Tesla is hiring staff for the company's new "first of its kind" data centers. Electrek reports: Tesla has shared a new job posting for a "Sr. Engineering Program Manager, Data Center" role first spotted by Electrek last week. In the job posting, Tesla says that it will build "1st of its kind Data Centers": "This role will lead the end-to-end design and engineering of Tesla's 1st of its kind Data Centers and will be one of the key members of the factory engineering team." Tesla didn't explain how those data centers will be "1st of their kind," which is not something you'd expect in a job posting anyway.

But interestingly, the new effort comes as Tesla has been taking over data centers from Twitter. [...] The Information reported that Tesla has taken over one of the old Twitter data centers leased from NTT Data that the social media company was using in Sacramento. The report also mentions that Tesla is in talks with Prime Data Centers to use another data center that Twitter used to have in Sacramento.

Tesla is seeing its need for data processing increasing rapidly as it tries to take advantage of its growing fleet of millions of vehicles all equipped with cameras in order to improve the neural nets powering its self-driving effort. The automaker is also handling a growing number of connectivity features that it tries to sell to vehicle owners through a $10-a-month "Premium Connectivity" subscription service. On the energy side, Tesla is also handling a lot of data to operate its virtual power plant and its services to distributed energy assets, like Autobidder and Powerhub.

Michael Burry, the money manager made famous in the book and film "The Big Short," held bearish options against the broad S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 Index at the end of the second quarter, according to securities fillings released on Monday. From a report: Burry's Scion Asset Management bought put options with a notional value of $739 million against the popular Invesco QQQ Trust ETF during the quarter, and separate put options with a notional value of $886 million against the SPDR S&P 500 ETF. Put options convey the right to sell shares at a fixed price in the future and are typically bought to express a bearish or defensive view. Burry rose to fame with his bets against the U.S. housing market before the 2008 financial crisis. Michael Lewis' nonfiction book "The Big Short" was released in 2010 and the movie version came out in 2015.

One of the Mac's built-in malware detection tools may not be working quite as well as you think. From a report: At the Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas, longtime Mac security researcher Patrick Wardle presented findings today about vulnerabilities in Apple's macOS Background Task Management mechanism, which could be exploited to bypass and, therefore, defeat the company's recently added monitoring tool. There's no foolproof method for catching malware on computers with perfect accuracy because, at their core, malicious programs are just software, like your web browser or chat app. It can be difficult to tell the legitimate programs from the transgressors. So operating system makers like Microsoft and Apple, as well as third-party security companies, are always working to develop new detection mechanisms and tools that can spot potentially malicious software behavior in new ways.

Apple's Background Task Management tool focuses on watching for software "persistence." Malware can be designed to be ephemeral and operate only briefly on a device or until the computer restarts. But it can also be built to establish itself more deeply and "persist" on a target even when the computer is shut down and rebooted. Lots of legitimate software needs persistence so all of your apps and data and preferences will show up as you left them every time you turn on your device. But if software establishes persistence unexpectedly or out of the blue, it could be a sign of something malicious. With this in mind, Apple added Background Task Manager in macOS Ventura, which launched in October 2022, to send notifications both directly to users and to any third-party security tools running on a system if a "persistence event" occurs. This way, if you know you just downloaded and installed a new application, you can disregard the message. But if you didn't, you can investigate the possibility that you've been compromised.

By 2035 America needs a 43% increase in its power-transmitting capacity, according to an analysis by the REPEAT project. But NPR reports there's another way to quickly improve capacity without building new transmission lines: That's where the laser sensors come in, says Jon Marmillo, co-founder of LineVision, the company that makes them. Sensors can help utilities get real-time data on their power lines, which can allow them to send more renewable electricity through the wires. This tech is part of a suite of innovations that could help the U.S. increase its grid capacity faster and cheaper than building new transmission lines...

At any given moment, utilities typically know how much power is going through their lines. But they aren't required to know the real time conditions of those lines, like the wind speed or how hot the line is. Without that data, utilities have to use conservative standards for how much power can safely flow, says Jake Gentle, senior program manager for infrastructure security at Idaho National Laboratory. But when sensors gather information from the wires — about wind, temperature, and wire sag — that data allows utilities to go beyond their conservative standards and safely put more electricity through the wires... With this tech, called "dynamic line rating", utilities are able to increase the efficiency of their lines — sometimes as much as 40%, says Gentle.
One Pittsburgh company using similar technology told NPR that "we found an average of 25% additional available capacity on transmission lines that were equipped with the sensors."

