Scientists have revived tiny animals called nematodes from a slumber that lasted 46,000 years, reports a new study. From a report: The microscopic animals were successfully woken from a state of suspended animation after researchers found them in the permafrost, or frozen soil, that flanks Siberia's northern Kolyma River. A radiocarbon analysis revealed that they hail from a prehistoric era when Neanderthals and dire wolves still roamed the world, and that they belong to a functionally extinct species called Panagrolaimus kolymaensis that was previously unknown to science.

The astonishing discovery is "important for the understanding of evolutionary processes because generation times could be stretched from days to millennia, and long-term survival of individuals of species can lead to the refoundation of otherwise extinct lineages," according to a study published on Thursday in the journal PLoS Genetics. "Their evolution was literally suspended for 40k years," wrote Philipp Schiffer, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Cologne and a co-author of the study, in an email to Motherboard. "We are now comparing them to species from the same genus, which my team samples around the world," he continued, noting that he is currently conducting fieldwork in the Australian Outback. "Studying their genomes we hope to understand a lot about how these populations became different in the last 40k years."

According to new research published Thursday, conservatives on Facebook during the 2020 presidential election were more isolated and saw more misinformation than the platform's liberal users -- though Facebook widely affected users' political content in different ways. Slashdot reader RUs1729 shared one of the four peer-reviewed studies, appearing in the journals Science and Nature. Forbes reports: The study, led by two researchers from the University of Texas and New York University, had hundreds of thousands of participants and analyzed mass amounts of Facebook user data. One of the study's papers, which used aggregated data for 208 million U.S. Facebook users, found that most misinformation on Facebook existed within conservative echo chambers, which did not have an equivalent on the liberal side of the platform. The paper found that news outlets on the right post a higher fraction of news stories rated false by Meta's third-party fact-checking program, meaning conservative audiences are more exposed to unreliable news.

In a separate paper that assigned users to Facebook and Instagram feeds chronologically instead of algorithm-based feeds, which are the platforms' default feed types, researchers found users on chronological feeds were less engaged and saw more political content compared to those viewing algorithm-based feeds, along with more content from untrustworthy sources and more content from ideologically moderate friends and sources with mixed audiences. However, the feed analysis noted replacing algorithmic feeds with chronological ones did not create any detectable changes in political attitudes, knowledge or offline behavior.

Another paper assigned nearly 9,000 U.S.-based Facebook users feeds with no reshares, later concluding that the removal of reshared content "substantially" lessened the amount of political news, and content from all untrustworthy sources decreased overall. The two lead researchers and 15 other academics, who had control rights for the study's papers, declined compensation from Meta to ensure an ethical study was completed.

OpenSignal blog: While eSIM adoption in the mobile market has been arriving for some time, Apple's move to make eSIM the only option for iPhone 14 range in the U.S. is propelling the worldwide shift towards eSIM technology. Opensignal's latest analysis reveals a significant surge in the proportion of users switching their operator among those who use an eSIM across seven examined markets -- Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, the U.K. and the U.S.

The switch from physical to embedded SIM cards threatens to alter how consumers switch operators and encourages operators to adopt new tactics to retain and acquire users, for example operators can offer network trials from within an app that provisions an eSIM immediately. eSIM also means the risks to operators of dual SIM devices that have long been common in many international markets are arriving in operator-controlled markets too, such as the U.S. and South Korea. Even on smartphones sold by operators, eSIM support is usually present in addition to a physical SIM, making them dual-SIM devices.

Google added eSIM-support to the Pixel range in 2017, Samsung added eSIM support to 2019's Galaxy S20 flagship. While Apple first added eSIM to their phones in 2018 with the iPhone Xs, it switched to selling exclusively eSIM models in the U.S. with the iPhone 14 range in late 2022. South Korea is also a special case -- eSIM support for domestic customers only began in mid-2022, before this point it was only available to international travelers. Notably, Samsung responded by introducing eSIM to a selection of its flagship devices in the home market, which had not been previously available there.

