System76, the Colorado-based Linux laptop, desktop, and server specialist, has announced a new highly portable laptop with an Intel Alder Lake processor inside. Tom's Hardware reports: The new Lemur Pro(opens in new tab) is a "lighter than Air" 14-inch form factor laptop with excellent battery life and attractions such as open firmware (powered by Coreboot) and a 180-degree hinge. In addition, buyers can choose to go with Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS or Ubuntu 22.04 LTS pre-installed. The new Lemur Pro has many attractive modern features you might see advertised in many rival mainstream thin and light designs. However, the special sauce here is the "System76 Open Firmware with Coreboot." Coreboot, known initially as LinuxBIOS, is significant as it is an open-source BIOS implementation embraced by Linux users. It is lightweight, flexible, and feature-rich. [...]

System76 has designed the Lemur Pro with monitor-based docking in mind. It envisions users connecting to a big screen using the USB-C connection to benefit from the more expansive workspace and laptop charging. Like Windows, Linux had to have some serious tinkering under the hood to prepare for the mix of Performance and Efficiency cores in Alder Lake chips. However, rest assured, efficient hybrid scheduling is taken care of with the two OS options that can be pre-installed on the Lemur Pro.

System76 allows customers to configure and buy Lemur Pro laptops right now. There are many RAM and storage configurations to pick through, and you can add external keyboards and monitors to the bundle. The entry price with an Intel Core i5-1235U, 8GB RAM, 240GB of storage, and no extras is $1,149. However, the Core i7-1255U model is a bit of a stretch, adding $200 to the base price for the faster CPU clocks.

U.S. right-to-repair advocates hoped a district judge would finally rule Friday on Massachusetts' voter-approved right-to-repair referendum. But they were disappointed again, reports the Boston Globe, since instead the judge said he'd first have to consider a recent ruling by America's Supreme Court limiting the regulatory powers of the U.S. government's Environmental Protection Agency: The Massachusetts law was approved by 75 percent of voters in a 2020 referendum. But its implementation has been held up by court challenges ever since. It would require all automakers selling new cars in Massachusetts to provide buyers with access to "telematic" data â diagnostic information â via a wireless connection. That way, car owners could get their cars repaired at any independent repair shop, instead of being forced to have the work done at manufacturer-approved dealerships.

But the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, an association of the world's top carmakers, sued to overturn the law, arguing that only the federal government, not states, may enact such a rule. In addition, carmakers said that they could not redesign the digital systems of their cars in time to comply with the law's 2022 model-year deadline.

The lawsuit went to trial last summer, but the court's judgment has been repeatedly delayed. In the meantime, at least two auto manufacturers, Subaru and Kia, began selling cars in Massachusetts with their telematic features switched off, to avoid violating the law.
The state's attorney general has now granted a two-week "grace period" during which the law won't be enforced, according to the article, while the district judge "said that he expected to rule before the end of a two-week grace period."

Google is warning of a sophisticated new spyware campaign that has seen malicious actors steal sensitive data from Android and iOS users in Italy and Kazakhstan. Engadget reports: On Thursday, the company's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) shared its findings on RCS Labs, a commercial spyware vendor based out of Italy. On June 16th, security researchers at Lookout linked the firm to Hermit, a spyware program believed to have been first deployed in 2019 by Italian authorities as part of an anti-corruption operation. Lookout describes RCS Labs as an NSO Group-like entity. The firm markets itself as a "lawful intercept" business and claims it only works with government agencies. However, commercial spyware vendors have come under intense scrutiny in recent years, largely thanks to governments using the Pegasus spyware to target activists and journalists.

According to Google, Hermit can infect both Android and iOS devices. In some instances, the company's researchers observed malicious actors work with their target's internet service provider to disable their data connection. They would then send the target an SMS message with a prompt to download the linked software to restore their internet connection. If that wasn't an option, the bad actors attempted to disguise the spyware as a legitimate messaging app like WhatsApp or Instagram.