Why aren't more people using Linux on the desktop? Slashdot reader technology_dude shares one solution: Jack Wallen at ZDNet says establishing an "official" version of Linux may (or may not) help Linux on the desktop increase the number of users, mostly as someplace to point new users. It makes sense to me. What does Slashdot think and what would be the challenges, other than acceptance of a particular flavor?
Wallen argues this would also create a standard for hardware and software vendors to target, which "could equate to even more software and hardware being made available to Linux." (And an "official" Linux might also be more appealing to business users.) Wallen suggests it be "maintained and controlled by a collective of people from users, developers, and corporations (such as Intel and AMD) with a vested interest in the success of this project... There would also be corporate backing for things like marketing (such as TV commercials)." He also suggests basing it on Debian, and supporting both Snap and Flatpak...

In comments on the original submission, long-time Slashdot reader bobbomo points instead to kernel.org, arguing "There already is an official version of Linux called mainline. Everything else is backports." And jd (Slashdot user #1,658) believes that the official Linux is the Linux Standard Base. "All distributions, more-or-less, conform to the LSB, which gives you a pseudo 'official' Linux. About the one variable is the package manager. And there are ways to work around that."

Unfortunately, according to Wikipedia... The LSB standard stopped being updated in 2015 and current Linux distributions do not adhere to or offer it; however, the lsb_release command is sometimes still available.[citation needed] On February 7, 2023, a former maintainer of the LSB wrote, "The LSB project is essentially abandoned."
That post (on the lsb-discuss mailing list) argues the LSB approach was "partially superseded" by Snaps and Flatpaks (for application portability and stability). And of course, long-time Slashdot user menkhaura shares the obligatory XKCD comic...

It's not exactly the same thing, but days after ZDNet's article, CIQ, Oracle, and SUSE announced the Open Enterprise Linux Association, a new collaborative trade association to foster "the development of distributions compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux."

So where does that leave us? Share your own thoughts in the comments.

And should there be an "official" version of Linux?

"Teams across Google are working hard to prepare the web for the migration to quantum-resistant cryptography," writes Chrome's technical program manager for security, Devon O'Brien.

"Continuing with our strategy for handling this major transition, we are updating technical standards, testing and deploying new quantum-resistant algorithms, and working with the broader ecosystem to help ensure this effort is a success." As a step down this path, Chrome will begin supporting X25519Kyber768 for establishing symmetric secrets in TLS, starting in Chrome 116, and available behind a flag in Chrome 115. This hybrid mechanism combines the output of two cryptographic algorithms to create the session key used to encrypt the bulk of the TLS connection:

X25519 — an elliptic curve algorithm widely used for key agreement in TLS today
Kyber-768 — a quantum-resistant Key Encapsulation Method, and NIST's PQC winner for general encryption

In order to identify ecosystem incompatibilities with this change, we are rolling this out to Chrome and to Google servers, over both TCP and QUIC and monitoring for possible compatibility issues. Chrome may also use this updated key agreement when connecting to third-party server operators, such as Cloudflare, as they add support. If you are a developer or administrator experiencing an issue that you believe is caused by this change, please file a bug.
The Register delves into Chrome's reasons for implementing this now: "It's believed that quantum computers that can break modern classical cryptography won't arrive for 5, 10, possibly even 50 years from now, so why is it important to start protecting traffic today?" said O'Brien. "The answer is that certain uses of cryptography are vulnerable to a type of attack called Harvest Now, Decrypt Later, in which data is collected and stored today and later decrypted once cryptanalysis improves." O'Brien says that while symmetric encryption algorithms used to defend data traveling on networks are considered safe from quantum cryptanalysis, the way the keys get negotiated is not. By adding support for a hybrid KEM, Chrome should provide a stronger defense against future quantum attacks...

Rebecca Krauthamer, co-founder and chief product officer at QuSecure, told The Register in an email that while this technology sounds futuristic, it's useful and necessary today... [T]he arrival of capable quantum computers should not be thought of as a specific, looming date, but as something that will arrive without warning. "There was no press release when the team at Bletchley Park cracked the Enigma code, either," she said.

