chicksdaddy writes: The Security Ledger is reporting that more than 50 Emergency Alert System (EAS) devices made by Monroe Electronics (now Digital Alert Systems) are un-patched and accessible from the public Internet, seven years after security researchers alerted the public about security flaws in the devices. More than 50 EAS deployments across the United States still use a shared SSH key, a security vulnerability first discovered and reported by IOActive in 2013, according to a warning posted by the security researcher Shawn Merdinger on January 19, seven years after the initial vulnerability report was issued.

Security Ledger viewed the exposed web interfaces for Monroe/Digital Alerts Systems EAS hardware used by two FM broadcasters in Texas and an exposed EAS belonging to a broadband cable provider in North Carolina. Also publicly accessible: EAS systems for two stations (FM and AM) serving the Island of Hawaii. Residents there received a false EAS alert about an incoming ICBM in 2018. That incident was found to be the result of human error but prompted the FCC to issue new guidance about securing EAS systems. Digital Alert Systems said it is aware of the problem and is contacting the customers whose gear is exposed. However, a search using the Shodan search engine suggests that few have taken steps to remove their EAS systems from the public Internet in the past week. Security Ledger is withholding the names of the broadcasters whose EAS systems were exposed for security reasons. None of the stations contacted for the story was able to provide comment prior to publication.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fast Company: Intuit's Mint personal-finance service wants me to know it's sorry. Again. "We're sorry!" its investments page bleats when I try to view my mutual funds' performance. "Our graphs require the latest version of Adobe Flash player." That site has spent years apologizing to me for needing Adobe's vulnerability-riddled plug-in: since I long ago booted Flash from my browser, since Adobe said in 2017 that it would drop Flash by the end of 2020, since Intuit told me in 2018 that Mint would wean itself from Flash "in the coming months."

But that's in keeping with this fossilized financial tool. Mint still provides a valuable service for free in aggregating transaction data from multiple financial institutions to clarify where your money comes and goes -- and in the bargain suggests hopefully-better financial products from advertisers -- but this app exhibits severe symptoms of neglect. It's as if Mint, with 13 million-plus registered users, were a resource-constrained startup instead of a property of Intuit, the Microsoft of personal finance. But more than a decade after the firm behind TurboTax and QuickBooks (and, until 2016, Quicken) bought Mint for $170 million, neatly taking a competitor off the map, this once-groundbreaking app might as well be streaked with cobwebs. The report goes on to note the "updates" category of Mint's blog "reveals no new features since April 2019's revised financial-advice interfaces in the mobile apps it introduced soon after the acquisition."

"It could be doing much more," says Aaron Patzer, founder of Mint. He points in particular to the lack of integration between Mint and TurboTax, saying, "I had a dream that TurboTax would take you about five minutes."

Another explanation for why the personal-finance service has gone neglected is the success of TurboTax, which generates roughly 10 to 20 times the revenue of Mint. Fast Company also notes that Mint "benefits from a lack of serious competition," as Quicken requires an annual subscription and remains desktop-bound, and the free Personal Capital web app is more geared toward investment management.

"[A]t the very time that it's become increasingly difficult for anyone to conduct their day to day lives without using the Net, some categories of people are increasingly being treated badly by many software designers," argues long-time Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein:
The victims of these attitudes include various special needs groups — visually and/or motor impaired are just two examples — but the elderly are a particular target. Working routinely with extremely elderly persons who are very active Internet users (including in their upper 90s!), I'm particularly sensitive to the difficulties that they face keeping their Net lifelines going. Often they're working on very old computers, without the resources (financial or human) to permit them to upgrade. They may still be running very old, admittedly risky OS versions and old browsers — Windows 7 is going to be used by many for years to come, despite hitting its official "end of life" for updates a few days ago.

Yet these elderly users are increasingly dependent on the Net to pay bills (more and more firms are making alternatives increasingly difficult and in some cases expensive), to stay in touch with friends and loved ones, and for many of the other routine purposes for which all of us now routinely depend on these technologies....

