"China has released landing process footage from its Zhurong rover as well as video and sounds of the vehicle roving on Mars," reports Space News: Footage of the entry, descent and landing shows deployment of a supersonic disk-gap-band parachute, separation of the backshell, followed by powered descent, a hazard-avoidance hover phase, and landing... Video of the descent of the Zhurong rover from its landing platform, including sounds made by the vehicle's egress, was included in the release. The sounds were created by the metal on metal interaction of a rack and pinion system and recorded by Zhurong's climate station, which intends to capture sounds of Martian winds... The 240-kilogram Zhurong rover successfully landed in Utopia Planitia on May 14.

The deployment took place late May 21 Eastern, following a week-long series of checks and analysis of the environment. The six-wheeled, solar-powered Zhurong has since covered 236 meters on the Martian surface. An undated panorama shows Zhurong and tracks leading back to the landing platform, along with surface and horizon features...

The rover is part of the Tianwen-1 mission, China's first independent interplanetary mission. Consisting of an orbiter, a lander, and a rover, Tianwen-1 launched in July 2020. It entered Mars orbit February 10. Zhurong is equipped with six science payloads, including a laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy instrument for analysing surface elements and minerals, panoramic and multispectral imagers, a climate station, magnetometer and a ground-penetrating radar. It aims to return data on potential water-ice deposits, weather, topography and geology, complementing science carried out by missions from other space agencies.

The Tianwen-1 orbiter is currently in an 8.2-hour orbit, allowing a pass over Utopia Planitia once per sol to perform a data relay role. Zhurong has a primary mission and design lifetime of 90 sols (92 Earth days). It is currently unknown if Zhurong's mission will be extended beyond this.
Engadget argues that this footage from Mars "is as much about bragging rights as anything. Zhurong is part of China's first truly independent mission to another planet, and the country no doubt wants to highlight its accomplishments in as much detail as possible."

Westland Real Estate Group patrols its 1,000-unit apartment complex in Las Vegas with "a conical, bulky, artificial intelligence-powered robot" standing just over 5 feet tall, according to NBC News. Manufactured by Knightscope, the robot is equipped with four internal cameras capturing a constant 360-degree view, and can also scan and record license plates (as well as the MAC addresses of cellphones). But is it doing any good? As more government agencies and private sector companies resort to robots to help fight crime, the verdict is out about how effective they are in actually reducing it. Knightscope, which experts say is the dominant player in this market, has cited little public evidence that its robots have reduced crime as the company deploys them everywhere from a Georgia shopping mall to an Arizona development to a Nevada casino. Knightscope's clients also don't know how much these security robots help. "Are we seeing dramatic changes since we deployed the robot in January?" Dena Lerner, the Westland spokesperson said. "No. But I do believe it is a great tool to keep a community as large as this, to keep it safer, to keep it controlled."

For its part, Knightscope maintains on its website that the robots "predict and prevent crime," without much evidence that they do so. Experts say this is a bold claim. "It would be difficult to introduce a single thing and it causes crime to go down," said Ryan Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington, comparing the Knightscope robots to a "roving scarecrow." Additionally, the company does not provide specific, detailed examples of crimes that have been thwarted due to the robots.
The robots are expensive — they're rented out at about $70,000-$80,000 a year — but growth has stalled for the two years since 2018, and over four years Knightscope's total clients actually dropped from 30 to just 23. (Expenses have now risen — partly because the company is now doubling its marketing budget.)

There's also a thermal scanning feature, but Andrew Ferguson, a law professor at American University, still called these robots an "expensive version of security theater." And NBC News adds that KnightScope's been involved "in both tragic and comical episodes." In 2016, a K5 roaming around Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, California, hit a 16-month-old toddler, bruising his leg and running over his foot. The company apologized, calling it a "freakish accident," and invited the family to visit the company's nearby headquarters in Mountain View, which the family declined. The following year, another K5 robot slipped on steps adjacent to a fountain at the Washington Harbour development in Washington, D.C., falling into the water. In October 2019, a Huntington Park woman, Cogo Guebara, told NBC News that she tried reporting a fistfight by pressing an emergency alert button on the HP RoboCop itself, but to no avail. She learned later the emergency button was not yet connected to the police department itself... [The northern California city] Hayward dispatched its robot in a city parking garage in 2018. The following year, a man attacked and knocked over the robot. Despite having clear video and photographic evidence of the alleged crime, no one was arrested, according to Adam Kostrzak, the city's chief information officer.
The city didn't renew its contract "due to the financial impact of Covid-19 in early 2020," the city's CIO tells NBC News. But the city had already spent over $137,000 on the robot over two years.

