The joint international and Chinese mission organized by the World Health Organization on the origins of Covid released its report last week suggesting that for almost every topic it covered, more study was needed. What kind of study and who will do it is the question. From a report: The report suggested pursuing multiple lines of inquiry, focused on the likely origin of the coronavirus in bats. It concluded that the most likely route to humans was through an intermediate animal, perhaps at a wildlife farm. Among future efforts could be surveys of blood banks to look for cases that could have appeared before December 2019 and tracking down potential animal sources of the virus in wildlife farms, the team proposed. Critics of the report have sought more consideration of the possibility that a laboratory incident in Wuhan could have led to the first human infection. A loosely organized group of scientists and others who have been meeting virtually to discuss the possibility of a lab leak released an open letter this week, detailing several ways to conduct a thorough investigation. It called for further action, arguing that "critical records and biological samples that could provide essential insights into pandemic origins remain inaccessible."

Much of the letter echoes an earlier release from the same group detailing what it saw as the failures of the W.H.O. mission. This second letter is more specific in the kind of future investigations it proposes. The group is seeking a new inquiry that would include biosecurity and biosafety experts, one that could involve the W.H.O. or a separate multination effort to set up a different process to explore the beginnings of the pandemic and its origins in China. Jamie Metzl, an author, senior fellow of the Atlantic Council, an international policy think tank and signer of the scientists' letter, said the renewed calls for a more thorough investigation reflected the need for greater monitoring of and restrictions on what viruses can be studied in labs around the world. "This is not about ganging up on China," Mr. Metzl said. Mr. Metzl's group was among those disappointed by the report issued last week, as it dismissed out of hand the possibility of a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, calling it extremely unlikely. Further reading: Data Withheld From WHO Team Probing COVID-19 Origins in China: Tedros.

"AMD and Intel have both proposed better ways of doing interrupt and exception handling the last few months," reports LinuxReviews.org.

Then they share this analysis Linus Torvalds posted on the Real World Technologies forum: "The AMD version is essentially "Fix known bugs in the exception handling definition".

The Intel version is basically "Yeah, the protected mode 80286 exception handling was bad, then 386 made it odder with the 32-bit extensions, and then syscall/sysenter made everything worse, and then the x86-64 extensions introduced even more problems. So let's add a mode bit where all the crap goes away".

In contrast, the AMD one is basically a minimal effort to fix actual fundamental problems with all that legacy-induced crap that are nasty to work around and that have caused issues...

Both are valid on their own, and they are actually fairly independent. Honestly, the AMD paper looks like a quick "we haven't even finished thinking all the details through, but we know these parts were broken, so we might as well release this".

I don't know how long it has been brewing, but judging by the "TBD" things in that paper, I think it's a "early rough draft"."
In the article (shared by long-time Slashdot reader xiando), LinuxReviews.org summarizes the state of the conversation today: Torvalds went on to say that while AMD's proposed "quick fix" would be easier to implement for him and others operating system vendors, it's not ideal in the long run. Intel's proposal throws the entire existing interrupt descriptor table (IDT) delivery system under the bus so it can be replaced with what they call a new "FRED event delivery" system. Torvalds believes this is a better long-term solution...

While the pros and cons of Intel and AMD's respective proposals for interrupt and event handling in future processors are worthy of discussion, it's in reality mostly up to Intel. They are the bigger and more powerful corporation. It is more likely than not that future processors from Intel will use their proposed Flexible Return and Event Delivery system. Their next generation processors won't, it will take years not months before consumer CPUs have the FRED technology. Remember, the above-mentioned technical document was published earlier this month [in March]. Things do not magically go from the drawing-board to store-shelves overnight.

Intel isn't going to just hand the FRED technology over to AMD and help them implement it. We will likely see both move forward with their own proposals. Intel will have FRED and AMD will have Supervisor Entry Extensions until AMD, inevitably, adopts FRED or some form of it years down the line.
They also note that Torvalds took issue with a poster arguing that microkernels are more secure than monolithic kernels like Linux. "Bah, you're just parroting the usual party line that had absolutely no basis in reality and when you look into the details, doesn't actually hold up.

It's all theory and handwaving and just repeating the same old FUD that was never actually really relevant."

