An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A computer scientist who created an artificial intelligence system capable of generating original inventions is suing the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) over its decision earlier this year to reject two patent applications which list the algorithmic system, known as DABUS, as the inventor. The lawsuit is the latest step in an effort by Stephen Thaler and an international group of lawyers and academics to win inventorship rights for non-human AI systems, a prospect that raises fundamental questions about what it means to be creative and also carries potentially paradigm-shifting implications for certain industries.

In July 2019, Thaler filed two patent applications in the U.S. -- one for an adjustable food container, the other for an emergency beacon -- and listed the inventor as DABUS. He describes DABUS as a "creativity engine" composed of neural networks trained on a broad swath of data, and not designed to solve any particular problem. The USPTO rejected the applications, citing court decisions ruling that corporations, as opposed to individuals within corporations, cannot be legal inventors, and asserting that "conception -- the touchstone of inventorship -- must be performed by a natural person." British, German, and European Union patent regulators have also rejected Thaler's applications, decisions he has appealed. Petitions for DABUS-invented patents are still pending in China, Japan, India, and several other countries.

In his suit, filed August 6 in the Eastern District of Virginia's federal court, Thaler argues (PDF) that the USPTO should instead adopt the principle laid out in a 1943 report from the National Patent Planning Commission, which helped reform the country's patent system into its modern form. The commission wrote, "patentability shall be determined objectively by the nature of the contribution to the advancement of the art, and not subjectively by the nature of the process by which the invention may have been accomplished." [...] "What we want is to have innovation. AI has been used to help generate innovation for decades and AI is getting better and better at doing these things, and people aren't." Ryan Abbott, a professor at the University of Surrey School of Law, who is representing Thaler in the suit, told Motherboard. "The law is not clear on whether you can have a patent if the AI does that sort of work, but if you can't protect inventions coming out of AI, you're going to under-produce them."

At the Hot Chips 2020 conference, which was held virtually this year, IBM announced the IBM Power10. From a report: It's the successor to the Power9 and represents the next generation of the company's processor family. IBM claims that the Power10 delivers up to three times greater efficiency than its predecessor while at the same time delivering higher workload capacity and container density. The Power10 was designed over five years and has the distinction of being IBM's first commercial 7-nanometer processor. (In 2015, IBM, Samsung, and other members of IBM's Research Alliance produced the first test chips as part of a $3 billion R&D investment.) There will be multiple configurations, and while the specifics aren't yet being disclosed, the maximum single-chip-module offering won't exceed 15 SMT8 cores and the dual-chip-module offering won't exceed 30 SMT8 cores, according to IBM distinguished engineer and Power10 architect William Starke.

"As controversy rages over the governance of Google's Istio service mesh, Microsoft has seen an opportunity to offer a simple and truly open alternative," reports InfoWorld: Microsoft has announced that it will release its own open source service mesh — called Open Service Mesh (OSM) — and transfer it to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as soon as possible. This sets the Redmond-based company apart from its cloud rival Google, which recently announced that its own Istio service mesh will no longer be part of the vendor-neutral CNCF and will instead sit under Google's own Open Usage Commons foundation.

The service mesh has quickly become a vital part of the modern cloud native computing stack, as it essentially enables communication, monitoring, and load balancing between disparate parts of today's microservices-based architecture. This differs from the popular container orchestration service Kubernetes in its level of granularity. When run in tandem with Kubernetes, a service mesh enables deeper security policy and encryption enforcement and automated load balancing and circuit breaking functionality...

With this launch Microsoft is not only aligning itself with the open governance side of the debate which has been raging through the open source software community for the past few months, but is also looking to solve a customer pain point.

Airbus-France will build the huge satellite that brings the first Martian rock samples back to Earth. The BBC reports: This material will be drilled on the Red Planet by the US space agency's next rover, Perseverance, before being blasted into orbit by a rocket. It'll be the Airbus satellite's job to grab the packaged samples and then ship them home. The joint American-European project is expected to cost billions and take just over a decade to implement. But scientists say it's probably the best way to confirm whether life has ever existed on the Red Planet. Any evidence is likely to be controversial and will need the powerful analytical tools only found in Earth laboratories to convince the doubters, the researchers argue.

