A Microsoft software engineer working on open-source technologies recently wrote that "you can find an open-source implementation for (almost) anything.

"But the mobile landscape is a notable exception." While there are some open-source success stories, Android being a massive one, only a handful of major companies rule hardware and software innovation for the devices we carry in our pockets. Together, Apple and Samsung hold over 50 percent of the world's market share for mobile devices, a figure that underscores just how few dominant players exist in the space. Numbers like these might leave you feeling somber about the overall viability of mobile open source. But a growing demand for better security and privacy, among other factors, may be turning the tides, and a host of inspectable, open-source solutions with transparent life cycle processes are emerging as promising alternatives....

Along with the open-source messaging app Telegram, Signal has garnered attention as a more privacy-focused alternative to apps like Facebook Messenger. The browser Chromium and the mobile game 2048 are other noteworthy examples, as well as proof that although open-source apps aren't the norm, they can be widely adopted and popular. For example, over 65 percent of mobile traffic flows through Chromium-based browsers...

Despite the many open-source technologies available to help build mobile apps, there's plenty of room to grow in the user-facing space — especially as more people recognize the value of having open-source and open-governance applications that can better safeguard their personal information. That growth isn't likely to extend to the hardware space, where the cost of building open-source implementations isn't as rewarding for developers or users — though we may start to see more devices that allow people to choose individual hardware modules from a variety of providers.
The article does cite the open source mobile hardware company Purism. And there's plenty of interesting open source software for mobile app developers, including frameworks like Apache Cordova (which lets developers use CSS3, HTML5, and JavaScript) and a whole ecosystem of open source libraries. But it all does raise the question...

Why aren't there more open source solutions for mobile devices?

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: 40 years ago the Rolling Stones released the song "Start Me Up" as part of their album Tattoo You. Then over the next four decades they built a reputation as a surprisingly tech-savvy band...

In 1994 they became the first major recording artists to broadcast live online using the experimental "Mbone" backbone/virtual network built on top of the Internet, and made one of their new songs available for download on an FTP site. In 1995 they licensed "Start Me Up" for an ad campaign promoting Microsoft's Windows 95 (the first version of Windows including a Start button). Now on the 40th anniversary of Tattoo You, the Rolling Stones have re-released the album with nine previously unreleased tracks from the same era, "recently completed and enhanced with additional vocals and guitar." And, according to Rolling Stone magazine, they've also collaborated with Boston Dynamics to recreate the "Start Me Up" music video "with the tech company's robot dogs....the first time Boston Dynamics have employed the technology to reenact a music video."

"Pout. Prance. Repeat," quips a headline at CNET. "Robo-dog Spot performs a rollicking Rolling Stones tribute..." noting there's also additional Spot robots standing in for the other members of the band. ("There's a Spot-Jagger, a Spot-Keith Richards, a Spot-Ronnie Wood and a Spot-Charlie Watts..." Though for some reason there's no robot for bassist Bill Wyman.)

It's being billed as a collaboration between Boston Dynamics and the Rolling Stones, and Friday the band's official Twitter account tweeted a highlight from the video — along with their reaction.

"Thank you to the Boston Dynamics team for making this happen."

To fund the Truth social network, former U.S. president Trump merged it with a special purpose acquisition company (or "SPAC"), reports the New York Times. "The result is that Mr. Trump — largely shut out of the mainstream financial industry because of his history of bankruptcies and loan defaults — secured nearly $300 million in funding for his new business."

But there may be a hitch: To get his deal done, Mr. Trump ventured into an unregulated and sometimes shadowy corner of Wall Street, working with an unlikely cast of characters: the former "Apprentice" contestants, a small Chinese investment firm and a little-known Miami banker named Patrick Orlando. Mr. Orlando had been discussing a deal with Mr. Trump since at least March, according to people familiar with the talks and a confidential investor presentation reviewed by The New York Times.

