If you're looking to try out a Linux distro that is not based on Ubuntu, Mageia 7 might be worth your consideration. It arrives two years after the release of Mageia 6 -- so unsurprisingly, the changelog is fairly long. The Mageia developers share the significant packages that have been updated below. Significant package updates include: kernel 5.1.14, rpm 4.14.2, dnf 4.2.6, Mesa 19.1, Plasma 5.15.4, GNOME 3.32, Xfce 4.14pre, Firefox 67, Chromium 73, and LibreOffice 6.2.3. Donald Stewart, Mageia developer, adds: There are lots of new features, exciting updates, and new versions of your favorite programs, as well as support for very recent hardware. There are classical installer images for both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures, as well as live DVDs for 64-bit Plasma, GNOME, Xfce, and 32-bit Xfce.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Ahead of its first day in a U.S. federal claims court in Washington DC, Oracle has outlined its position against the Pentagon's award of the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract to Amazon Web Services. Big Red's lengthy filing questions the basis of Uncle Sam's procurement procedure as well as Amazon's hiring of senior Department of Defense staff involved in that procurement process. Oracle's first day in court is set for 10 July. The JEDI deal could be worth up to $10 billion over 10 years. The Department of Defense handed the contract to AWS after deciding that only Amazon and Microsoft could meet the minimum security standards required in time.

Oracle's filing said that U.S. "warfighters and taxpayers have a vested interest in obtaining the best services through lawful, competitive means... Instead, DoD (with AWS's help) has delivered a conflict-ridden mess in which hundreds of contractors expressed an interest in JEDI, over 60 responded to requests for information, yet only the two largest global cloud providers can clear the qualification gates." The company said giving JEDI, with its "near constant technology refresh requirements", to just one company was in breach of procurement rules. It accused the DoD of gaming the metrics used in the process to restrict competition for the contract. Oracle also accused Amazon of breaking the rules by hiring two senior DoD staff, Deap Ubhi and Anthony DeMartino, who were involved in the JEDI procurement process. Ubhi is described as "lead PM." A third name is redacted in the publicly released filing. The DoD, which is expected to make an offer to settle the case in late August, said in a statement: "We anticipate a court decision prior to that time. The DoD will comply with the court's decision. While the acquisition and litigation processes are proceeding independently the JEDI implementation will be subject to the determination of the court."

The 50-page filing can be found here (PDF).

Facebook said on Tuesday that it's downgrading content that makes dubious health claims, including posts that try to sell or promote "miracle cures." From a report: Big technology platforms have faced growing criticism over the spread of fake or misleading content. Reports emerged last year that Facebook had been featuring homemade cancer "cures" more prominently than genuine information from renowned organizations, such as cancer research charities. And a few months back, a separate report found that YouTube videos were promoting bleach as a cure for autism. Facebook also recently said it would crack down on anti-vaccine content. The fight against digital misinformation is ongoing, and it isn't limited to spurious health cures. "In order to help people get accurate health information and the support they need, it's imperative that we minimize health content that is sensational or misleading," Facebook product manager Travis Yeh wrote in a blog post.

The Google Earth team recently released a beta preview of a WebAssembly port of Google Earth. The new port runs in Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers, including Edge (Canary version) and Opera, as well as Firefox. From a report: The port thus brings cross-browser support to the existing Earth For Web version, which uses the native C++ codebase and Chrome's Native Client (NaCl) technology. Difference in multi-threading support between browsers leads to varying performance. Google Earth was released 14 years ago and allowed users to explore the earth through the comfort of their home. This original version of Google Earth was released as a native C++ based application intended for desktop install because rendering the whole world in real time required advanced technologies that weren't available in the browser. Google Earth was subsequently introduced for Android and iOS smartphones, leveraging the existing C++ codebase through technologies such as NDK and Objective-C++. In 2017, Google Earth was released for the Chrome browser, using Google's Native Client (NaCl) to compile the C++ code and run it in the browser.

