China has revealed a prototype for a new high-speed Maglev train that is capable of reaching speeds of 385 miles (620 kilometers) per hour. CNN reports: The train runs on high-temperature superconducting (HTS) power that makes it look as if the train is floating along the magnetized tracks. The sleek 21-meter-long (69 feet) prototype was unveiled to media in the city of Chengdu, Sichuan Province, on January 13. In addition, university researchers constructed 165 meters (541 feet) of track to demonstrate how the train would look and feel in transit, according to state-run Xinhua News.

Professor He Chuan (vice president of Southwest Jiaotong University, which worked on the prototype) told reporters that the train could be "operational" within 3-10 years. He added: "Sichuan has rich rare earth resources, which is very beneficial to our construction of permanent magnet tracks, thus promoting the faster development of experiments."

HTC's latest tease on its Twitter account looks related to the lip-tracking module for its Vive headsets. UploadVR reports: Paired with last week's tease that included the message "It's your move," plus numerous replies that use the word 'tracking' and even a more recent reference to Avatar, it certainly seems like HTC is teasing new add-ons for its existing Vive headsets, rather than an all-new device.

HTC revealed the lip-tracking module for Vive all the way back at GDC 2019. At the time the company said it had no plans for a full release of the device. The kit hangs below the headset and reads movement in your mouth, which a given experience could then use to replicate on a virtual avatar of yourself. Paired with the eye-tracking in the HTC Vive Pro Eye, it's feasible that HTC could soon be bringing very expressive virtual avatars to VR. Go a step further and implement the Vive Trackers for full-body tracking, and there's a lot of potential here.

Hmmmmmm shares a report from Bloomberg: Taiwan offered reassurances Monday it has sufficient water reserves to keep a giant tech industry led by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. humming till late May, when monsoon rains arrive to alleviate its worst drought in decades. The island should have enough water to supply the public and industry till then though precipitation is likely to fall short of average historical levels, Minister of Economic Affairs Wang Mei-hua told reporters Monday. The drought has so far exerted no impact on TSMC nor other companies, Wang added. Taiwan faces its worst drought in 56 years, a challenge to water-intensive sectors of the economy from chipmakers to textile factories and farms. The heightened level of concern coincides with a global shortage of semiconductors that's halting output at automakers from General Motors Co. to Volkswagen AG, spurring TSMC and its peers to run their fabs at close to full capacity to try and sate demand.

Spanning the Tropic of Cancer in the western Pacific Ocean, Taiwan typically receives copious amounts of rainfall. But last year was abnormally dry by historical standards. Hsinchu City, home to the likes of TSMC and MediaTek Inc., received just half the amount of rain in 2020 than it did the year before. The southern city of Tainan, another major center of technology manufacturing, also saw a significant drop-off in the amount of rain. Typhoons are usually an important source of precipitation but they didn't deliver for Taiwan last year. Not a single typhoon made landfall in all of 2020. Over the past century, the island is hit by between three and four typhoons each year on average, according to the island's Central Weather Bureau.

A user shares a report from Apple Insider: Researchers are working on a cabling system that could provide data transfer speeds multiple times faster than existing USB connections using an extremely thin polymer cable, in a system that echoes the design path of Thunderbolt. Presented at the February IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference, the research aims to develop a connection type that offers far better connectivity than current methods. In part, it aims to accomplish this by replacing copper wiring with something else.

Copper is typically used for wires like USB and HDMI to handle data transfers, but it requires a lot of power to work for high levels of data transmission. "There's a fundamental tradeoff between the amount of energy burned and the rate of information exchanged," said MIT alumni and lead author Jack Holloway. While the "increasingly bulky and costly" copper could be replaced by fiber optic cables, that introduces its own issues. As silicon chips have difficulty dealing with photons, this makes the interconnection between the cable and the computers more challenging to optimize. Combining the benefits of copper and fiber optic conduits, a plastic polymer is used by the researchers. This makes it cheaper to manufacture than copper wires, which could be an attractive proposition for cable producers.

