Matthew Garrett is a security developer at Google and a Linux contributor who in 2014 won the Free Software Foundation's annual "Advancement of Free Software" award. But now he's asking if we need to re-think what free software is: If users can pay Amazon to provide a hosted version of a piece of software, there's little incentive for them to pay the authors of that software. This has led to various projects adopting license terms such as the Commons Clause that effectively make it nonviable to provide such a service, forcing providers to pay for a commercial use license instead. In general the entities pushing for these licenses are VC backed companies who are themselves benefiting from free software written by volunteers that they give nothing back to, so I have very little sympathy. But it does raise a larger issue -- how do we ensure that production of free software isn't just a mechanism for the transformation of unpaid labour into corporate profit...?

At the same time, people are spending more time considering some of the other ethical outcomes of free software. Copyleft ensures that you can share your code with your neighbour without your neighbour being able to deny the same freedom to others, but it does nothing to prevent your neighbour using your code to deny other fundamental, non-software, freedoms. As governments make more and more use of technology to perform acts of mass surveillance, detention, and even genocide, software authors may feel legitimately appalled at the idea that they are helping enable this by allowing their software to be used for any purpose. The JSON license includes a requirement that "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil", but the lack of any meaningful clarity around what "Good" and "Evil" actually mean makes it hard to determine whether it achieved its aims.

As stewards of the free software definition, the Free Software Foundation should be taking the lead in ensuring that these issues are discussed. The priority of the board right now should be to restructure itself to ensure that it can legitimately claim to represent the community and play the leadership role it's been failing to in recent years, otherwise the opportunity will be lost and much of the activist energy that underpins free software will be spent elsewhere. If free software is going to maintain relevance, it needs to continue to explain how it interacts with contemporary social issues. If any organisation is going to claim to lead the community, it needs to be doing that.

"Despite looking to make DNS-over-HTTPS the default for its American users, Mozilla has assured culture secretary Nicky Morgan that this won't be the case in the UK," reports Gizmodo: DNS-over-HTTPS has been fairly controversial, with the Internet Services Providers Association nominating Mozilla for an 'Internet Villain' over the whole thing, saying it will "bypass UK filtering obligations and parental controls, undermining internet safety standards in the UK."

In his letter to Morgan, Mozilla vice president of global policy, trust and security, Alan Davidson, stressed that the company "has no plans to turn on our DNS-over-HTTPS feature by default in the United Kingdom and will not do so without further engagement with public and private stakeholders". He did add that Mozilla does "strongly believe that DNS-over-HTTPS would offer real security benefits to UK citizens. The DNS is one of the oldest parts of the internet's architecture, and remains largely untouched by efforts to make the web more secure.

"Because current DNS requests are unencrypted, the road that connects your citizens to their online destination is still open and used by bad actors looking to violate user privacy, attack communications, and spy on browsing activity. People's most personal information, such as their health-related data, can be tracked, collected, leaked and used against people's best interest. Your citizens deserve to be protected from that threat."

It's been five years since the release of CentOS 7, but Indy1 (Slashdot reader #99,447) reminded us that CentOS 8 finally arrived this week -- along with a big new plan for rolling releases.

It Pro Today points out that CentOS already runs on about 16% of all servers, "a number that's only bested by Ubuntu with an estimated 28%," and says that this move "points to CentOS taking a more important role within Red Hat [and] indicates a sea change not only for CentOS, but for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) development pipeline." According to Karanbir Singh, CentOS project lead and Red Hat engineer, Stream will contain the code under development for the next minor RHEL release, which will allow the developer community to discuss, suggest, and contribute features and fixes into RHEL more quickly. "To do this, Red Hat Engineering is planning to move parts of RHEL development into the CentOS Project in order to collaborate with everyone on updates to RHEL," he said.

This would seem to mean that not only will CentOS remain under Red Hat's care and protection, but that CentOS will play a more important role within Red Hat going forward.

OneHundredAndTen writes: According to this Forbes article, the Pentagon is worried that many in the USA's military nerve center claim to use Agile methods, when in fact, they aren't. Those responsible for these things at the Pentagon have therefore come up with a Detecting Agile BS document, so people can tell when they are doing Agile vs. when they are doing BS Agile. The implicit conclusion seems to be the usual "if it doesn't work for you, you are not doing it right."
The article was written by the author of The Age of Agile: How Smart Companies Are Transforming the Way Work Gets Done, a 2018 book arguing "An unstoppable business revolution is under way -- and it is Agile. Companies that embrace Agile Management learn to connect everyone and everything...all the time. They can deliver instant, intimate, frictionless value on a large scale." The book's author is Stephen Denning, who spent four years as Program Director of Knowledge Management during his decades of management at the World Bank.