The Airbus satellite will be a Goliath among spacecraft. The Earth Return Orbiter (ERO) will weigh 6.5 tonnes at launch in 2026 and use a mix of chemical and electric propulsion to get to Mars, orbit the planet and then return to Earth with its rock consignment. Thales Alenia Space of Italy will be a lead subcontractor working on this aspect of the design. The inclusion of a powerful ion engine will require a lot power, hence the use of immense solar arrays. These panels will give the satellite a "wingspan" of 39m, more than 120ft. But the really remarkable facet of the satellite's mission is the game of catch it will have to play high above Mars. Nasa will put a rocket on the planet later this decade to fire the rocks collected by Perseverance into orbit. The Airbus spacecraft will have to manoeuvre itself into a position to capture these samples that will be packaged inside a football-sized container. After ingesting this container, the satellite must then prepare it for return to Earth. "This is not just twice as difficult as any typical Mars mission; it's twice squared - when you think about the complexity involved," said Dr David Parker, the director of human and robotic exploration at the European Space Agency (Esa). "And this satellite that Airbus will build -- I like to call it 'the first interplanetary cargo ship,' because that's what it will be doing. It's designed to carry cargo between Mars and Earth," he told BBC News.

emil (Slashdot reader #695) writes: The advent of quantum computing poses a well-recognized threat to RSA and other well-known asymmetric cryptosystems. It has been four years since NIST opened the post-quantum cryptography competition, and we are seeing extensive delays compared to AES.

A new and (hopefully) quantum-secure SSH key exchange, based on NTRU Prime, has been present in OpenSSH since January 2019, first implemented in TinySSH shortly before. This key exchange is marked by OpenSSH as experimental, and not enabled by default.

For those ready to evaluate NTRU Prime, or otherwise seeking an SSH server with "state-of-the-art crypto" (as described by TinySSH author Jan Mojí), a complete procedure for a Musl build and Busybox container deployment is presented, with additional focus on supplemental servers and key conversion.

Sphere packing might seem like a topic only a mathematician could love. Who else could get excited about finding the most efficient way to arrange circles in the plane, or spheres in space? But right now, millions of people all over the world are thinking about this very problem. From a report: Determining how to safely reopen buildings and public spaces under social distancing is in part an exercise in geometry: If each person must keep six feet away from everyone else, then figuring out how many people can sit in a classroom or a dining room is a question about packing non-overlapping circles into floor plans. Of course there's a lot more to confronting COVID than just this geometry problem. But circle and sphere packing plays a part, just as it does in modeling crystal structures in chemistry and abstract message spaces in information theory.

It's a simple-sounding problem that's occupied some of history's greatest mathematicians, and exciting research is still happening today, particularly in higher dimensions. For example, mathematicians recently proved the best way to pack spheres into 8- and 24-dimensional space -- a technique essential for optimizing the error-correcting codes used in cell phones or for communication with space probes. So let's take a look at some of the surprising complications that arise when we try to pack space with our simplest shape. If your job involves packing oranges in a box or safely seating students under social distancing, the size and shape of your container is a crucial component of the problem. But for most mathematicians, the theory of sphere packing is about filling all of space. In two dimensions, this means covering the plane with same-size circles that don't overlap.

"All the pieces are coming together for Microsoft to launch a direct competitor to Chromebooks..." argues an industry analyst writing for ZDNet: Since adopting the Chromium rendering engine, Microsoft Edge has featured virtually perfect compatibility with Chrome, right down to being able to install extensions from the Chrome app store. It's also enabled Microsoft to more easily support operating systems that Edge didn't previously support such as macOS and Linux. But now that Edge is working well, might Microsoft try to go after Chrome OS? While a "lite" version of Windows has been rumored for years, many of the other pieces are already in place or announced.

First, Microsoft has made no secret of how it covets the education market that has embraced Chromebooks. It has fought back with low-cost Windows notebooks from partners that are competitively priced with such devices but may lack Chrome OS' perception of simplicity and security.