Jalopnik reports: A new United Kingdom-based study conducted by CarGurus confirms a trend that's been popping up lately: most drivers aren't confident in sharing the road with fully-autonomous vehicles. The site surveyed just over 1,000 automobile owners in the UK to understand their thoughts regarding self-driving cars, making sure to balance respondents by race, income, gender, and more. The study showed that, overall, 36 percent of respondents were concerned about the development of self-driving cars, with another 35 percent identifying as neutral and 30 percent as excited.

41 percent of respondents said they would not be comfortable in any self-driving car scenario, whether they were the one behind the wheel or they were sharing the road with autonomous delivery vehicles...

Ultimately, CarGurus offers a few points that sum up the sentiment of the survey:

- More people are concerned about autonomous vehicles than they are excited. It'll take more convincing and safety assurances to get people involved.

- Most buyers would rather have driver assistance features but still be in charge.
On the bright side, the study also found that people were at least excited about having a car that could steer into a parking spot by itself.

The New York Times reports: When Yahoo banned working from home in 2013, the reason was one often cited in corporate America: Being in the office is essential for spontaneous collaboration and innovation. "It is critical that we are all present in our offices," wrote Jacqueline Reses, then a Yahoo executive, in a staff memo. "Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people and impromptu team meetings." Today, Ms. Reses, now chief executive of Post House Capital, an investment firm, has a different view. "Would I write that memo differently now?" she said. "Oh yeah." She still believes that collaboration can benefit from being together in person, but over the last year, people found new, better ways to work.

As the pandemic winds down in the United States, however, many bosses are sounding a note similar to Ms. Reses' in 2013. "Innovation isn't always a planned activity," said Tim Cook, chief executive of Apple, about post-pandemic work. "It's bumping into each other over the course of the day and advancing an idea you just had." Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, said working from home "doesn't work for spontaneous idea generation, it doesn't work for culture." Yet people who study the issue say there is no evidence that working in person is essential for creativity and collaboration. It may even hurt innovation, they say, because the demand for doing office work at a prescribed time and place is a big reason the American workplace has been inhospitable for many people...

"There's credibility behind the argument that if you put people in spaces where they are likely to collide with one another, they are likely to have a conversation," said Ethan S. Bernstein, who teaches at Harvard Business School and studies the topic. "But is that conversation likely to be helpful for innovation, creativity, useful at all for what an organization hopes people would talk about? There, there is almost no data whatsoever. All of this suggests to me that the idea of random serendipity being productive is more fairy tale than reality," he said....

Professor Bernstein found that contemporary open offices led to 70 percent fewer face-to-face interactions. People didn't find it helpful to have so many spontaneous conversations, so they wore headphones and avoided one another.
The chief people officer at real estate marketplace Zillow believes this always-in-the-office culture is what's ultimately lead to problems like long hours, the lack of representation, and burnout, according to the New York Times, which notes Zillow, Salesforce, and Ford are now reconfiguring their offices with fewer rows of desks and more places for informal gatherings.

"Some experts have suggested a new idea for the office: not as a headquarters people go to daily or weekly, but as a place people go sometimes, for group hangouts."

The Houston Chronicle reports: The Texas Supreme Court ruled Friday in a Houston case that Facebook is not a "lawless no-man's-land" and can be held liable for the conduct of pimps who use its technology to recruit and prey on children.

The ruling came in a trio of Houston civil actions involving teenage trafficking victims who met their abusive pimps through Facebook's messaging functions. They sued the California-based social media juggernaut for negligence and product liability, saying that Facebook failed to warn about or attempt to prevent sex trafficking from taking place on its internet platforms. The suits also alleged that Facebook benefited from the sexual exploitation of trafficking victims. The justices said trafficking victims can move forward with lawsuits on the grounds that Facebook violated a provision of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code passed in 2009.

