Apple's end-to-end iCloud encryption product ("Advanced Data Protection") was famously removed in the U.K. after a government order demanded backdoors for accessing user data.

So now a Google software engineer wants to build an open source version of Advanced Data Protection for everyone. "We need to take action now to protect users..." they write (as long-time Slashdot reader WaywardGeek). "The whole world would be able to use it for free, protecting backups, passwords, message history, and more, if we can get existing applications to talk to the new data protection service." "I helped build Google's Advanced Data Protection (Google Cloud Key VaultService) in 2018, and Google is way ahead of Apple in this area. I know exactly how to build it and can have it done in spare time in a few weeks, at least server-side... This would be a distributed trust based system, so I need folks willing to run the protection service. I'll run mine on a Raspberry PI...

The scheme splits a secret among N protection servers, and when it is time to recover the secret, which is basically an encryption key, they must be able to get key shares from T of the original N servers. This uses a distributed oblivious pseudo random function algorithm, which is very simple.

In plain English, it provides nation-state resistance to secret back doors, and eliminates secret mass surveillance, at least when it comes to data backed up to the cloud... The UK and similarly confused governments will need to negotiate with operators in multiple countries to get access to any given users's keys. There are cases where rational folks would agree to hand over that data, and I hope we can end the encryption wars and develop sane policies that protect user data while offering a compromise where lives can be saved.
"I've got the algorithms and server-side covered," according to their original submission. "However, I need help." Specifically...

• Running protection servers. "This is a T-of-N scheme, where users will need say 9 of 15 nodes to be available to recover their backups."
• Android client app. "And preferably tight integration with the platform as an alternate backup service."
• An iOS client app. (With the same tight integration with the platform as an alternate backup service.)
• Authentication. "Users should register and login before they can use any of their limited guesses to their phone-unlock secret."

"Are you up for this challenge? Are you ready to plunge into this with me?"


In the comments he says anyone interested can ask to join the "OpenADP" project on GitHub — which is promising "Open source Advanced Data Protection for everyone."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SiliconANGLE: Hugging Face has open-sourced the blueprints of two internally developed robots called HopeJR and Reachy Mini. The company debuted the machines on Thursday. Hugging Face is backed by more than $390 million in funding from Nvidia Corp., IBM Corp. and other investors. It operates a GitHub-like platform for sharing open-source artificial intelligence projects. It says its platform hosts more than 1 million AI models, hundreds of thousands of datasets and various other technical assets.

The company started prioritizing robotics last year after launching LeRobot, a section of its platform dedicated to autonomous machines. The portal provides access to AI models for powering robots and datasets that can be used to train those models. Hugging Face released its first hardware blueprint, a robotic arm design called the SO-100, late last year. The SO-100 was developed in partnership with a startup called The Robot Studio. Hugging Face also collaborated with the company on the HopeJR, the first new robot that debuted this week. According to TechCrunch, it's a humanoid robot that can perform 66 movements including walking.

HopeJR is equipped with a pair of robotic arms that can be remotely controlled by a human using a pair of specialized, chip-equipped gloves. HopeJR's arms replicate the movements made by the wearer of the gloves. A demo video shared by Hugging Face showed that the robot can shake hands, point to a specific text snippet on a piece of paper and perform other tasks. Hugging Face's other new robot, the Reachy Mini, likewise features an open-source design. It's based on technology that the company obtained through the acquisition of a venture-backed startup called Pollen Robotics earlier this year. Reachy Mini is a turtle-like robot that comes in a rectangular case. Its main mechanical feature is a retractable neck that allows it to follow the user with its head or withdraw into the case. This case, which is stationary, is compact and lightweight enough to be placed on a desk. Hugging Face will offer pre-assembled versions of its open-source Reach Mini and HopeJR robots for $250 and $3,000, with the first units starting to ship by the end of the year.

DevNull127 writes: Stack Overflow will test paying experts to answer questions. That's one of many radical experiments they're now trying to stave off an AI-induced death spiral. Questions and answers to the site have plummeted more than 90% since April of 2020. So here's what Stack Overflow will try next.

1. They're bringing back Chat, according to their CEO (to foster "even more connections between our community members" in "an increasingly AI-driven world").