Second, after years of having the web apps of office.com languish as Microsoft emphasized the PC versions, the online suite will be the first to take advantage of Fluid Framework, the company's open-source component framework that allows the embedding of applet functionality and collaboration into a range of container documents such as Edge pages. Third, while the idea of Microsoft limiting the opportunity for Windows developers on a platform might have been unthinkable years ago, times have changed. Many developers, Microsoft included, have made web apps mainstream. Outside of the Windows-boosting Surface team, Microsoft seems indifferent as to where you access its subscription-based client and cloud offerings.

Finally, Microsoft now has the cross-processor architecture support to take the battle to Google -- although, at least for now, it has exclusively focused on high-performance Qualcomm Snapdragon designs as opposed to Mediatek or Allwinner ARM-based chips in budget Chromebooks...

Microsoft's strongest competitive point would be the greater focus on privacy, one of the best reasons to use Edge versus Chrome today.

The CDC says to wash cloth face coverings after "each use," which leaves room for interpretation. From a report: The CDC notes that wearing a mask is a precaution to keep from spreading virus-carrying respiratory droplets to others. The idea is that if everyone wears a mask, the likelihood of the droplets getting sprayed around is much less. Each new study only provides further evidence that wearing face masks is a crucial component in slowing the spread of coronavirus. One recent paper, published by the Institute of Labor Economics in Germany, showed that masks may reduce the spread of COVID-19 by 40 percent. This is great, because wearing a mask is an easy thing to do, even if it's a little irritating. But as we accept masks as just another thing that must be worn in public, I have to wonder: What's the appropriate number to own -- and how often should they be cleaned?

Personally, I have one mask, which I bought in March from a friend on Instagram. I wash it when it "smells dirty" by swirling it around in a takeout soup container filled with hot water and laundry detergent, then hang drying it on my fire escape/backyard fence. The CDC has official guidelines on washing cloth face coverings that I'm not properly following. According to the CDC, a reusable cloth mask (versus the blue surgical masks and N95s, which are disposable and should be saved for healthcare workers) are to be washed on the warmest appropriate setting in a washing machine, or hand-washed in a solution of bleach and water. The CDC also says a mask should be "washed after each use." What constitutes a "use" isn't defined, and so how often one should perform the chore of cleaning their mask(s) is a bit of a gray area.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: One of the three Google employees who created Kubernetes — the open source container-orchestration platform now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation — was software engineer Brendan Burns. But in 2016 Burns became an engineer at Microsoft (where since March he's been a corporate vice president at Microsoft).

This week in a new podcast interview [video here], Burns explained why he went from Google to Microsoft, which was "all-in on cloud":

Obviously growing up in Seattle, Microsoft is sort of like the home-town team — so that was a big plus also. And it's been great to be able to come in and really help them figure out — I think one of the really amazing things about being there is it's a company in transition. Certainly four years ago when I joined, it's a company in transition. And getting a chance to help continue that transition, and help continue and shift its focus from closed-source and Windows to a really renewed focus on open source and Linux and cloud native application development — that ability to influence and help shape direction has been really awesome also.

But it was more than just their commitment to the cloud...

"There's just such a great developer history there, of developer tooling and developer productivity. Just such a focus on empowering people to build stuff. That's really compelling to me too, because I think one of the things we really haven't done a good job of in Kubernetes is make it easier to build these programs. Right? We do a lot to make it easier to operate the stuff, but it's still really hard to build these systems, and Kubernetes isn't helping you at all. So I'm really excited and interested and thinking a lot about how can we make it easier for developers to build systems. And I think the DNA and history and experience of Microsoft to build things, the hugely successful platform that is Windows, means there's just a great — a really strong amount of DNA about what it takes to build a platform that doesn't just succeed for elite devs but can really succeed for people all the way from no-code solutions all the way through to advance systems solutions. And so that opportunity is really exciting.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: When Docker sold off its enterprise division to Mirantis last fall, that didn't mark the end of the company. In fact, Docker still exists and has refocused as a cloud-native developer tools vendor. Today it announced an expanded partnership with Microsoft around simplifying running Docker containers in Azure. As its new mission suggests, it involves tighter integration between Docker and a couple of Azure developer tools including Visual Studio Code and Azure Container Instances (ACI). According to Docker, it can take developers hours or even days to set up their containerized environment across the two sets of tools. The idea of the integration is to make it easier, faster and more efficient to include Docker containers when developing applications with the Microsoft tool set. Docker CEO Scott Johnston says it's a matter of giving developers a better experience.