What makes Hermit particularly dangerous is that it can gain additional capabilities by downloading modules from a command and control server. Some of the addons Lookout observed allowed the program to steal data from the target's calendar and address book apps, as well as take pictures with their phone's camera. One module even gave the spyware the capability to root an Android device. Google believes Hermit never made its way to the Play or App stores. However, the company found evidence that bad actors were able to distribute the spyware on iOS by enrolling in Apple's Developer Enterprise Program. Apple told The Verge that it has since blocked any accounts or certificates associated with the threat. Meanwhile, Google has notified affected users and rolled out an update to Google Play Protect.

"China's ambition to collect a staggering amount of personal data from everyday citizens is more expansive than previously known," reports the New York Times, after their Visual Investigations team with reporters in Asia "spent more than a year analyzing more than 100,000 government bidding documents." The Chinese government's goal is clear: designing a system to maximize what the state can find out about a person's identity, activities and social connections.... The Times analysis found that the police strategically chose locations to maximize the amount of data their facial recognition cameras could collect.... The police also wanted to install facial recognition cameras inside private spaces, like residential buildings, karaoke lounges and hotels. In the police's own words, the strategy to upgrade their video surveillance system was to achieve the ultimate goal of "controlling and managing people."

Authorities are using phone trackers to link people's digital lives to their physical movements. Devices known as Wi-Fi sniffers and IMSI catchers can glean information from phones in their vicinity, which allow the police to track a target's movements... In a 2017 bidding document from Beijing, the police wrote that they wanted the trackers to collect phone owners' usernames on popular Chinese social media apps.... As of today, all 31 of mainland China's provinces and regions use phone trackers.

DNA, iris scan samples and voice prints are being collected indiscriminately from people with no connection to crime. The police in China are starting to collect voice prints using sound recorders attached to their facial recognition cameras. In the southeast city of Zhongshan, the police wrote in a bidding document that they wanted devices that could record audio from at least a 300-foot radius around cameras. Software would then analyze the voice prints and add them to a database. Police boasted that when combined with facial analysis, they could help pinpoint suspects faster.
The Times also created a separate video summarizing the results of their investigation.

And their article notes estimates that more than half the world's 1 billion surveillance cameras are already in China — but there's more information to be gathered. One of China's largest surveillance contractors also pitched software that to the government displays a person's "movements, clothing, vehicles, mobile device information and social connections," according to the Times. "The Times investigation found that this product was already being used by Chinese police."

Thanks to Slashdot reader nray for sharing the story.

schwit1 shares a report from Ars Technica: Europe's much-anticipated next-generation rocket, which has a roughly comparable lift capacity to SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster, was originally due to launch before the end of 2020. The Ariane 6 rocket has subsequently been delayed a few times, but before this week the European Space Agency had been holding to a debut launch date before the end of this year. However, during a BBC interview on Monday, European Space Agency Director General Josef Aschbacher said the rocket would not fly until sometime in 2023.

The source said an issue with the "cryogenic connection system" had been a critical item requiring a lot of focus for development efforts and a driver of delays. However, that test was recently completed, with the cryogenic lines carrying liquefied hydrogen and oxygen to the Ariane 6 rocket right up until liftoff, demonstrating a successful release at the correct moment. Due to development issues, other critical tests have been long-delayed as well, such as a hot-fire test of the rocket's second stage, which features a single Vinci engine. The official said he expected the second stage test to occur soon at Lampoldshausen, Germany.

As is often the case, European Space Agency officials and the rocket's developer, Ariane Group, are also struggling to complete ground systems and flight software. "It's the ground systems coming together with the launcher, and they need to talk to each other in a very accurate way," the official said. "This is a source of challenge in every launcher development." The official declined to provide a new, specific launch target for Ariane 6's debut flight. (A separate source has told Ars the working date is no earlier than April 2023). The new launch target is expected to be revealed on July 13 during a joint news conference with European space officials. Meanwhile, SpaceX set a new reuse record after one of its Falcon 9 rockets launched for the 13th time today.

An anonymous reader shares a report: On the painful occasion of a mass shooting in the US, it has become customary for some politician or pundit to point an accusatory finger at video games. In late May, after two such attacks -- in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, it was Texas Senator Ted Cruz. These tragedies, he said in a speech at a National Rifle Association convention, were a mirror of our culture, and specifically, where our culture is failing. In addition to "broken families" and "declining church attendance," he said, "desensitizing the act of murder in video games" has contributed to the epidemic of mass shootings.