That was well before his SPAC, Digital World Acquisition, made its debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange last month. In doing so, Mr. Orlando's SPAC may have skirted securities laws and stock exchange rules, lawyers said... SPACs aren't supposed to have a merger planned at the time of their I.P.O. Lawyers and industry officials said that talks between Mr. Orlando and Mr. Trump or their associates consequently could draw scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Another issue is that Digital World's securities filings repeatedly stated that the company and its executives had not engaged in any "substantive discussions, directly or indirectly," with a target company — even though Mr. Orlando had been in discussions with Mr. Trump. Given the politically fraught nature of a deal with Mr. Trump, securities lawyers said that Digital World's lack of disclosure about those conversations could be considered an omission of "material information."
The Times adds that Trump had previously even discussed merging Trump Media with a smaller SPAC created with help from the same Shanghai-based investment bank — which "specialized in helping Chinese companies list on U.S. stock exchanges."

Something is slowing internet subscriber growth at Comcast and Charter, reports Bloomberg, "raising concerns about an end to what has been a huge growth business."

But why? Explanations ranging from a slowdown in consumer spending to competition from phone giants. Slashdot reader JoeyRox shared this report from Bloomberg: Charter on Friday reported 25% fewer new broadband subscribers than analysts estimated and said the overall number of new customers would fall back to 2018 levels. Comcast, which had earlier cut its subscriber forecast, reported 300,000 new internet customers Thursday, less than half the number added a year ago. Analysts were expecting some slowdown in demand coming off 2020, a year when broadband sign-ups spiked as the pandemic shifted people to working and schooling from home. Still, with Charter echoing Comcast's gloomy picture from Thursday, suddenly there's a chill on the cable broadband front, which became the most prized segment of the business as consumers cut traditional TV service.

Charter's shortfall raises "questions about whether this is the beginning of the end of the cable broadband story," said Geetha Ranganathan, an industry analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence...

Both Charter and Comcast blamed a slower new home market for some of the slack in demand, leaving the companies to try and squeeze more business out of their saturated markets. Other factors could include a dropoff in lower-paying customers as government assisted broadband funds dry up... New competition from phone companies certainly doesn't help. AT&T Inc. is expanding its network and added 289,000 new fiber internet customers last quarter. Meanwhile, T-Mobile US Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. are very excited about new wireless home broadband offers that aim directly at cable and outlying areas where cable could potentially expand.

Changes in TV viewing may also be a factor. For decades, cable companies sold TV and internet in discounted bundles. With rise of streaming video "the cable promos aren't as appealing for broadband only," Lopez said. Even as Comcast and Charter deploy new faster network technology to attract more lucrative customers, cable's share of the market is starting to shrink, according to Tammy Parker, a senior analyst with GlobalData.

"U.S. tech giant Google has paid Russia more than 32 million roubles ($455,079) in fines," reports Reuters, "for failing to delete content Moscow deems illegal, the company and a Russian lawmaker said after talks on Monday." Russia last week said it would seek to fine the U.S. tech giant a percentage of its annual Russian turnover later this month for repeatedly failing to delete banned content on its search engine and YouTube, in Moscow's strongest move yet to rein in foreign tech firms... Russia's state communications regulator, Roskomnadzor, on Monday said it has the technical capability to slow down the speed of YouTube, Interfax reported, but that administrative measures are currently sufficient.

In 2020, Google's compliance with requests to delete content was 96.2%, Pancini said, and in the first half of this year, it removed over 489,000 videos, but Russia said too much banned content still remained available.

new nukes "A sophisticated electronic sensor buried in hardened metal shells at the tip of a growing number of America's ballistic missiles reflects a significant achievement in weapons engineering that experts say could help pave the way for reductions in the size of the country's nuclear arsenal," reports the Washington Post, "but also might create new security perils." The wires, sensors, batteries and computing gear now being installed on hundreds of the most powerful U.S. warheads give them an enhanced ability to detonate with what the military considers exquisite timing over some of the world's most challenging targets, substantially increasing the probability that in the event of a major conflict, those targets would be destroyed in a radioactive rain of fire, heat and unearthly explosive pressures.