The polymer can also use sub-terahertz electromagnetic signals, which is more energy-efficient than copper at high data loads. It is believed this efficiency brings it close to that of fiber optic systems, but crucially with better compatibility with silicon chips. Low-cost chips are paired with the polymer conduit that can generate the high-frequency signals powerful enough to transmit into the conduit directly. As such, the system is expected to be manufactured with standard methods, which also makes it cost-effective to produce. The cables themselves can also be extremely thin, with the cross-sectional area of the interconnect measuring 0.4 millimeters by a quarter millimeter, smaller than typical copper variants. That small hair-like cable can be used to transport data over three different parallel channels, enabling it to achieve a total bandwidth of 105 gigabits per second. Bundling conduits together could bring the cables into the terabit-per-second range, while still remaining at a reasonable cost.

LG's battery division is planning to build advanced battery cells for Tesla's electric vehicles in 2023 and is considering potential production sites in the U.S. and Europe, according to Reuters. From the report: Tesla has not yet agreed to a deal that would expand LG's role in its supply chain beyond China, one of the sources said. Last week, the Korean battery maker told Korean reporters it plans to build a U.S. factory where it would make battery cells for EVs and energy storage systems, to cater to U.S. and global customers as well as startups. It did not identify potential customers then, but one of the sources said it was hoping Tesla would buy the batteries.

In September, Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk announced an ambitious plan to develop new cells in-house, prompting suppliers like LG and Panasonic to embrace the unproven technology or face risks of losing a major customer for the longer term. The Korean supplier, a unit of LG Chem, has made samples for the so-called 4680 large-format cylindrical cells, said the sources, who asked not to be identified. It faces technological hurdles and the challenge of scaling up production, people familiar with the matter said.

"LG plans to produce 4680 cells at its new U.S. factory. They plan to build a new 4680 cell line to supply Tesla's Giga Berlin in Europe," one of the sources said, adding Spain is one of candidate for the European plant. One of the sources said LG has never mass produced such large-format cylindrical cells, although increasing battery capacity is the correct call. "Tesla is a major customer, and LG can take risks," another source said. He said LG has not yet secured orders from Tesla for the 4680 cells, still under development. For now, Tesla is sharply boosting orders for 2170 cells used in the Model 3 and Model Y vehicles made in China, the source said.

Google is failing to do enough to combat fake reviews within its business listings, and must be held to account by a UK watchdog, according to Which? The BBC reports: Which? conducted its research by essentially setting up a "sting" operation to catch unscrupulous operators in the act. It created a fake business listing which it called "five-star reviews," and searched online for companies advertising paid-for Google reviews. It then spent $150 on their services. Which? told each company it wanted five-star reviews only, and between three and five of them a day -- and the consumer group's researchers wrote the reviews themselves, "praising how good the made-up business and its fake owner Catherine are." The fake reviews appeared over the following week, a few at a time.

But in investigating the "reviewers" behind them, the Which? team found, among others:
- 15 reviewers who had rated both an Edinburgh search engine optimization business and a London psychic as five stars, which it called "an unlikely coincidence"
- A stockbroker in Canary Wharf who, having had several bad reviews in mid-2020, received 30 five-star ones "in quick succession" a few months later
- A reviewer who claimed to have lived in Surrey for years while praising a local car company, and a Glasgow electric gate firm 412 miles (663 km) away for work on his home
- The same reviewer also praised a dentist in Manchester, a paving firm in Bournemouth, and a Cambridgeshire locksmith, who allegedly saved his toddler from a locked car

Which? said it linked some 45 businesses scattered across the country to three suspicious "reviewers." That suggested they had each paid the same review seller to post their reviews, it said. It called on regulators and Google to take action. When it presented Google with the findings, the fake sting company was immediately deleted, Which? said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Instagram recommended false claims about COVID-19, vaccines and the 2020 U.S. election to people who appeared interested in related topics, according to a new report from a group that tracks online misinformation. From September to November 2020, Instagram recommended 104 posts containing misinformation, or about one post a week per profile, to 15 profiles set up by the U.K.-based nonprofit. The automated recommendations appeared in several places on the photo-sharing app, including in a new "suggested posts" feature introduced in August 2020 and the "Explore" section, which points users toward content they might be interested in.