What surprised me wasn't what Cruz said. It was how little traction it received in the mainstream media. A Fox News host asked his guest, Arizona State University criminal justice professor Bernard Zapor, whether violent video games' heightened realism contributed to an increase in mass homicides. Zapor dodged, instead citing the dissolution of community bonds. Most coverage of Cruz's comments (and Fox's interview) were in the service of invalidating the question itself: Decades of research have shown no connection between playing violent video games and committing violent acts. For more than 20 years years, the idea that video games like Doom somehow spurred these heinous shootings held sway in popular culture. In the '90s, "There was really no pushback," said Chris Ferguson, Stetson University's co-chair of psychology, who has studied violent video games' impact on gamers for about 20 years.

Police forces around the world have increasingly used hacking tools to identify and track protesters, expose political dissidents' secrets, and turn activists' computers and phones into inescapable eavesdropping bugs. Now, new clues in a case in India connect law enforcement to a hacking campaign that used those tools to go an appalling step further: planting false incriminating files on targets' computers that the same police then used as grounds to arrest and jail them. Wired: More than a year ago, forensic analysts revealed that unidentified hackers fabricated evidence on the computers of at least two activists arrested in Pune, India, in 2018, both of whom have languished in jail and, along with 13 others, face terrorism charges. Researchers at security firm SentinelOne and nonprofits Citizen Lab and Amnesty International have since linked that evidence fabrication to a broader hacking operation that targeted hundreds of individuals over nearly a decade, using phishing emails to infect targeted computers with spyware, as well as smartphone hacking tools sold by the Israeli hacking contractor NSO Group. But only now have SentinelOne's researchers revealed ties between the hackers and a government entity: none other than the very same Indian police agency in the city of Pune that arrested multiple activists based on the fabricated evidence.

"There's a provable connection between the individuals who arrested these folks and the individuals who planted the evidence," says Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade, a security researcher at SentinelOne who, along with fellow researcher Tom Hegel, will present findings at the Black Hat security conference in August. "This is beyond ethically compromised. It is beyond callous. So we're trying to put as much data forward as we can in the hopes of helping these victims." SentinelOne's new findings that link the Pune City Police to the long-running hacking campaign, which the company has called Modified Elephant, center on two particular targets of the campaign: Rona Wilson and Varvara Rao. Both men are activists and human rights defenders who were jailed in 2018 as part of a group called the Bhima Koregaon 16, named for the village where violence between Hindus and Dalits -- the group once known as "untouchables" -- broke out earlier that year. (One of those 16 defendants, 84-year-old Jesuit priest Stan Swamy, died in jail last year after contracting Covid-19. Rao, who is 81 years old and in poor health, has been released on medical bail, which expires next month. Of the other 14, only one has been granted bail.)

Dr. Saul Griffith, the author of "Electrify" and the founder and chief scientist of Rewiring America, Rewiring Australia and Otherlab, writes in a column: I recently moved back here to my home country partly because I believe Australians can show the world how much money households can save through simple climate solutions like rooftop solar. How is it that Australia, a country that historically has been a coal-burning climate pariah, is leading the world on solar? The four-bedroom house we recently bought provides a hint: It came with two rooftop solar systems of 11 kilowatts of combined capacity and a battery with 16 kilowatt-hours of storage. This system should produce more than enough to power my family's home, one electric car and both of our electric bikes with some left over to send back to the grid. Solar is now so prevalent in Australia that over a quarter of households here have rooftop panels, compared with roughly 2.5 percent of American households.

Australia pays its solar installers salaries comparable to those in the United States, and it buys most of its solar modules from China at 25 cents per watt, just a little less than what American buyers pay. Our houses are mostly detached single-family, like America, too. But unlike in the United States, it's easy to get permits and install rooftop solar in Australia. Australia's rooftop solar success is a function partly of luck, partly of design. In the early 1990s, regulators considered rooftop solar a hobby, and no one stood in the way of efforts to make the rules favorable to small-scale solar. Looking for a good headline to varnish over Australia's refusal to agree to the same greenhouse emissions reductions as the rest of the world in the 1997 Kyoto climate agreement, the federal government embraced renewable energy policies that set the stage for rooftop solar. Households were given rebates for the upfront costs, and were paid to send excess electricity back to the grid. In 2007, Prime Minister John Howard doubled the rebate, a move that is credited with kick-starting a solar installation boom.