The Gulf Stream system could collapse as soon as 2025, a new study suggests. The shutting down of the vital ocean currents, called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (Amoc) by scientists, would bring catastrophic climate impacts. From a report: Amoc was already known to be at its weakest in 1,600 years owing to global heating and researchers spotted warning signs of a tipping point in 2021. The new analysis estimates a timescale for the collapse of between 2025 and 2095, with a central estimate of 2050, if global carbon emissions are not reduced. Evidence from past collapses indicate changes of temperature of 10C in a few decades, although these occurred during ice ages.

Other scientists said the assumptions about how a tipping point would play out and uncertainties in the underlying data are too large for a reliable estimate of the timing of the tipping point. But all said the prospect of an Amoc collapse was extremely concerning and should spur rapid cuts in carbon emissions. Amoc carries warm ocean water northwards towards the pole where it cools and sinks, driving the Atlantic's currents. But an influx of fresh water from the accelerating melting of Greenland's ice cap and other sources is increasingly smothering the currents.

Chainalysis' head of investigations doesn't seem to have a great understanding of whether her company's flagship software even works. From a report: Elizabeth Bisbee, head of investigations at Chainalysis Government Solutions, testified she was "unaware" of scientific evidence for the accuracy of Chainalysis' Reactor software used by law enforcement, an unreleased transcript of a June 23 hearing shared with CoinDesk shows.

The fact that Chainalysis' blockchain demystification tools have become so widespread is a serious threat to the crypto ecosystem. Although industry insiders have raged against Chainalysis since it was founded, often accusing it of violating people's financial privacy, there may be a better argument to make against the company and analysis firms like it: it's within the realm of possibility that these "probabilistic" machines don't work as well as advertised. This is a big deal considering Chainalysis' surveillance tools are used widely across the industry for compliance, and have at times led to unjustified account restrictions and -- even worse -- land unsuspecting individuals on the radar of law enforcement agencies without probable cause.

A group of cybersecurity researchers has uncovered what they believe is an intentional backdoor in encrypted radios used by police, military, and critical infrastructure entities around the world. The backdoor may have existed for decades, potentially exposing a wealth of sensitive information transmitted across them, according to the researchers. From a report: While the researchers frame their discovery as a backdoor, the organization responsible for maintaining the standard pushes back against that specific term, and says the standard was designed for export controls which determine the strength of encryption. The end result, however, are radios with traffic that can be decrypted using consumer hardware like an ordinary laptop in under a minute. "There's no other way in which this can function than that this is an intentional backdoor," Jos Wetzels, one of the researchers from cybersecurity firm Midnight Blue, told Motherboard in a phone call.

The research is the first public and in-depth analysis of the TErrestrial Trunked RAdio (TETRA) standard in the more than 20 years the standard has existed. Not all users of TETRA-powered radios use the specific encryption algorithim called TEA1 which is impacted by the backdoor. TEA1 is part of the TETRA standard approved for export to other countries. But the researchers also found other, multiple vulnerabilities across TETRA that could allow historical decryption of communications and deanonymization. TETRA-radio users in general include national police forces and emergency services in Europe; military organizations in Africa; and train operators in North America and critical infrastructure providers elsewhere.

"Having big U.K. meat-eaters cut some of it out of their diet would be like taking 8 million cars off the road," reports the BBC: That's just one of the findings of new research that scientists say gives the most reliable calculation yet of how what we eat impacts our planet.

The Oxford University study is the first to pinpoint the difference high- and low-meat diets have on greenhouse gas emissions, researchers say... [Oxford University] professor Peter Scarborough, who is part of the Livestock Environment And People project surveyed 55,000 people who were divided into big meat-eaters, who ate more than 100g of meat a day, which equates to a big burger, low meat-eaters, whose daily intake was 50g or less, approximately a couple of chipolata sausages, fish-eaters, vegetarians and vegans... The research shows that a big meat-eater's diet produces an average of 10.24 kg of planet-warming greenhouse gasses each day. A low meat-eater produces almost half that at 5.37 kg per day. [Fish diet: 4.74 kg. "Vegetarian" diet: 4.16 kg] And for vegan diets — it's halved again to 2.47 kg a day.

