For decades Eric S. Raymond has been one of the open source movement's staunchest supporters. He co-founded the Open Source Initiative, and was the author of the influential book The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary .

Tuesday the 61-year-old super-geek posted a dramatic story to his blog: Today I had to -- literally -- crawl from my wife's car to my house. Because I couldn't walk. Life is what happens while you were making other plans. About six months ago I sprained my right ankle in kung fu class. It gave me occasional pain, mostly in cold weather, but I thought it was healing and I could just let it heal. Until about two months ago when I was out with friends on a chilly evening and my ankle folded up under me, just lost the power to support me entirely...

A couple of visits to doctors and an MRI scan later we determined that I had developed one of the more unfortunate possible sequelae of a sprain, a thing called an osteochondral lesion. This is what happens when an area of bone in the load-bearing area of the joint erodes away, so the cartilage above it is no longer supported. If the unsupported cartilage is then damaged, the long-term result can be crippling arthritis of the joint. In my case, it seemed I had gotten lucky. The cartilage seemed undamaged in the MRI images. The indicated procedure is to go in with an arthroscopic probe and squirt synthetic bone into the lesion. Once it hardens it can support the cartilage so it doesn't take additional damage.
Then two weeks ago, while waiting for his scheduled surgery, Raymond collapsed again in his kitchen, leading to an emergency room visit, another MRI, and three head staples where he'd hit his head on a chair leg: Home again home again. It's nice that even at 61 I'm a physically tough person with a high pain threshold and a thick skull who is actually rather difficult to injure -- my school name over at the kung fu kwoon is "The Mighty Oak". And I like that I can be self-reliant and stoic under stress. But thank you, I'd prefer not to have this confirmed by repeated injuries...

I had that surgery about eighteen hours ago. And ended up crawling from my car because none of the medical people talked about or planned for my post-operative problems until after I was out of anesthesia. Pain management was as far as they got... So now it's oh-dark-thirty the next morning, I'm writing this because the anesthesia and the four hours or so of shut-eye after I got home have left me all slept out for the moment, and I've learned from experience that quietly coding or writing until I'm tired enough to sleep again is better for me than tossing and turning.
By Wednesday he'd posted a reassuring update -- that "The post-op pain has stabilized at a level where the occasional Tylenol will handle it nicely." But the Tuesday blog post reminded readers that he'd been scheduled to give the main keynote at South East Linux Fest on June 14th. "Part of the reason this is a public blog post is as my subjunctive apology to everyone who was expecting to see me at SELF, in the all-too-likely event that I can't be there."

Posting stoicly about the details of his recovery -- at one point he writes "Improvise, adapt, overcome!" -- Eric Raymond added one final thought: If you've ever thought that you might join my Patreon feed, now would be a really good time. This... adventure... has blown a $6000 hole in my budget and the expenses aren't over yet. There's that post-op check at minimum, and probably physical therapy afterwards, and that's if all heals well; otherwise it'll be much, much more expensive.

"The Facebook shareholder revolt just got bloody," reports Business Insider: It's now clear that independent Facebook investors voted overwhelmingly in support of proposals last week to fire Mark Zuckerberg as chairman and scrap the firm's share structure. According to the results of votes at Facebook's annual shareholder meeting, 68% of outside investors want the company to hire an independent chairman. The majority was up from 51% last year.

Despite the revolt, the proposals did not pass because of Zuckerberg's voting control of the stock, which means he can swat away shareholder demands. "Arrogance is not a substitute for good corporate governance," Michael Connor, who helped coordinate action among activist Facebook investors, said.
"Facebook's voting rights are tilted heavily in favor of B-class shareholders, which consist almost exclusively of Zuckerberg and his small coterie," explains Slashdot reader schwit1. "Which means that the company's founder enjoys all the cash from being publicly-held, but none of the discipline from shareholders."

Facebook's investors are now demanding an independent investigation into Zuckerberg's "outsized" power, according to the article, which notes that 83.2% of outside shareholders also backed a proposal to scrap Facebook's dual-class share structure altogether.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Architectural Digest on Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' $80 million New York City bachelor pad: "Jeff Bezos is not only taking over the internet but is also ruling the real-estate world too. It was just revealed that he purchased not one but three Manhattan apartments overlooking Madison Square Park for $80 million. Included in the sale was a three-floor penthouse apartment [video], in addition to the two units below, giving the Amazon founder and CEO the potential to create a palatial 17,000-square-foot, 12-bedroom pad. [...] This is just the billionaire's latest purchase. He already owns an apartment overlooking Central Park, four California homes, and homes in Texas, Washington state, and Washington, D.C."