There's an aspect of this that is even worse. It's attitudes! It's the attitudes of many software designers that suggest they apparently really don't care about this class of users much — or at all. They design interfaces that are difficult for these users to navigate. Or in extreme cases, they simply drop support for many of these users entirely, by eliminating functionality that permits their old systems and old browsers to function.
He cites the example of Discourse, the open source internet forum software, which recently announced they'd stop supporting Internet Explorer. Weinstein himself hates Microsoft's browser, "Yet what of the users who don't understand how to upgrade? Who don't have anyone to help them upgrade? Are we to tell them that they matter not at all?"

So he confronted Stack Exchange co-founder Jeff Atwood (who is also one of the co-founders of Discourse) on Twitter — and eventually found himself blocked.

"Far more important though than this particular case is the attitude being expressed by so many in the software community, an attitude that suggests that many highly capable software engineers don't really appreciate these users and the kinds of problems that many of these users may have, that can prevent them from making even relatively simple changes or upgrades to their systems — which they need to keep using as much as anyone — in the real world."

Monday Red Hat and IBM jointly filed their own amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in the "Google vs. Oracle" case, arguing that APIs cannot be copyrighted.

"That simple, yet powerful principle has been a cornerstone of technological and economic growth for over sixty years. When published (as has been common industry practice for over three decades) or lawfully reverse engineered, they have spurred innovation through competition, increased productivity and economic efficiency, and connected the world in a way that has benefited commercial enterprises and consumers alike."

An anonymous reader quotes Red Hat's announcement of the brief: "The Federal Circuit's unduly narrow construction of 17 U.S.C. 102(b) is harmful to progress, competition, and innovation in the field of software development," Red Hat stated in the brief. "IBM and Red Hat urge the Court to reverse the decision below on the basis that 17 U.S.C. 102(b) excludes software interfaces from copyright protection...."

The lower court incorrectly extended copyright protection to software interfaces. If left uncorrected, the lower court rulings could harm software compatibility and interoperability and have a chilling effect on the innovation represented by the open source community... Red Hat's significant involvement with Java development over the last 20 years has included extensive contributions to OpenJDK, an open source implementation of the Java platform, and the development of Red Hat Middleware, a suite of Java-based middleware solutions to build, integrate, automate and deploy enterprise applications. As an open source leader, Red Hat has a stake in the consistent and correct determination of the scope of copyright protection that applies to interfaces of computer programs, including the Java platform interface at stake in this case.

Open source software development relies on the availability of and unencumbered access to software interfaces, including products that are compatible with or interoperate with other computer products, platforms, and services...

With a phone, anywhere else is always just a tap away. From a column: Those old enough to remember video-rental stores will recall the crippling indecision that would overtake you while browsing their shelves. With so many options, any one seemed unappealing, or insufficient. In a group, different tastes or momentary preferences felt impossible to balance. Everything was there, so there was nothing to watch. Those days are over, but the shilly-shally of choosing a show or movie to watch has only gotten worse. First, cable offered hundreds of channels. Now, each streaming service requires viewers to manipulate distinct software on different devices, scanning through the interfaces on Hulu, on Netflix, on AppleTV+ to find something "worth watching." Blockbuster is dead, but the emotional dread of its aisles lives on in your bedroom.

This same pattern has been repeated for countless activities, in work as much as leisure. Anywhere has become as good as anywhere else. The office is a suitable place for tapping out emails, but so is the bed, or the toilet. You can watch television in the den -- but also in the car, or at the coffee shop, turning those spaces into impromptu theaters. Grocery shopping can be done via an app while waiting for the kids' recital to start. Habits like these compress time, but they also transform space. Nowhere feels especially remarkable, and every place adopts the pleasures and burdens of every other. It's possible to do so much from home, so why leave at all?