Canonical engineering manager Ben Hoyt believes that a variable's name is more important than its type, so "the name should be more prominent and come first in declarations." In many popular programming languages, including C, C++, Java, and C#, when you define a field or variable, you write the type before the name. For example (in C++):

// Struct definition
struct person {
std::string name;
std::string email;
int age;
};

In other languages, including Go, Rust, TypeScript, and Python (with type hints), you write the name before the type. For example (in Go):

// Struct definition
type Person struct {
Name string
Email string
Age int
}

There's a nice answer in the Go FAQ about why Go chose this order: "Why are declarations backwards?". It starts with "they're only backwards if you're used to C", which is a good point — name-before-type has a long history in languages like Pascal. In fact, Go's type declaration syntax (and packages) were directly inspired by Pascal.

The FAQ goes on to point out that parsing is simpler with name-before-type, and declaring multiple variables is less error-prone than in C. In C, the following declares x to be a pointer, but (surprisingly at first!) y to be a normal integer:

int* x, y;

Whereas the equivalent in Go does what you'd expect, declaring both to be pointers:

var x, y *int

The Go blog even has an in-depth article by Rob Pike on Go's Declaration Syntax, which describes more of the advantages of Go's syntax over C's, particularly with arrays and function pointers.

Oddly, the article only hints at what I think is the more important reason to prefer name-before-type for everyday programming: it's clearer.
Hoyt argues a variable's name has more meaning (semantically) — pointing out dynamically-typed languages like Python and Ruby don't even need types, and that languages like Java, Go, C++ and C# now include type inference.

"I think the takeaway is this: we can't change the past, but if you're creating a new language, please put names before types!"

For storing passwords, Slashdot reader eggegick has a simple, easy solution: "I use Vim to keep my passwords in an encrypted file."

But what's the easiest solution for people who don't use Vim? My wife is not a Linux geek like I am, so she's using [free and open-source] KeePass. It's relatively simple to install and use, but I seem to recall it used to be even much simpler... Does anybody know of a really simple password manager or encrypting notepad?

I've looked at a number of them, and they use Java or Javascript, or they involve an external web site, or they have way too many features, or they use an installation program. Or Windows Defender objects to them.
Share your own suggestions and thoughts in the comments.

What's the best (encrypted) password manager?

Dumi, a Zimbabwean, fell for E-Creator's review-writing job, investing $112. When the company's director disappeared with $1M, his account was frozen, leaving him scammed. Rest of World reports: Thousands of Zimbabweans have been lured into a scam in hopes of making a quick buck, at a time when unemployment in the country is high: Estimates vary from 7.9% to 20%, or even 90%, according to the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions. Alongside the job crisis, the country has been reeling under an inflation of more than 100%, with many struggling to make ends meet. Dumi, who previously worked as a clerk, told Rest of World he found it hard to get another job due to scarce opportunities. He said he joined the E-Creator scheme hoping he'd earn an income while waiting to find the job of his dreams. "Some of us living in marginalized townships such as Mbare, with no decent employment, jumped at an opportunity, which seemed to be so technologically significant and rewarding. Losing money in the process was unexpected," Dumi said, adding that he would not have joined the scheme if he had a job of his choice.

E-Creator agents told Rest of World they had taken up the role because they were unemployed or couldn't find enough work. They said they were lured by the promise of earning 10% returns for posting 10 fake reviews if they invested between $15 and $100. There were higher rewards promised for bigger investments: Depositing $100-$500 and recruiting five agents meant an additional 4.5% return; depositing $500-$2,000 and recruiting over 50 others would take earnings to the highest level of a 5% commision and a 10% base payout. While they could withdraw money from their E-Creator wallets, the lure of getting higher returns stopped them from doing so. Watson Manjobo, a former manager and affiliate marketer for E-Creator, told Rest of World the company owed him his salary for June. His job was to recruit more users and help people reset their account passwords. When news of Jiaotong's escape went viral, users flooded his phone with messages demanding answers, he said, adding that his direct superiors have since been unreachable.