The analysis is the first to look at the detailed impact of diets on other environmental measures all together. These are land use, water use, water pollution and loss of species, usually caused by loss of habitat because of expansion of farming. In all cases high meat-eaters had a significantly higher adverse impact than other groups...

A separate study also published in Nature Food in 2021 concluded that food production was responsible for a third of all global greenhouse gas emissions. And an independent review for the Department for the Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) called for a 30% reduction in meat consumption by 2032 in order to meet the UK's net zero target.
"The meat industry said the analysis overstated the impact of eating meat."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader beforewisdom for sharing the article.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PBS: An IRS plan to test drive a new electronic free-file tax return system next year has got supporters and critics of the idea mobilizing to sway the public and Congress over whether the government should set up a permanent program to help people file their taxes without needing to pay somebody else to figure out what they owe. On one side, civil society groups this week launched a coalition to promote the move toward a government-run free-file program. On the other, tax preparation firms like Intuit -- the parent company of TurboTax -- and H&R Block have been pouring millions into trying to stop the idea cold. The advocacy groups are exponentially out-monied.

An April AP analysis found that overall, Intuit, H&R Block, and other private companies and advocacy groups for large tax preparation businesses, as well as proponents in favor of electronic free file, have reported spending $39.3 million since 2006 to lobby on "free-file" and other matters. Federal law doesn't require domestic lobbyists to itemize expenses by specific issue, so the sums are not limited to free-file. Intuit spent at least $25.6 million since 2006 on lobbying, H&R Block about $9.6 million and the conservative Americans for Tax Reform roughly $3 million. In contrast, the NAACP has spent $140,000 lobbying on "free-file" since 2006 and Public Citizen has spent $110,000 in the same time frame. "What we have on our side is public opinion," said Igor Volsky, executive director of the liberal Groundwork Action advocacy group. Volsky's organization and leaders from Public Citizen, the Center for the Study of Social Policy, Code for America, the Economic Security Project and others launched the "Coalition for Free and Fair Filing" on Wednesday. The group's mission is to "ensure all U.S. taxpayers can easily file tax returns and get the tax credits they deserve by safeguarding and expanding" the new IRS program. "The overwhelming majority of people demand a free-file option," Volsky said. "Now the question for us is how do you channel that into effective political pressure."

The IRS in May released a report that said most taxpayers are interested in filing their taxes directly to the IRS for free, and concurrently announced plans to launch the pilot program for the 2024 filing season. The goal is to test a direct file system that will help the IRS decide whether to move forward with a more permanent program. That idea has faced the immediate threat of budget cuts from congressional Republicans. Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee in June proposed a budget rider that would prohibit funds to be used for the IRS to create a government-run tax preparation software, unless approved by a group of House and Senate committees. The move "safeguards the IRS from an obvious conflict of interest where the tax collector becomes the tax preparer," the bill's summary states.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: JumpCloud, a cloud-based IT management service that lists Cars.com, GoFundMe, and Foursquare among its 5,000 paying customers, experienced a security breach carried out by hackers working for a nation-state, the company said last week. The attack began on June 22 as a spear-phishing campaign, the company revealed last Wednesday. As part of that incident, JumpCloud said, the "sophisticated nation-state sponsored threat actor" gained access to an unspecified part of the JumpCloud internal network. Although investigators at the time found no evidence any customers were affected, the company said it rotated account credentials, rebuilt its systems, and took other defensive measures.

On July 5, investigators discovered the breach involved "unusual activity in the commands framework for a small set of customers." In response, the company's security team performed a forced-rotation of all admin API keys and notified affected customers. As investigators continued their analysis, they found that the breach also involved a "data injection into the commands framework," which the disclosure described as the "attack vector." The disclosure didn't explain the connection between the data injection and the access gained by the spear-phishing attack on June 22. Ars asked JumpCloud PR for details, and employees responded by sending the same disclosure post that omits such details. Investigators also found that the attack was extremely targeted and limited to specific customers, which the company didn't name.