His Forbes article this week warns "effective software development at DoD is not just a narrow issue affecting a few software developers. Questions of national cyber security and the integrity of the upcoming U.S. presidential election may depend on it... Fresh thinking and Agile mindsets are urgently needed."

"Social media platforms based in the U.S. including Facebook and WhatsApp will be forced to share users' encrypted messages with British police under a new treaty between the two countries, " reports Bloomberg, citing "a person familiar with the matter." The accord, which is set to be signed by next month, will compel social media firms to share information to support investigations into individuals suspected of serious criminal offenses including terrorism and pedophilia, the person said.

What if the problems with social media just can't be solved by a for-profit platform?

Writing in the New York Times, a former Tumblr executive argues the solution might require the creation of a nonprofit publicly-funded social media platform. The mechanics of how a public social media product would work have been fairly well figured out by now: It would be a digital platform that allows people to post and share a variety of media -- pictures, audio, video, text -- to other people in the network. I personally would structure it a little more like Instagram or Tumblr, where I was one of the early employees, than Twitter or Facebook. In other words, it should be built to prioritize sharing things you love over getting attention by simply being loud online... A nonprofit model eliminates most of the incentives for bad behavior. The network would not be under pressure from investors to generate growth at all costs. There would be no incentive to allow fake accounts; in fact the incentives would be opposite, since fake accounts impose costs on the network and provide no benefits.

Unlike for-profit social media, public social media would be explicitly noncommercial -- no brand accounts allowed. In fact, there would be no accounts for any organizations -- this network is for people only. An account on a public media platform would be tied to a real-world, local identity, like a driver's license or library card. Anonymity online has real benefits, and a user name doesn't have to be your real name. The public social media network could keep this information hashed, unscrambled only when action against a user is required, which would make it easier to crack down on fake and troll accounts...

In some ways this structure is very similar to what Facebook once was. TheFacebook started as a platform limited to Harvard students. This restricted access helped behavior on the network: Only people with a verified real-world identity and accountability could get in. This is not the case today with Facebook, of course, or with any other for-profit social platform that depends on getting as many accounts as possible... Public social media is an idea that our civic space can be improved by the creation of a platform organized in the public interest. A thriving digital social network is as vital to the public sphere as a public library, public schools, or even a public water fountain.

Let's build one.
He argues that this community could then work through any issues that come up, adding "This is the key work of a democracy, and establishing those community standards shouldn't be left, as they are now, for any for-profit, unaccountable company to decide."

JustAnotherOldGuy quotes ItsFOSS: The GNOME Foundation is facing a lawsuit from Rothschild Patent Imaging, LLC. Rothschild allege that Shotwell, a free and open source personal photo manager infringes its patent.

Neil McGovern, Executive Director for the GNOME Foundation says "We have retained legal counsel and intend to vigorously defend against this baseless suit. Due to the ongoing litigation, we unfortunately cannot make any further comments at this time."

While Neil cannot make any further comments on this issue, let me throw some lights on this matter. The patent in the question deals with wireless image distribution. The patent is ridiculous because it could mean any software that transfers images from one device to another could be violating this patent.
BoingBoing adds: Rothschild was only recently awarded a patent relating to wifi image transfers, but he has a long history taking companies like Apple and Samsung to court. His LLC was named in 2015 as the single largest nonpracticing entity by defendant count; a NPE is a company or person who holds patents but makes no products, instead pursuing companies that do for settlements. One website counts 30 lawsuits filed since June involving Rothschild Patent Imaging LLC, with more than 100 ongoing.
ZDNet argues the suit " doesn't make much sense. But when has that ever stopped a patent troll?"

dryriver shares a report from the BBC: Facebook is creating an immersive environment called Horizon to tempt people into spending more time in virtual reality. The VR app will be a mix of social places where users can mingle and chat, and other areas where they can play games against each other. People will inhabit and explore the virtual spaces via a cartoon avatar. The app will be made available and tested in early 2020, by a small group of Facebook users. Details about Horizon and early footage of the virtual space were shown off at Facebook's Oculus Connect 6 developer conference this week. Facebook said anyone using Horizon would be able to call on human "guides" to help them navigate and become more familiar with the virtual environment. The guides will not be "moderators" who will police behavior, said Facebook. It added that it would include tools that let people manage how they interact with other users. It will also have options that let people shape and build their own part of the environment. They will also be able to design their own avatars. The entire space has been given a cartoon-like feel as it is intended to be used on Facebook's Oculus Quest headset, which does not have the high resolution graphics of PC-linked headsets.