The new components — which determine and set the best height for a nuclear blast — are now being paired with other engineering enhancements that collectively increase what military planners refer to as the individual nuclear warheads' "hard-target kill capability." This gives them an improved ability to destroy Russian and Chinese nuclear-tipped missiles and command posts in hardened silos or mountain sanctuaries, or to obliterate military command and storage bunkers in North Korea, also considered a potential U.S. nuclear target.

The increased destructiveness of the warheads means that in some cases fewer weapons could be needed to ensure that all the objectives in the nation's nuclear targeting plans are fully met, opening a path to future shrinkage of the overall arsenal, current and former U.S. officials said in a number of interviews, in which some spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive technology.

Production of the first of many high-yield nuclear warheads containing the gear, developed over the past decade at a cost of billions of dollars, was completed in July for installation on missiles aboard Navy submarines, the National Nuclear Security Administration announced.
The Post notes that the U.S. has now installed the technology on hundreds of submarine-based warheads, doubling their destructive power (according to estimates by a Georgetown professor).

The acting administrator of America's National Nuclear Security Administration called it "the culmination of over a decade of work."

Phoronix ran some fun performance tests this week. "Now that Windows 11 has been out as stable and the initial round of updates coming out, I've been running fresh Windows 11 vs. Linux benchmarks for seeing how Microsoft's latest operating system release compares to the fresh batch of Linux distributions." First up is the fresh look at the Windows 11 vs. Linux performance on an Intel Core i9 11900K Rocket Lake system... The Windows 11 performance was being compared to all of the latest prominent Linux distributions, including:

- Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS
- Ubuntu 21.10
- Arch Linux (latest rolling)
- Fedora Workstation 35
- Clear Linux 35150

[...] Each operating system was cleanly installed and then run at its OS default settings for seeing how the out-of-the-box OS performance compares for these five Linux distributions to Microsoft Windows 11 Pro...

The geometric mean for all 44 tests showed Linux clearly in front of Windows 11 for this current-generation Intel platform. Ubuntu / Arch / Fedora were about 11% faster overall than Windows 11 Pro on this system. Meanwhile, Clear Linux was about 18% faster than Windows 11 and enjoyed about 5% better performance overall than the other Linux distributions.
Out of 44 tests, here's a breakdown of how many first-place wins were scored by each OS:

• Clear Linux: 33 (75%)
• Fedora Workstation 35: 4 (9.1%)
• Windows 11 Pro: 3 (6.8%)
• Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS: 2 (4.5%)
• Arch Linux: 1 (2.3%)
• Ubuntu 21.10: 1 (2.3%)

"Every hour, YouTube deletes nearly 2,000 channels," reports the New York Times. "The deletions are meant to keep out spam, misinformation, financial scams, nudity, hate speech and other material that it says violates its policies.

"But the rules are opaque and sometimes arbitrarily enforced," they write — and sometimes, YouTube does end up making mistakes. (Alternate URL here...) The gatekeeper role leads to criticism from multiple directions. Many on the right of the political spectrum in the United States and Europe claim that YouTube unfairly blocks them. Some civil society groups say YouTube should do more to stop the spread of illicit content and misinformation... Roughly 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute globally in different languages. "It's impossible to get our minds around what it means to try and govern that kind of volume of content," said Evelyn Douek, senior research fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. "YouTube is a juggernaut, by some metrics as big or bigger than Facebook."

In its email on Tuesday morning, YouTube said Novara Media [a left-leaning London news group] was guilty of "repeated violations" of YouTube's community guidelines, without elaborating. Novara's staff was left guessing what had caused the problem. YouTube typically has a three-strikes policy before deleting a channel. It had penalized Novara only once before... Novara's last show released before the deletion was about sewage policy, which hardly seemed worthy of YouTube's attention. One of the organization's few previous interactions with YouTube was when the video service sent Novara a silver plaque for reaching 100,000 subscribers...