A leading U.S. retail group, whose members include Walmart, Target, Best Buy and others, has penned a letter to the Federal Trade Commission that details its concerns over big tech companies' dominance. From a report: The letter specifically calls out Amazon and Google for their control over the majority of internet product searches, how price and product information reaches consumers and other concerns. The letter, written by The Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA), urges the FTC to take a closer look at the big tech platforms. The group also offers to help in any antitrust investigations. "It should...be quite concerning to the Commission that Amazon and Google control the majority of all Internet product search, and can very easily affect whether and how price and product information actually reaches consumers," write the RILA. "Moreover, these firms are extraordinarily adept at determining how small changes in the way in which information is conveyed affect consumer behavior -- given that nearly everything they do is driven by big-data science and machine learning models," the letter continues.

"To put the matter as simply as possible, a firm does not need to have the power to control prices if it has the power to control effective access to price information," it says. The RILA says it understands the consumer benefits to e-commerce, in that it provides fast and efficient access to products at a scale that exceeds what's possible in the physical realm. But it also presents their case where the major tech firms are called out as "bottleneck technology platforms," where information about products is not transparently shared with consumers.

From a report: Apple's Memoji may have become the more popular 3D avatar feature for smartphones, but Xiaomi wants people to know that its similarly-named version -- Mimoji -- came first, despite increasingly confusing overlap between the apps' names and features. Moreover, it's apparently threatening legal action against writers who call it a copycat without providing proof. In September 2017, Apple introduced Animoji as an iPhone X-exclusive component of Messages, enabling the high-end smartphone's users to see their facial expressions rendered in augmented reality as one of 12 animated emoji glyphs, including pig, fox, rabbit, panda, and poop icons. [...]

Writers and users in China found the similarities similar enough to call Xiaomi's version a clone, but after a day of "internal self-examination," the company challenged that on the Weibo social network. As Gizmochina notes, PR head Xu Jieyun posted the app's naming timeline, and said that the "functional logic difference between the two products is huge." It also promised "the next phase of action" against people who said it was copying Apple's Memoji without proof.

No, it's not just you -- major websites across the internet are down as of Tuesday morning. From a report: That's because Cloudflare is experiencing issues, according to the website-hosting platform itself and hundreds of tweets from frustrated social media users. Cloudflare is an internet-hosting platform that many internet services rely on to remain functioning and protected in the case of a distributed denial-of-services (DDoS) attack. An outage from Cloudflare affects internet services globally. Flightradar, a site that tracks flights, is down, for example. And so is Coinbase Pro, a cryptocurrency service.

MojoKid writes: NVIDIA just launched three new GeForce RTX gaming GPUs to battle against AMD's forthcoming Radeon RX 5700 series. The GeForce RTX 2080 Super, GeForce RTX 2070 Super and GeForce RTX 2060 Super will all be shipping this month. GeForce RTX 2070 Super and RTX 2060 Super cards are out making the rounds in benchmark reviews, while the RTX 2080 Super will arrive in a couple of weeks. The GeForce RTX 2070 Super is more than just an overclocked RTX 2070 but actually based on the GeForce RTX 2080's TU104 NVIDIA Turing GPU with 40 active SMs, for a total of 2,560 CUDA cores at 1,605MHz and 1,770MHz base and boost clocks, respectively. The RTX 2060 Super is still based on the original TU106 GPU, but it has four additional SMs enabled, which brings the CUDA core count up to 2,176 (from 1,920) at a somewhat higher 1470MHz base clock and boost clock 30MHz lower at 1,650MHz.

There is an additional 2GB of GDDR6 memory on the card too for a total of 8GB now. Performance-wise, both cards are significant upgrades over the originals, with roughly 10 -- 23 percent gains, depending on the resolution or application. The GeForce RTX 2070 Super is often faster than the pricier AMD Radeon VII, especially at 1440p. At 4K, however, the Radeon VII's memory bandwidth advantage often gives it an edge. The new GeForce RTX 2060 Super is faster than a Radeon RX Vega 64 more often than not. It will be interesting to see how these cards compete with AMD's Radeon RX 5700 Navi-based card when they arrive later this month. NVIDIA could have just thrown a wrench in the works for AMD.