Why has America been significantly slower to adopt this solution to high energy costs? The failures are mostly regulatory: local building codes and zoning laws, state rules that govern the grid connection and liability issues. Permitting can take as little as a day in Australia and is done over the web; in the United States permitting and connecting to the grid can take as long as six months. Many customers just give up. America also generally requires a metal conduit around the wiring; in Australia, the connections can be less expensive soft cables, similar to extension cords. The cost of rooftop solar in the United States depends on many things, including the latitude, tree cover and federal and state incentives. Installation costs can also vary quite a bit, depending on what laborers charge and the local permitting and inspection policies. My friend Andrew Birch, co-founder of the solar and solar software companies OpenSolar in Sydney and Sungevity in the United States, wrote an excellent critique of American rooftop solar and its high price in 2018.

U.S. law enforcement have announced the takedown of SSNDOB, a notorious marketplace used for trading the personal information -- including Social Security numbers, or SSNs -- of millions of Americans. From a report: The operation was conducted by the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and the Department of Justice (DOJ), with help from the Cyprus Police, to seize four domains hosting the SSNDOB marketplace -- ssndob[dot]ws, ssndob[dot]vip, ssndob[dot]club, and blackjob[dot]biz. SSNDOB listed the personal information for approximately 24 million individuals in the United States, including names, dates of birth, SSNs, and credit card numbers, and generated more than $19 million in revenue, according to the DOJ. Chainalysis, a blockchain analysis company, reports separately that the marketplace has received nearly $22 million worth of Bitcoin across over 100,000 transactions since April 2015, though the marketplace is believed to have been active since at least 2013. These figures suggest that some users were buying personally identifiable information from the service in bulk, according to Chainalysis, which also uncovered a connection between SSNDOB and Joker's Stash, a large dark net market focused on stolen credit card information that shut down in January 2021.

Last summer Chinese market analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reported the iPhone 13 would include satellite communication capability, remembers long-time tech pundit Robert Cringley, who adds that the prediction was denied by Apple. "This, in itself, was weird because Apple generally doesn't react to rumors. But beyond the mere reaction, the way Apple responded to Ming's prediction was especially odd." An unattributed leak from Cupertino said that the iPhone 13 definitely would not include satellite communication capability. And even if some iPhone could communicate with satellites, the leak continued, it wouldn't be offering satellite voice service (which Ming had mentioned), limiting iPhones to satellite text or iMessage.... This was making less and less sense, but it clearly meant there was something happening.

Then came the iPhone 13 launch and Ming was wrong for a change — no satellite communications. So the Cupertino rumor mill went about its business, Ming's satellite rumor apparently forgotten.

But not by me....
And this leads Cringley to another prediction of his own: I am convinced an announcement will be coming soon. Apple will shortly enter the satellite business by acquiring GlobalStar and its 24 satellites. They will use those 24, plus 24 more satellites that Apple has already commissioned, to offer satellite service for iMessage and Apple's Find My network just like they implied in their denial last year.

These apps are proxies for Apple entering — and then dominating — the Internet of Things (IoT) business. After all, iPhones will give them 1.6 billion points of presence for AirTag detection even on sailboats in the middle of the ocean — or on the South Pole.

IoT is already a big business that is going to get even bigger even faster because of Apple. Adding that satellite connection to iMessage and Find My offers the possibility of ubiquity for IoT, though only on Apple's network. Ubiquity (being able to track anything in near real time anywhere on the planet) signals the maturity of IoT, turning it quickly into a $1 TRILLION business — in this case Apple's $1 TRILLION business....