Areyoukiddingme writes: EFF has filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in Google v. Oracle, arguing that APIs are not copyrightable. From the press release: "The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today asked the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that functional aspects of Oracle's Java programming language are not copyrightable, and even if they were, employing them to create new computer code falls under fair use protections. The court is reviewing a long-running lawsuit Oracle filed against Google, which claimed that Google's use of certain Java application programming interfaces (APIs) in its Android operating system violated Oracle's copyrights. The case has far-reaching implications for innovation in software development, competition, and interoperability.

In a brief filed today, EFF argues that the Federal Circuit, in ruling APIs were copyrightable, ignored clear and specific language in the copyright statute that excludes copyright protection for procedures, processes, and methods of operation. 'Instead of following the law, the Federal Circuit decided to rewrite it to eliminate almost all the exclusions from copyright protection that Congress put in the statute,' said EFF Legal Director Corynne McSherry. 'APIs are not copyrightable. The Federal Circuit's ruling has created a dangerous precedent that will encourage more lawsuits and make innovative software development prohibitively expensive. Fortunately, the Supreme Court can and should fix this mess.'" Oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court are scheduled for March 2020, and a decision by June.

New submitter profi shares a report from Computing: Huawei has released the source code of openEuler, its distribution of Linux based on CentOS. The operating system was formally launched by Huawei in September 2019 in response to U.S. sanctions, which had briefly affected the company's access to Windows and Android operating systems. The source code has now been published on Gitee, the Chinese version of Github.

OpenEuler comprises two organizations on Gitee, one for source code and one for package sources. The openEuler organization was keen to highlight two particular packages, iSulad and A-Tune, among the openEuler source code. "iSulad is a lightweight gRPC service-based container runtime. Compared to runc, iSulad is written in C, but all interfaces are compatible with OCI. A-Tune is a system software to auto-optimize the system adaptively to multiple scenarios with embedded AI-engine." The announcement continues: "You will also see several infrastructure-supported projects that set up the community's operating systems... these systems are built on the Huawei Cloud through script automation."

Among the package sources, covered by the src-openeuler organization on Gitee, are around 1,000 packages with versions in both ARM64 and X86 architecture packages. Huawei claims its developers have made a number of enhancements to ARM64 openEuler code to improve multi-core efficiency. It is also working on a "green computing" ecosystem with Linaro and the Green Industry Alliance. At the moment, the organization claims, there are more than 50 contributors and just under 600 commits. The openEuler community has around 20 SIGs or project groups.

DevNull127 writes: The Debian Project has announced the results of its vote on how much to support non-systemd init systems. The eight options voted on included "Focus on systemd" and "Support for multiple init systems is required" (as well as milder choices like "Support for multiple init systems is Important" and "Support non-systemd systems, without blocking progress.") The winning option?

"Systemd but we support exploring alternatives."

Here's the position for the Debian project described by that option:

The Debian project recognizes that systemd service units are the preferred configuration for describing how to start a daemon/service. However, Debian remains an environment where developers and users can explore and develop alternate init systems and alternatives to systemd features.

Those interested in exploring such alternatives need to provide the necessary development and packaging resources to do that work. Technologies such as elogind that facilitate exploring alternatives while running software that depends on some systemd interfaces remain important to Debian. It is important that the project support the efforts of developers working on such technologies where there is overlap between these technologies and the rest of the project, for example by reviewing patches and participating in discussions in a timely manner.

Packages should include service units or init scripts to start daemons and services. Packages may use any systemd facility at the package maintainer's discretion, provided that this is consistent with other Policy requirements and the normal expectation that packages shouldn't depend on experimental or unsupported (in Debian) features of other packages. Packages may include support for alternate init systems besides systemd and may include alternatives for any systemd-specific interfaces they use. Maintainers use their normal procedures for deciding which patches to include.

Debian is committed to working with derivatives that make different choices about init systems. As with all our interactions with downstreams, the relevant maintainers will work with the downstreams to figure out which changes it makes sense to fold into Debian and which changes remain purely in the derivative.