Staff members worried it had been a coordinated campaign by critics of their coverage to file complaints with YouTube, triggering its software to block their channel, a tactic sometimes used by right-wing groups to go after opponents.... An editor, Gary McQuiggin, filled out YouTube's online appeal form. He then tried using YouTube's online chat bot, speaking with a woman named "Rose," who said, "I know this is important," before the conversation crashed. Angry and frustrated, Novara posted a statement on Twitter and other social media services about the deletion. "We call on YouTube to immediately reinstate our account," it said. The post drew attention in the British press and from members of Parliament.

Within a few hours, Novara's channel had been restored. Later, YouTube said Novara had been mistakenly flagged as spam, without providing further detail.
"We work quickly to review all flagged content," YouTube said in a statement, "but with millions of hours of video uploaded on YouTube every day, on occasion we make the wrong call "

But Ed Procter, chief executive of the Independent Monitor for the Press, told the Times that it was at least the fifth time that a news outlet had material deleted by YouTube, Facebook or Twitter without warning.

A white-haired, green-eyed pixelated character known as a CryptoPunk 9998 just sold for more than half a billion U.S. dollars -- or so it appeared -- the latest wild development in the booming non-fungible token space. But the Ethereum blockchain shows the money from the NFT trade ended up right back where it started, raising the question of why anyone bothered. Bloomberg reports: The process started Thursday at 6:13 p.m. New York time, when someone using an Ethereum address beginning with 0xef76 transferred the CryptoPunk to an address starting with 0x8e39. The process started Thursday at 6:13 p.m. New York time, when someone using an Ethereum address beginning with 0xef76 transferred the CryptoPunk to an address starting with 0x8e39.

To pay for the trade, the buyer shipped the Ether tokens to the CryptoPunk's smart contract, which transferred them to the seller -- normal stuff, a buyer settling up with a seller. But the seller then sent the 124,457 Ether back to the buyer, who repaid the loans. And then the last step: the avatar was given back to the original address, 0xef76, and offered up for sale again for 250,000 Ether, or more than $1 billion.

Larva Labs, which created the CryptoPunks, said on Twitter that "someone bought this punk from themself with borrowed money and repaid the loan in the same transaction." Evidently, this isn't the first time this has happened. "Some recent large bids were done the same way. The ether is offered and removed in a single transaction. So, while technically briefly valid, the bid can never be accepted. We'll add filtering to avoid generating notifications for these kinds of transactions in the future." In conventional, regulated securities markets, this would be called wash trading, which is banned on grounds that trading with yourself can artificially inflate prices and suggest more demand than really exists.

The documents leaked to U.S. regulators by a Facebook whistleblower "reveal that the social media giant has privately and meticulously tracked real-world harms exacerbated by its platforms," reports the Washington Post.

Yet it also reports that at the same time Facebook "ignored warnings from its employees about the risks of their design decisions and exposed vulnerable communities around the world to a cocktail of dangerous content."

And in addition, the whistleblower also argued that due to Mark Zuckberg's "unique degree of control" over Facebook, he's ultimately personally response for what the Post describes as "a litany of societal harms caused by the company's relentless pursuit of growth." Zuckerberg testified last year before Congress that the company removes 94 percent of the hate speech it finds before a human reports it. But in internal documents, researchers estimated that the company was removing less than 5 percent of all hate speech on Facebook...

For all Facebook's troubles in North America, its problems with hate speech and misinformation are dramatically worse in the developing world. Documents show that Facebook has meticulously studied its approach abroad, and is well aware that weaker moderation in non-English-speaking countries leaves the platform vulnerable to abuse by bad actors and authoritarian regimes. According to one 2020 summary, the vast majority of its efforts against misinformation — 84 percent — went toward the United States, the documents show, with just 16 percent going to the "Rest of World," including India, France and Italy...