Google's internet freedom moonshot has gotten glowing attention for its ambitious projects. But current and former employees, leaked documents, and internal messages reveal a grim reality. From a report: It's an organization that over the years has earned a seemingly endless run of glowing press coverage: Jigsaw has been called the "internet justice league," an "elite think tank," and a team that is "fighting the darkest parts of the internet." While trying to save the internet from censorship, extremists, and hackers may sound like one of the best jobs in tech, more than a dozen current and former employees of Jigsaw told Motherboard that the reality inside Google's moonshot is bleak. [...]

Current and former Jigsaw employees describe a toxic workplace environment, mismanagement, poor leadership, HR complaints that haven't resulted in action, retaliation against employees who speak up, and a chronic failure to retain talent, particularly women engineers and researchers. Sources describe a place full of well-intentioned people who are undermined by their own leaders; an organization that, despite the breathless headlines it has garnered, has done little to actually make the internet any better. Jigsaw's internal problems are driving away employees. Since mid-2018, a total of roughly two dozen Jigsaw employees have left, according to sources on the team. As of this week, Jigsaw has about 60 employees, according to a current employee.

PolygamousRanchKid shares a report from Engadget: Samsung hasn't commented much on its decision to delay the Galaxy Fold and address design flaws, but it's opening up a little today. The company's electronics division CEO, DJ Koh, told those at a media event that he "pushed [the phone] through before it was ready." The setback was "embarrassing," he added. While Koh didn't elaborate on what happened, the statement suggests that Samsung was in a hurry to get the Fold out the door and claim some bragging rights. The Fold was supposed to arrive in late April, but early reviewers quickly discovered problems, including a display cover that was too easy to peel off and gaps that allowed debris to get behind the foldable screen. It was all too easy to break the sensitive panel -- and that would have been a problem with any phone, let alone one costing $1,980. Koh noted that Samsung had over 2,000 devices in the field and "defined all the issues," but didn't give an answer as to when the Fold might go back on sale.

Officials from Lake City, Florida, have fired an IT employee last week after the city was forced to approve a gigantic ransomware payment of nearly $500,000 last Monday. The employee, whose name was not released, was fired on Friday, according to local media reports, who cited the Lake City mayor. ZDNet reports: Lake City's IT network was infected with malware on June 10. The city described the incident as a "triple threat." In reality, an employee opened a document they received via email, which infected the city's network with the Emotet trojan, which later downloaded the TrickBot trojan, and later, the Ryuk ransomware. The latter spread to the city's entire IT network and encrypted files. Hackers eventually demanded a ransom to let the city regain access to its systems. The city's leadership approved a ransom payment last Monday, which was paid the next day, on Tuesday. The city's IT staff started decrypting files on the same day.

carbonnation writes: As Spock so elegantly opined, "Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." Today Stanford U researchers presented the clearest proof to date that self-sacrifice can also benefit wind farms. In their demonstration at an Alberta wind farm, one turbine sacrifices a fifth of its generating potential to enable better performance by neighboring turbines, boosting the group's collective output. And all it takes to harness this altruistic behavior is a small (but intelligent) tweak to their control systems. "It is called 'wake steering' because rotors are turned about their towers to point slightly away from the oncoming wind and thus deflect their wakes away from downstream turbines," reports IEEE Spectrum. "To determine the best yaw angle for their experiment, the Stanford team fed five years of wind speed, wind direction and power generation data from the six test turbines to their proprietary optimization algorithm. Combining that data with a simple wind model, the algorithm projected that yawing each of the five upstream turbines about 20 degrees to the north would maximize the group's generation from the northwest winds."