The Pentagon announced that Microsoft has won a contract to build more than 120,000 custom HoloLens augmented-reality headsets for the U.S. Army. The contract could be worth up to $21.88 billion over 10 years, a Microsoft spokesperson said. From a report: The deal shows Microsoft can generate meaningful revenue from a futuristic product resulting from years of research, beyond core areas such as operating systems and productivity software. It follows a $480 million contract Microsoft received to give the Army prototypes of the Integrated Visual Augmented System, or IVAS, in 2018. The new deal will involve providing production versions.

The standard-issue HoloLens, which costs $3,500, enables people to see holograms overlaid over their actual environments and interact using hand and voice gestures. An IVAS prototype that a CNBC reporter tried out in 2019 displayed a map and a compass and had thermal imaging to reveal people in the dark. The system could also show the aim for a weapon. "The IVAS headset, based on HoloLens and augmented by Microsoft Azure cloud services, delivers a platform that will keep soldiers safer and make them more effective," Alex Kipman, a technical fellow at Microsoft and the person who introduced the HoloLens in 2015, wrote in a blog post. "The program delivers enhanced situational awareness, enabling information sharing and decision-making in a variety of scenarios."

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: The video in this story will be familiar to anyone who's played the 3D world-building game Minecraft. But it's not a human constructing these castles, trees, and caterpillars -- it's artificial intelligence. The algorithm takes its cue from the "Game of Life," a so-called cellular automaton. There, squares in a grid turn black or white over a series of timesteps based on how many of their neighbors are black or white. The program mimics biological development, in which cells in an embryo behave according to cues in their local environment.

The scientists taught neural networks to grow single cubes into complex designs containing thousands of bricks, like the castle or tree or furnished apartment building above, and even into functional machines, like the caterpillar. And when they sliced a creation in half, it regenerated. (Normally in Minecraft, a user would have to reconstruct the object by hand.) Going forward, the researchers hope to train systems to grow not only predefined forms, but to invent designs that perform certain functions. This could include flying, allowing engineers to find solutions human designers would not have otherwise foreseen. Or tiny robots might use local interactions to assemble rescue robots or self-healing buildings. The researchers presented their system in a paper posted on arXiv.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: More than five hours of questioning later, we have learned very little about the state of disinformation from today's marathon hearing with Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey and Sundar Pichai. Democrats pushed the CEOs to answer for their platforms' failing on vaccine misinformation and extremism. Republicans wanted to talk about child safety. Everyone wanted simple "yes" or "no" answers, though few were given. What is clear is that both sides are more than ready to impose new rules on Facebook, Twitter and Google.

The hearing was supposed to be about the platforms' handling of misinformation and extremism. The issue has taken on a new significance during the coronavirus pandemic and in the wake of the Jan. 6 riot at the US Capitol. [...] As with other recent hearings, the format made it nearly impossible to extract meaningful answers. Many lawmakers used their allotted five minutes to demand "yes or no" answers, which the executives were reluctant to give. In one particularly memorable exchange, Rep. Anna Eshoo of California was questioning Zuckerberg over Facebook's algorithms when she interrupted him to point out that "we don't do filibuster in the House." "I think it's irritating all of us and that is, no one seems to know the word yes or the word no, which one is it," she said. "Congresswoman, these are nuanced issues, " Zuckerberg said before he was cut off. "Okay, that's a no," she said.

As the hearing dragged on, lawmakers began to repeat themselves. Inevitably, when a new issue or angle was raised -- like when Rep. David McKinley showed Zuckerberg copies of Instagram posts selling prescription pills -- the executives had little time to respond in a meaningful way. The result is that the CEOs' opening statements provided more detail on the issues at hand than anything they were able to say in the five hours that came after them. This, of course, is nothing new. Over the last couple of years, Congress has convened a number of hearings featuring Big Tech executives, and most of them have played out in a similar fashion. But what's increasingly clear is that the both sides of the aisle are eager to impose new regulations on tech platforms.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: The most advanced mind-controlled devices being tested in humans rely on tiny wires inserted into the brain. Now researchers have paved the way for a less invasive option. They've used ultrasound imaging to predict a monkey's intended eye or hand movements -- information that could generate commands for a robotic arm or computer cursor. If the approach can be improved, it may offer people who are paralyzed a new means of controlling prostheses without equipment that penetrates the brain.

A key next step will be to use the computer predictions in real time to guide a robot hand or a cursor. But ultrasound could still guide a robotic arm, as long as a computer could quickly direct the arm's fine motor movements from the user's cue. The team foresees many future improvements to the technique. "The technology is absolutely not at its full potential yet." The study has been published in the journal Neuron.