Facebook chooses maximum engagement over user safety. Zuckerberg has said the company does not design its products to persuade people to spend more time on them. But dozens of documents suggest the opposite. The company exhaustively studies potential policy changes for their effects on user engagement and other factors key to corporate profits.

Amid this push for user attention, Facebook abandoned or delayed initiatives to reduce misinformation and radicalization... Starting in 2017, Facebook's algorithm gave emoji reactions like "angry" five times the weight as "likes," boosting these posts in its users' feeds. The theory was simple: Posts that prompted lots of reaction emoji tended to keep users more engaged, and keeping users engaged was the key to Facebook's business. The company's data scientists eventually confirmed that "angry" reaction, along with "wow" and "haha," occurred more frequently on "toxic" content and misinformation. Last year, when Facebook finally set the weight on the angry reaction to zero, users began to get less misinformation, less "disturbing" content and less "graphic violence," company data scientists found.
The Post also contacted a Facebook spokeswoman for their response. The spokewoman denied that Zuckerberg "makes decisions that cause harm" and then also dismissed the findings as being "based on selected documents that are mischaracterized and devoid of any context..."

Responding to the spread of specific pieces of misinformation on Facebook, the spokeswoman went as far to acknowledge that at Facebook, "We have no commercial or moral incentive to do anything other than give the maximum number of people as much of a positive experience as possible."

She added that the company is "constantly making difficult decisions."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: A new study from the [CDC] finds that vaccination provides better protection against hospitalization with COVID-19 than a previous infection with the virus. The analysis found people hospitalized with coronavirus-like symptoms were more than five times more likely to test positive for COVID-19 if they had had recent prior infection than if they were recently vaccinated. The study released Friday examined more than 7,000 people across nine states and 187 hospitals, comparing those who were unvaccinated and had previously had the coronavirus in the last three to six months and those who were vaccinated over the same time frame.

The CDC urged even those who were previously infected to get their shots. [...] Overall, [CDC Director Rochelle Walensky] said at a press briefing earlier this week that the hospitalization rate among unvaccinated people is 12 times higher than for vaccinated people. The vaccination rate for those 12 and older has now reached 78 percent with at least one shot, but Walensky noted that still leaves more than 60 million eligible Americans unvaccinated.

NASA is calling on any interested humans to contribute to the machine learning algorithms that help Perseverance get around. All you need to do is look at some images and label geological features. ExtremeTech reports: The project is known as AI4Mars, and it's a continuation of a project started last year using images from Curiosity. That particular rover arrived on Mars in 2012 and has been making history ever since. NASA used Curiosity as the starting point when designing Perseverance. The new rover has 23 cameras, which capture a ton of visual data from Mars, but the robot has to rely on human operators to interpret most of those images. The rover has enhanced AI to help it avoid obstacles, and it will get even better if you chip in.

The AI4Mars site lets you choose between Opportunity, Curiosity, and the new Perseverance images. After selecting the kind of images you want to scope out, the site will provide you with several different marker types and explanations of what each one is. For example, the NavCam asks you to ID sand, consolidated soil (where the wheels will get good traction), bedrock, and big rocks. There are examples of all these formations, so it's a snap to get started.