JumpCloud says on its website that it has a global user base of more than 200,000 organizations, with more than 5,000 paying customers. They include Cars.com, GoFundMe, Grab, ClassPass, Uplight, Beyond Finance, and Foursquare. JumpCloud has raised over $400 million from investors, including Sapphire Ventures, General Atlantic, Sands Capital, Atlassian, and CrowdStrike. The company has also published a list of IP addresses, domain names, and cryptographic hashes used by the attacker that other organizations can use to indicate if they were targeted by the same attackers. JumpCloud has yet to name the country of origin or other details about the threat group responsible.

Online publishers are inundated with useless article pitches as websites using AI-generated content multiply. From a report: When she first heard of the humanlike language skills of the artificial-intelligence bot ChatGPT, Jennifer Stevens wondered what it would mean for the retirement magazine she edits. Months later, she has a better idea. It means she is spending a lot of time filtering out useless article pitches. People like Stevens, the executive editor of International Living, are among those seeing a growing amount of AI-generated content that is so far beneath their standards that they consider it a new kind of spam.

The technology is fueling an investment boom. It can answer questions, produce images and even generate essays based on simple prompts. Some of these techniques promise to enhance data analysis and eliminate mundane writing tasks, much as the calculator changed mathematics. But they also show the potential for AI-generated spam to surge and potentially spread across the internet. In early May, the news site rating company NewsGuard found 49 fake news websites that were using AI to generate content. By the end of June, the tally had hit 277, according to Gordon Crovitz, the company's co-founder. "This is growing exponentially," Crovitz said. The sites appear to have been created to make money through Google's online advertising network, said Crovitz, formerly a columnist and a publisher at The Wall Street Journal.

Researchers also point to the potential of AI technologies being used to create political disinformation and targeted messages used for hacking. The cybersecurity company Zscaler says it is too early to say whether AI is being used by criminals in a widespread way, but the company expects to see it being used to create high-quality fake phishing webpages, which are designed to trick victims into downloading malicious software or disclosing their online usernames and passwords. On YouTube, the ChatGPT gold rush is in full swing. Dozens of videos offering advice on how to make money from OpenAI's technology have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times. Many of them suggest questionable schemes involving junk content. Some tell viewers that they can make thousands of dollars a week, urging them to write ebooks or sell advertising on blogs filled with AI-generated content that could then generate ad revenue by popping up on Google searches.

Harvard professor Avi Loeb believes he may have found fragments of alien technology from a meteor that landed in the waters off of Papua, New Guinea in 2014. CBS News reports: Loeb and his team just brought the materials back to Harvard for analysis. The U.S. Space Command confirmed with almost near certainty, 99.999%, that the material came from another solar system. The government gave Loeb a 10 km (6.2 mile) radius of where it may have landed. "That is where the fireball took place, and the government detected it from the Department of Defense. It's a very big area, the size of Boston, so we wanted to pin it down," said Loeb. "We figured the distance of the fireball based off the time delay between the arrival of blast wave, the boom of explosion, and the light that arrived quickly."

Their calculations allowed them to chart the potential path of the meteor. Those calculations happened to carve a path right through the same projected 10 km range that came from the U.S. government. Loeb and his crew took a boat called the Silver Star out to the area. The ship took numerous passes along and around the meteor's projected path. Researchers combed the ocean floor by attaching a sled full of magnets to their boat. "We found ten spherules. These are almost perfect spheres, or metallic marbles. When you look at them through a microscope, they look very distinct from the background," explained Loeb, "They have colors of gold, blue, brown, and some of them resemble a miniature of the Earth."