To test how Instagram's recommendations work, the nonprofit, working with youth advocacy group Restless Development, had volunteers set up 15 new Instagram profiles. The profiles followed different sets of existing accounts on the social network. Those accounts ranged from reputable health authorities; to wellness, alternative health, and anti-vaccine advocates; to far-right militia groups and people promoting the discredited QAnon conspiracy theory, which Facebook banned in October. Profiles following wellness influencers and vaccine opponents were served up posts with false claims about COVID-19 and more aggressive anti-vaccine content, the researchers found. But the recommendations didn't end there. Those profiles were also "fed election misinformation, identity-based hate, and conspiracy theories," including anti-Semitic content. Profiles that followed QAnon or far-right accounts, in turn, were recommended disinformation about COVID and vaccines -- even if they also followed credible health organizations. The only profiles that were not served up misinformation followed, exclusively, recognized health organizations, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization and the Gates Foundation. Facebook spokesperson Raki Wane told NPR: "This research is five months out of date and uses an extremely small sample size of just 104 posts. This is in stark contrast to the 12 million pieces of harmful misinformation related to vaccines and COVID-19 we've removed from Facebook and Instagram since the start of the pandemic."

"We're also working on improvements to Instagram Search, to make accounts that discourage vaccines harder to find," Wane said.

The study can be found here (PDF).

FastCompany has a feature story on Chrome OS, which has turned 10. The story talks about a new feature of Chrome OS: A new version of Chrome OS rolling out starting today will introduce a long-under-development Phone Hub feature that'll let you see and interact with notifications from your Android phone on your Chromebook, without any complex configuration or clunky software required. You'll also be able to silence your phone, adjust some of its settings, and see and access recent Chrome browser tabs you had open on the device right from your Chrome OS desktop.

Carefully examined clues in Google's open-source Chromium code suggest the system could eventually do even more -- with some indications that full-fledged phone-mirroring that would let you get access to all the apps and files on your phone from your Chromebook could be in the cards. I asked John Solomon's (VP and GM of Chrome OS at Google) colleague, Chrome OS Product Manager, Engineering, and UX Lead John Maletis, if and when such a capability might come online, and while he wouldn't outright confirm any future plans, he did allow that what we're seeing now is only scratching the surface. "You're just seeing the beginning," he says. "That little tiny Phone Hub real estate -- I would put a big 'Watch This Space' on it, because there's a lot of stuff we can and will do there." The publication also touched on Fuchsia, a new operating system that Google has been working on for several years: My final pressing question about the future of Chrome OS is simply how much of it there will be. In a familiar twist, the Android- and Chrome-OS-watching communities are once again filled with speculation that Google could be working to bring the two platforms together -- this time by way of a mysterious underdeveloped Google operating system known as Fuchsia.

Officially, Google says only that Fuchsia is an "open-source effort to create a production-grade operating system that prioritizes security, updatability, and performance" across a "broad range of devices." But the vague nature of its ultimate purpose along with some eyebrow-raising bits of progress in its development -- such as the recent move to allow the operating system to support both Android and Linux apps as native programs -- raise some interesting questions about what, exactly, Google is actually up to with the effort. Solomon declined to answer directly about if or how Fuchsia might one day replace or otherwise relate to Chrome OS (and there are certainly more nuanced, less black-and-white possibilities to consider), but he did offer up some broad thoughts on what Google hopes to accomplish as time wears on.

T-Mobile will automatically enroll its phone subscribers in an advertising program informed by their online activity, testing businesses' appetite for information that other companies have restricted. From a report: The No. 2 U.S. carrier by subscribers said in a recent privacy-policy update that unless they opt out it will share customers' web and mobile-app data with advertisers starting April 26. For example, the program could help advertisers identify people who enjoy cooking or are sports enthusiasts, the company said. T-Mobile's new policy will also cover Sprint customers acquired through the carriers' 2020 merger. Sprint had previously shared similar data only from customers who opted into its third-party ad program.

A T-Mobile spokeswoman said the changes give subscribers advertising that aligns with their interests. "We've heard many say they prefer more relevant ads so we're defaulting to this setting," she said. T-Mobile ended 2020 with more than 60 million phone users under its main brand and more than 20 million customers on prepaid plans. The company said the changes wouldn't apply to business accounts or children's lines.