Among the features they are announcing is the ability to log into Azure directly from the Docker command line interface, a big simplification that reduces going back and forth between the two sets of tools. What's more, developers can set up a Microsoft ACI environment complete with a set of configuration defaults. Developers will also be able to switch easily between their local desktop instance and the cloud to run applications. It's worth noting that these integrations are starting in Beta, but the company promises they should be released some time in the second half of this year.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: It's finally happening. Microsoft is giving developers a command line interface to install their favorite tools. That's right -- at Build 2020 today, Microsoft announced Windows Package Manager in preview. This is not simply about helping developers build for Windows. It's about helping developers and businesses embrace Windows. Microsoft is on a mission to get developers to love using Windows over macOS and Linux. Part of that mission involves releasing tools like Windows Terminal for enterprises and improving WSL for anyone who needs Linux while they code. Another part is helping developers (and IT admins) set up their Windows environments as effortlessly as possible. In a similar vein, Microsoft today also threw in highly requested features for PowerToys: Run and Keyboard Remapper. But the former is definitely the bigger news.

Windows Package Manager is a command line interface for searching, viewing, and installing commonly used developer tools. Developers list their applications in a GitHub repository; the package manager grabs and installs them. Even better, Windows Package Manager is open source -- Microsoft is asking for developers to help improve it.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Like humans, solar panels don't work well when overheated. Now, researchers have found a way to make them "sweat" -- allowing them to cool themselves and increase their power output. In recent years, researchers have devised materials that can suck water vapor from the air and condense it into liquid water for drinking. Among the best is a gel that strongly absorbs water vapor at night, when the air is cool and humidity is high. The gel -- a mix of carbon nanotubes in polymers with a water-attracting calcium chloride salt -- causes the vapor to condense into droplets that the gel holds. When heat rises during the day, the gel releases water vapor. If covered by a clear plastic, the released vapor is trapped, condenses back into liquid water, and flows into a storage container.

Peng Wang, an environmental engineer at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and his colleagues thought of another use for the condensed water: coolant for solar panels. So, the researchers pressed a 1-centimeter-thick sheet of the gel against the underside of a standard silicon solar panel. Their idea was that during the day, the gel would pull heat from the solar panel to evaporate water it had pulled out of the air the previous night, releasing the vapor through the bottom of the gel. The evaporating water would cool the solar panel as sweat evaporating from the skin cools us down. The researchers found that the amount of gel they needed depended primarily on the environment's humidity. In a desert environment with 35% humidity, a 1-square-meter solar panel required 1 kilogram of gel to cool it, whereas a muggy area with 80% humidity required only 0.3 kilograms of gel per square meter of panel. The upshot in either case: The temperature of the water-cooled solar panel dropped by as much as 10C. And the electricity output of the cooled panels increased by an average of 15% and up to 19% in one outdoor test, where the wind likely enhanced the cooling effect, Wang and his colleagues report today in Nature Sustainability.

On Monday, the United States Patent and Trademark Office published a decision that claims artificial intelligences cannot be inventors. Only "natural persons" currently have the right to get a patent. From a report: Last year, two relatively mundane patents -- one for a shape-shifting food container and another for an emergency flashlight -- posed an existential question for international patent regulations around the world: Does an inventor have to be a human? These two inventions were the work of DABUS, an artificial intelligence system created by physicist and AI researcher Stephen Thaler. Now, the USPTO has decided that DABUS and any other AI cannot be listed as an inventor on a patent filing. Until now, US patent law was vague about whether machines could invent, referring to "individuals" as eligible inventors. Thaler, along with a group of patent law experts, argued that because Thaler didn't have any expertise in containers or flashlights, and didn't help DABUS make the inventions, it wouldn't be right for him to be listed as the inventor.