An analysis of the composition showed that the spherules are made of 84% iron, 8% silicon, 4% magnesium, and 2% titanium, plus trace elements. They are sub-millimeter in size. The crew found 50 of them in total. "It has material strength that is tougher than all space rock that were seen before, and catalogued by NASA," added Loeb, "We calculated its speed outside the solar system. It was 60 km per second, faster than 95% of all stars in the vicinity of the sun. The fact that it was made of materials tougher than even iron meteorites, and moving faster than 95% of all stars in the vicinity of the sun, suggested potentially it could be a spacecraft from another civilization or some technological gadget." He likens the situation to any of the Voyager spacecrafts launched by NASA.

The UN secretary general has said that "climate change is out of control," as an unofficial analysis of data showed that average world temperatures in the seven days to Wednesday were the hottest week on record. From a report: "If we persist in delaying key measures that are needed, I think we are moving into a catastrophic situation, as the last two records in temperature demonstrates," Antonio Guterres said, referring to the world temperature records broken on Monday and Tuesday. The average global air temperature was 17.18C (62.9F) on Tuesday, according to data collated by the US National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), surpassing the record 17.01C reached on Monday. For the seven-day period ending Wednesday, the daily average temperature was .04C (.08F) higher than any week in 44 years of record-keeping, according to the University of Maine's Climate Reanalyzer data. That metric showed that Earth's average temperature on Wednesday remained at the record high of 17.18C.

Climate Reanalyzer uses data from the NCEP climate forecast system to provide a time series of daily mean two-metre air temperature, based on readings from surface, air balloon and satellite observations. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), whose figures are considered the gold standard in climate data, said on Thursday it could not validate the unofficial numbers. It noted that the reanalyzer uses model output data, which it called "not suitable" as substitutes for actual temperatures and climate records. The NOAA monitors global temperatures and records on a monthly and an annual basis, not daily.

Inflection AI, an AI startup company, has built a cutting-edge supercomputer equipped with 22,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs. Wccftech reports: For those unfamiliar with Inflection AI, it is a business that aims at creating "personal AI for everyone." The company is widely known for its recently introduced Inflection-1 AI model, which powers the Pi chatbot. Although the AI model hasn't yet reached the level of ChatGPT or Google's LaMDA models, reports suggest that Inflection-1 performs well on "common sense" tasks, making it much more suitable for applications such as personal assistance.
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Coming back, Inflection announced that it is building one of the world's largest AI-based supercomputers, and it looks like we finally have a glimpse of what it would be. It is reported that the Inflection supercomputer is equipped with 22,000 H100 GPUs, and based on analysis, it would contain almost 700 four-node racks of Intel Xeon CPUs. The supercomputer will utilize an astounding 31 Mega-Watts of power.

The surprising fact about the supercomputer is the acquisition of 22,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs. We all are well aware that, in recent times, it has been challenging to acquire even a single unit of the H100s since they are in immense demand, and NVIDIA cannot cope with the influx of orders. In the case of Inflection AI, NVIDIA is considering being an investor in the company, which is why in their case, it is easier to get their hands on such a massive number of GPUs.

The FBI's primary tool for monitoring social media threats is the same contractor that labeled peaceful Black Lives Matter protest leaders DeRay McKesson and Johnetta Elzie as "threat actors" requiring "continuous monitoring" in 2015. From a report: The contractor, ZeroFox, identified McKesson and Elzie as posing a "high severity" physical threat, despite including no evidence that McKesson or Elzie were suspected of criminal activity. "It's been almost a decade since the referenced 2015 incident and in that time we have invested heavily in fine-tuning our collections, analysis and labeling of alerts," Lexie Gunther, a spokesperson for ZeroFox, told The Intercept, "including the addition of a fully managed service that ensures human analysis of every alert that comes through the ZeroFox Platform to ensure we are only alerting customers to legitimate threats and are labeling those threats appropriately."