Dropbox announced today that it plans to acquire DocSend for $165 million. The company helps customers share and track documents by sending a secure link instead of an attachment. From a report: "We're announcing that we're acquiring DocSend to help us deliver an even broader set of tools for remote work, and DocSend helps customers securely manage and share their business critical documents, backed by powerful engagement analytics," Houston told me. When combined with the electronic signature capability of HelloSign, which Dropbox acquired in 2019, the acquisition gives the company an end-to-end document sharing workflow it had been missing. "Dropbox, DocSend and HelloSign will be able to offer a full suite of self-serve products to help our millions of customers manage the entire critical document workflows and give more control over all aspects of that," Houston explained.

On Friday, SpaceX asked the FCC for permission to deploy Starlink satellite broadband to aircraft, ships, large trucks & RVs. Ars Technica reports: SpaceX said it is "seek[ing] authority to deploy and operate these earth stations... throughout the United States and its territories... in the territorial waters of the United States and throughout international waters worldwide, and... on US-registered aircraft operating worldwide and non-US-registered aircraft operating in US airspace." "Granting this application would serve the public interest by authorizing a new class of ground-based components for SpaceX's satellite system that will expand the range of broadband capabilities available to moving vehicles throughout the United States and to moving vessels and aircraft worldwide," SpaceX told the FCC. Internet users are no longer "willing to forego connectivity while on the move, whether driving a truck across the country, moving a freighter from Europe to a US port, or while on a domestic or international flight," SpaceX said.

The application said that vehicle-mounted terminals will be similar to the Starlink satellite dishes designed for home-Internet service, with some key differences: "SpaceX Service's ESIMs are electrically identical to its previously authorized consumer user terminals but have mountings that allow them to be installed on vehicles, vessels, and aircraft, which are suitable for those environments. SpaceX Service's ESIMs will communicate only with those SpaceX satellites that are visible on the horizon above a minimum elevation angle of 25 degrees. The proposed phased array user terminal will track SpaceX's NGSO [non-geostationary orbit] satellites passing within its field of view. As the terminal steers the transmitting beam, it automatically changes the power to maintain a constant level at the receiving antenna of its target satellite, compensating for variations in antenna gain and path loss associated with the steering angle." While the article speculated that that Starlink terminals could fit Tesla cars and other passenger vehicles, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk clarified on Twitter today that passenger cars are not in the plan because the terminal is "much too big."

In regard to the new Google Pay app, "Google is killing one perfectly fine service and replacing it with a worse, less functional service," writes Ars Technica's Ron Amadeo. "The fun, confusing wrinkle here is that the new and old services are both called 'Google Pay.'" From the report: The old Google Pay service that has been around for years is dying. The app will be shut down in the US on April 5, and if you want to continue using New Google Pay, you'll have to go find and download a totally new app. NFC tap-and-pay functionality won't really change once you set up the new app, but the New Google Pay app won't use your Google account for P2P payments anymore. You'll be required to make a new account. You won't be able to send any money to your new contacts until they download the new app and make a new account, too. On top of all that, the Google Pay website will be stripped of all payment functionality in the US on April 5, and New Google Pay won't support doing anything from the web. You won't be able to transfer money, view payment activity, or see your balance from a browser.

In addition to less convenient access and forcing users to remake their accounts, New Google Pay is also enticing users to switch with new fees for transfers to debit cards. Old Google Pay did this for free, but New Google Pay now has "a fee of 1.5% or $.31 (whichever is higher), when you transfer out money with a debit card."

Google is currently sending out emails to existing users detailing all this. There's also a support page link and a notice at the top of pay.google.com. On the Play Store, Google has already started hiding the old Google Pay app from search results, renamed it "Google Pay (old app)," and updated the app home screen with a message to sign up for the new app.

MIPS Technologies, the company that had been synonymous with the MIPS processor architecture, will now be developing processors based on RISC-V architecture. TuxPhones reports: The MIPS silicon manufacturer is one of the oldest RISC chip manufacturers, used in several systems since the late 80s. Characterized by clean and efficient designs, allowing adaption in varied applications, this company has been considered one of the most innovative in the market during its golden age - to the point that the Windows OS had a MIPS port in the early 90s. However, the company has been struggling with an increasingly lower market share and risked bankruptcy in recent years, ultimately leading to acquisition by start-up Wave Computing, which faced bankruptcy last year.