Next, since the researchers couldn't reprogram the control systems running at Pincher Creek, they repositioned the direction-tracking wind vanes atop the turbines' nacelles during the 10-day test and thereby tricked the control system to turn 20 degrees off the wind. The results were significant: power generation rose 13 percent under 7-8 meters per second (mps) wind speeds. "Steering had a still greater impact amidst slower northwest winds by reducing the times when the wind hitting turbines fell below the 5 mps -- the threshold at which they automatically shut down," the report adds. "For 5-6 mps winds wake steering boosted generation by up to 47 percent."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Facebook has been exploited to act as a distribution platform for a set of Remote Access Trojans (RATs) for years, researchers say. According to Check Point Research, a "large-scale" campaign has been operating under Facebook's radar since at least 2014 throughout a campaign related to politics in Libya. The aim of the operation has been to spread RATs including Houdini, Remcos, and SpyNote. Tens of thousands of victims from Libya, Europe, the US, and China are believed to have been compromised. The threat actor behind the campaign has used the political turmoil in Libya to their advantage. Libya's National Army commander, Khalifa Haftar, has been impersonated for years and a page apparently operated by the public figure was actually a central point for the distribution of malware.

The page impersonating Haftar was created in April 2019 and has since attracted over 11,000 followers. Posts were shared with political themes and links claiming to share leaked intelligence reports and material, but if someone interested in Libyan politics clicked on the URLs, they would instead be sent to malicious content. Malicious VBE and WSF files for Windows machines, as well as malware-laden APK files for the mobile Android operating system, would then be downloaded and upon execution would install a Trojan. The malware was hosted on public services including Google Drive, Box, and Dropbox. The researchers say over 30 Facebook pages have been spreading approximately 40 malicious links since 2014 and one of them has over 100,000 followers.

"In order to avoid any suspicion, the pages in question would also publish legitimate content, most commonly related to news in Libya," the report adds. "Occasionally, other content -- such as download links to fake applications for watching football matches for free or malicious VPN services -- would also be released." Facebook says they have taken down the pages for violating their policies.

Virginia has amended an existing law in the Commonwealth to impose criminal penalties on the distribution of non-consensual "deepfake" images and videos. The amendment was made earlier this year and goes into effect today, making Virginia one of the first states to make a law covering deepfakes. Ars Technica reports: The new law amends existing law in the Commonwealth that defines distribution of nudes or sexual imagery without the subject's consent -- often called revenge porn -- as a Class 1 misdemeanor. The new bill updated the law by adding a category of "falsely created videographic or still image" to the text. New laws in Virginia take effect on July 1. The state's General Assembly passed the bill in early March, and it was signed into law by Gov. Ralph Northam later that month.

On July 1st, 1979, Sony revolutionized the way we listen to music when it released the iconic Walkman TPS-L2, the first real portable music player. "Boomboxes and portable radios had been around for a while, but the Walkman made portable music private, ushering in a whole new era of people listening to music away from home," writes Chaim Gartenberg for The Verge. The Walkman stood the test of time by continuing to sell well even through the CD era. "[It] would go on to see numerous hardware iterations over the years, including 'Discman' CD models and MiniDisc players, as well as more modern portable media player devices that Sony still sells today," writes Gartenberg. It wasn't until Apple unveiled the iPod in 2001 and digital downloads began to dominate that Walkman sales started to plummet.

What do you remember about the Sony Walkman? Do you have any fond memories of the music player that are worth sharing? Let us know in a comment.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Tesla's head of production in charge of its Fremont factory, Peter Hochholdinger, is going to hold a similar position at Lucid Motors, an electric car startup looking to soon move to production. Lucid Motors has kind of spun out of Tesla. It was started by a former Tesla board member and executive and it is led by Peter Rawlinson, the former chief engineer of the Tesla Model S. Several other Tesla engineers and executives have also joined the startup and they are now also adding Hochholdinger to the team. Today, the startup announced that the Tesla and Audi veteran is joining as Vice President of Manufacturing and he will lead "Lucid's global manufacturing operations, commencing with Lucid's plant in Casa Grande, Arizona, as well as manufacturing engineering." Rawlinson commented on the hire: "We are delighted to welcome Peter to the Lucid team. Peter's extensive experience and proven leadership in premium-vehicle manufacturing will prove invaluable as we continue our progress towards the launch of Lucid Air and future models. In joining Lucid, Peter is empowered to create an industry-leading manufacturing process that will deliver the quality products our discerning customers demand and deserve."