Sam Machkovech, a reporter for Ars Technica, who has tried Horizon, said Facebook had put "a ton of work" into the version he saw, to make it as welcoming as possible. But he noted that Horizon was "yet another" combination of apps, chat and avatars which Facebook had produced in just a few years. He suggested that it was still searching for a good combination that proved properly tempting to users. "We're still waiting for Facebook to inspire confidence that it will launch a social-VR app and stick with it for more than two years," he wrote. Anyone interested in joining Horizon can sign up to be an early tester. You can watch the strange YouTube pre-rendered CGI ad for Facebook Horizon here.

NASA engineers want to create a rocket engine powered by nuclear fusion. "A nuclear rocket engine would be twice as efficient as the chemical engines powering rockets today," reports Wired. "But despite their conceptual simplicity, small-scale fission reactors are challenging to build and risky to operate because they produce toxic waste. Space travel is dangerous enough without having to worry about a nuclear meltdown. But for future human missions to the moon and Mars, NASA believes such risks may be necessary." From the report: At the center of NASA's nuclear rocket program is Bill Emrich, the man who literally wrote the book on nuclear propulsion. "You can do chemical propulsion to Mars, but it's really hard," says Emrich. "Going further than the moon is much better with nuclear propulsion." Emrich has been researching nuclear propulsion since the early '90s, but his work has taken on a sense of urgency as the Trump administration pushes NASA to put boots on the moon ASAP in preparation for a journey to Mars. Although you don't need a nuclear engine to get to the moon, it would be an invaluable testing ground for the technology, which will almost certainly be used on any crewed mission to Mars.

Let's get one thing clear: A nuclear engine won't hoist a rocket into orbit. That's too risky; if a rocket with a hot nuclear reactor blew up on the launch pad, you could end up with a Chernobyl-scale disaster. Instead, a regular chemically propelled rocket would hoist a nuclear-powered spacecraft into orbit, which would only then fire up its nuclear reactor. The massive amount of energy produced by these reactors could be used to sustain human outposts on other worlds and cut the travel time to Mars in half. [...] But before a nuclear rocket engine gets its first flight, NASA needs to overhaul its regulations for launching nuclear materials. In August, the White House issued a memo that tasked NASA with developing safety protocols for operating nuclear reactors in space. Once they're adopted by NASA, the stage will be set for the first flight of a nuclear engine as soon as 2024. This coincides with Trump's deadline to return American astronauts to the moon; maybe this time they'll be hitching a ride on a nuclear rocket.

Apple has applied for a patent to use the logo on the back of its phones as a notification light. The patent application, which was first spotted by Apple Insider, outlines how the "adjustable decoration" could respond to events such as "incoming communication" or "a calendar reminder" by changing its appearance or flashing to attract your attention. The Verge reports: The feature makes sense for Apple's products. After all, the company has a history of illuminating its logo on its older MacBooks, even if it dropped the design feature with the laptop's 2015 redesign. It wouldn't be a massive leap for it to bring back its illuminated logo with a little practical functionality added. The application makes frequent references to "cellular telephone" calls as part of its description, which heavily suggests that Apple is considering using the feature on a future iPhone. However, the patent also includes images showing a series of "illustrative electronic devices" including a laptop, a tablet, and what appears to be an iMac.

German investigators say they have shut down a data processing center installed in a former NATO bunker (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source) that hosted sites dealing in drugs and other illegal activities. Seven people were arrested. The Washington Post reports: Officials said Friday that the former military bunker in Traben-Trarbach, a picturesque town on the Mosel River in western Germany, was acquired in 2013 by a Dutch man who turned it into a heavily secured data processing center. Prosecutor Juergen Bauer said 13 people are under investigation, including three Germans and seven Dutch citizens. Seven were arrested in raids Thursday. They are suspected of membership in a criminal organization because of a tax offense, as well as being accessories to hundreds of thousands of offenses involving drugs, counterfeit money, forged documents and the distribution of child pornography.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A new study has found the FCC's primary justification for repealing net neutrality was indisputably false. For years, big ISPs and Trump FCC boss Ajit Pai have told anyone who'd listen that the FCC's net neutrality rules, passed in 2015 and repealed last year in a flurry of controversy and alleged fraud, dramatically stifled broadband investment across the United States. Repeal the rules, Pai declared, and U.S. broadband investment would explode. But a new study from George Washington University indicates that Pai's claims were patently false. The study took a closer look at the earnings reports and SEC filings of 8,577 unique companies from Q1 2009 through Q3 2018 to conclude that the passage and repeal of the rules had no meaningful impact on broadband investment. Several hundred of these were telecom companies.