2. They're building a "new Stack Overflow" meant to feel like a personalized portal. "It might collect videos, blogs, Q&A, war stories, jokes, educational materials, jobs... and fold them together into one personalized destination."

3. They're proposing areas more open to discussion, described as "more flexible Stack Exchanges... where users can explore ideas or share opinions."

4. They're also licensing Stack Overflow content to AI companies for training their models.

5. Again, they will test paying experts to answer questions.

SpaceX's Starship Flight 9 successfully launched and reached space -- marking the first reuse of a Super Heavy booster -- but both rocket stages were ultimately lost mid-mission due to a "rapid unscheduled disassembly." SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said in a statement: "Starship made it to the scheduled ship engine cutoff, so big improvement over last flight! Leaks caused loss of main tank pressure during the coast and re-entry phase. Lot of good data to review." Musk said the next three Starship test launches could lift off every three to four weeks in the days ahead. Space.com reports: The mission lifted off from Starbase today at 7:37 p.m. EDT (2337 GMT; 6:37 p.m. local Texas time), sending the 40-story-tall rocket into the Texas sky atop a pillar of flame. It was a milestone launch, marking the first-ever reuse of a Super Heavy booster; this one earned its wings on Flight 7 in January. (SpaceX swapped out just four of its Raptors after that mission, meaning that 29 of the engines that flew today were flight-proven.) "Lessons learned from the first booster refurbishment and subsequent performance in flight will enable faster turnarounds of future reflights as progress is made towards vehicles requiring no hands-on maintenance between launches," the company wrote in a Flight 9 mission preview.

The Super Heavy had a somewhat different job to do today; it conducted a variety of experiments on its way back down to Earth. For example, the booster performed a controlled rather than randomized return flip and hit the atmosphere at a different angle. "By increasing the amount of atmospheric drag on the vehicle, a higher angle of attack can result in a lower descent speed, which in turn requires less propellant for the initial landing burn," SpaceX wrote in the mission preview. "Getting real-world data on how the booster is able to control its flight at this higher angle of attack will contribute to improved performance on future vehicles, including the next generation of Super Heavy." These experiments complicated Super Heavy's flight profile compared to previous missions, making another "chopsticks" catch at Starbase a tougher proposition. So, rather than risk damaging the launch tower and other infrastructure, SpaceX decided to bring the booster back for a "hard splashdown" in the Gulf of Mexico on Flight 9. That was the plan, anyway; Super Heavy didn't quite make it that far. The booster broke apart about 6 minutes and 20 seconds into today's flight, just after beginning its landing burn. "Confirmation that the booster did demise," [Dan Huot, of SpaceX's communications team] said during the Flight 9 webcast. Super Heavy's flight ended "before it was able to get through landing burn," he added.

Ship, by contrast, improved its performance a bit this time around. It reached space today on a suborbital trajectory that took it eastward over the Atlantic Ocean -- the same basic path the vehicle took on the truncated Flight 7 and Flight 8. But Flight 9 got choppy for Ship after that. The vehicle was supposed to deploy eight dummy versions of SpaceX's Starlink satellites about 18.5 minutes after liftoff, which would have been a landmark first for the Starship program. That didn't happen, however; the payload door couldn't open fully, so SpaceX abandoned the deployment try. Then, about 30 minutes after launch, Ship started to tumble, which was the result of a leak in Ship's fuel-tank systems, according to Huot. "A lot of those [tanks] are used for your attitude control," he said. "And so, at this point, we've essentially lost our attitude control with Starship." As a result, SpaceX nixed a plan to relight one of Ship's Raptor engines in space, a test that was supposed to happen about 38 minutes after launch. And the company gave up hope of a soft splashdown for the vehicle, instead becoming resigned to a breakup over the Indian Ocean during Ship's reentry.

The company therefore will not get all the data it wanted about Flight 9. And there was quite a bit to get; for example, SpaceX removed some of Ship's heat-shield tiles to stress-test vulnerable areas, and it also tried out several different tile materials, including one with an active cooling system. But the company plans to bounce back and try again soon, just as it did after Flight 7 and Flight 8. You can watch a recording of the launch on YouTube.