Facebook lawyers argued the company was shielded from liability under Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, which states that what users say or write online is not akin to a publisher conveying the same message. Essentially, they said, Facebook is immune to these types of lawsuits. The majority wrote, "We do not understand Section 230 to 'create a lawless no-man's-land on the Internet' in which states are powerless to impose liability on websites that knowingly or intentionally participate in the evil of online human trafficking... Holding internet platforms accountable for the words or actions of their users is one thing, and the federal precedent uniformly dictates that Section 230 does not allow it," the opinion said. "Holding internet platforms accountable for their own misdeeds is quite another thing. This is particularly the case for human trafficking."

The justices explained that Congress recently amended Section 230 to add the possibility of civil liability for websites that violate state and federal human-trafficking laws. They said under the amended law states may protect residents from internet companies that knowingly or intentionally participate in human trafficking through their action or inaction..... Annie McAdams, a lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said it was a groundbreaking decision. This is the first case to beat Facebook on its argument that it had immunity under Section 230, she said.

The Wall Street Journal reports: Authorities in the U.K. and Japan took aim at affiliates of Binance Holdings Ltd., the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange network, in the latest regulatory crackdown on the wildly popular trade in bitcoin and other digital assets. The U.K. Financial Conduct Authority, the country's lead financial regulator, told consumers Saturday that Binance's local unit wasn't permitted to conduct operations related to regulated financial activities...

Binance Markets Ltd., the company's U.K. arm, applied to be registered with the Financial Conduct Authority and withdrew its application on May 17. "A significantly high number of cryptoasset businesses are not meeting the required standards" under money-laundering regulations, said a spokesperson for the FCA in an email. "Of the firms we've assessed to date, over 90% have withdrawn applications following our intervention."

Japan's financial watchdog issued a statement on June 25, saying that Binance isn't registered to do business in the country...

As of April, Binance operated the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world by trading volume, allowing tens of billions of dollars of trades to pass through its networks, according to data provider CryptoCompare. It was founded in 2017 and initially based in China, later moving offices to Japan and Malta. It recently said it is a decentralized organization with no headquarters... The FCA move doesn't ban customers from using Binance completely; U.K. customers can continue to use Binance's non-U.K. operations for activities the FCA doesn't directly regulate, such as buying and selling direct holdings in bitcoin.
The Financial Times called the move "one of the most significant moves any global regulator has made against Binance" and "a sign of how regulators are cracking down on the cryptocurrency industry over concerns relating to its potential role in illicit activities such as money laundering and fraud, and over often weak consumer protection." But more countries are also taking action, Reuters reports: Last month, Bloomberg reported that officials from the U.S. Justice Department and Internal Revenue Service who probe money laundering and tax offences had sought information from individuals with insight into Binance's business. In April, Germany's financial regulator BaFin warned the exchange risked being fined for offering digital tokens without an investor prospectus.
And CoinDesk adds: Binance is no longer open for business in Canada's most populous province, apparently choosing to close shop rather than meet the fate of other cryptocurrency exchanges that have had actions filed against them for allegedly failing to comply with Ontario securities laws.

Some users who bought an external hard drive that's delightfully shaped like a book ended up with "terabytes' worth of data, years of memories and months of hard work vanished in an instant," reports Engadget. (Though according to a new statement from Western Digital, "Some customers have reported that data recovery tools may be able to recover data from affected devices, and we are currently investigating the effectiveness of these tools.")

But why were these deletions from "My Books" happening in the first place? Slashdot reader Obipale shares the first clue from Engadget's report: Several owners looked into the cause of the issue and determined that their devices were wiped after receiving a remote command for a factory reset. The commands starting going out at 3PM on Wednesday and lasted throughout the night. One user posted a copy of their log showing how a script was run to shut down their storage device for a factory restore.
Friday Western Digital's statement offered much more detail: Western Digital has determined that some My Book Live and My Book Live Duo devices are being compromised through exploitation of a remote command execution vulnerability... The log files we have reviewed show that the attackers directly connected to the affected My Book Live devices from a variety of IP addresses in different countries. This indicates that the affected devices were directly accessible from the Internet, either through direct connection or through port forwarding that was enabled either manually or automatically via UPnP.

Additionally, the log files show that on some devices, the attackers installed a trojan with a file named ".nttpd,1-ppc-be-t1-z", which is a Linux ELF binary compiled for the PowerPC architecture used by the My Book Live and Live Duo. A sample of this trojan has been captured for further analysis and it has been uploaded to VirusTotal.