The FBI, which declined to comment, hired ZeroFox in 2021, a fact referenced in the new 106-page Senate report about the intelligence community's failure to anticipate the January 6, 2021, uprising at the U.S. Capitol. The June 27 report, produced by Democrats on the Senate Homeland Security Committee, shows the bureau's broad authorities to surveil social media content -- authorities the FBI previously denied it had, including before Congress. It also reveals the FBI's reliance on outside companies to do much of the filtering for them. The FBI's $14 million contract to ZeroFox for "FBI social media alerting" replaced a similar contract with Dataminr, another firm with a history of scrutinizing racial justice movements. Dataminr, like ZeroFox, subjected the Black Lives Matter movement to web surveillance on behalf of the Minneapolis Police Department, previous reporting by The Intercept has shown.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Researchers say that nearly 336,000 devices exposed to the Internet remain vulnerable to a critical vulnerability in firewalls sold by Fortinet because admins have yet to install patches the company released three weeks ago. CVE-2023-27997 is a remote code execution in Fortigate VPNs, which are included in the company's firewalls. The vulnerability, which stems from a heap overflow bug, has a severity rating of 9.8 out of 10. Fortinet released updates silently patching the flaw on June 8 and disclosed it four days later in an advisory that said it may have been exploited in targeted attacks. That same day, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Administration added it to its catalog of known exploited vulnerabilities and gave federal agencies until Tuesday to patch it.

Despite the severity and the availability of a patch, admins have been slow to fix it, researchers said. Security firm Bishop Fox on Friday, citing data retrieved from queries of the Shodan search engine, said that of 489,337 affected devices exposed on the internet, 335,923 of them -- or 69 percent -- remained unpatched. Bishop Fox said that some of the vulnerable machines appeared to be running Fortigate software that hadn't been updated since 2015. "Wow -- looks like there's a handful of devices running 8-year-old FortiOS on the Internet," Caleb Gross, director of capability development at Bishop Fox, wrote in Friday's post. "I wouldn't touch those with a 10-foot pole."

Scientists have achieved a breakthrough by observing the early universe in extreme slow motion, confirming Einstein's theory of an expanding universe. The research is published in Nature Astronomy. Phys.Org reports: Einstein's general theory of relativity means that we should observe the distant -- and hence ancient -- universe running much slower than the present day. However, peering back that far in time has proven elusive. Scientists have now cracked that mystery by using quasars as "clocks." "Looking back to a time when the universe was just over a billion years old, we see time appearing to flow five times slower," said lead author of the study, Professor Geraint Lewis from the School of Physics and Sydney Institute for Astronomy at the University of Sydney. "If you were there, in this infant universe, one second would seem like one second -- but from our position, more than 12 billion years into the future, that early time appears to drag."

Professor Lewis and his collaborator, Dr. Brendon Brewer from the University of Auckland, used observed data from nearly 200 quasars -- hyperactive supermassive black holes at the centers of early galaxies -- to analyze this time dilation. Previously, astronomers have confirmed this slow-motion universe back to about half the age of the universe using supernovae -- massive exploding stars -- as "standard clocks." But while supernovae are exceedingly bright, they are difficult to observe at the immense distances needed to peer into the early universe. By observing quasars, this time horizon has been rolled back to just a tenth the age of the universe, confirming that the universe appears to speed up as it ages.

Professor Lewis worked with astro-statistician Dr. Brewer to examine details of 190 quasars observed over two decades. Combining the observations taken at different colors (or wavelengths) -- green light, red light and into the infrared -- they were able to standardize the "ticking" of each quasar. Through the application of Bayesian analysis, they found the expansion of the universe imprinted on each quasar's ticking. "With these exquisite data, we were able to chart the tick of the quasar clocks, revealing the influence of expanding space," Professor Lewis said. These results further confirm Einstein's picture of an expanding universe but contrast earlier studies that had failed to identify the time dilation of distant quasars.

Reactions continue to Red Hat's announcement that they'd start limiting access to Red Hat Enterprise Linux sources, reports Ars Technica: Rocky Linux, launched by CentOS co-founder Greg Kurtzer as a replacement RHEL-compatible distro, announced Thursday that it believes Red Hat's moves "violate the spirit and purpose of open source." Using a few different methods (Universal Base Image containers, pay-per-use public cloud instances), Rocky Linux intends to maintain what it considers legitimate access to RHEL code under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and make the code public as soon as it exists.
"These methods are possible because of the power of GPL," explains Rocky Linux's blog post. "No one can prevent redistribution of GPL software. To reiterate, both of these methods enable us to legitimately obtain RHEL binaries and SRPMs without compromising our commitment to open source software or agreeing to TOS or EULA limitations that impede our rights. Our legal advisors have reassured us that we have the right to obtain the source to any binaries we receive, ensuring that we can continue advancing Rocky Linux in line with our original intentions.... [O]ur unwavering dedication and commitment to open source and the Enterprise Linux community remain steadfast."