"If you're a cryptocurrency startup, would you face a huge backlash by hacking your own customers to keep their funds safe if you know that a hacker is about to launch an attack and steal their funds?" asks ZDNet: This is exactly what happened yesterday when the Komodo Platform learned about a backdoor in one of its older wallet apps named Agama. Knowing they had little time to act, the Komodo team said it used the same backdoor to extract users' funds from all impacted wallets and move them to a safe location, out of the hacker's reach.

The tactic paid off, and 8 million Komodo coins and 96 bitcoins, worth nearly $13 million, were taken from users' vulnerable accounts before the hacker could get a chance to abuse the backdoor and steal users' funds... While initially, it did not make any sense for a library with a very limited feature-set to contain such an advanced functionality, after investigating the issue, npm staffers realized they were dealing with a supply-chain attack aimed at another app downstream, which was using the now-backdoored library... The npm team said the malicious code would work as intended and collect Agama wallet app seeds and passphrases, and upload the data to a remote server.
These malicious-payload updates are "becoming more and more popular," according to a post on the official npm blog (a point they later emphasized in a press release).

"After being notified by our internal security tooling of this threat we responded by notifying and coordinating with Komodo to protect their users as well as remove the malware from npm."

In a new essay Friday, technology pundit Robert Cringely remembers the day he got his first home fax machine in 1986, arguing that broadcast television is like a fax machine -- in that "they are both obsolete."

Then he offers a quick history of television, cable TV, and the rise of Netflix, concluding "I'll be surprised if broadcast TV in the U.S. survives another decade" -- also predicting the end of cable TV packages: 5G wireless networking, as I've written here before, has pretty much nothing to do with mobile phones. It has to do with replacing every other kind of data network with 5G wireless. No more land lines, no more cable systems, no more wires. Going all-wireless almost completely eliminates customer-facing labor. No more guy with a tool belt to keep you waiting for service. No more truck rolls. There will be 5G and there will be content, that's all.

Content can mean a phone call or a movie, a game, or anything else that involves electrons in motion. And given that we'll all have voracious and completely different demands for high-resolution content, 5G will suck-up all available bandwidth and then some. Legacy broadcast license holders like broadcast TV and radio stations will sell their airspace to 5G carriers and retire to Florida. They'll get offers they can't refuse....

Cable TV packages will fall apart with every network fighting for itself in an a la carte programming world.
"There's nothing sacrosanct about a broadcast network paradigm that we've been riding for a century," he concludes. "This too shall pass."

The Internet Storm Center reports: RDP, the remote desktop protocol, made the news recently after Microsoft patched a critical remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2019-0708). While the reporting around this "Bluekeep" vulnerability focused on patching vulnerable servers, exposing RDP to the Internet has never been a good idea. Botnets have been scanning for these servers and are using weak and reused passwords to gain access to them.

The latest example of such a botnet is an ongoing malicious campaign we are refering to as "GoldBrute". This botnet is currently brute forcing a list of about 1.5 million RDP servers exposed to the Internet... Each bot will only try one particular username and password per target. This is possibly a strategy to fly under the radar of security tools as each authentication attempt comes from different addresses.
Long-time Slashdot reader UnderAttack writes: Infected systems will retrieve target lists from the command and control server and attempt to brute force credentials against the list, while at the same time looking for more exposed servers. With all the attention spent on patching RDP servers for the recent "BlueKeep" vulnerability, users should also make sure to just not expose RDP in the first place. Even patched, it will still be susceptible to brute forcing.

"Nuclear experts have warned against re-opening a 43-year-old Scottish nuclear reactor riddled with cracks over fears of a meltdown," writes the Daily Mirror.

An anonymous reader quotes their report: Hunterston B nuclear power plant was shut down last year after it was found that Reactor 3 had almost 400 cracks in it -- exceeding the operational limit. EDF, which own the plant in Ardrossan, Ayrshire, are pushing to return the reactor to service at the end of June and July and want to extend the operational limit of crack allowed from 350 to 700. However, the plans to reopen the plant have sparked fears it could lead to a nuclear meltdown similar to the 1986 Chernoybl disaster.

Experts have warned that in the very worst case the hot graphite core could become exposed to air and ignite leading to radioactive contamination and evacuation of a large area of Scotland's central belt -- including Glasgow and Edinburgh. According to Dr Ian Fairlie, an independent consultant on radioactivity in the environment, and Dr David Toke, Reader in Energy Policy at the University of Aberdeen, the two reactors definitely should not be restarted...