Our investigation of this incident has not uncovered any evidence that Western Digital cloud services, firmware update servers, or customer credentials were compromised. As the My Book Live devices can be directly exposed to the internet through port forwarding, the attackers may be able to discover vulnerable devices through port scanning...

At this time, we recommend you disconnect your My Book Live and My Book Live Duo from the Internet to protect your data on the device by following these instructions on our Knowledge Base. We have heard customer concerns that the current My Cloud OS 5 and My Cloud Home series of devices may be affected. These devices use a newer security architecture and are not affected by the vulnerabilities used in this attack. We recommend that eligible My Cloud OS 3 users upgrade to OS 5 to continue to receive security updates for your device

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares an interesting report from Science Alert: Thunderstorms that roil across the Southern Great Plains of the US are amongst the strongest of such storms on Earth... Their intensity and frequency have been increasing, yet our best climate models still struggle to predict just how and when they'll arise.

To help refine climate models for the Southern Great Plains, paleoclimatologist Christopher Maupin from Texas A&M University and colleagues used oxygen and hydrogen isotopes to track the ferocity of past storms. Water molecules based on elements wielding an additional neutron or two tend to require a little more energy to vaporize, and release more energy as they condense. This leaves a clear signature in the ratios of isotopes separated by rainfall under various conditions. By comparing the results of analyses taken today with historic ratios of hydrogen and oxygen isotopes found trapped by stalactites in Texan caves, the researchers developed an accurate picture of weather events in the past...

Using another set of isotopes, this time measuring those of uranium and thorium, the team dated the stalactites and stalagmites to around the last Ice Age, 30-50 thousand years ago. Measuring the shifts in oxygen and hydrogen isotopes down their lengths allowed the researchers to see the storms cycled from weakly to strongly organized, roughly every thousand years. The more strongly organized the complex of storms becomes, the more intense and damaging they are. They discovered these changes in thunderstorm intensities coincided with well-known, abrupt shifts in global climate, known as Dansgaard-Oeschger events.

The researchers also found these intensity increases coincide with a reduction in rain in southwestern US and greater atmospheric upwelling in the Santa Barbara Basin area. They believe the observed pattern suggests an increased frequency or intensity of the giant global atmospheric waves that drive the weather, called Rossby waves, may be providing the extra lift needed to fuel these greater storms. "Modern anthropogenic climate forcing has increasingly favored an amplification of these synoptic factors," the team wrote in their paper.

"This work will help predict trends of storms in the future," explained geoscientist Courtney Schumacher.

I sometimes talk about "the family of geeks" — how our shared experiences can bring us together.

But if that's true, there's been a death in the family.... Manatee County Administrator Scott Hopes, who is also an epidemiologist, said six unvaccinated employees, including five in the IT department, tested positive for the virus within a two-week period.

The two IT employees who died last week were identified in local media and obituaries as Mary Knight, 58, and Alphonso Cox, 53.

Hopes said that the one IT employee, 23, exposed to the virus who was vaccinated did not get infected. "This particular outbreak demonstrates the effectiveness, I believe, with the vaccine," he said to reporters Monday. "All of the cases were non-vaccinated. They were unvaccinated." He added in a news release, "Individual employees in the IT Department who were known to be fully vaccinated and who were in close proximity of those who were infected did not contract COVID-19."

But even with the outbreak, masks will remain optional for staffers returning this week, with unvaccinated workers being "encouraged but not required, to follow covid-19 prevention measures...." Manatee County, located in southwest Florida, has fully vaccinated 43 percent of its eligible population. The Manatee Board of County Commissioners repealed coronavirus safety requirements last month and strongly recommended that people visiting the County Administration Building "use their best judgment" to protect themselves from a potential spread of the virus...

When the second employee died Thursday, the decision was made to shut down the building the next day so it could be disinfected. "When you have that many cases, and you have a 40 percent fatality rate, you have to worry," Hopes said to Florida Politics. "I would prefer not to have any more employee funerals." Yet the county announced over the weekend that "face masks will be optional for the public and employees inside the facility...."