"In the unfortunate event that Red Hat decides to ramp up efforts to negatively impact the community, Rocky Linux will persist to continue serving the best interests of the entire open source community. As a reminder, we welcome everyone to contribute to our efforts. You can learn more about how you can join us and all of the various ways to contribute on our wiki."

Ars Technica notes that AlmaLinux is "also working to keep providing RHEL-compatible updates and downstream rebuilds." "The process is more labor intensive as we require gathering data and patches from several sources, comparing them, testing them, and then building them for release," wrote Jack Aboutboul, community manager for AlmaLinux, in a blog post. "But rest assured, updates will continue flowing just as they have been."

The Software Freedom Conservancy's Bradley M. Kuhn weighed in last week with a comprehensive overview of RHEL's business model and its tricky relationship with GPL compliance. Red Hat's business model "skirts" GPL violation but had only twice previously violated the GPL in newsworthy ways, Kuhn wrote. Withholding Complete Corresponding Source (CCS) from the open web doesn't violate the GPL itself, but by doing so, Red Hat makes it more difficult for anyone to verify the company's GPL compliance.

Kuhn expressed sadness that "this long road has led the FOSS community to such a disappointing place."
Red Hat argued that they "do not find value in a RHEL rebuild." Rocky Linux dismissed this view as "narrow-minded," and RHEL-derived AlmaLinux even responded with specific examples, also noting its contributions to the RHEL and CentOS communities. AlmaLinux's community manager wrote "When executed properly, downstream rebuilds provide tremendous value and are a tremendous asset to upstream projects."

And ITWire shares one more reaction: German open source vendor SUSE says it will not be making any changes to its policies on source code access, emphasising "that the freedom to access, modify, and distribute software should remain open to all".

schwit1 shares a report from Popular Science: NASA said in a conference call with reporters that it would not ever be flying its experimental electric aircraft, the X-57, citing safety concerns that are insurmountable with the time and budget they have for the project. The X-57 program will wind down without the aircraft ever going up into the sky. The project had previously seen challenges. For example, transistor modules in the electrical inverters kept failing and "blowing up" in testing, Sean Clark, the project's principal investigator told Popular Science in January. That problem was solved, Clark said.

The problem that led them to scrap the plan to fly the aircraft stemmed from motors that power the propellers. Clark said today that analysis of the issue is ongoing. "As we got into the detailed analysis and airworthiness assessment of the motors themselves, we found that there were some potential failure modes with the motors mechanically, under flight loads, that we hadn't seen on the ground," he said. "We've got a great design in progress to fix it, it's just [that] it would take too long for us to go through and implement that."

NASA said that the reason behind permanently scrubbing the flight is safety and time. "Unfortunately, we recently discovered a potential failure mode in the propulsion system that we determined to pose an unacceptable risk to the pilot's safety, and the safety of personnel on the ground, during ground tests," Bradley Flick, the director of NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center in California, said in the call. "Mitigation of that failure would take the project well beyond its planned end at the end of this fiscal year, so NASA has decided to end the project on time without taking the vehicle to flight."

Motherboard reports: Scientists are currently searching for the submerged remains of an interstellar object that crashed into the skies near Papua New Guinea in January 2014 and probably sprinkled material from another star system into the Pacific Ocean, according to an onboard diary by Avi Loeb, the Harvard astronomer who is leading the expedition. The effort, which kicked off on June 14, aims to recover what is left of the otherworldly fireball using a deep-sea magnetic sled.