While Apple's stated goals will be only iMessage and Find My, followed by IoT, in the longer run Cupertino plans to dis-intermediate the mobile carriers — becoming themselves a satellite-based global phone and data company. That will require shifting over additional Globalstar bandwidth plus launching another 300-600 satellites, so it is several years away but IS coming. Apple will compete not just with every other mobile carrier including Cupertino's own customers, they will also compete with satellite Internet providers like Starlink, OneWeb, and Amazon's Kuiper. Apple can compete with Starlink with so many fewer satellites because GlobalStar has vastly more licensed spectrum than does SpaceX, which has to reuse the same spectrum over and over again with thousands of satellites.

ExpressVPN has removed its servers from India, becoming the first major virtual private network (VPN) provider to do so in the aftermath of the recent cybersecurity rules introduced by the country's cybersecurity agency. The rules require VPN providers to store user data for a period of five years. ExpressVPN said it "refuses to participate in the Indian government's attempts to limit internet freedom." The India Express reports: In a blog post, the British Virgin Island-based company said that with the introduction of the new cybersecurity rules by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), it has made a "very straightforward decision to remove our Indian-based VPN servers." While ExpressVPN is the first to pull its services from India, other VPN providers like NordVPN have also taken a similar stance.

The guidelines, released by CERT-In on April 26, asked VPN service providers along with data centers and cloud service providers, to store information such as names, e-mail IDs, contact numbers, and IP addresses (among other things) of their customers for a period of five years. The government said it wants these details to fight cybercrime, but the industry argues that privacy is the main selling points of VPN services, and such a move would be in breach of the privacy cover provided by VPN platforms.

ExpressVPN described the cybersecurity rules as "broad" and "overreaching." "The law is also overreaching and so broad as to open up the window for potential abuse. We believe the damage done by potential misuse of this kind of law far outweighs any benefit that lawmakers claim would come from it," ExpressVPN said. It added that while CERT-In's rules are intended to fight cybercrime, they are "incompatible with the purpose of VPNs, which are designed to keep users' online activity private." Indian users of ExpressVPN will still be able to use its service via "virtual" India servers located in Singapore and the UK. "We will never collect logs of user activity, including no logging of browsing history, traffic destination, data content, or DNS queries. We also never store connection logs, meaning no logs of IP addresses, outgoing VPN IP addresses, connection timestamps, or session durations," the company said.

Over the last day or two, there have been a growing number of reports by people who own certain Canon Pixma printers that the devices either won't turn on at all or, once turned on, get stuck in a reboot loop, cycling on and off as long as they're plugged in. The Verge reports: Verge reader Jamie pointed us to posts on Reddit about the problem and Canon's own support forum, citing problems with models including the MX490, MX492, MB2010, and MG7520. Some believe their problem is due to a software update Canon pushed to the printers, but that hasn't been confirmed yet. In response to an inquiry from The Verge, corporate communications senior director and general manager Christine Sedlacek said, "We are currently investigating this issue and hope to bring resolution shortly as customer satisfaction is our highest priority."

Until there is an official update or fix, some people in the forums have found that disconnecting the printers from the internet is enough to keep them from rebooting, with control still possible via USB. To get the printers to work while maintaining your connection to the internet and their connection to local network devices, one reply from a customer on Canon's support forum suggests a method that many people report has worked for them.

25 gigabits per second — both downloading and uploading. CRN reports broadband infrastructure wholesaler Chorus demonstrated those speeds over their existing passive optical fiber network [PON]. The demonstration in Auckland achieved 21.4 Gbps throughput, tested simultaneously on the same strand of fibre that ran an 8 Gbps symmetric HyperFibre connection, and a 900/550 Mbps UFB link.... Chorus uses Nokia's Lightspan FX and MX access nodes for multiple types of fibre service, including standard GPON, the XGS-PON behind HyperFibre, point-to-point Ethernet, and envisages the 25 GPON service to run on it as well. It is based on the Quillion chip set line cards, which Nokia says are 50 per cent more energy efficient than earlier models.

Currently, Chorus has no wholesale 25 GPON product, with its fastest offering topping out at 8/8 Gbps HyperFibre. The wholesaler expects to develop a 25 GPON based services within the next two to three years, with a Nokia optical network termination unit that supports either 25/25 Gbps or 25/10 Gbps options. Kurt Rodgers, network strategy manager at Chorus, said the faster broadband service would come into its own for industrial metaverse applications, the Internet of Things, and low-latency cloud connectivity....