Funerals and celebration-of-life events for Knight and Cox are scheduled to take place later this week.
Thanks to Slashdot reader luis_a_espinal (a Florida-based software engineer) for sharing the story. Country administrator Hopes is concerned, reports the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, because "Of the first five cases, all were sick enough to be hospitalized or died. That's not the normal COVID variant that we saw last year." And yet... As officials work to control the outbreak, questions have been raised about how far the county can go to keep employees safe — including whether it can inquire about employees' vaccination status, since the recent victims so far have not been fully vaccinated... "We are allowed to ask," Hopes said. "But they don't have to tell us, and whatever their response is, we are not to ask any further." Manatee County School District General Counsel Mitch Teitelbaum said the school district had the same understanding of privacy laws...

[The county-owned seaport] Port Manatee had reported three new cases of COVID-19 on Monday, spurring fears that the virus was continuing to spread among the county's workforce. On Tuesday, port spokeswoman Virginia Zimmerman said the three cases had been an "aberration" and that there are not any additional cases to report. Zimmerman said the port does not inquire about employees' vaccination status, and that the port "encourages, but does not require, staff to be vaccinated."

While the county scrambles to mitigate the spread of the virus, Hopes said many county employees are grieving the loss of their coworkers.

"These weren't just colleagues," Hopes said. "These people have basically lived at work together for 20 years, and this happened quickly."

"Every Sony PlayStation 3 ID out there was compromised, provoking bans of legit players on the network," Threatpost is reporting, calling it "just the latest in a shocking spike in attacks on unsuspecting gamers."

tlhIngan (Slashdot user #30,335) shares Threatpost's report: Sony reportedly left a folder with every PS3 console ID online unsecured, and it was discovered and reported by a Spanish YouTuber with the handle "The WizWiki" in mid-April... Now, several weeks later, players on PlayStation Network message boards are complaining that they can't sign on and are receiving the error message 8071006. After enabling two-factor authentication (2FA), one player was able to sign back in without issue, according to posts on the PS3 subreddit, which includes a link to instructions on how to opt into 2FA on the PS3.

It appears threat actors have started using the stolen PS3 console IDs for malicious purposes, causing the legitimate players to get banned... Sony has not responded to Threatpost's request for comment or confirmed a connection between the PS3 ID breach and player reports of being locked out of the platform...

Sony is hardly the only gaming company leaking data like a sieve. A report from January found a half a million credentials stolen from the Top 25 gaming companies on caches of breached data for sale in criminal marketplaces. In June, the "Battle of the Galaxy" mobile game leaked 6 million gamer profiles, and attackers are working out how to use gaming platforms like Steam to host or deliver malware.

The Washington Post reports that this week the U.S. government "banned the import of solar panels and other goods made with materials produced by a Chinese company that it accused of using forced laborers from China's Xinjiang region, a move likely to complicate the U.S. push toward clean energy." U.S. Customs and Border Protection issued a withhold release order Thursday barring silicon-based products from the company, Hoshine Silicon, which operates from plants in Xinjiang that have been connected to coercive state labor programs targeting Uyghurs and other minorities, as The Post reported on Thursday.

The order could have widespread impact on the solar industry, which is dominated by Chinese suppliers that source materials from Hoshine, the world's largest producer of metallurgical-grade silicon, a key raw material in solar panels. "Almost the complete solar industry is affected by Hoshine," said Johannes Bernreuter, a research analyst in Germany who studies the solar supply chain... By banning only Hoshine imports, CBP stopped short of targeting Xinjiang producers of another key solar ingredient, polysilicon. Those producers have also been connected to coercive labor programs targeting Uyghurs. In a note to investors, Height Securities described the ban "as a substantive but measured first shot across the bow" by the Biden administration, "which needs solar industry support" as it tries to balance rooting out forced labor in U.S. supply chains and an environmental agenda...

[I]ndustry experts said enforcement could be a challenge given the complexity of the solar supply chain and Hoshine's dominance in the industry. Hoshine has produced metallurgical-grade silicon for at least eight of the world's largest polysilicon makers, according to the company's public statements and annual reports. Analysts say that together these firms account for nearly all of the world's supply of solar-grade polysilicon. The move could also undermine U.S. hopes of cooperating with China on climate change, one of few areas of potential collaboration between the two countries increasingly at loggerheads over human rights and investigating the origin of the covid-19 pandemic... Industry experts say it would be safer for U.S. agents to assume all silicon products entering the United States from China contain at least some material sourced from Hoshine, whose metallurgical-grade silicon is used in a wide range of consumer products, including electronics, cars, chemicals and sealants...