Google's long-running project to split up ChromeOS and its Chrome browser is currently in beta and should be live in the stable channel later this month. The flags that turn on the feature by default were spotted by Kevin Tofel from About Chromebooks. Ars Technica reports: The project is called "Lacros" which Google says stands for "Linux And ChRome OS." This will split ChromeOS's Linux OS from the Chrome browser, allowing Google to update each one independently. Google documentation on the project says, "On Chrome OS, the system UI (ash window manager, login screen, etc.) and the web browser are the same binary. Lacros separates this functionality into two binaries, henceforth known as ash-chrome (system UI) and lacros-chrome (web browser)." Part of the project involves sprucing up the ChromeOS OS, and Google's docs say, "Lacros can be imagined as 'Linux chrome with more Wayland support.'"

On the browser side, ChromeOS would stop using the bespoke Chrome browser for ChromeOS and switch to the Chrome browser for Linux. The same browser you get on Ubuntu would now ship on ChromeOS. In the past, turning on Lacros in ChromeOS would show both Chrome browsers, the outgoing ChromeOS one and the new Linux one. Lacros has been in development for around two years and can be enabled via a Chrome flag. Tofel says his 116 build no longer has that flag since it's the default now. Google hasn't officially confirmed this is happening, but so far, the code is headed that way.

Worldcoin will expand its operations to sign up more users globally and aims to allow other organisations to use its iris-scanning and identity-verifying technology, a senior manager for the company behind the project told Reuters. From the report: "We are on this mission of building the biggest financial and identity community that we can," said Ricardo Macieira, general manager for Europe at Tools For Humanity, the San Francisco and Berlin-based company behind the project.

Macieira said Worldcoin would continue rolling out operations in Europe, Latin America, Africa and "all the parts of the world that will accept us." Worldcoin's website mentions various possible applications, including distinguishing humans from artificial intelligence, enabling "global democratic processes" and showing a "potential path" to universal basic income, although these outcomes are not guaranteed. Most people interviewed by Reuters at sign-up sites in Britain, India and Japan last week said they were joining in order to receive the 25 free Worldcoin tokens the company says verified users can claim.

Amazon is rolling out its virtual health clinic service nationwide, the company announced Tuesday. From a report: The e-retailer launched the service, called Amazon Clinic, last November, touting it as a virtual platform for users to connect with health-care providers to treat common conditions like sinus infections, acne, and migraines. Users select their condition, choose a provider, then answer a brief questionnaire. Depending on where they live, users can choose to connect with a clinician over video or text message. Amazon does not provide the telemedicine services itself, but instead provides Amazon Clinic as a platform to connect telemedicine partners with patients. Current partners include Curai Health, Hello Alpha, SteadyMD and Wheel.

With Tuesday's announcement, users in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., can access Amazon Clinic via video visits. Due to regulatory issues, message-based chat on Amazon Clinic is only available in 34 states. Nworah Ayogu, the chief medical officer and general manager of Amazon Clinic, told CNBC in an interview that the company vets the quality of each provider and their internal operations to determine "they have stood up as a provider group." The e-commerce giant also makes sure the provider groups are staffed across all 50 states "to be able to deliver care in a timely response," Ayogu added.

The European Space Agency's (ESA) Euclid space telescope has released its first test images. New Scientist reports: Euclid launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida on 1 July and took about a month to reach its final orbit about four times as far from Earth as the moon. While it sailed to its destination, researchers on Earth were hard at work turning on and calibrating its two cameras. The telescope's first images show that both cameras are working as expected, peering into the universe in both visible and infrared light. These images show an area of the sky about one-quarter the area of the full moon, but over the course of its six-year mission Euclid is expected to observe an area about 300,000 times larger, covering about a third of the entire sky.

"We see just a few galaxies here, produced with minimum system tuning," said Giuseppe Racca, Euclid's project manager at ESA, in a statement. "The fully calibrated Euclid will ultimately observe billions of galaxies to create the biggest ever 3D map of the sky." Once the instruments are fully calibrated, which is expected to take a few months, Euclid will begin mapping. The ultimate goal is to figure out the distribution of matter in the universe, measuring how it clumps and moves, which will give scientists unprecedented insights into the nature of dark matter and dark energy.