The New York Times reports: Not long ago Volkswagen was a global pariah after pleading guilty to the biggest emissions fraud in automotive history. Now it is the toast of the stock market, with its shares worth twice as much as they were a year ago.

What happened?

Ironically, Volkswagen's misdeeds helped pave the way for its reversal of fortune... The financial commitment Volkswagen made then, when sales of electric vehicles were minimal, is paying off now as the company rolls out a line of vehicles developed from the ground up to run on batteries, with more interior space and more appeal than adaptations of gasoline vehicles... Investors have noticed, lighting up online stock forums with chatter about Volkswagen and rewarding other established carmakers, like General Motors and Ford Motor, that are pivoting to electric propulsion. Shares of Tesla, on the other hand, have slipped. Tesla is still the most valuable car company in the world by a wide margin, but investors are no longer as certain that Tesla will have the fast-growing electric car market to itself...

Volkswagen also benefited from a report issued this month by analysts at UBS, the Swiss bank, which rated it as the traditional carmaker best positioned to compete with Tesla because it already has the ability to mass-produce electric cars economically... With 665,000 employees and sales of 9.3 million vehicles last year, Volkswagen is the second-largest carmaker in the world after Toyota. It can spread the cost of developing new technologies over millions of vehicles and undercut Tesla on price. By 2025, Volkswagen will be able to produce electric vehicles for less than it costs to build a gasoline or diesel car, UBS analysts wrote in this month's report.

They cautioned that Tesla retains a significant lead in battery technology and autonomous driving software.
Sales of electric VW cars tripled last year, to 230,000 vehicles, the article points out — noting that that's just the beginning. This week VW also announced plans to employ 10,000 software engineers to work on new technologies including autonomous driving, becoming the second-biggest software company in all of Europe.

"The diesel scandal remains a financial burden. The company disclosed in its annual report this week that potential liabilities from lawsuits, such as one by shareholders claiming the company misled them, could cost 4.2 billion euros, or $5 billion. That is in addition to the tens of billions of euros Volkswagen has already paid in fines and settlements since 2017 after admitting that it programmed diesel cars to produce lower emissions in testing conditions than in normal use."

But "Investors this week were focusing on Volkswagen's future rather than its past..."

Facebook says it has created a wristband that translates motor signals from your brain so you can move a digital object just by thinking about it. From a report: The wristband, which looks like a clunky iPod on a strap, uses sensors to detect movements you intend to make. It uses electromyography (EMG) to interpret electrical activity from motor nerves as they send information from the brain to the hand. The company says the device, as yet unnamed, would let you navigate augmented-reality menus by just thinking about moving your finger to scroll. A quick refresher on augmented reality: It overlays information on your view of the real world, whether it's data, maps, or other images.

The most successful experiment in augmented reality was Pokemon Go, which took the world by storm in 2016 as players crisscrossed neighborhoods in search of elusive Pokemon characters. That initial promise has faded over the intervening years, however, as companies have struggled to translate the technology into something appealing, light, and usable. Google Glass and Snap Spectacles bombed, for example: people simply did not want to use them. Facebook thinks its wristband is more user friendly. Does it work the way Facebook claims? Too soon to tell. The product is still in research and development at the company's internal Facebook Reality Labs, and I didn't get to have a go. No word yet on when it will be released or how much it will cost, either. Years in the making: Facebook acquired startup CTRL-labs in September 2019 for between $500 million and $1 billion. CTRL had been working on its own wrist-based EMG device, and its head, Thomas Reardon, now leads Facebook's AR/VR research team. At the press preview, Reardon said the device was "not mind control." He added, "This is coming from the part of the brain that controls motor information, not thought."

Google's second-generation Nest Hub will be able to track your sleep via a Soli radar sensor -- not a camera. "Sleep Sensing" is the highlight feature, though, as "there's still a 7-inch display with a middling 600p resolution, a rear-facing fabric-covered speaker, and the device sensors poking through the otherwise uniform bezel," reports Android Police. From the report: According to Google, about 20 percent of first-gen Nest Hubs were placed in bedrooms, and the new Nest Hub can only show its full capabilities when you put it next to your bed. The lack of a camera is actually a selling point here as it ensures a certain degree of privacy. The Hub won't be able to see you, but it still kind of "sees" with radar waves. The Soli radar module creates a bubble where the Hub can track your breathing and movement overnight. Google says Soli in the Hub is accurate enough to detect the general shape and position of a person, but not specific faces or bodies. Combined with temperature and light levels, the Nest Hub can track your sleep and feed that data into Google Fit. Over time, Sleep Sensing can offer actionable tips to improve your sleep, too. This is similar to what you get with various fitness trackers and smartwatches that have sleep monitoring features, but you never have to worry about forgetting to wear your device to bed.