The import ban was the most prominent of several measures the Biden administration took Thursday against China's solar-product suppliers. The Commerce Department also added several Chinese polysilicon producers to an export black list, which bars U.S. entities from exporting technology or other goods to the firms without first obtaining a government license.

The New York Times tells the story of Fayçal Ziraoui, a 38-year-old French-Moroccan business consultant who "caused an online uproar" after saying he'd cracked the last two unsolved ciphers of the four attributed to the Zodiac killer in California "and identified him, potentially ending a 50-year-old quest." Maybe because he said he cracked them in just two weeks. Many Zodiac enthusiasts consider the remaining ciphers — Z32 and Z13 — unsolvable because they are too short to determine the encryption key. An untold number of solutions could work, they say, rendering verification nearly impossible.

But Mr. Ziraoui said he had a sudden thought. The code-crackers who had solved the [earlier] 340-character cipher in December had been able to do so by identifying the encryption key, which they had put into the public domain when announcing their breakthrough. What if the killer used that same encryption key for the two remaining ciphers? So he said he applied it to the 32-character cipher, which the killer had included in a letter as the key to the location of a bomb set to go off at a school in the fall of 1970. (It never did, even though police failed to crack the code.) That produced a sequence of random letters from the alphabet. Mr. Ziraoui said he then worked through a half-dozen steps including letter-to-number substitutions, identifying coordinates in numbers and using a code-breaking program he created to crunch jumbles of letters into coherent words...

After two weeks of intense code-cracking, he deciphered the sentence, "LABOR DAY FIND 45.069 NORT 58.719 WEST." The message referred to coordinates based on the earth's magnetic field, not the more familiar geographic coordinates. The sequence zeroed in on a location near a school in South Lake Tahoe, a city in California referred to in another postcard believed to have been sent by the Zodiac killer in 1971.

An excited Mr. Ziraoui said he immediately turned to Z13, which supposedly revealed the killer's name, using the same encryption key and various cipher-cracking techniques. [The mostly un-coded letter includes a sentence which says "My name is _____," followed by a 13-character cipher.] After about an hour, Mr. Ziraoui said he came up with "KAYR," which he realized resembled the last name of Lawrence Kaye, a salesman and career criminal living in South Lake Tahoe who had been a suspect in the case. Mr. Kaye, who also used the pseudonym Kane, died in 2010.

The typo was similar to ones found in previous ciphers, he noticed, likely errors made by the killer when encoding the message. The result that was so close to Mr. Kaye's name and the South Lake Tahoe location were too much to be a coincidence, he thought. Mr. Kaye had been the subject of a report by Harvey Hines, a now-deceased police detective, who was convinced he was the Zodiac killer but was unable to convince his superiors. Around 2 a.m. on Jan. 3, an exhausted but elated Mr. Ziraoui posted a message entitled "Z13 — My Name is KAYE" on a 50,000-member Reddit forum dedicated to the Zodiac Killer.

The message was deleted within 30 minutes.

"Sorry, I've removed this one as part of a sort of general policy against Z13 solution posts," the forum's moderator wrote, arguing that the cipher was too short to be solvable.

The Record reports: The Wikimedia Foundation has banned the administrator of the Croatian version of Wikipedia after an investigation revealed that together with other admins, they edited and distorted content on the site with radical right views. This group had de-facto control of the website between 2011 and 2020, the Wikimedia Foundation said in a report published earlier this month... This included:

- Claiming that Hitler attacked Poland and started World War II after the Poles committed genocide against Germans.
- Redefining a World War II concentration camp as a labor camp...
- Pushing opinions that EU decision-making endangers Croatia's sovereignty.
- Claiming that the EU had used propaganda to trick Croatian citizens into joining the European Union...
Since 2013 the dubious edits had been spotted by users and the Croatian press, according to the article — but other Croatian Wikipedia editors failed, multiple times, to wrest away control of the site's moderation.