"The results of the paper are clear and should be both unsurprising and uncontroversial," The researchers said. "The key finding is there were no impacts on telecommunication industry investment from the net neutrality policy changes. Neither the 2010 or 2015 U.S. net neutrality rule changes had any causal impact on telecommunications investment." While the study is the biggest yet to do so, it's not the first to reach this conclusion. "This paper once again validates what the FCC found in 2015 and what net neutrality advocates have said for years -- that neither the net neutrality rules nor Title II classification had any impact on ISP investment," Gigi Sohn, a former FCC lawyer who helped craft the FCC's 2015 rules, said.

"Not surprisingly, the ISPs and their friends at the FCC and the Hill keep saying the opposite, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary," she added. "Hopefully this comprehensive study, which studies ISP investment over nearly a decade, will put this matter to rest."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Yes, 5G is coming and data rates will improve, but we, the mobile industry, still have a lot of work to do. We could regale you with litanies of woe about roaming and hand-offs, or belabor the small cell backhaul density logjam. But perhaps the best example of roadblocks to 5G is much easier to grasp -- Heat. 5G phones get hot. Really hot. Probably not hot enough to ignite your battery (probably), but enough to generate a definite burning sensation in your pants pockets. At Mobile World Congress in February, we spoke with an engineer from Sony who was demo'ing a phone (behind glass) that was clocking 1 Gbps speeds. Wow, fast. We asked the engineer why it was not going faster and he said "It overheats." A good solid answer, from a nuts-and-bolts-and-antenna person. We will wager any amount that at next year's show, no one on the floor will be as open about this problem.

The big improvement in data rates for 5G will only come with mmWave radios. This is a whole new spectrum band that allows for really high data rates (again, let's set aside the whole densification issue for now). The trouble is that mmWave radios generate a lot of heat. To greatly oversimplify, mmWave frequencies are pretty close to microwave frequencies, as in the thing we use to reheat our lunches. From some of our very recent industry conversations we know that the handset industry is using a tried-and-tested method for dealing with this problem -- ignoring it and hoping it goes away. The whole issue strikes us as one of those issues where middle management really does not want to raise the subject with senior management who have wrapped themselves so tightly around the 5G flagpole. "Uh boss, your pants are literally on fire."

Canonical today released the official beta for the upcoming Ubuntu Linux 19.10. Code-named "Eoan Ermine," it features Linux kernel 5.3. From a report: There are several great desktop environments from which to choose too, such as KDE Plasma, Budgie, and the default GNOME. Ubuntu 19.10 is not a long term support (LTS) version, sadly, so support for the stable release will only be a mere 9 months. "The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the beta pre-release of the Ubuntu 19.10 Desktop, Server, and Cloud products. Codenamed "Eoan Ermine," 19.10 continues Ubuntu's proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. The team has been hard at work through this cycle, introducing new features and fixing bugs," says Adam Conrad, Software Engineer, Canonical.

Federal accident investigators called for broad changes in decades-old engineering principles and design assumptions related to pilot emergency responses, the first formal U.S. safety recommendations stemming from two fatal Boeing 737 MAX crashes. From a report: As part of lessons learned from the crashes that took 346 lives and grounded the global MAX fleet, the National Transportation Safety Board suggested that Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration used unrealistic tests to initially certify the aircraft to carry passengers [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. The board also urged the plane maker and the FAA to pay more attention to interactions between humans and cockpit computers to ensure safety. The board wants Boeing and the FAA to reassess -- and potentially jettison -- what senior investigators portrayed as overly optimistic assumptions about the speed and effectiveness of cockpit-crew reactions to complex automation failures.

Five of the NTSB's seven recommendations, released Thursday, called for the use of more-objective methods to predict likely responses of airline pilots in such cases when automation goes haywire. The board's announcement challenged long-held industry and FAA practices that largely use the nearly instantaneous responses of highly trained test pilots -- rather than those of average pilots, who typically have less experience -- to verify the safety of new jetliner models. Some of the recommendations cover future airliner designs, not just the MAX.