How this company was reborn just weeks ago, exiting the state of bankruptcy, is surprising, but not at all irrational: in its official statement, (the new) MIPS has become a member of RISC-V International, the non-profit organization managing the fully open-hardware ISA, substantially replacing their current architecture with the de facto open chip standard in its entirety. Licensing of the original MIPS architecture to third parties will probably be managed as before, so that the "old" architecture will remain available upon need. This is officially known as the "8th generation" of MIPS chips, indicating a total architectural gap from the previous seven iterations, essentially leaving the old architecture and fully embracing the new one. The Electronic Engineering Journal says it's likely that the new MIPS will continue to honor pre-existing licensing agreements, but it's unclear what level of support the company will offer for older MIPS-based chip designs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Elon Musk is getting into the Texas power market, with previously unrevealed construction of a gigantic battery connected to an ailing electric grid that nearly collapsed last month. The move marks Tesla's first major foray into the epicenter of the U.S. energy economy. A Tesla subsidiary registered as Gambit Energy Storage LLC is quietly building a more than 100 megawatt energy storage project in Angleton, Texas, a town roughly 40 miles south of Houston. A battery that size could power about 20,000 homes on a hot summer day. Workers at the site kept equipment under cover and discouraged onlookers, but a Tesla logo could be seen on a worker's hard hat and public documents helped confirm the company's role. Property records on file with Brazoria County show Gambit shares the same address as a Tesla facility near the company's auto plant in Fremont, California. A filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission lists Gambit as a Tesla subsidiary. According to a document on the city of Angleton's website, the installation will use lithium iron phosphate batteries that are expected to last 10 to 20 years. The document says that it will generate around $1 million in property tax revenue for the city and the site will be unmanned but remotely monitored.

In a bid to prove that its robot drivers are safer than humans, Waymo simulated dozens of real-world fatal crashes that took place in Arizona over nearly a decade. From a report: The Google spinoff discovered that replacing either vehicle in a two-car crash with its robot-guided minivans would nearly eliminate all deaths, according to data it publicized today. The results are meant to bolster Waymo's case that autonomous vehicles operate more safely than human-driven ones. With millions of people dying in auto crashes globally every year, AV operators are increasingly leaning on this safety case to spur regulators to pass legislation allowing more fully autonomous vehicles on the road.

But that case has been difficult to prove out, thanks to the very limited number of autonomous vehicles operating on public roads today. To provide more statistical support for its argument, Waymo has turned to counterfactuals, or "what if?" scenarios, meant to showcase how its robot vehicles would react in real-world situations. Last year, the company published 6.1 million miles of driving data in 2019 and 2020, including 18 crashes and 29 near-miss collisions. In those incidents where its safety operators took control of the vehicle to avoid a crash, Waymo's engineers simulated what would have happened had the driver not disengaged the vehicle's self-driving system to generate a counterfactual. The company has also made some of its data available to academic researchers.

"The new Google Pay app came out of beta this week, and it marks the first step in a major upheaval in the Google Pay service," writes Ars Technica, complaining "Google is killing one perfectly fine service and replacing it with a worse, less functional service." The fun, confusing wrinkle here is that the new and old services are both called "Google Pay...." The old Google Pay service that has been around for years is dying. The app will be shut down in the U.S. on April 5...

- If you want to continue using New Google Pay, you'll have to go find and download a totally new app.

- NFC tap-and-pay functionality won't really change once you set up the new app, but the New Google Pay app won't use your Google account for P2P payments anymore. You'll be required to make a new account.

- You won't be able to send any money to your new contacts until they download the new app and make a new account, too.

- On top of all that, the Google Pay website will be stripped of all payment functionality in the U.S. on April 5, and New Google Pay won't support doing anything from the web. You won't be able to transfer money, view payment activity, or see your balance from a browser.

- In addition to less convenient access and forcing users to remake their accounts, New Google Pay is also enticing users to switch with new fees for transfers to debit cards. Old Google Pay did this for free, but New Google Pay now has "a fee of 1.5% or $.31 (whichever is higher), when you transfer out money with a debit card..."