Boeing's CST-100 Starliner program, developed for NASA since 2014, has incurred total losses exceeding $1 billion, with an additional $257 million loss announced in the second quarter of 2023. Gizmodo reports: Boeing's total losses now amount to a staggering $1.14 billion for the Starliner program. The impact of these setbacks is evident in the company's Defense, Space, and Security division, which reported a significant loss of $527 million during the second quarter, with the Starliner project accounting for a substantial portion of this downturn, according to Ars Technica. Adding insult to injury, there's still no indication as to when Starliner will perform its first flight with a crew on board.

Boeing, currently operating under a fixed-price contract with NASA, is obligated to absorb any additional costs. The company signed a $4.2 billion contract in 2014 as part of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, encompassing six operational Starliner missions. NASA also holds a parallel contract with SpaceX. Since 2020, SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule has completed six crewed flights for NASA, with a seventh mission planned for this coming August and an eighth tentatively planned for February 2024. Boeing has yet to fly Starliner with a crew on board, though it did perform a reasonably successful uncrewed mission in May 2022.

In its latest financial earnings statement, Boeing said the Starliner program "recorded a $257 million loss primarily due to the impacts of the previously announced launch delay." The company initially aimed for a Crew Flight Test (CFT) launch on July 1, with NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry "Butch" Wilmore destined for the International Space Station (ISS). However, Boeing announced an indefinite delay to the launch on June 1 due to the discovery of two major safety issues. The first problem has to do with the load capacity of Starliner's three parachutes, designed to ensure a safe landing for the crew vehicle. The fabric sections of the parachutes have a failure load limit lower than anticipated, implying that if one parachute fails, the remaining two would be incapable of adequately decelerating the spacecraft for its landing in New Mexico. The second issue involves hundreds of feet of protective tape used to insulate the wiring harnesses inside the Starliner vehicle, which were found to be flammable. Mark Nappi, Boeing Starliner program manager and vice president, explained during the June briefing that it's too late to remove the flammable tape without inflicting further damage to the vehicle. Instead, Boeing and NASA are considering solutions involving additional wrapping over the existing tape in high-risk areas to mitigate fire hazards. On Wednesday, Boeing President and CEO David Calhoun said: "On Starliner, we are in lockstep with our customer. We prioritize safety and we're taking whatever time is required. We're confident in that team and committed to getting it right."

An anonymous reader shares a report: As Hollywood executives insist it is "just not realistic" to pay actors -- 87 percent of whom earn less than $26,000 -- more, they are spending lavishly on AI programs. While entertainment firms like Disney have declined to go into specifics about the nature of their investments in artificial intelligence, job postings and financial disclosures reviewed by The Intercept reveal new details about the extent of these companies' embrace of the technology. In one case, Netflix is offering as much as $900,000 for a single AI product manager.

[...] Netflix's posting for a $900,000-a-year AI product manager job makes clear that the AI goes beyond just the algorithms that determine what shows are recommended to users. The listing points to AI's uses for content creation: "Artificial Intelligence is powering innovation in all areas of the business," including by helping them to "create great content." Netflix's AI product manager posting alludes to a sprawling effort by the business to embrace AI, referring to its "Machine Learning Platform" involving AI specialists "across Netflix."

A research section on Netflix's website describes its machine learning platform, noting that while it was historically used for things like recommendations, it is now being applied to content creation. "Historically, personalization has been the most well-known area, where machine learning powers our recommendation algorithms. We're also using machine learning to help shape our catalog of movies and TV shows by learning characteristics that make content successful. We use it to optimize the production of original movies and TV shows in Netflix's rapidly growing studio."

Google Street View's cameras have returned to Germany more than a decade after a privacy backlash in the country pushed it to stop updating images. From a report: Alphabet's update will start with new photos of the streets and landmarks of the country's 20 largest cities and expand from there, the company said in a blog post on Tuesday. Google voluntarily suspended Street View photography in Germany in 2011, after an outcry from privacy advocates and opposition from regulators.

"We've been back on the road with our vehicles in Germany since June and will be posting the latest images as they become available -- adding footage from other regions across the country," Sven Tresp, a program manager for Street View, wrote. Google is posting information about where its cameras are traveling, he said. The Street View rollout across Europe more than a decade ago triggered probes by data protection watchdogs across the European Union. The investigations included a probe by the Hamburg authority, where Google had its main German base. Some led to fines, including a $1.1 million penalty in Italy.