The team has already turned up "anomalous" magnetic spherules, steel shards, curious wires, and heaps of volcanic ash, but has not identified anything that is unambiguously extraterrestrial — or interstellar — at this point. However, Loeb is optimistic that the crew will identify pieces of Interstellar Meteor 1 (IM1), the mysterious half-ton object that struck Earth nearly a decade ago, which he thinks could be an artifact, or "technosignature," from an alien civilization...

The fireball that sparked the hunt smashed into the atmosphere on January 8, 2014, and was detected by NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), which keeps track of extraterrestrial impacts using a network of sensors around the world. Years later, Loeb and his student, Amir Siraj, concluded that the meteor's high velocity at impact suggested that it was interstellar in origin, a hypothesis that was ultimately supported by the United States Space Command using classified sensor data.
Today Loeb posted on Medium that "by now, we have 25 spherules from the site of the first recognized interstellar meteor," with a cumulative weight of about 30 milligrams — estimated to be one part in ten million of the original fireball's mass: The success of the Interstellar Expedition constitutes the first opportunity for astronomers to learn about interstellar space by using a microscope rather than a telescope. It opens the door for a new branch of observational astronomy.
Updates about the expedition are running on the Mega Screen in New York's Times Square, Motherboard reports. And Loeb writes that "If further analysis of the 50 milligrams retrieved from IM1's site will inform us that IM1's composition requires a technological origin, we will know that we are not alone."

He also shared an email that responded to his online diaries: I had a heart attack four weeks ago and am now in rehab. I read your IM1 diary every day and it always gives me new courage to face life. There are still so many things to discover and I want to live long enough to see some of them. I wish you and your team all the best.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Intercept: The legal research and public records data broker LexisNexis is providing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement with tools to target people who may potentially commit a crime -- before any actual crime takes place, according to a contract document obtained by The Intercept. LexisNexis then allows ICE to track the purported pre-criminals' movements. The unredacted contract overview provides a rare look at the controversial $16.8 million agreement between LexisNexis and ICE, a federal law enforcement agency whose surveillance of and raids against migrant communities are widely criticized as brutal, unconstitutional, and inhumane.

"The purpose of this program is mass surveillance at its core," said Julie Mao, an attorney and co-founder of Just Futures Law, which is suing LexisNexis over allegations it illegally buys and sells personal data. Mao told The Intercept the ICE contract document, which she reviewed for The Intercept, is "an admission and indication that ICE aims to surveil individuals where no crime has been committed and no criminal warrant or evidence of probable cause." While the company has previously refused to answer any questions about precisely what data it's selling to ICE or to what end, the contract overview describes LexisNexis software as not simply a giant bucket of personal data, but also a sophisticated analytical machine that purports to detect suspicious activity and scrutinize migrants -- including their locations.

The document, a "performance of work statement" made by LexisNexis as part of its contract with ICE, was obtained by journalist Asher Stockler through a public records request and shared with The Intercept. LexisNexis Risk Solutions, a subsidiary of LexisNexis's parent company, inked the contract with ICE, a part of the Department of Homeland Security, in 2021. The document reveals that over 11,000 ICE officials, including within the explicitly deportation-oriented Enforcement and Removal Operations branch, were using LexisNexis as of 2021. "This includes supporting all aspects of ICE screening and vetting, lead development, and criminal analysis activities," the document says. In practice, this means ICE is using software to "automate" the hunt for suspicious-looking blips in the data, or links between people, places, and property. It is unclear how such blips in the data can be linked to immigration infractions or criminal activity, but the contract's use of the term "automate" indicates that ICE is to some extent letting computers make consequential conclusions about human activity. The contract further notes that the LexisNexis analysis includes "identifying potentially criminal and fraudulent behavior before crime and fraud can materialize." (ICE did not respond to a request for comment.) "LexisNexis Risk Solutions prides itself on the responsible use of data, and the contract with the Department of Homeland Security encompasses only data allowed for such uses," said LexisNexis spokesperson Jennifer Richman. She says the company's work with ICE doesn't violate the law or federal policy.