The worst part of it all is that, like the move from Google Music to YouTube Music, there is no reward at the end of this transition.
Besides sending out an email, Google also created a support page and a notice at the top of pay.google.com, Ars Technica reports.

But they call it "yet anothre annoying transition... an occurrence that's getting more frequent and more annoying in recent years, thanks to similar Google shutdowns of Google Play Music, Cloud Print, Inbox, Works with Nest, the ongoing Hangouts situation, and many others."

"WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messaging platform used by 2 billion people largely in the global south, has become a particularly troublesome vector for misinformation," writes Quartz — though it's not clear what the answer is: The core of the problem is its use of end-to-end encryption, a security measure that garbles users' messages while they travel from one phone to another so that no one other than the sender and the recipient can read them. Encryption is a crucial privacy protection, but it also prevents WhatsApp from going as far as many of its peers to moderate misinformation. The app has taken some steps to limit the spread of viral messages, but some researchers and fact-checkers argue it should do more, while privacy purists worry the solutions will compromise users' private conversations...

In April 2020, WhatsApp began slowing the spread of "highly forwarded messages," the smartphone equivalent of 1990s chain emails. If a message has already been forwarded five times, you can only forward it to one person or group at a time. WhatsApp claims that simple design tweak cut the spread of viral messages by 70%, and fact-checkers have cautiously cheered the change. But considering that all messages are encrypted, it's impossible to know how much of an impact the cut had on misinformation, as opposed to more benign content like activist organizing or memes. Researchers who joined and monitored several hundred WhatsApp groups in Brazil, India, and Indonesia found that limiting message forwarding slows down viral misinformation, but doesn't necessarily limit how far the messages eventually spread....

This isn't just a semantic argument, says EFF strategy director Danny O'Brien. Even the smallest erosion of encryption protections gives Facebook a toehold to begin scanning messages in a way that could later be abused, and protecting the sanctity of encryption is worth giving up a potential tool for curbing misinformation. "This is a consequence of a secure internet," O'Brien says. "Dealing with the consequences of that is going to be a much more positive step than dealing with the consequences of an internet where no one is secure and no one is private...."

No matter what WhatsApp does, it will have to contend with dueling constituencies: the privacy hawks who see the app's encryption as its most important feature, and the fact-checkers who are desperate for more tools to curb the spread of misinformation on a platform that counts a quarter of the globe among its users.

Whatever Facebook decides will have widespread consequences in a world witnessing the simultaneous rise of fatal lies and techno-authoritarianism.

Reuters reports: The White House on Sunday urged computer network operators to take further steps to gauge whether their systems were targeted amid a hack of Microsoft Corp's Outlook email program, saying a recent software patch still left serious vulnerabilities. "This is an active threat still developing and we urge network operators to take it very seriously," a White House official said, adding that top U.S. security officials were working to decide what next steps to take following the breach...

While Microsoft released a patch last week to shore up flaws in its email software, the remedy still leaves open a so-called back door that can allow access to compromised servers and perpetuating further attacks by others. "We can't stress enough that patching and mitigation is not remediation if the servers have already been compromised, and it is essential that any organization with a vulnerable server take measures to determine if they were already targeted," the White House official said...

The back channels for remote access can impact credit unions, town governments and small business, and have left U.S. officials scrambling to reach victims, with the FBI on Sunday urging them to contact the law enforcement agency. Those affected appear to host Web versions of Microsoft's email program Outlook on their own machines instead of cloud providers, possibly sparing many major companies and federal government agencies, records from the investigation suggest... So far, only a small percentage of infected networks have been compromised through the back door, the source previously told Reuters, but more attacks are expected.

David Plummer is a retired Microsoft operating systems engineer, "going back to the MS-DOS and Windows 95 days." (He adds that in the early '90s he'd fixed a few handle leaks in the early source code of Linux, "and sent my changes off to Linus at Rutgers.")