The inevitable day when machines learn to design our apps. From a report: When AR wearables hit the market, our apps will start tracking both our conscious and subconscious behavior. By measuring our heart rate, respiration, pupil size, and eye movement, our AIs will be able to map our psychology in high resolution. And armed with this information, our interfaces will morph and adapt to our mood as we go about our day. Future interfaces will not be curated, but tailored to fulfill our subconscious needs. Maybe the best way to navigate a digital ecosystem isn't through buttons and sliders. Maybe the solution is something more organic and abstract.

Autodesk is developing a system that uses Generative Design to create 3D models. You enter your requirements, and the system spits out a solution. The method has already produced drones, airplane parts, and hot rods. So it's only a matter of time before we start seeing AI-generated interfaces. This may all sounds far out, but the future tends to arrive sooner than we expect. One day, in a brave new world, we will look at contemporary interfaces the same way we look at an old typewriter; gawking at its crudeness and appreciating how far we've come.

The media ecosystem is undergoing a massive change as streaming video looks to extend its recent dominance over traditional distribution, according to research firm MoffettNathanson, which wrote that a large minority of cable consumers could cut their subscriptions in coming years. From a report: "The video market is in full disruption and this year could be the cord cutting tipping point," analyst Michael Nathanson wrote to clients. "Media companies will need to master a whole new suite of skill sets to win going forward," with content creation, user interfaces and "churn mitigation strategies" among the factors that could determine the next generation of winners in the market. Consumers have been abandoning traditional media bundles for years, instead looking to services like Netflix or Walt Disney's recently launched Disney+ service, which has signed up more than 10 million subscribers since launching in November. Streaming services have made in-roads into a number of major categories of video entertainment, including TV shows and movies. In a measure of how big streaming has become, Wells Fargo Securities wrote that between November 17-23, "The Mandalorian," a series from Disney+ set in the "Star Wars" universe, was the "most in-demand show in OTT and overall on a linear+OTT basis." OTT stands for "over the top" content, which bypasses cable boxes. Linear TV airs at set times, as opposed to being on-demand, as with streaming.

A mix of silkworms' proteins acts as a scaffold for 3-D-printed tissues and organs. From a report: Many research groups are testing "ink" made from silk proteins to print human tissues, implants and perhaps even organs. The process is a less costly alternative to conventional 3-D printing with collagen, a key protein in the body's natural scaffolding. Researchers in Assam, a state in India, are investigating using local silkworm species for the task -- they recently submitted a patent for bioinks using a combination of proteins extracted from local species Antheraea assamensis and Samia ricini, as well as the commonly used Bombyx mori. The scientists have woven them into synthetic structures ranging from blood vessels to liver lobes; in a paper published in September in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, they described mimicking the cartilage of an entire ear. Silk is a natural polymer, a substance with long, repeating molecular chains. It is mechanically strong and completely biodegradable, well suited for applications in tissue engineering.

To use it, researchers draw liquid silk from the silkworm's glands or dissolve silk fibers in solvents. They carefully mix the gelatinous liquid with a patient's stem cells, then build structures layer by layer with a 3-D printer. After implantation, the cells grow and replace the silken scaffold, which eventually degenerates into amino acids. Extracting and purifying collagen from animal remains, a common medical source, is complex and expensive. "Compared with collagen, silks have an immense advantage in terms of supply and processing. Local sourcing is also a clear plus in their use in India," says David Kaplan, who heads the department of biomedical engineering at Tufts University and is not involved in the new research. Silk from domesticated silkworms has been used widely in bioprinting, but Biman B. Mandal's laboratory at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati in Assam is among the first to incorporate wild silks.