A German court has sentenced two former Volkswagen executives to prison and handed suspended sentences to two others for their roles in the Dieselgate emissions scandal, marking the conclusion of a nearly four-year fraud trial. Politico reports: The former head of diesel development was sentenced to four and a half years in prison, and the head of drive train electronics to two years and seven months by the court in Braunschweig, German news agency dpa reported. Two others received suspended sentences of 15 months and 10 months. The scandal began in September 2015 when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued a notice of violation. saying that the company had rigged engine control software that let the cars pass emissions tests while they emitted far more pollution in actual driving.

The company has paid more than $33 billion in fines and compensation to vehicle owners. Two VW managers received prison sentence in the U.S. The former head of the company's Audi division, Rupert Stadler, was given a suspended sentence of 21 months and a fine of 1.1 million euros ($1.25 million). The sentence is still subject to appeal. Missing from the trial, which lasted almost four years, was former CEO Martin Winterkorn. Proceedings against him have been suspended because of health issues, and it's not clear when he might go on trial. Winterkorn has denied wrongdoing. Further proceedings are open against 31 other suspects in Germany.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For millions of music fans, the most controversial app ban of the past year was not the brief TikTok outage but the ongoing delisting of Musi from Apple's App Store. Those users are holding out hope that Musi can defeat Apple in court and soon be reinstated. However, rather than coming to any sort of resolution, that court fight has intensified over the past month, with both sides now seeking sanctions, TorrentFreak reported. [...] For Musi, the App Store removal came as an existential threat, prompting a lawsuit after Musi's attempts to work out the dispute with Apple outside of court failed. The music-streaming app has alleged that the Apple ban did not come at YouTube's request but at the request of Apple's apparent music industry friends who allegedly asked Apple to find a way to get the app removed -- prompting Apple to push YouTube to re-open a supposedly resolved complaint.

In a court filing, Apple claimed that this "conspiracy theory," as well as other "baseless" claims, were "false and misleading allegations" warranting sanctions. "Discovery thoroughly disproved Musi's baseless conspiracy theory that Apple schemed to eliminate the Musi app from the App Store to benefit 'friends' in the music industry," Apple argued. But Musi fired back over the weekend, calling (PDF) Apple's motion for sanctions "frivolous" and demanding sanctions be ordered instead against Apple for allegedly abusing the sanctions rule as a "tactic of intimidation and harassment." Musi noted that Apple's requested sanctions against Musi "are not appropriate if there is even 'some credible evidence,'" then included internal emails and references to testimony from Apple's own employees that seemingly met this low bar.

Most likely, this part of the dispute will not be settled until July 30, when a hearing is scheduled on the motions for sanctions. Apple is seemingly hoping that the court will agree that Musi's complaint misrepresents the facts and is so misleading that the complaint must be struck entirely, perhaps cutting out the heart of Musi's argument. However, Musi pointed out that Apple previously sought sanctions and withdrew that fight, allegedly recognizing that its bid for sanctions was "baseless." To convince the court that this second bid is "equally frivolous," Musi shared receipts, attaching internal communications from Apple employees that Apple allegedly worked hard to keep out of the courtroom.

The Browser Company has ceased the active development of its Arc browser to focus on Dia, a new AI-powered browser currently in alpha testing, the company said Tuesday. In a lengthy letter to users, CEO Josh Miller said the startup should have stopped working on Arc "a year earlier," noting data showing the browser suffered from a "novelty tax" problem where users found it too different to adopt widely.

Arc struggled with low feature adoption -- only 5.52% of daily active users regularly used multiple Spaces, while 4.17% used Live Folders. The company will continue maintenance updates for Arc but won't add new features. Arc also won't open-source the browser because it relies on proprietary infrastructure called ADK (Arc Development Kit) that remains core to the company's value.

New submitter zuki shares an obit published at The Register: John Young, the co-founder of the legendary internet archive Cryptome, died at the age of 89 on March 28. The Register talked to friends and peers who gave tribute to a bright, pugnacious man who was devoted to the public's right to know.

Before WikiLeaks, OpenLeaks, BayFiles, or Transparency Toolkit, there was Cryptome - an open internet archive that inspired them all, helped ignite the first digital crypto war, and even gave Julian Assange his start before falling out with him on principle.