The plant, which is more than 40 years old, can generate enough electricity to power more than 1.7 million homes, and is one of Britain's eight nuclear plants which provide around 20 percent of the country's electricity.
Nuclear expert Professor Neil Hyat reminds The Sun that the reactor will be shut down by 2030 -- and "possibly earlier."

McGruber quotes TechCrunch: Maker Media Inc ceased operations this week and let go of all of its employees — about 22 employees" founder and CEO Dale Dougherty told TechCrunch. "I started this 15 years ago and it's always been a struggle as a business to make this work. Print publishing is not a great business for anybody, but it works . . . barely. Events are hard . . . there was a drop off in corporate sponsorship." Microsoft and Autodesk failed to sponsor this year's flagship Bay Area Maker Faire.

But Dougherty is still desperately trying to resuscitate the company in some capacity, if only to keep MAKE:'s online archive running and continue allowing third-party organizers to license the Maker Faire name to throw affiliated events. Rather than bankruptcy, Maker Media is working through an alternative Assignment for Benefit of Creditors process.

"We're trying to keep the servers running" Dougherty tells me. "I hope to be able to get control of the assets of the company and restart it. We're not necessarily going to do everything we did in the past but I'm committed to keeping the print magazine going and the Maker Faire licensing program." The fate of those hopes will depend on negotiations with banks and financiers over the next few weeks. For now the sites remain online.

AmiMoJo shares an article by Cory Doctorow: Wednesday, Youtube announced that it would shut down, demonetize and otherwise punish channels that promoted violent extremism, "supremacy" and other forms of hateful expression; predictably enough, this crackdown has caught some of the world's leading human rights campaigners, who publish Youtube channels full of examples of human rights abuses in order to document them and prompt the public and governments to take action....

Some timely reading: Caught in the Net: The Impact of "Extremist" Speech Regulations on Human Rights Content, a report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Jillian C York: "The examples highlighted in this document show that casting a wide net into the Internet with faulty automated moderation technology not only captures content deemed extremist, but also inadvertently captures useful content like human rights documentation, thus shrinking the democratic sphere. No proponent of automated content moderation has provided a satisfactory solution to this problem."
A British history teacher living in Romania complained Wednesday that his YouTube channel had been banned completely from YouTube, possibly over its documenting of propaganda speeches from World War II. He tweeted that he was frustrated that "15 years of materials for #HistoryTeacher community have ended so abruptly."

Later that same day, his account was restored -- but he's still concerned about other YouTube accounts. "It's absolutely vital that @YouTube work to undo the damage caused by their indiscriminate implementation as soon as possible," he tweeted Wednesday. "Access to important material is being denied wholesale as many other channels are left branded as promoting hate when they do nothing of the sort."

"Neuroscientists can now see that brain behavior changes when people rely on turn-by-turn directions," says science writer M.R. O'Connor, citing a study of personal GPS devices co-authored by Kent-based cognitive neuroscience researcher Amir-Homayoun Javadi: What isn't known is the effect of GPS use on hippocampal function when employed daily over long periods of time. Javadi said the conclusions he draws from recent studies is that "when people use tools such as GPS, they tend to engage less with navigation. Therefore, brain area responsible for navigation is less used, and consequently their brain areas involved in navigation tend to shrink."

How people navigate naturally changes with age. Navigation aptitude appears to peak around age 19, and after that, most people slowly stop using spatial memory strategies to find their way, relying on habit instead. But neuroscientist Veronique Bohbot has found that using spatial-memory strategies for navigation correlates with increased gray matter in the hippocampus at any age. She thinks that interventions focused on improving spatial memory by exercising the hippocampus -- paying attention to the spatial relationships of places in our environment -- might help offset age-related cognitive impairments or even neurodegenerative diseases. "If we are paying attention to our environment, we are stimulating our hippocampus, and a bigger hippocampus seems to be protective against Alzheimer's disease," Bohbot told me in an email.
This piece originally appeared in the Washington Post's opinion section -- under the headline "Ditch the GPS. It's Ruining Your Brain."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Researchers from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and Oklahoma State University this week released a new study again tying better broadband to lower unemployment. The study tracked broadband availability and unemployment rates across 95 counties in Tennessee from 2011 to 2016, and found that counties with access to high speed broadband had a 0.26 percentage point lower rate of unemployment compared to low speed counties. Early adoption of faster speeds also aided unemployment rates, researchers found. The researchers concluded that "better quality broadband appears to have a disproportionately greater effect in rural areas" that have been historically neglected by private ISPs, many of which received countless billions in taxpayer subsidies over the last decade. Disinterested with the slow return on investment, many private ISPs have let their networks literally fall apart.