Chorus chief technology officer Ewen Powell said the 25 GPON service demonstrated "a future-proofed technology." Although two-wavelength 50 Gbps service is appearing as a choice for providers, with 100 GPON on the horizon, Chorus is betting that the 25 Gbps variant will offer the best cost benefit overall for providers, as it can use existing optics equipment.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Bismillah for submitting the article.

The head of the UK government's digital transformation unit recently announced a change to the nation's government services site gov.uk: they've "removed jQuery as a dependency for all frontend apps, meaning 32 KB of minified and compressed JavaScript was removed" for everything from selecting elements to attaching event listeners....

Nearly 84% of mobile pages used jQuery in 2021, points out a new essay at Gov.UK — before explaining why they decided not to: jQuery was an instrumental tool in a time when we really needed a way to script interactivity in a way that smoothed over the differing implementations of stuff like event handling, selecting elements, animating elements, and so on.

The web is better because of jQuery — not just because it has such incredible utility, but because its ubiquity led to making what it provided part of the web platform itself. Nowadays, we can do just about anything jQuery can do in vanilla JavaScript... It really begs the question: Do we really need jQuery today? That's a question that GOV.UK has answered with a resounding "no"....

This is a big deal when it comes to the user experience, because GOV.UK provides services and information online for The United Kingdom at scale. Not everyone is tapping away on their 2022 MacBook Pro on a rip-roarin' broadband connection. GOV.UK has to be accessible to everyone, and that means keepin' it lean.... dependencies matter when it comes to performance. Don't shortchange your users if the web platform can easily do the job a framework can.

This level of commitment to the user experience from a institution that works at the scale GOV.UK does is commendable. I can only hope others follow in their footsteps.

Netflix lost 200,000 subscribers last quarter and potentially two million this current period, according to a note to shareholders from last month. Now, new research highlights that the number of long-standing subscribers canceling Netflix rose precipitously in the past few years. 9to5Mac reports: The data provided by the research firm Antenna to The Information shows that people who had been subscribers for more than three years accounted for just 5% of total cancelations at the start of 2022, while it hit 13% in the first quarter of 2022: "Newbie subscribers, meantime, accounted for only 60% of cancellations in the quarter, down from 64% in the fourth quarter. Also in the first quarter, overall cancellations rose to 3.6 million people, compared with around 2.5 million in each of the preceding five quarters. Antenna says it draws its data from a panel of 5 million Americans who anonymously contribute their streaming subscriptions."

While Netflix is losing ground, the streaming market as a whole is gaining more subscribers, and Antenna's data suggest a connection between the price increase and Netflix's subscriber losses: "'Consumers vote with their wallets on a monthly basis, and now there are just more viable candidates on the ballot,' said Brendan Brady, media and entertainment lead at Antenna. Also, since many entertainment companies, like NBCUniversal and Disney, have pulled their shows off Netflix and put them on their own services, Netflix has had to rely more on its originals, which have been hit or miss, he said."

Tony Fadell, Apple's iPod creator and Nest co-founder, warns the metaverse risks creating more trolls and damaging human interaction. The BBC reports: The virtual reality-based metaverse removes the ability "to look into the other person's face," Tony Fadell said. "If you put technology between that human connection that's when the toxicity happens," he said. [...] While Mr Fadell said the technology behind the metaverse has merit: "When you're trying to make social interaction and social connection, when you can't look into the other person's face, you can't see their eyes you don't have real humanistic ways of connecting. It become disintermediated and you have the ability at that point to create more trolls, people who hide behind things and then use that to their advantage to get attention." He added: "We need to regain control of that human connection, we don't need more technology between us."

He said told The Verge that people should not be living through "small, glowing rectangles" such as their phones. "A lot of the meetings that we have today, you're looking at a grid of faces on a screen. That's not how we process things either." However, the metaverse has also prompted criticism and concerns over safety due to the ability of people to create and hide behind avatars. Mr Fadell said: "We had the same problem with text-based commenting and with blogs, we've had it with videos now we're going to have it in metaverse."