"Do we need publicly-owned social networks to escape Silicon Valley?" asks an opinion piece in Spain's El Pais newspaper.

It argues it's necessary because social media platforms "have consolidated themselves as quasi-monopolies, with a business model that consists of violating our privacy in search of data to sell ads..." Among the proposals and alternatives to these platforms, the idea of public social media networks has often been mentioned. Imagine, for example, a Twitter for the European Union, or a Facebook managed by media outlets like the BBC. In February, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called for "the development of our own browsers, European public and private social networks and messaging services that use transparent protocols." Former Spanish prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero — who governed from 2004 until 2011 — and the left-wing Sumar bloc in the Spanish Parliament have also proposed this. And, back in 2021, former British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn made a similar suggestion.

At first glance, this may seem like a good idea: a public platform wouldn't require algorithms — which are designed to stimulate addiction and confrontation — nor would it have to collect private information to sell ads. Such a platform could even facilitate public conversations, as pointed out by James Muldoon, a professor at Essex Business School and author of Platform Socialism: How to Reclaim our Digital Future from Big Tech (2022)... This could be an alternative that would contribute to platform pluralism and ensure we're not dependent on a handful of billionaires. This is especially important at a time when we're increasingly aware that technology isn't neutral and that private platforms respond to both economic and political interests.
There's other possibilities. Further down they write that "it makes much more sense for the state to invest in, or collaborate with, decentralized social media networks based on free and interoperable software" that "allow for the portability of information and content." They even spoke to Cory Doctorow, who they say "proposes that the state cooperate with the software systems, developers, or servers for existing open-source platforms, such as the U.S. network Bluesky or the German firm Mastodon." (Doctorow adds that reclaiming digital independence "is incredibly important, it's incredibly difficult, and it's incredibly urgent."

The article also acknowledges the option of "legislative initiatives — such as antitrust laws, or even stricter regulations than those imposed in Europe — that limit or prevent surveillance capitalism." (Though they also figures showing U.S. tech giants have one of the largest lobbying groups in the EU, with Meta being the top spender...)

A year ago, the original creator of SerenityOS posted that "for the past two years, I've been almost entirely focused on Ladybird, a new web browser that started as a simple HTML viewer for SerenityOS." So it became a stand-alone project that "aims to render the modern web with good performance, stability and security." And they're also building a new web engine.

"We are building a brand-new browser from scratch, backed by a non-profit..." says Ladybird's official web site, adding that they're driven "by a web standards first approach." They promise it will be truly independent, with "no code from other browsers" (and no "default search engine" deals).

"We are targeting Summer 2026 for a first Alpha version on Linux and macOS. This will be aimed at developers and early adopters." More from the Ladybird FAQ: We currently have 7 paid full-time engineers working on Ladybird. There is also a large community of volunteer contributors... The focus of the Ladybird project is to build a new browser engine from the ground up. We don't use code from Blink, WebKit, Gecko, or any other browser engine...

For historical reasons, the browser uses various libraries from the SerenityOS project, which has a strong culture of writing everything from scratch. Now that Ladybird has forked from SerenityOS, it is no longer bound by this culture, and we will be making use of 3rd party libraries for common functionality (e.g image/audio/video formats, encryption, graphics, etc.) We are already using some of the same 3rd party libraries that other browsers use, but we will never adopt another browser engine instead of building our own...

We don't have anyone actively working on Windows support, and there are considerable changes required to make it work well outside a Unix-like environment. We would like to do Windows eventually, but it's not a priority at the moment.
"Ladybird's founder Andreas Kling has a solid background in WebKit-based C++ development with both Apple and Nokia,," writes software developer/author David Eastman: "You are likely reading this on a browser that is slightly faster because of my work," he wrote on his blog's introduction page. After leaving Apple, clearly burnt out, Kling found himself in need of something to healthily occupy his time. He could have chosen to learn needlepoint, but instead he opted to build his own operating system, called Serenity. Ladybird is a web project spin-off from this, to which Kling now devotes his time...