Tim Anderson reporting via The Register: The first thing users will see after updating to Mozilla's latest browser, Firefox 74, is a prompt to install the Facebook Container add-on. The Facebook Container add-on is not new, but has been enhanced in its latest version, 2.1.0, with the ability to add custom sites to the container so that you can "login with Facebook wherever you need to." The purpose of the Facebook Container is to let you continue to use Facebook but without having the social network site track your browsing elsewhere. "Installing this extension closes your Facebook tabs, deletes your Facebook cookies, and logs you out of Facebook," say the docs.

When you visit Facebook and log in, the cookies it plants are isolated to the container. This prevents Facebook Like buttons and embedded comments from working on other sites. There is also an issue with sites that require or offer a Facebook login, which you can now overcome by adding those sites to the container. Sites are added by clicking a fence icon and selecting "Allow site in Facebook container." The effect is like having two web browsers, one in which you are logged into Facebook and subject to potential tracking on any site which has Facebook content, and another where Facebook has no knowledge of you.

Greg Kogan, writes in a blog post: The Maersk Triple-E Class container ship is 1,300 feet long, carries over 18,000 containers across 11,000 miles between Europe and Asia, and... Its entire crew can fit inside a passenger van. As a former naval architect and a current marketing consultant to startups, I found that the same principle that lets a 13-person crew navigate the world's largest container ship to a port halfway around the world without breaking down also applies to startups working towards aggressive growth goals: Simple systems have less downtime.

Ships contain simple systems that are easy to operate and easy to understand, which makes them easy to fix, which means they have less downtime. An important quality, considering that "downtime" for a ship could mean being stranded thousands of miles from help. Take the ship's steering system, for instance. The rudder is pushed left or right by metal rods. Those rods are moved by hydraulic pressure. That pressure is controlled by a hydraulic pump. That pump is controlled by an electronic signal from the wheelhouse. That signal is controlled by the autopilot. It doesn't require a rocket scientist or a naval architect to find the cause of and solution to any problem.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A 3D model is sliced up into hundreds of 2D horizontal layers and slowly built up, one layer at a time. This layer-by-layer process can take hours or even days, but what if we could print the entire model at once? A new technique demonstrated by researchers from Switzerland's Ecole polytechnique federale de Lausanne (EPFL) -- and further detailed in this Nature article -- does just that and can print an entire model in seconds. The new technique builds a model by hardening a photosensitive resin with a laser, not unlike existing stereolithography (SLA) printers. The big difference here is the application of tomographic techniques, the same used in x-rays and ultrasounds, that allows for rotational printing. Laser light is modulated with a DLP chip (just like in old rear-projection HDTVs) and is blasted into a container full of resin. The laser covers the entire build volume, and the container of resin actually rotates while it's being exposed to the light. The laser projects the model at different rotational perspectives, which is synced up with the spinning resin, and a whole 3D model can be produced in seconds.

The EPFL writes, "The system is currently capable of making two-centimeter structures with a precision of 80 micrometers, about the same as the diameter of a strand of hair. But as the team develops new devices, they should be able to build much bigger objects, potentially up to 15 centimeters." In this first public demonstration, the build volume is 16mm x 16mm x 20mm, making it one of the smallest 3D printers on earth. An 80 um resolution is also nothing to write home about and can be bested by ~$500 consumer SLA printers. It is very fast, though, and the technique is just getting started. The researchers have set up a spin-off company called "Readily 3D" to develop and market the technology.

pgmrdlm shares a report from ABC News: The results are finally in for the first chocolate chip cookie bake-off in space. While looking more or less normal, the best cookies required two hours of baking time last month up at the International Space Station. It takes far less time on Earth, under 20 minutes. And how do they taste? No one knows. Still sealed in individual baking pouches and packed in their spaceflight container, the cookies remain frozen in a Houston-area lab after splashing down two weeks ago in a SpaceX capsule. They were the first food baked in space from raw ingredients.

Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano was the master baker in December, radioing down a description as he baked them one by one in the prototype Zero G Oven. The first cookie -- in the oven for 25 minutes at 300 degrees Fahrenheit (149 degrees Celsius) -- ended up seriously under-baked. He more than doubled the baking time for the next two, and the results were still so-so. The fourth cookie stayed in the oven for two hours, and finally success. Parmitano cranked the oven up to its maximum 325 degrees F (163 degrees C) for the fifth cookie and baked it for 130 minutes. He reported more success. As for aroma, the astronauts could smell the cookies when they removed them from the oven, except for the first.