Google says the raw Soli data (above) never leaves your Hub -- machine learning enhancements allow the smart display to do all the processing locally to further preserve your privacy. Soli also supports some basic gestures like holding your hand up to pause media or waving to snooze an alarm. Sleep Sensing will be a free feature at launch, but Google is planning to make it a paid add-on in the future.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Hackaday: Probably the best known brand of cutter comes from Cricut, and that company has dropped a bombshell in the form of an update to the web-based design software that leaves their now very annoyed users with a monthly upload limit of 20 new designs unless they sign up for a Cricut Access Plan that costs $9.99 on monthly payments. Worse still, a screenshot is circulating online purporting to be from a communication with a Cricut employee attempting to clarify matters, in which it is suggested that machines sold as second-hand will be bricked by the company.

We'd like to think that given the reaction from their online community the subscription plan will backfire, but unlike the world of 3D printing their market is not necessarily an online-savvy one. A crafter who buys a Cricut from a bricks-and-mortar warehouse store and uses it with Cricut cartridges may not balk at being required to pay rent to use hardware that's already paid for in the same way a member of our community with a 3D printer would. After all, Cricut have always tried to make their software a walled garden. However if the stories about second-hand models being bricked turn out to bear fruit that might be a different matter. UPDATE 3/18/21: Cricut has decided to reverse its decision and allow every member to upload an unlimited number of images and patterns for free.

"Right now, every member can upload an unlimited number of images and patterns to Design Space for free, and we have no intention to change this policy," a Cricut spokesperson told us in an email. "This is true whether you're a current Cricut member or are thinking about joining the Cricut family before or after December 31, 2021."

They addressed these changes in a letter to the Cricut community, which you can read here.

Today much of the world honors an annual tradition: setting their clocks backwards by one hour. "I hope you enjoy it," writes Boston Globe Jeff Jacoby.

In an essay titled "Heed the science and abolish daylight saving time," Jacoby writes "I also hope this is the last year we have to go through this business of shifting our clocks ahead, and that by this time next year we'll be back on standard time for good." I am not a fan of daylight saving time, and if the polls are accurate, neither are most Americans. According to a 2019 survey by the Associated Press and the National Opinion Research Center, 71 percent of the public wants to put an end to the twice-yearly practice of changing clocks... Most of the rest of the world doesn't want it either. In Asia, Africa, and South America, it's virtually nonexistent. Most of Australia and many of the nations of the South Pacific eschew it, as do Russia and most of the former Soviet republics. The European Parliament voted by a large margin to end daylight saving time across the European Union, though whether to implement that change is left up to each EU member state...

The point of "saving" daylight was to save fuel: Congress believed that by shifting the clock so daylight extended later into the evening, the law would reduce demand for electricity and thereby conserve oil. But researchers attempting to measure the effects of clock-changing on energy savings have found them pretty elusive... But daylight saving time doesn't just fail to deliver the single most important benefit expected of it. It also generates a slew of harms. In the days following the onset of daylight time each March, there is a measurable increase in suicides, atrial fibrillation, strokes, and heart attacks. Workplace injuries climb. So do fatal car crashes and emergency room visits. There is even evidence that judges hand down harsher sentences. All of which helps explain the growing chorus of scientists calling for an end to daylight saving time. The public-health problems stem not just from the loss of an hour of sleep once a year but from the ongoing disruption to the human circadian clock...

We should no longer be thinking about "springing forward" and "falling back" in terms of personal preference or convenience but should be focusing instead on the proven degradation to human well-being. Scientists now understand vastly more about the workings and importance of circadian rhythm than they did when clock-shifting was instituted decades ago. There is a growing medical consensus that what we've been doing with our clocks each spring is unhealthy.

It's time to stop doing it.

Salesforce canceled its 325,000-square-foot lease at the unbuilt Parcel F tower in San Francisco's Transbay neighborhood, reports SFGate: The company announced in February that more than half of its workforce will continue working remotely or on a flexible schedule after the pandemic is over...