[B]eyond the extensive open source politics, the main reason for supporting other independent browser projects is to maintain diverse alternatives — to prevent the web platform from being entirely captured by one company. This is where Ladybird comes in. It doesn't have any commercial foundation and it doesn't seem to be waiting to grab a commercial opportunity. It has a range of sponsors, some of which might be strategic (for example, Shopify), but most are goodwill or alignment-led. If you sponsor Ladybird, it will put your logo on its webpage and say thank you. That's it. This might seem uncontroversial, but other nonprofit organisations also give board seats to high-paying sponsors. Ladybird explicitly refuses to do this...

The Acid3 Browser test (which has nothing whatsoever to do with ACID compliance in databases) is an old method of checking compliance with web standards, but vendors can still check how their products do against a battery of tests. They check compliance for the DOM2, CSS3, HTML4 and the other standards that make sure that webpages work in a predictable way. If I point my Chrome browser on my MacBook to http://acid3.acidtests.org/, it gets 94/100. Safari does a bit better, getting to 97/100. Ladybird reportedly passes all 100 tests.
"All the code is hosted on GitHub," says the Ladybird home page. "Clone it, build it, and join our Discord if you want to collaborate on it!"

"Firefox's address bar just got an upgrade," Mozilla writes on their blog: Keep your original search visible

When you perform a search, your query now remains visible in the address bar instead of being replaced by the search engine's URL. Whereas before your address bar was filled with long, confusing URLs, now it's easier to refine or repeat searches... [Clicking an icon left of the address bar even pulls up a list of search-engine choices under the heading "This time search with..."]


Search your tabs, bookmarks and history using simple keywords

You can access different search modes in the address bar using simple, descriptive keywords like @bookmarks, @tabs, @history, and @actions, making it faster and easier to find exactly what you need.


Type a command, and Firefox takes care of it

You can now perform actions like "clear history," "open downloads," or "take a screenshot" just by typing into the address bar. This turns the bar into a practical productivity tool — great for users who want to stay in the flow...


Cleaner URLs with smarter security cues

We've simplified the address bar by trimming "https://" from secure sites, while clearly highlighting when a site isn't secure. This small change improves clarity without sacrificing awareness.
"The new address bar is now available in Firefox version 138," Mozilla writes, calling the new address bar faster, more intuitive "and designed to work the way you do."

SiFive was one of the first companies to produce a RISC-V chip. This week they announced a new collaboration with Red Hat "to bring Red Hat Enterprise Linux support to the rapidly growing RISC-V community" and "prepare Red Hat's product portfolio for future intersection with RISC-V server hardware from a diverse set of RISC-V suppliers."

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 is available in developer preview on the SiFive HiFive Premier P550 platform, which they call "a proven, high performance RISC-V CPU development platform." The SiFive HiFive Premier P550 provides a proven, high performance RISC-V CPU development platform. Adding support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, the latest version of the world's leading enterprise Linux platform, enables developers to create, optimize, and release new applications for the next generation of enterprise servers and cloud infrastructure on the RISC-V architecture...

SiFive's high performance RISC-V technology is already being used by large organizations to meet compute-intensive AI and machine learning workloads in the datacenter... "With the growing demand for RISC-V, we are pleased to collaborate with SiFive to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 deployments on SiFive HiFive Premier P550," said Ronald Pacheco, senior director of RHEL product and ecosystem strategy, "to further empower developers with the power of the world's leading enterprise Linux platform wherever and however they choose to deploy...."

Dave Altavilla, principal analyst at HotTech Vision And Analysis, said "Native Red Hat Enterprise Linux support on SiFive's HiFive Premier P550 board offers developers a substantial enterprise-grade toolchain for RISC-V.

"This is a pivotal step forward in enabling a full-stack ecosystem around open RISC-V hardware. SiFive says the move will "inspire the next generation of enterprise workloads and AI applications optimized for RISC-V," while helping their partners "deliver systems with a meaningfully lower total cost of ownership than incumbent platforms."

"With the growing demand for RISC-V, we are pleased to collaborate with SiFive to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 deployments on SiFive HiFive Premier P550..." said Ronald Pacheco, senior director of RHEL product and ecosystem strategy. .