An anonymous reader writes: It can be a bit difficult to wrap your brain around what exactly neural interface startup Ctrl-labs is doing with technology. That's ironic, given that Ctrl-labs wants to let your brain directly use technology by translating mental intent into action. We caught up with Ctrl-labs CEO Thomas Reardon at Web Summit 2019 earlier this month to understand exactly how the brain-machine interface works. Founded in 2015, Ctrl-labs is a New York-based startup developing a wristband that translates musculoneural signals into machine-interpretable commands. But not for long -- Facebook acquired Ctrl-labs in September 2019. The acquisition hasn't closed yet, so Reardon has not spoken to anyone at the social media giant since signing the agreement. He was, however, eager to tell us more about the neural interface technology so we could glean why Facebook (and the tech industry at large) is interested.

Microsoft gave a status update today on its experiments on using the Rust programming language instead of C and C++ to write Windows components. From a report: Microsoft began experimenting with Rust over the summer. The Redmond-based software giant said it was interested in Rust because, over the past decade, more than 70% of the security patches it shipped out fixed memory-related bugs, an issue that Rust was created to address.

[...] Today, almost four months later, we got the first feedback. "I've been tasked with an experimental rewrite of a low-level system component of the Windows codebase (sorry, we can't say which one yet)," said Adam Burch, Software Engineer at the Microsoft Hyper-V team, in a blog post today. "Though the project is not yet finished, I can say that my experience with Rust has been generally positive," Burch added. "In general, new components or existing components with clean interfaces will be the easiest to port to Rust," the Microsoft engineer said. However, not all things went smoothly. It would have been unrealistic if we expected they would. Burch cited the lack of safe transmutation, safe support for C style unions, fallible allocation, and a lack of support for at-scale unit testing, needed for Microsoft's sprawling code-testing infrastructure.

Adobe Photoshop is now available for iPads. From a report: The release follows an official announcement at Adobe's MAX event last year. The app is free to download and use for 30 days, but you'll need a Creative Cloud subscription to continue using it after that. If you already have a subscription for Adobe's desktop apps that covers Photoshop, you should be good to go -- you just need to log in with your paid account credentials. The app has full support for Apple Pencil, and lets you work on full PSD files -- layers and all. The company has also modified oft-used Photoshop functions for touchscreen interfaces, such as quick selection and paintbrush.

The streaming giant is having to navigate different political and moral landscapes, and calls for government oversight, as it seeks subscribers worldwide. From a report: In September, Netflix released a trailer for the "Breaking Bad" sequel "El Camino." In it, a character sits in a car, lights a cigarette and holds it out the window, its orange tip glowing. The next day, Netflix Turkey released its own version. In it, the character sparks a lighter and puts his hand out of the window. But there's a difference: The cigarette has been edited out. It wasn't the first time Netflix had censored one of its trailers here. In January, the streaming giant edited one for "Sex Education," a series about a teenage sex therapist, to blur a character's hands so you couldn't see the raised middle fingers. These changes may seem small, but they are a sign of Netflix trying to get ahead of regulation it could soon face in Turkey.

[...] In Turkey, and in other countries, Netflix must navigate different political and moral landscapes, and calls for censorship, as it expands worldwide. Its 2018 annual report lists both "censorship" and "the need to adapt our content and users interfaces for specific cultural and language differences" as business risks. India is another country where Netflix has been embroiled in debates around regulation and censorship. In 2017, the company offered viewers "Angry Indian Goddesses," a movie that had been released in Indian theaters in a censored form to avoid offending religious sensibilities.ï Netflix, which is not subject to India's movie theater code, initially showed the censored version anyway, to avoid a backlash from religious viewers. But complaints came instead from viewers who wanted to see the movie uncut. Netflix made that version available and released a statement: "Our members reached out to us and we listened."

Gartner research has announced 10 "strategic technology trends that will drive significant disruption and opportunity over the next 5 to 10 years." And the trends include "hyperautomation" -- applying advanced technologies like AI and machine learning to tasks "that once required humans," combining robotic process automation with intelligent business management software to provide "real-time, continuous intelligence about the organization...with a goal of increasingly AI-driven decision making."