Nasa's Juno mission, the solar-powered robotic explorer of Jupiter, has completed its five-year prime mission to reveal the inner workings of the Solar System's biggest planet. The most recent findings from these measurements have now been published in a series of papers, revealing the three-dimensional structure of Jupiter's weather systems -- including of its famous Great Red Spot, a centuries-old storm big enough to swallow the Earth whole. The Conversation reports: Jupiter's Great Red Spot has had a hard time in recent years. [...] But fans of the storm can take comfort from Juno's latest findings. In 2017, Juno was able to observe the red spot in microwave light. Then, in 2019, as Juno flew at more than 200,000 kilometers per hour above the vortex, Nasa's Deep Space Network was monitoring the spacecraft's velocity from millions of kilometers away. Tiny changes as small as 0.01 millimeters per second were detected, caused by the gravitational force from the massive spot. By modeling the microwave and gravity data, my colleagues and I were able to determine that the famous storm is at least 300 km (186 miles) deep, maybe as deep as 500 km (310 miles). That's deeper than the expected cloud-forming "weather layer" that reaches down to around 65 km (40 miles) below the surface, but higher than the jet streams that might extend down to 3,000 km (1,864 miles). The deeper the roots, the more likely the Red Spot is to persist in the years to come, despite the superficial battering it has been receiving from passing storms. To place the depth in perspective, the International Space Station orbits ~420 km (260 miles) above Earth's surface. Yet despite these new findings, the spot could still be a "pancake-like" structure floating in the bottomless atmosphere, with the spot's 12,000 km (7,456 mile) width being 40 times larger than its depth.

In the cloud-forming weather layer, Juno's microwave antennae saw the expected structure of belts and zones. The cool zones appeared dark, indicating the presence of ammonia gas, which absorbs microwave light. Conversely, the belts were bright in microwave light, consistent with a lack of ammonia. These bright and dark bands in the weather layer were perfectly aligned with the winds higher up, measured at the top of the clouds. But what happens when we probe deeper? The temperature of Jupiter's atmosphere is just right for the formation of a water cloud around 65 km (40 miles) down below the cloud tops. When Juno peered through this layer, it found something unexpected. The belts became microwave-dark, and the zones became microwave-bright. This is the complete reverse of what we saw in the shallower cloudy regions, and we are calling this transition layer the "jovicline" -- some 45-80 km (28-50 miles) below the visible clouds. [...] The jovicline may separate the shallow cloud-forming weather layer from the deep abyss below. This unexpected result implies something is moving all that ammonia around.

One possibility is that each jet stream is associated with a "circulation cell," a climate phenomenon that moves gases around via currents of rising and falling air. The rising could cause ammonia enrichment, and the sinking ammonia depletion. If true, there would be about eight of these circulation cells in each hemisphere. [...] Other meteorological phenomena might be responsible for moving the ammonia around within this deep atmosphere. For example, vigorous storms in Jupiter's belts might create mushy ammonia-water hailstones (known as "mushballs"), which deplete ammonia within the shallow belts before falling deep, eventually evaporating to enrich the belts at great depths.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from InterestingEngineering: Energy densities of lithium-ion batteries haven't reached the potential where long-range flights can be undertaken. So, a Colorado-based startup, H3X, looked to the electric motor for ways to improve its power capacity. The team started from scratch, looking at the various components of the electric motor. Comprised of a gearbox, a power delivery system, and a main motor, these components are usually housed separately to allow sufficient cooling space, without which could result in engine failure. However, using advances in material science and electronics, coupled with the ability to 3D-print structures such as copper, the team managed to put all components together into a single housing that weighs just 33 pounds (15 kg) without impacting their cooling needs. Their motor, called the HPDM-250, is much smaller than their contemporaries and has a lesser mass as well.

The company claims that, according to the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) guidelines, a propulsion system of a commercial aircraft such as Boeing 737 must deliver a continuous power density of 12 kW/kg. However, conventional electric motors can only generate a maximum of up to 4kW/kg. Thanks to its reduced weight, the HPDM-250's power density clocks up to an impressive 13kW/kg. According to H3X, this is sufficient to power any mass-sensitive or high-performance application such as electric boats and has urban air mobility applications. Among the other targets for the company that remain in the distance are short-haul, large commercial flights in the sub-1000 mile range.

Max Liben, Chief Technology Office at H3X, told TechCrunch that using advanced technologies made the manufacturing of their electric motor less laborious and yet not very expensive. Even when putting the components together, the team was conscious of maintenance needs and has ensured that servicing their motors is hassle-free as well. Whether powered by electric batteries or hydrogen fuel, these advanced electric motors are likely to play a role in enabling electric air mobility, even over longer distances.