Beta News notes that there's also a new AI-powered assistant in RHEL 10, so "Instead of spending all day searching for answers or poking through documentation, admins can simply ask questions directly from the command line and get real-time help Security is front and center in this release, too. Red Hat is taking a proactive stance with early support for post-quantum cryptography. OpenSSL, GnuTLS, NSS, and OpenSSH now offer quantum-resistant options, setting the stage for better protection as threats evolve. There's a new sudo system role to help with privilege management, and OpenSSH has been bumped to version 9.9. Plus, with new Sequoia tools for OpenPGP, the door is open for even more robust encryption strategies. But it's not just about security and AI. Containers are now at the heart of RHEL 10 thanks to the new "image mode." With this feature, building and maintaining both the OS and your applications gets a lot more streamlined...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Researchers have found malicious software that received more than 6,000 downloads from the NPM repository over a two-year span, in yet another discovery showing the hidden threats users of such open source archives face. Eight packages using names that closely mimicked those of widely used legitimate packages contained destructive payloads designed to corrupt or delete important data and crash systems, Kush Pandya, a researcher at security firm Socket, reported Thursday. The packages have been available for download for more than two years and accrued roughly 6,200 downloads over that time.

"What makes this campaign particularly concerning is the diversity of attack vectors -- from subtle data corruption to aggressive system shutdowns and file deletion," Pandya wrote. "The packages were designed to target different parts of the JavaScript ecosystem with varied tactics." [...] Some of the payloads were limited to detonate only on specific dates in 2023, but in some cases a phase that was scheduled to begin in July of that year was given no termination date. Pandya said that means the threat remains persistent, although in an email he also wrote: "Since all activation dates have passed (June 2023-August 2024), any developer following normal package usage today would immediately trigger destructive payloads including system shutdowns, file deletion, and JavaScript prototype corruption." The list of malicious packages included js-bomb, js-hood, vite-plugin-bomb-extend, vite-plugin-bomb, vite-plugin-react-extend, vite-plugin-vue-extend, vue-plugin-bomb, and quill-image-downloader.

Google has launched the NotebookLM app for Android and iOS, offering a native mobile experience with offline support, audio overviews, and integration into the system share sheet for adding sources like PDFs and YouTube videos. 9to5Google reports: This native experience starts on a homepage of your notebooks with filters at the top for Recent, Shared, Title, and Downloaded. The app features a light and dark mode based on your device's system theme with no manual toggle. Each colorful card features the notebook name, emoji, number of sources, and date, as well as a play button for Audio Overviews. There's background playback and offline support for the podcast-style experience (the fullscreen player has a nice glow), while you can "Join" the AI hosts (in beta) to ask follow-up questions.

You get a "Create new" button at the bottom of the list to add PDFs, websites, YouTube videos, and text. Notably, the NotebookLM app will appear in the Android and iOS share sheet to quickly add sources. When you open a notebook, there's a bottom bar for the list of Sources, Chat Q&A, and Studio. It's similar to the current mobile website, with the native client letting users ditch the Progressive Web App. Out of the gate, there are phone and (straightforward) tablet interfaces. You can download the app for iOS and Android using their respective links.

Microsoft unveiled "Edit on Windows," a new command-line text editor, at its Build conference today. The open-source tool allows developers to edit files directly in the command line without switching to another app, similar to vim but designed to be more user-friendly.

Accessible by typing "edit" in a command prompt, the lightweight editor (less than 250KB) includes features like multiple file support via ctrl + P shortcuts, find and replace functionality, and regular expression support. "What motivated us to build Edit was the need for a default CLI text editor in 64-bit versions of Windows," said Christopher Nguyen, product manager of Windows Terminal, noting that 32-bit Windows versions already ship with MS-DOS Edit.

Microsoft also wanted to avoid the notorious "how do I exit vim?" problem by creating a modeless editor, The Verge writes. The tool will be available to Windows Insiders in the coming months.

Microsoft has announced NLWeb, an open protocol designed to democratize AI-powered search capabilities for websites and apps. Developed by Microsoft technical fellow Ramanathan V. Guha, who previously created RSS and Schema.org, NLWeb allows site owners to implement ChatGPT-style natural language search with minimal code. The protocol enables websites to process complex queries like "spicy and crunchy appetizers for Diwali" or "jackets warm enough for Quebec," requiring only an AI model, some code, and the site's own data.