Anyone who has taken an Uber, sent a Slack message or enjoyed a free beer at a WeWork owes a little something to Masayoshi Son. The New York Times: Through his Japanese conglomerate SoftBank and a $100 billion investment fund, Mr. Son plowed huge sums into these and other companies that aim to change how people work, travel and live. His investments enabled the young companies to throw caution to the wind and run up big losses as they expanded at a breakneck pace in recent years. Even in the start-up world, where idealism is abundant and losses are a badge of honor, Mr. Son's approach and ambition stood out.

His early bet on the Chinese technology giant Alibaba earned a return of more than $100 billion and cemented his reputation as a farsighted investor. He has outlined a 300-year plan to make SoftBank a leader in artificial intelligence, robotics and other advanced technologies. But this year, his grand designs collided with reality. In what may turn out to be a reckoning for Mr. Son, Wall Street has started running from companies backed by SoftBank and its Vision Fund. The chief executive of WeWork stepped down this week after a botched initial public offering. Uber's stock has fallen nearly 30 percent from its I.P.O. price in May. And shares in Slack, which provides a workplace messaging service, have tumbled more than 40 percent from their first day of trading in June.

After briefly breaking up, Sony Pictures and Marvel have found a way to get back in the Spider-Man business together. From a report: Their new film even has a release date: July 16, 2021. "I am thrilled that Spidey's journey in the MCU will continue, and I and all of us at Marvel Studios are very excited that we get to keep working on it," said Marvel topper Kevin Feige. "Spider-Man is a powerful icon and hero whose story crosses all ages and audiences around the globe. He also happens to be the only hero with the superpower to cross cinematic universes, so as Sony continues to develop their own Spidey-verse you never know what surprises the future might hold."

Also, as part of the arrangement, Spider-Man will appear in a future Marvel movie. In 2015, Marvel and Sony unveiled an unprecedented intra-studio partnership that produced not only two well-regarded and massive hits with Spider-Man: Homecoming and this summer's Spider-Man: Far From Home, but it also took the character, whose movie rights are owned by Sony, and put him into the Marvel Cinematic Universe where the character became one of its key players. But the co-parenting deal fell apart not too long after the release of Far From Home, spilling into the open in August.

The "OK" hand gesture is now a hate symbol, according to a new report by the Anti-Defamation League. From a report: The ADL added that symbol along with several others on Thursday to its long-standing database of slogans and symbols used by extremists. The finger-and-thumb OK sign is universally known for meaning everything is all right or approval of something. But the ADL says while not everyone means it to be hateful, the sign has been co-opted by the alt-right.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vox: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says his company is developing a set of laws to regulate facial recognition technology that it plans to share with federal lawmakers. In February, the company, which has faced escalating scrutiny over its controversial facial recognition tech, called Amazon Rekognition, published guidelines it said it hoped lawmakers would consider enacting. Now Amazon is taking another step, Bezos told reporters in a surprise appearance following Amazon's annual Alexa gadget event in Seattle on Wednesday.

"Our public policy team is actually working on facial recognition regulations; it makes a lot of sense to regulate that," Bezos said in response to a reporter's question. The idea is that Amazon will write its own draft of what it thinks federal legislation should look like, and it will then pitch lawmakers to adopt as much of it as possible. "It's a perfect example of something that has really positive uses, so you don't want to put the brakes on it," Bezos added. "But, at the same time, there's also potential for abuses of that kind of technology, so you do want regulations. It's a classic dual-use kind of technology." He did not provide details on what's in the proposed legislation. ACLU Northern CA Attorney Jacob Snow said in a statement: "It's a welcome sign that Amazon is finally acknowledging the dangers of face surveillance. But we've seen this playbook before. Once companies realize that people are demanding strong privacy protections, they sweep in, pushing weak rules that won't protect consumer privacy and rights. Cities across the country are voting to ban face surveillance, while Amazon is pushing its surveillance tech deeper into communities."

Google's hyperlocal news service called Bulletin is shutting down in November. Android Police reports: The idea behind bulletin was that users could post news from their neighborhood, allowing others in the same area to hear stories that would otherwise be lost in the shuffle. The service also relied on AMP to load pages quickly. Google started with just a few cities, but Bulletin later expanded to all of the U.S. and Canada. Bulletin never gained traction, probably because Google failed to promote it in any way, and now it's shutting down.

Google says Bulletin will close for good on November 22nd, at which time it will delete all remaining Bulletin content. If you used Bulletin and would like to save your stories, Google has added an export option. Google suggests Bulletin users can start posting on the Blogger platform, but that naturally lacks all the location-aware features of Bulletin.