system76-scheduler/assignments/. Over on the github page for the project, the team indicates that they are indeed making a trade off from the default CFS to benefit Desktop configurations over the typical load a server might see.

Submission + - Slackware 15.0 released (slackware.com)

Submitted by saxa
saxa writes: After a long long development cycle we now have a new Slackware 15.0 release. Yeah that's it, Slackware 15.0 is out. See more on www.slackware.com

Submission + - Slackware, Oldest Actively Maintained Linux Distro, Releases Slackware 15.0

Submitted by sombragris
sombragris writes: Slackware, the oldest actively maintained Linux distributon, released version 15.0 yesterday after a long release cycle which comes all the way back from 2016, where the last version (14.2) was released. As the release notes said, the whole spirit of this release is: "Keep it familiar, but make it modern".

Among the news, this release offers kernel 5.15.19, PAM, PipeWire and PulseAudio, and Wayland and X11 graphical systems, Rust and Python 3. As graphical environments, both Xfce 4.16 and the latest Plasma 5 (Plasma 5.23.5, Frameworks 5.90, KDE apps 21.12 running under Qt 5.15.3) are available, with Cinnamon and Mate also available from third parties. The main compilers are gcc-11.2 and llvm 13.0. The default browser is Firefox 91.5esr, with Chromium available as a third-party repository. And... no systemd at all.

Slackware can be downloaded from a variety of mirrors, with a list available at http://mirrors.slacware.com./ BitTorrent dowloads are going to be available too.

I've used Slackware for 20 years and always impressed me with its stabilitty and speed. I encourage everyone interested to try it.

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