During his demonstration to news outlet The Verge, Guha showed how NLWeb remembers user preferences, such as dietary restrictions, for future interactions. "It's a protocol, and the protocol is a way of asking a natural-language question, and the answer comes back in structured form," explained Guha, who argues the approach is significantly cheaper than traditional search methods that require extensive web crawling and indexing. Microsoft is partnering with publishers and companies including TripAdvisor, Eventbrite, and Shopify to implement NLWeb, though Guha acknowledges the challenge of achieving widespread adoption in a web that historically tends toward centralization.

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is now open source, Microsoft said Monday. The tool, which allows developers to run Linux distributions directly in Windows, is available for download, modification, and contribution. "We want Windows to be a great dev box," said Pavan Davuluri, corporate VP at Microsoft. "Having great WSL performance and capabilities" allows developers "to live in the Windows-native experience and take advantage of all they need in Linux."

First launched in 2016 with an emulated Linux kernel, WSL switched to using the actual Linux kernel in 2019 with WSL 2, improving compatibility. The system has since gained support for GPUs, graphical applications, and systemd. Microsoft significantly refactored core Windows components to make WSL a standalone system before open sourcing it.

It's a nonprofit that's provide hosting for the Linux Foundation, the Apache Software Foundation, Drupal, Firefox, and 160 other projects — delivering nearly 430 terabytes of information every month. (It's currently hosting Debian, Fedora, and Gentoo Linux.) But hosting only provides about 20% of its income, with the rest coming from individual and corporate donors (including Google and IBM). "Over the past several years, we have been operating at a deficit due to a decline in corporate donations," the Open Source Lab's director announced in late April.

It's part of the CS/electrical engineering department at Oregon State University, and while the department "has generously filled this gap, recent changes in university funding makes our current funding model no longer sustainable. Unless we secure $250,000 in committed funds, the OSL will shut down later this year."

But "Thankfully, the call for support worked, paving the way for the OSU Open Source Lab to look ahead, into what the future holds for them," reports the blog It's FOSS.

"Following our OSL Future post, the community response has been incredible!" posted director Lance Albertson. "Thanks to your amazing support, our team is funded for the next year. This is a huge relief and lets us focus on building a truly self-sustaining OSL." To get there, we're tackling two big interconnected goals:

1. Finding a new, cost-effective physical home for our core infrastructure, ideally with more modern hardware.
2. Securing multi-year funding commitments to cover all our operations, including potential new infrastructure costs and hardware refreshes.


Our current data center is over 20 years old and needs to be replaced soon. With Oregon State University evaluating the future of this facility, it's very likely we'll need to relocate in the near future. While migrating to the State of Oregon's data center is one option, it comes with significant new costs. This makes finding free or very low-cost hosting (ideally between Eugene and Portland for ~13-20 racks) a huge opportunity for our long-term sustainability. More power-efficient hardware would also help us shrink our footprint.

Speaking of hardware, refreshing some of our older gear during a move would be a game-changer. We don't need brand new, but even a few-generations-old refurbished systems would boost performance and efficiency. (Huge thanks to the Yocto Project and Intel for a recent hardware donation that showed just how impactful this is!) The dream? A data center partner donating space and cycled-out hardware. Our overall infrastructure strategy is flexible. We're enhancing our OpenStack/Ceph platforms and exploring public cloud credits and other donated compute capacity. But whatever the resource, it needs to fit our goals and come with multi-year commitments for stability. And, a physical space still offers unique value, especially the invaluable hands-on data center experience for our students....

[O]ur big focus this next year is locking in ongoing support — think annualized pledges, different kinds of regular income, and other recurring help. This is vital, especially with potential new data center costs and hardware needs. Getting this right means we can stop worrying about short-term funding and plan for the future: investing in our tech and people, growing our awesome student programs, and serving the FOSS community. We're looking for partners, big and small, who get why foundational open source infrastructure matters and want to help us build this sustainable future together.
The It's FOSS blog adds that "With these prerequisites in place, the OSUOSL intends to expand their student program, strengthen their managed services portfolio for open source projects, introduce modern tooling like Kubernetes and Terraform, and encourage more community volunteers to actively contribute."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader I'm just joshin for suggesting the story.