Starting July 1st, electric vehicles with four or more wheels must be fitted with an "Acoustic Vehicle Alert System" (AVAS) if they want to be able to legally drive in the European Union. With AVAS, vehicles would make a continuous noise of at least 56 decibels if the car's going 20 km/h (12 mph) or slower. New Atlas reports: Designed to address the public's fear of quiet electric vehicles, the new laws require cars -- not motorcycles -- to make some kind of noise at slower speeds. The noise, which isn't prescribed to be any particular sound, must rise and fall in pitch to signal whether the vehicle is accelerating or decelerating.

Fifty-six decibels isn't particularly loud, mercifully -- it's about the sound level of a running air con unit or electric toothbrush. A diesel truck, for example, will make about 85 decibels when it passes, and the rules state that the warning sounds can't be any louder than 75 decibels, or about the noise level of a regular dinosaur burning car. So the AVAS systems will make no difference at all to people who walk around with earphones in. Jaguar has decided to go with a "weird kind of spaceship sound," while BMW has gone with something that sounds more like a traditional engine. Nissan "seems to have gone for a bit of a jet airliner feel," writes Loz Blain for New Atlas.

At an event in Montreal earlier this week, Michelin and General Motors unveiled a new airless wheel prototype called the Uptis Prototype, which stands for "Unique Puncture-proof Tire System." The prototype looks like an old-fashioned tire, but has treads in the middle and no sidewalls. Interesting Engineering reports: "Uptis" as it is more simply called, was first unveiled at the Movin'On Summit for sustainable mobility in 2017. The aim is for a complete reshuffle of conventional wheels and tires, so that they are fully replaced as an assembly unit for passenger cars. GM's plan is to start tests at the end of this year on their Michigan-based Bolt Electic Vehicles (EVs).

The airless tire has all-round benefits: less raw material and energy are used in their production, the amount of scrapped tires due to punctures or damage will dramatically minimize, wear and tear issues due to over or under inflation will be eliminated, and roads will become safer with fewer blowouts or flat tires. Michelin has been on the case since 2005 when it unveiled its Tweel system. The Uptis is a production-ready version of the Tweel system. For those not navigating such large vehicles, the Uptis will be just the ticket. Michelin further states that these airless tires won't feel any different to our current, very air-filled ones.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Smithsonian: A new study is shining troubling light on the quantity of microplastics Americans are consuming each year -- as many as 121,000 particles, per a conservative estimate. A research team led by Kieran Cox, a PhD candidate at the University of Victoria and a former Link Fellow at the Smithsonian Institute, looked at 26 papers assessing the amount of microplastics in commonly consumed food items, among them seafood, sugars, salts, honey, alcohol and water. The team also evaluated the potential consumption of microplastics through inhalation using previously reported data on microplastic concentrations in the air and the Environmental Protection Agency's reported respiration rates. To account for factors like age and sex, the researchers consulted dietary intakes recommended by the U.S. Health Department.

Based on this data, the researchers calculated that our annual consumption of microplastics via food and drink ranges between 39,000 and 52,000 particles, depending on age and sex. Female children consume the least and male adults consume the most, the team reveals in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. When microplastics ingested through inhalation are taken into account, the range jumps from 74,000 to 121,000 particles per year.

In what marks the largest ever philanthropic effort to combat climate change, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is pledging $500 million to close all of the nation's remaining coal plants by 2030 and put the United States on track toward a 100% clean energy economy. The New York Times reports: The new campaign, called Beyond Carbon, is designed to help eliminate coal by focusing on state and local governments. The effort will bypass Washington, where Mr. Bloomberg has said national action appears unlikely because of a divided Congress and a president who denies the established science of climate change. "We're in a race against time with climate change, and yet there is virtually no hope of bold federal action on this issue for at least another two years," Mr. Bloomberg said in a statement before the announcement, which he made in a commencement address at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Mother Nature is not waiting on our political calendar, and neither can we."

A spokesman for Mr. Bloomberg said most of the money would be spent over the next three years, though the time frame could be extended. It will fund lobbying efforts by environmental groups -- in state legislatures, City Councils and public utility commissions -- that aim to close coal plants and replace them with wind, solar and other renewable power. Part of the cash also will go toward efforts to elect local lawmakers who prioritize clean energy. The campaign will be based on the need to avoid the most dangerous effects of climate change, but will also emphasize the economic benefits of switching to clean energy.