Germany's cyber-security agency is working on a set of minimum rules that modern web browsers must comply with in order to be considered secure. From a report: The new guidelines are currently being drafted by the German Federal Office for Information Security (or the Bundesamt fur Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik -- BSI), and they'll be used to advise government agencies and companies from the private sector on what browsers are safe to use. A first version of this guideline was published in 2017, but a new standard is being put together to account for improved security measures added to modern browsers, such as HSTS, SRI, CSP 2.0, telemetry handling, and improved certificate handling mechanisms -- all mentioned in a new draft released for public debate last week. According to the BSI's new draft, to be considered "secure," a modern browser must follow the following requirements, among others: Must support TLS, must have a list of trusted certificates, must support extended validation (EV) certificates, must verify loaded certificates against a Certification Revocation List (CRL) or an Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP); the browser must use icons or color highlights to show when communications to a remote server is encrypted or in plaintext, connections to remote websites running on expired certificates must be allowed only after specific user approval; must support HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) (RFC 6797). Further reading: Germany and the Netherlands To Build the First Ever Joint Military Internet.

The hospital technology, typically used to identify human ailments, captured perhaps the world's smallest magnetic resonance image. weiserfireman shares a report: Different microscopy techniques allow scientists to see the nucleotide-by-nucleotide genetic sequences in cells down to the resolution of a couple atoms as seen in an atomic force microscopy image. But scientists at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif. and the Institute for Basic Sciences in Seoul, have taken imaging a step further, developing a new magnetic resonance imaging technique that provides unprecedented detail, right down to the individual atoms of a sample [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. The technique relies on the same basic physics behind the M.R.I. scans that are done in hospitals. When doctors want to detect tumors, measure brain function or visualize the structure of joints, they employ huge M.R.I. machines, which apply a magnetic field across the human body. This temporarily disrupts the protons spinning in the nucleus of every atom in every cell. A subsequent, brief pulse of radio-frequency energy causes the protons to spin perpendicular to the pulse. Afterward, the protons return to their normal state, releasing energy that can be measured by sensors and made into an image.

But to gather enough diagnostic data, traditional hospital M.R.I.s must scan billions and billions of protons in a person's body, said Christopher Lutz, a physicist at IBM. So he and his colleagues decided to pack the power of an M.R.I. machine into the tip of another specialized instrument known as a scanning tunneling microscope to see if they could image individual atoms. The tip of a scanning tunneling microscope is just a few atoms wide. And it moves along the surface of a sample, it picks up details about the size and conformation of molecules. The researchers attached magnetized iron atoms to the tip, effectively combining scanning-tunneling microscope and M.R.I. technologies.

From a blog post: For 25 years, the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) was only a de-facto standard. This had frustrating implications sometimes. On one hand, for webmasters, it meant uncertainty in corner cases, like when their text editor included BOM characters in their robots.txt files. On the other hand, for crawler and tool developers, it also brought uncertainty; for example, how should they deal with robots.txt files that are hundreds of megabytes large? Today, we announced that we're spearheading the effort to make the REP an internet standard. While this is an important step, it means extra work for developers who parse robots.txt files.

We're here to help: we open sourced the C++ library that our production systems use for parsing and matching rules in robots.txt files. This library has been around for 20 years and it contains pieces of code that were written in the 90's. Since then, the library evolved; we learned a lot about how webmasters write robots.txt files and corner cases that we had to cover for, and added what we learned over the years also to the internet draft when it made sense.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Three and a half years ago, Mark Russinovich, Azure CTO, Microsoft's cloud, said, "One in four [Azure] instances are Linux." Next, in 2017, Microsoft revealed that 40% of Azure virtual machines (VM) were Linux-based. Then in the fall of 2018, Scott Guthrie, Microsoft's executive VP of the cloud and enterprise group, told me in an exclusive interview, "About half Azure VMs are Linux". Now, Sasha Levin, Microsoft Linux kernel developer, in a request that Microsoft be allowed to join a Linux security list, revealed that "the Linux usage on our cloud has surpassed Windows." Shocking you say? Not really. Linux is largely what runs enterprise computing both on in-house servers and on the cloud. Windows Server has been declining for years. In the most recent IDC Worldwide Operating Systems and Subsystems Market Shares report covering 2017, Linux had 68% of the market. Its share has only increased since then.