"The Wikimedia Foundation got involved last year after it was discovered that the administrator of Croatian Wikipedia had been using sockpuppet accounts to manipulate discussions and staff elections on the site..." The Wikimedia Foundation's report on the abuses of this team also points to possibly similar far-right-based editing on Wikipedia's Serbian version as well. This is the second major Wikipedia scandal in the past year. In September 2020, the Wikimedia Foundation said it found and banned a public relations firm that had created and used a network of sockpuppet accounts to edit the site on behalf of some of its customers.

"When Red Hat killed off CentOS Linux in a highly controversial December 2020 announcement, Gregory Kurtzer immediately announced his intention to recreate CentOS with a new distribution named after his deceased mentor," Ars Technica reported in February.

And this week, "The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation has announced general availability (GA) of Rocky Linux 8.4," reports ZDNet. "It's an important milestone because it's the first Rocky Linux general availability release ever." Huge companies, including Disney, GoDaddy, Rackspace, Toyota and Verizon, relied on CentOS, and they were reportedly not happy about RedHat's decision... It turns out that Kurtzer's decision has been a popular one. Besides quickly building up an army of hundreds of contributors for the project, Rocky Linux 8.4 - which follows the May 18 release of Red Hat's RHEL 8.4 - was downloaded at least 10,000 times within half a day of its release... "If we extrapolate the count to include our other mirrors we are probably at least 3-4x that (if not even way more)!" boasts Kurtzer in a LinkedIn post. "Lots of reports coming in of people and organizations already replacing their CentOS systems (and even other Linux distributions) with Rocky. The media is flying off the hook and business analysts also validating to me personally that Rocky Linux might soon be the most utilized Linux operating system used in enterprise and cloud!"

Rocky Linux 8.4 took seven months for the newly formed community to release, and is available for x86_64 and ARM64 (aarch64) architecture hardware in various ISOs.
"Sufficient testing has been performed such that we have confidence in its stability for production systems," explains a blog post at RockyLinux.org, adding that free community support is available through the forums as well as live chat avaiable through IRC and Rocky Linux Mattermost. "Paid commercial support is currently available through CIQ..."

"Corporations come and go, their interests as transient as they are self-serving. But a community persists, and that's who we dedicate Rocky Linux to: you." Rocky is more than the next free and open, community enterprise operating system. It's a community. A commitment to an ideal bigger than the sum of its parts, and a promise that our principles — embedded even within our repositories and ISOs — are immutable...

This is just the beginning, and the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation is more than just Rocky Linux — it's a home for those that believe that open source isn't just a switch that can be toggled at will, and that projects that many rely on not be subject to the whims of a few. To this point, you can easily find all of our sources, our build infrastructure, Git repositories, and everything else anyone would need to fork our work and ensure that it continues if need be...

When we announced our release candidate, we asked you to come build the next free, open, community enterprise operating system with us. Now we're asking you for more: join us as we build our community.
They also thanked 11 sponsors and partners for contributing "resources, financial backing, software, and infrastructure."

Space.com reports: The U.S. government needs some more time to get to the bottom of the UFO mystery. That's the main take-home message from the highly anticipated UFO report released Friday.

"The limited amount of high-quality reporting on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) hampers our ability to draw firm conclusions about the nature or intent of UAP," the report's executive summary states, using the military's now-preferred term for "UFO" (presumably because that older acronym has a lot of baggage attached to it).
Or, as CNET puts it, "all those sightings of bizarre things in the sky over the years fall into several categories, require more study and remain largely unexplained and unidentified." (Though they point out the Department of Defense's "UAP" Task Force reported eleven "documented instances in which pilots reported near misses...")

The report drew a response from Chris Carter, who created The X-Files, a TV drama about a government conspiracy hiding evidence of UFO's. Filming the show brought Carter in contact with real-world people who claimed they'd seen aliens, and he still thinks that when it comes to UFO, most of us are not quite there yet — but want to believe: The universe is just too vast for us to be alone in it. Carl Jung wanted to believe, as did Carl Sagan. Both wrote books on the subject... Can the new report, or any government report, give us clear answers?

I'm as skeptical now as I've ever been... [F]or me, the report on U.F.O.s was dead on arrival. Ordered up by a bipartisan group of legislators during the Trump administration, the interim report revealed nothing conclusive about U.F.O.s or their extraterrestrial origins. And the portions that remain classified will only fuel more conspiracy theories.

This is "X-Files" territory if there ever was any...