They also predict "autonomous things," including drones, appliances, robots, and even ships, sometimes working in collaborative swarms, that "exploit AI to perform tasks usually done by humans." Trend #6 is "the empowered edge," where IoT devices become the foundation for "smart spaces" that move services and applications closer to where they're actually used, creating a world of smart buildings and city spaces. Plus, they're also predicting a movement from centralized public clouds to distributed public clouds which allow data centers to be located anywhere. ("This solves both technical issues like latency and also regulatory challenges like data sovereignty.")

Trend #10 looks at the possibility of AI-enhanced security solutions -- and AI-powered security threats -- as well as the need to provide security for our new AI-powered systems. But they also envision a trend that "replaces technology-literate people with people-literate technology" providing sophisticated "multiexperiences" though "multisensory and multitouchpoint interfaces like wearables and advanced computer sensors." They even predict "fully-scalable" blockchain by 2023, while also predicting its impact on the economy will be felt through integrations with "complementary technologies" like AI and IoT. ("For example, a car would be able to negotiate insurance prices directly with the insurance company based on data gathered by its sensors.")

Trend #3 is "Democratization of technology" (or "citizen access"), a prediction which includes "AI-driven development" of data science models for automated testing. And interestingly, trend #5 is transparency and traceability: The evolution of technology is creating a trust crisis. As consumers become more aware of how their data is being collected and used, organizations are also recognizing the increasing liability of storing and gathering the data. Additionally, AI and ML are increasingly used to make decisions in place of humans, evolving the trust crisis and driving the need for ideas like explainable AI and AI governance.

This trend requires a focus on six key elements of trust: Ethics, integrity, openness, accountability, competence and consistency.
Trend #4 even predicts humans will merge with technology. "[W]hat if scientists could augment the brain to increase memory storage, or implant a chip to decode neural patterns? What if exoskeletons became a standard uniform for autoworkers, enabling them to lift superhuman weights? What if doctors could implant sensors to track how drugs travel inside a body...?"

A new article this week on Motherboard argues that Flash "is responsible for the internet's most creative era," citing a new 640-page book by Rob Ford on the evolution of web design.

[O]ne could argue that the web has actually gotten less creative over time, not more. This interpretation of events is a key underpinning of Web Design: The Evolution of the Digital World 1990-Today (Taschen, $50), a new visual-heavy book from author Rob Ford and editor Julius Wiedemann that does something that hasn't been done on the broader internet in quite a long time: It praises the use of Flash as a creative tool, rather than a bloated malware vessel, and laments the ways that visual convention, technical shifts, and walled gardens have started to rein in much of this unvarnished creativity.

This is a realm where small agencies supporting big brands, creative experimenters with nothing to lose, and teenage hobbyists could stand out simply by being willing to try something risky. It was a canvas with a built-in distribution model. What wasn't to like, besides a whole host of malware?
The book's author tells Motherboard that "Without the rebels we'd still be looking at static websites with gray text and blue hyperlinks." But instead we got wild experiments like Burger King's "Subservient Chicken" site or the interactive "Wilderness Downtown" site coded by Google.

There were also entire cartoon series like Radiskull and Devil Doll or Zombie College -- not to mention games like "A Murder of Scarecrows" or the laughably unpredictible animutations of 14-year-old Neil Cicierega. But Ford tells Motherboard that today, many of the wild ideas have moved from the web to augmented reality and other "physical mediums... The rise in interactive installations, AR, and experiential in general is where the excitement of the early days is finally happening again."

Motherboard calls the book "a fitting coda for a kind of digital creativity that -- like Geocities and MySpace pages, multimedia CD-ROMs, and Prodigy graphical interfaces before it -- has faded in prominence."

Wired recently remembered Flash as "the annoying plugin" that transformed the web "into a cacophony of noise, colour, and controversy, presaging the modern web."

They write that its early popularity in the mid-1990s came in part because "Microsoft needed software capable of showing video on their website, MSN.com, then the default homepage of every Internet Explorer user." But Flash allowed anyone to become an animator. (One Disney artist tells them that Flash could do in three days what would take a professional animator 7 months -- and cost $10,000.)