This weekend on YouTube he shared his thoughts on "the classic confrontation: Windows versus Linux," promising an "epic operating systems face-off." Some highlights: On Usability: "Linux's itself lacks a proper user interface beyond the command line. That command line can be incredibly powerful, particularly if you're adept with Bash or Zsh or similar, but you can't really describe it as particularly usable. Of course most distributions do come with a desktop user interface of some kind if you prefer, but as a bit of a shell designer myself, if I might be so bold, they're generally pretty terrible. At least the Mint distribution looks pretty nice.

"Windows, on the other hand, includes by default a desktop shell interface that, if you set aside the entirely subjective design aesthetics, is professionally designed, usability tested and takes into consideration the varying levels of accessibility required by people with different limitations. In terms of usability, particularly if you do include accessibility in that metric, Windows comes out ahead..."

On Updates: "Windows users are well served by a dedicated Windows Update team at Microsoft, but the process has occasionally had its hiccups and growing pains. It's very easy to update a Linux system, and while there's no professional team sitting by the big red phone ready to respond to Day Zero exploits, the updates do come out with reasonable alacrity, and in some cases you can even update the kernel without rebooting.

"Keep in mind, however, that Linux is a monolithic kernel, which means that it's all one big happy kernel. Almost everything is in there. If they hadn't started to add that ability a few years back, you'd be rebooting for every driver install. The reality is that some parts of the Linux kernel are just going to require a reboot, just as some parts of the Windows system are going to as well. I think we can likely all agree, however, that Windows software is hardly selective about rebooting the system, and you're asked to do it far too often.

"While we're on the topic of upgrades, we can't overlook the fact that upgrades are generally free in the Open Source world, unless you're using a pre-built distribution from a vendor. To it's credit, though, I don't remember the last time Microsoft actually charged for an operating system upgrade if you were just a normal end user or enthusiast. Still, this point goes to Linux."
Plummer also says he agrees with the argument that open source software is more open to security exploits, "simply because, all else equal, it's easy to figure out where the bugs are to exploit in the first place," while proprietary software has professional test organizations hunting for bugs. "I think it's a bit of a fallacy to rely on the 'many eyeballs' approach..."

Yet he still ultimately concludes Linux is more secure simply because the vast universe of Windows makes it a much more attractive target. Especially since most Windows users retain full administrator privileges...

The Seattle Times reports: Haunted by the two deadly crashes of Boeing 737 MAX jets and his agency's role in approving the plane, veteran Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) safety engineer Joe Jacobsen is stepping forward publicly to give the victims' families "a firsthand account of what the truth is." In a detailed letter sent last month to a family that lost their daughter in the second MAX crash in Ethiopia two years ago this week, and in interviews with The Seattle Times, Jacobsen gave the first personal account by an insider of the federal safety agency's response to the MAX crashes...

He believes additional system upgrades are needed beyond Boeing's fix for the MAX that was blessed by the FAA and other regulators.

And Jacobsen argues that the plane would be safer if Boeing simply removed altogether the new software — the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) — that went wrong in the two crashes that killed 346 people. Jacobsen also calls for the replacement of some of the people at "the highest levels of FAA management," whom he blames for creating a culture too concerned with fulfilling the demands of industry. In his letter and interview, Jacobsen also described in more depth than previously reported how an autothrottle system issue may have contributed to the crash in Ethiopia in March 2019.

Boeing and the FAA said in separate statements they believe the MAX is fixed and safe, and that regulators worldwide have validated this conclusion...

A week after the Lion Air crash on Oct. 29, 2018, Jacobsen received an email from a colleague asking if there was an issue paper on MCAS. "This was the first day that I heard about MCAS," he wrote. "We had no issue papers, and if we had, I would have been the engineer responsible for providing technical content and comment on such an issue paper." When he did get a look at the system, Jacobsen said he was "shocked to discover that the airplane was purposely designed and certified to use just one AOA (Angle of Attack) input for a flight critical function."

If given the chance during the original certification, he's certain that he and "6 to 8 of our most experienced engineers in the Seattle office" would have identified that as a serious design flaw because there's "a long history of AOA sensor failures."

Instead, Boeing minimized MCAS and kept the details of its assessment to itself...
The article also argues that Boeing itself didn't grasp the danger of its system. "Michael Teal, 737 MAX chief engineer, testified to Congress that he first learned only after the Lion Air crash that MCAS relied on a single sensor.