America's law schools "would be given a green light to end admission test requirements," reports the Washington Post, "under a recommendation from a key committee of the American Bar Association that is scheduled for review in a public meeting this month." The proposal still faces layers of scrutiny within the ABA and would not take effect until next year at the earliest. If approved, it could challenge the long-dominant role of the Law School Admission Test, or LSAT, in the pathway to legal education.
Some context from The Week US: Like the SAT in undergraduate admissions, the LSAT has been accused of racial bias and promoting a destructive obsession with rankings. Critics also argue that the LSAT, which was designed to predict academic performance, has little connection to professional accomplishment....

The incentives for law schools to dump the LSAT aren't only political, though.... [L]aw schools face declining applications after a pandemic-driven spike in interest. That's partly because word is getting out that the legal profession isn't as glamorous or lucrative as people imagine or the media depict. Accepting alternate exams, such as the GRE, or going test-optional altogether can help pump up enrollment, particularly at marginal institutions.
The article points out that admitted law students will still eventually have to pass the official certifying "bar exam" before they're ever allowed to actually practice law.

It's looking increasingly likely that Wi-Fi 7 will be an option next year. This week, Qualcomm joined the list of chipmakers detailing Wi-Fi 7 products they expect to be available to homes and businesses soon. From a report: The Wi-Fi Alliance, which makes Wi-Fi standards and includes Qualcomm as a member, has said that Wi-Fi 7 will offer a max throughput of "at least 30Gbps," and on Wednesday, Qualcomm said its Network Pro Series Gen 3 platform will support "up to 33Gbps." These are theoretical speeds that you likely won't reach in your home, and you'll need a premium broadband connection and Wi-Fi 7 devices, which don't exist yet. Still, the speeds represent an impressive jump from Wi-Fi 6 and 6E's 9.6Gbps.

Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare said this week that it mitigated one of the largest volumetric distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that has been recorded to date. From a report: Cloudflare said it detected and mitigated a 15.3 million request-per-second (rps) DDoS attack earlier this month -- making it one of the largest HTTPS DDoS attacks on record. Volumetric DDoS attacks differ from traditional bandwidth DDoS attacks where attackers attempt to exhaust and clog up the victim's internet connection bandwidth. Instead, attackers focus on sending as many junk HTTP requests to a victim's server in order to take up precious server CPU and RAM and prevent legitimate users from using targeted sites. Cloudflare previously announced that it stopped the largest DDoS attack on record in August 2021, when it mitigated a 17.2 million HTTP requests/second (rps) attack, a figure that the company described as almost three times larger than any previous volumetric DDoS attack that was ever reported in the public domain. Earlier this month, the company said it stopped an attack targeting a company in the cryptocurrency space.

vm shares a report from Space.com: SpaceX is among companies that might replace services of NASA's aging space telecoms constellation that has kept the International Space Station connected to Earth for decades. For years, NASA's Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) constellation has served as the main link between the International Space Station and Earth, providing astronauts with constant connection to ground control as well as the ability to engage with the public and stay in touch with their loved ones. The American space agency, however, plans to retire the six aging satellites in the next decade and hand over their task to commercial companies. This month, the agency announced partnerships with six commercial satellite operators including SpaceX, U.K. company Inmarsat, American Viasat and Switzerland-based SES, to demonstrate how they could take care of NASA's space communication needs in the future. "We don't plan to launch any new TDRS satellites in the future," Eli Naffah, the manager of NASA's Commercial Services Project, who oversees the partnership with the commercial companies, told Space.com. "The plan is to allow the constellation to basically [reach the end of its life]. At some point later in this decade, we are going to have some diminished capability and the plan is for the [commercial companies] to come up with a different way of providing communication services to our missions."

"Back in the 1980s, when we developed TDRS, there really wasn't an ability on the commercial side to be able to provide this service," Naffah said. "But since then, the industry has far outpaced NASA's investment in this area. There's a lot of infrastructure, both on the ground and in orbit that is capable of providing these types of services to a spacecraft. [...] Hopefully, we can achieve some cost efficiencies in buying commercial services, get out of the business of operating networks, and really put more focus on science and exploration." According to Naffah, NASA will invest $278 million into the project over the next five years, with the agency's industry partners contributing a total of about $1.5 billion.