Their article opens in 2008, a golden age when Flash was installed on 98% of desktops -- then looks back on its impact: The online world Flash entered was largely static. Blinking GIFs delivered the majority of online movement. Constructed in early HTML and CSS, websites lifted clumsily from the metaphors of magazine design: boxy and grid-like, they sported borders and sidebars and little clickable numbers to flick through their pages (the horror).

Flash changed all that. It transformed the look of the web...

Some of these websites were, to put it succinctly, absolute trash. Flash was applied enthusiastically and inappropriately. The gratuitous animation of restaurant websites was particularly grievous -- kitsch abominations, these could feature thumping bass music and teleporting ingredients. Ishkur's 'guide to electronic music' is a notable example from the era you can still view -- a chaos of pop arty lines and bubbles and audio samples, it looks like the mind map of a naughty child...

In contrast to the web's modern, business-like aesthetic, there is something bizarre, almost sentimental, about billion-dollar multinationals producing websites in line with Flash's worst excess: long loading times, gaudy cartoonish graphics, intrusive sound and incomprehensible purpose... "Back in 2007, you could be making Flash games and actually be making a living," remembers Newgrounds founder Tom Fulp, when asked about Flash's golden age. "That was a really fun time, because that's kind of what everyone's dream is: to make the games you want and be able to make a living off it."
Wired summarizes Steve Jobs' "brutally candid" diatribe against Flash in 2010. "Flash drained batteries. It ran slow. It was a security nightmare. He asserted that an era had come to an end... '[T]he mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards -- all areas where Flash falls short.'" Wired also argues that "It was economically viable for him to rubbish Flash -- he wanted to encourage people to create native games for iOS."

But they also write that today, "The post-Flash internet looks different. The software's downfall precipitated the rise of a new aesthetic...one moulded by the specifications of the smartphone and the growth of social media," favoring hits of information rather than striving for more immersive, movie-emulating thrills.

And they add that though Newgrounds long-ago moved away from Flash, the site's founder is now working on a Flash emulator to keep all that early classic content playable in a browser.

Samsung has announced a new prototype key-value SSD that is compatible with the first industry standard API for key-value storage devices. "Earlier this year, the Object Drives working group of Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) published version 1.0 of the Key Value Storage API Specification," reports AnandTech. "Samsung has added support for this new API to their ongoing key-value SSD project." From the report: Samsung has been working on key-value SSDs for quite a while, and they have been publicly developing open-source software to support KV SSDs for over a year, including the basic libraries and drivers needed to access KV SSDs as well as a sample benchmarking tool and a Ceph backend. The prototype drives they have previously discussed have been based on their PM983 datacenter NVMe drives with TLC NAND, using custom firmware to enable the key-value interface. Those drives support key lengths from 4 to 255 bytes and value lengths up to 2MB, and it is likely that Samsung's new prototype is based on the same hardware platform and retains similar size limits.

Samsung's Platform Development Kit software for key-value SSDs originally supported their own software API, but now additionally supports the vendor-neutral SNIA standard API. The prototype drives are currently available for companies that are interested in developing software to use KV SSDs. Samsung's KV SSDs probably will not move from prototype status to being mass production products until after the corresponding key-value command set extension to NVMe is finalized, so that KV SSDs can be supported without needing a custom NVMe driver. The SNIA standard API for key-value drives is a high-level transport-agnostic API that can support drives using NVMe, SAS or SATA interfaces, but each of those protocols needs to be extended with key-value support.

Catalin Cimpanu, writing for ZDNet: More than 47,000 workstations and servers, possibly more, running on Supermicro motherboards are currently open to attacks because administrators have left an internal component exposed on the internet. These systems are vulnerable to a new set of vulnerabilities named USBAnywhere that affect the baseboard management controller (BMC) firmware of Supermicro motherboards. Patches are available to fix the USBAnywhere vulnerabilities, but Supermicro and security experts recommend restricting access to BMC management interfaces from the internet, as a precaution and industry best practice.