"I've grown quite fond of the docker container runtime. It's easy to install and use, and many of the technologies I write about depend upon this software," writes TechRepublic/Linux.com contributor Jack Wallen.

"But Red Hat has other plans." The company decided -- seemingly out of the blue -- to drop support for the docker runtime engine. In place of docker came Podman. When trying to ascertain why Red Hat split with Docker, nothing came clear. Sure, I could easily draw the conclusion that Red Hat had grown tired of the security issues surrounding Docker and wanted to take matters in their own hands. There was also Red Hat's issue with "no big fat daemons." If that's the case, how do they justify their stance on systemd?

Here's where my tinfoil hat comes into play. Understand this is pure conjecture here and I have zero facts to back these claims up... Red Hat is now owned by IBM. IBM was desperate to gain serious traction within the cloud. To do that, IBM needed Red Hat, so they purchased the company. Next, IBM had to score a bit of vendor lock-in. Using a tool like docker wouldn't give them that lock-in. However, if Red Hat developed and depended on their own container runtime, vendor lock-in was attainable....

Red Hat has jettisoned a mature, known commodity for a less-mature, relatively unknown piece of software -- without offering justification for the migration.... Until Red Hat offers up a sound justification for migrating from the docker container engine to Podman, there's going to be a lot of people sporting tinfoil hats. It comes with the territory of an always-connected world. And if it does turn out to be an IBM grab for vendor lock-in, there'll be a lot of admins migrating away from RHEL/CentOS to the likes of Ubuntu Server, SUSE/openSUSE, Debian, and more.
Red Hat's product manager of containers later touted Podman's ability to deploy containers without root access privileges in an interview with eWeek. "We felt the sum total of its features, as well as the project's performance, security and stability, made it reasonable to move to 1.0. Since Podman is set to be the default container engine for the single-node use case in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, we wanted to make some pledges about its supportability."

And a Red Hat spokesperson also shared their position with The New Stack. "We saw our customer base wanting the container runtime lifecycle baked-in to the OS or in delivered tandem with OpenShift."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) today announced it is funding a bug bounty program for Kubernetes. Security researchers who find security vulnerabilities in Kubernetes' codebase, as well as the build and release processes, will be rewarded with bounties ranging from $100 to $10,000. Bug bounty programs motivate individuals and hacker groups to not only find flaws but disclose them properly, instead of using them maliciously or selling them to parties that will. Originally designed by Google and now run by the CNCF, Kubernetes is an open source container orchestration system for automating application deployment, scaling, and management. Given the hundreds of startups and enterprises that use Kubernetes in their tech stacks, it's significantly cheaper to proactively plug security holes than to deal with the aftermath of breaches.

New submitter profi shares a report from Computing: Huawei has released the source code of openEuler, its distribution of Linux based on CentOS. The operating system was formally launched by Huawei in September 2019 in response to U.S. sanctions, which had briefly affected the company's access to Windows and Android operating systems. The source code has now been published on Gitee, the Chinese version of Github.

OpenEuler comprises two organizations on Gitee, one for source code and one for package sources. The openEuler organization was keen to highlight two particular packages, iSulad and A-Tune, among the openEuler source code. "iSulad is a lightweight gRPC service-based container runtime. Compared to runc, iSulad is written in C, but all interfaces are compatible with OCI. A-Tune is a system software to auto-optimize the system adaptively to multiple scenarios with embedded AI-engine." The announcement continues: "You will also see several infrastructure-supported projects that set up the community's operating systems... these systems are built on the Huawei Cloud through script automation."

Among the package sources, covered by the src-openeuler organization on Gitee, are around 1,000 packages with versions in both ARM64 and X86 architecture packages. Huawei claims its developers have made a number of enhancements to ARM64 openEuler code to improve multi-core efficiency. It is also working on a "green computing" ecosystem with Linaro and the Green Industry Alliance. At the moment, the organization claims, there are more than 50 contributors and just under 600 commits. The openEuler community has around 20 SIGs or project groups.