The lease termination is just the latest blow to San Francisco's downtown office footprint as more companies shrink or offload leases because of the persistence of remote work. The lease on Yelp's 161,876-square-foot office space at 140 New Montgomery St. is up in October 2021 and the entire space has been listed for rent. WeWork confirmed it would be scaling back its Bay Area locations and is closing five downtown locations. Just this week, the Mission Bay headquarters once leased by Dropbox is being sold for $1.08 billion. The company adopted a remote work policy in October 2020... In August 2020, Pinterest paid $89.5 million to terminate its lease for 88 Bluxome.

Scientists have used 3D computer modeling to figure out how the world's oldest "computer" worked. BBC reports: The Antikythera Mechanism has baffled experts since it was found on a Roman-era shipwreck in Greece in 1901. The hand-powered Ancient Greek device is thought to have been used to predict eclipses and other astronomical events. But only a third of the device survived, leaving researchers pondering how it worked and what it looked like. Scientists from University College London (UCL) believe they have finally cracked the puzzle using 3D computer modeling. They have recreated the entire front panel, and now hope to build a full-scale replica of the Antikythera using modern materials.

On Friday, a paper published in Scientific Reports revealed a new display of the gearing system that showed its fine details and complex parts. The mechanism has been described as an astronomical calculator as well as the world's first analogue computer. It is made of bronze and includes dozens of gears. The back cover features a description of the cosmos display, which shows the motion of the five planets that were known at the time the device was built. But only 82 fragments -- amounting to around a third of the device -- survived, This meant scientists have had to piece together the full picture using X-Ray data and an Ancient Greek mathematical method.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: US President Joe Biden is reportedly planning to nominate antitrust scholar Lina Khan to the Federal Trade Commission, a move that would indicate his administration is open to aggressive antitrust regulation not only generally but specifically against Amazon and other Big Tech firms. At present, Khan is an associate law professor at Columbia Law School. Khan vaulted directly to antitrust superstardom in 2017 while she was still a law student, when she published her blockbuster paper "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox" in the Yale Law Journal.

In "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox," Khan argued that using consumer pricing as the key benchmark for determining whether a company or a merger is anticompetitive is not sufficient and that Amazon's size and scale make it anticompetitive. "Specifically," she wrote in the abstract, "current doctrine underappreciates the risk of predatory pricing and how integration across distinct business lines may prove anticompetitive." Her work made an enormous splash. FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra, a Democrat, sought her as an advisor in 2018, when the commission was kicking off an antitrust enforcement review. "It's rare to come across a legal prodigy like Lina Khan," Chopra told The New York Times in 2018. "Nothing about her career is typical. You don't see many law students publish groundbreaking legal research, or research that had such a deep impact so quickly." Critics, on the other hand, dubbed her theories "hipster antitrust."

During 2019 and 2020, Khan served as one of the House subcommittee staffers who compiled a massive, blockbuster report digging into the antitrust implications of Big Tech. After 16 months of hearings, research, and analysis, the committee determined last fall that Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google were all in some way breaking competition law and needed to be reined in. The news comes only a few days after the Biden administration announced it was bringing on Tim Wu as special advisor on technology and competition policy. Wu is one of the most outspoken critics of Big Tech, arguing in his most recent book, 2018's The Curse of Bigness, that unchecked market concentration was leading to a new Gilded Age and all the problems that come with it.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Amazon One, the technology that lets customers pay in shops by scanning their palm, is expanding to more stores in the greater Seattle area. The company says it's available starting today in its 4-star store in Lynnwood, and in the coming weeks, Amazon One is also coming to its Amazon Books store in Bellevue and its 4-star and Pop Up stores in South Lake Union. In total, 12 of Amazon's physical stores will soon feature the technology.

The e-commerce giant announced its palm recognition Amazon One system last year. It works by scanning your hand and identifying its unique characteristics like surface area details and vein patterns. Palm scanning technology has been around for a few years, and it's pretty secure as biometric security methods go, though there are concerns about how Amazon might use the data gathered as part of the system. So far, Amazon has made Amazon One available as a payment option across a number of its own-branded physical stores around Seattle. But in the longer term, the company hopes the convenience factor of being able to confirm your identity using just your hand will convince third-party businesses to use the service, too.

Researchers from machine learning lab OpenAI have discovered that their state-of-the-art computer vision system can be deceived by tools no more sophisticated than a pen and a pad. The Verge reports: As illustrated in the image above, simply writing down the name of an object and sticking it on another can be enough to trick the software into misidentifying what it sees. "We refer to these attacks as typographic attacks," write OpenAI's researchers in a blog post. "By exploiting the model's ability to read text robustly, we find that even photographs of hand-written text can often fool the model." They note that such attacks are similar to "adversarial images" that can fool commercial machine vision systems, but far simpler to produce.