Tuesday North America's largest lithium mining operation cleared its last legal hurdle in federal appeals court, giving a green light to the mining of 6,000 acres in an 18,000-acre project site near Nevada's northern border.

But meanwhile, in Southern Nevada... Federal land managers have formally withdrawn their authorization of a Canadian mining company's lithium exploration project bordering a national wildlife refuge in southern Nevada after conservationists sought a court order to block it.

The Center for Biological Diversity and the Amargosa Conservancy said in a lawsuit filed July 7 that the project on the edge of the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge outside Las Vegas posed an illegal risk to a dozen fish, snail and plant species currently protected under the Endangered Species Act. They filed an additional motion this week in federal court seeking a temporary injunction prohibiting Rover Metals from initiating the drilling of 30 bore sites in search of the highly sought-after metal used to manufacture batteries for electric vehicles.

But before a judge in Las Vegas could rule on the request, the Bureau of Land Management notified Rover Metals on Wednesday that its earlier acceptance of the company's notice of its intent to proceed "was in error... The agency has concluded that proposed operations are likely to result in disturbance to localized groundwaters that supply the connected surface waters associated with Threatened and Endangered species in local springs," said Angelita Bulletts, district manager of the bureau's southern Nevada district...

Conservationists said the reversal provides at least a temporary reprieve for the lush oasis in the Mojave Desert that is home to 25 species of fish, plants, insects and snails that are found nowhere else on Earth — one of the highest concentrations of endemic species in North America at one of the hottest, driest places on the planet.
The article ends with this quote from a director at the Center for Biological Diversity and the Amargosa Conservancy. "We need lithium for our renewable energy transition, but this episode sends a message loud and clear that some places are just too special to drill."

Last weekend in Portland, Oregon, the Software Freedom Conservancy hosted a new conference called the Free and Open Source Software Yearly.

And long-time free software activist Bradley M. Kuhn (currently a policy fellow/hacker-in-residence for the Software Freedom Conservancy) hosted a lively panel discussion on "the recent change" to public source code releases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux which shed light on what may happen next. The panel also included:

• benny Vasquez, the Chair of the AlmaLinux OS Foundation
• Jeremy Alison, Samba co-founder and software engineer at CIQ (focused on Rocky Linux). Allison is also Jeremy Allison - Sam Slashdot reader #8,157.
• James (Jim) Wright, Oracle's chief architect for Open Source policy/strategy/compliance/alliances

"Red Hat themselves did not reply to our repeated requests to join us on this panel... SUSE was also invited but let us know they were unable to send someone on short notice to Portland for the panel."

One interesting audience question for the panel came from Karsten Wade, a one-time Red Hat senior community architect who left Red Hat in April after 21 years, but said he was "responsible for bringing the CentOS team onboard to Red Hat." Wade argued that CentOS "was always doing a clean rebuild from source RPMS of their own..." So "isn't all of this thunder doing Red Hat's job for them, of trying to get everyone to say, 'This thing is not the equivalent to RHEL.'"

In response Jeremy Alison made a good point. "None of us here are the arbiters of whether it's good enough of a rebuild of Red Hat Linux. The customers are the arbiters." But this led to an audience member asking a very forward-looking question: what are the chances the community could adopt a new (and open) enterprise Linux standard that distributions could follow. AlmaLinux's Vasquez replied, "Chances are real high... I think everyone sees that as the obvious answer. I think that's the obvious next step. I'll leave it at that." And Oracle's Wright added "to the extent that the market asks us to standardize? We're all responsive."

When asked if they'd consider adding features not found in RHEL ("such as high-security gates through reproducible builds") AlmaLinux's Vasquez said "100% -- yeah. One of the things that we're kind of excited about is the opportunities that this opens for us. We had decided we were just going to focus on this north star of 1:1 Red Hat no matter what -- and with that limitation being removed, we have all kinds of options." And CIQ's Alison said "We're working on FIPS certification for an earlier version of Rocky, that Red Hat, I don't believe, FIPS certified. And we're planning to release that."

AlmaLinux's Vasquez emphasized later that "We're just going to build Enterprise Linux. Red Hat has done a great job of establishing a fantastic target for all of us, but they don't own the rights to enterprise Linux. We can make this happen, without forcing an uncomfortable conversation with Red Hat. We can get around this."

And Alison later applied a "Star Wars" quote to Red Hat's predicament. "The more things you try and grab, the more things slip through your fingers." That is, "The more somebody tries to exert control over a codebase, the more the pushback will occur from people who collaborate in that codebase." AlmaLinux's Vasquez also said they're already "in conversations" with independent software vendors about the "flow of support" into non-Red Hat distributions -- though that's always been the case. "Finding ways to reduce the barrier for those independent software vendors to add official support for us is, like, maybe more cumbersome now, but it's the same problem that we've had..."

Early in the discussion Oracle's Jim Wright pointed out that even Red Hat's own web site defines open source code as "designed to be publicly accessible — anyone can see, modify, and distribute the code as they see fit." ("Until now," Wright added pointedly...) There was some mild teasing of Oracle during the 50-minute discussion -- someone asked at one point if they'd re-license their proprietary implementation of ZFS under the GPL. But at the end of the panel, Oracle's Jim Wright still reminded the audience that "If you want to work on open source Linux, we are hiring."

Read Slashdot's transcript of highlights from the discussion.

Passengers have flooded the FAA with complaints about narrow seats and scant legroom. From a report: Passengers have been sounding off for years about airline seating -- no legroom, thin cushions, too narrow. Now politicians are listening. A bill introduced in Congress last month to update aircraft evacuation standards would compel federal regulators to study seat sizes and spacing. Tito Echeverria, who used to travel frequently as a plant manager for a manufacturing company, has had too many awkward interactions with other squished travelers. "You end up having to consistently rub legs with someone, even though you're not really trying to," said Echeverria, 32, from Ontario, Calif. "You're just freaking there next to them."

U.S. regulations cover aisle width and the number of seats allowed on planes, but not minimum seat sizes. The Federal Aviation Administration has said in court it isn't required to set seat standards unless it finds they are necessary to protect passenger safety. In late 2019 and early 2020, it simulated emergency evacuations and found seat size and spacing didn't adversely affect the process. Last year, the FAA sought public feedback on whether seat sizes posed safety issues, and it got an earful. More than 26,000 public comments poured in over a three-month stretch. "Airplane seat sizes are appalling," one commenter wrote. "They are built for people from the '40s and '50s. They cannot remotely accommodate a person over 6 feet or 200 pounds. It's literally painful to fly today."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Polygon: Bungie has won almost $500,000 in damages from a Destiny 2 player who harassed one of its community managers and his wife with abusive, racist, and distressing calls and messages, and sent an unsolicited pizza order to their home in a manner designed to intimidate and frighten the couple. According to members of Bungie's legal team, the judgment from a Washington state court sets important precedents that will empower employers to go after anyone who harasses their employees online, and strengthen the enforcement of laws against online trolling and harassment. "This one is special," Bungie's attorney Dylan Schmeyer tweeted.

As laid out in the court's judgment, the defendant, Jesse James Comer, was "incensed" when the community manager -- whom both Bungie and the court declined to name, to protect them from further harassment -- spotlighted some fan art by a Black community member. Using anonymous phone numbers, Comer left a string of "hideous, bigoted" voicemails on the community manager's personal phone, some asking that Bungie create options in Destiny 2 "in which only persons of color would be killed," before proceeding to threaten the community manager's wife with more racist voicemails and texts. Then he ordered a pizza to be delivered to their home, leaving instructions for the driver to knock at least five times, loudly, to make the intrusion as frightening as possible.

The court ruled that Comer was liable to pay over $489,000 in damages, fees, and expenses it had accrued in protecting and supporting its employees, investigating Comer, and prosecuting the case against him. As laid out in a Twitter thread by Kathryn Tewson, a crusading paralegal who worked on the case, the judgment is significant because it recognizes that patterns of harassment escalate from online trolling to real-world violence; establishes that harassment of an employee for doing their job damages the employer as well, which can then use its resources to go after the culprit; and recognized a new tort -- a legal term for a form of injury or harm for which courts can impose liability -- around cyber and telephone harassment. While it may seem odd to celebrate a judgment that awards a company -- rather than an individual -- with damages for personal harassment, the significance of the case is that its legal precedent empowers and motivates employers to use their resources to protect employees who face harassment as part of their jobs. Bungie and its lawyers have broken important new ground that could improve the level of protection for workers in the game industry and beyond.