[T]he danger posed by this specific attack is, at least for now, nothing to worry about. The OpenAI software in question is an experimental system named CLIP that isn't deployed in any commercial product. Indeed, the very nature of CLIP's unusual machine learning architecture created the weakness that enables this attack to succeed. CLIP is intended to explore how AI systems might learn to identify objects without close supervision by training on huge databases of image and text pairs. In this case, OpenAI used some 400 million image-text pairs scraped from the internet to train CLIP, which was unveiled in January.

After downloading Microsoft's Edge, "Technically Incorrect" columnist Chris Matyszczyk "was then subject to constant pestering from Microsoft to, well, download the new Edge. Which was an entirely new dimension of irritation."

But occasionally browsing with Edge triggered other responses... Initially, this annoyed Google. When the misguided logged into their Gmail accounts from Edge, Google sent them a helpful message telling them that Chrome was better. You know, fast, simple, and secure. Supposedly. As the months rolled on, things seem to calm down. Google and Microsoft came to a rapprochement. Edge is now the second most popular browser — it does help that it descends upon all Windows users like manna from Seattle.

Perhaps it's Edge's swift rise that has finally made Apple shriek in public. Last week, I opened Edge, only to get a big surprise. In the top right-hand corner of my MacBook Air, there appeared a message. From Apple. "TRY THE NEW SAFARI," shouted the headline. The text added: "Fast, energy efficient and with a beautiful design."

I gasped in wonder. I stared and then, naturally, took a screenshot.

The notifications in the top right-hand corner of my screen are usually confined to declarations of a pending update, or a nag about my last backup. But never actually selling. I've never seen an Apple ad appear there. I don't think I've ever seen Apple instantly react to my opening any rival's product on my MacBook Air.

It's not as if, every time I open Microsoft Word, Apple taps me on the shoulder and aggressively suggests I use Pages.

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...

Slashdot reader b-dayyy quotes the Linux Security blog: While all Linux 'distros' — or distributed versions of Linux software — are secure by design, certain distros go above and beyond when it comes to protecting users' privacy and security. We've put together a list of our favorite specialized secure Linux distros and spoken with some of their lead developers to find out first-hand what makes these distros so great.
This "favorites" list cites six "excellent specialized secure Linux distros." Some highlights from the article:

• In a conversation with the LinuxSecurity editors, Qubes OS Community Manager Andrew David Wong elaborated, "Rather than attempting to fix all of the security bugs in software, Qubes assumes that all software is buggy and compartmentalizes it accordingly, so that when flaws are inevitably exploited, the damage is contained and the user's most valuable data is protected."

• A Kali Linux contributor provides some insight into the distro's history and the benefits it offers users: "Named after a Hindu goddess, Kali has been around for a long time — but it's still updated weekly, can be run in live mode or installed to a drive, and can also be used on ARM devices like Raspberry Pi."

Obviously there's strong opinions among Slashdot readers. So share your own thoughts in the comments.

What's the best Linux distro for enhanced privacy and security?

A US magistrate judge has ordered Valve to provide sales data to Apple in response to a subpoena issued amid Apple's continuing legal fight with Epic Games. From a report: In addition to some aggregate sales data for the entirety of Steam, Valve will only have to provide specific, per-title pricing and sales data for "436 specific apps that are available on both Steam and the Epic Games Store," according to the order. That's a significant decrease from the 30,000+ titles Apple for which Apple originally requested data. In resisting the subpoena, Valve argued that its Steam sales data was irrelevant to questions about the purely mobile app marketplaces at issue in the case. Refocusing the request only on games available on both Steam and the Epic Games Store makes it more directly relevant to the questions of mobile competition in the case, Judge Thomas Hixson writes in his order.

"Recall that in these related cases, [Epic] allege that Apple's 30% commission on sales through its App Store is anti-competitive and that allowing iOS apps to be sold through other stores would force Apple to reduce its commission to a more competitive level," Hixson writes in the order. "By focusing... on 436 specific games that are sold in both Steam and Epic's store, Apple seeks to take discovery into whether the availability of other stores does in fact affect commissions in the way [Epic] allege." The California judge overseeing Apple's attempts to drag Valve into an ongoing beef with Epic Games admitted that Apple "salted the Earth with subpoenas, so don't worry, it's not just you."