"The altruistic OpenAI is gone, if it ever existed," argues a new article in the Atlantic, based on interviews with more than 90 current and former employees, including executives. It notes that shortly before Altman's ouster (and rehiring) he was "seemingly trying to circumvent safety processes for expediency," with OpenAI co-founder/chief scientist Ilya telling three board members "I don't think Sam is the guy who should have the finger on the button for AGI." (The board had already discovered Altman "had not been forthcoming with them about a range of issues" including a breach in the Deployment Safety Board's protocols.)

Adapted from the upcoming book, Empire of AI, the article first revisits the summer of 2023, when Sutskever ("the brain behind the large language models that helped build ChatGPT") met with a group of new researchers: Sutskever had long believed that artificial general intelligence, or AGI, was inevitable — now, as things accelerated in the generative-AI industry, he believed AGI's arrival was imminent, according to Geoff Hinton, an AI pioneer who was his Ph.D. adviser and mentor, and another person familiar with Sutskever's thinking.... To people around him, Sutskever seemed consumed by thoughts of this impending civilizational transformation. What would the world look like when a supreme AGI emerged and surpassed humanity? And what responsibility did OpenAI have to ensure an end state of extraordinary prosperity, not extraordinary suffering?

By then, Sutskever, who had previously dedicated most of his time to advancing AI capabilities, had started to focus half of his time on AI safety. He appeared to people around him as both boomer and doomer: more excited and afraid than ever before of what was to come. That day, during the meeting with the new researchers, he laid out a plan. "Once we all get into the bunker — " he began, according to a researcher who was present.

"I'm sorry," the researcher interrupted, "the bunker?"

"We're definitely going to build a bunker before we release AGI," Sutskever replied. Such a powerful technology would surely become an object of intense desire for governments globally. The core scientists working on the technology would need to be protected. "Of course," he added, "it's going to be optional whether you want to get into the bunker." Two other sources I spoke with confirmed that Sutskever commonly mentioned such a bunker. "There is a group of people — Ilya being one of them — who believe that building AGI will bring about a rapture," the researcher told me. "Literally, a rapture...."

But by the middle of 2023 — around the time he began speaking more regularly about the idea of a bunker — Sutskever was no longer just preoccupied by the possible cataclysmic shifts of AGI and superintelligence, according to sources familiar with his thinking. He was consumed by another anxiety: the erosion of his faith that OpenAI could even keep up its technical advancements to reach AGI, or bear that responsibility with Altman as its leader. Sutskever felt Altman's pattern of behavior was undermining the two pillars of OpenAI's mission, the sources said: It was slowing down research progress and eroding any chance at making sound AI-safety decisions.
"For a brief moment, OpenAI's future was an open question. It might have taken a path away from aggressive commercialization and Altman. But this is not what happened," the article concludes. Instead there was "a lack of clarity from the board about their reasons for firing Altman." There was fear about a failure to realize their potential (and some employees feared losing a chance to sell millions of dollars' worth of their equity).

"Faced with the possibility of OpenAI falling apart, Sutskever's resolve immediately started to crack... He began to plead with his fellow board members to reconsider their position on Altman." And in the end "Altman would come back; there was no other way to save OpenAI." To me, the drama highlighted one of the most urgent questions of our generation: How do we govern artificial intelligence? With AI on track to rewire a great many other crucial functions in society, that question is really asking: How do we ensure that we'll make our future better, not worse? The events of November 2023 illustrated in the clearest terms just how much a power struggle among a tiny handful of Silicon Valley elites is currently shaping the future of this technology. And the scorecard of this centralized approach to AI development is deeply troubling. OpenAI today has become everything that it said it would not be....
The author believes OpenAI "has grown ever more secretive, not only cutting off access to its own research but shifting norms across the industry to no longer share meaningful technical details about AI models..."

"At the same time, more and more doubts have risen about the true economic value of generative AI, including a growing body of studies that have shown that the technology is not translating into productivity gains for most workers, while it's also eroding their critical thinking."

"With the help of more than five dozen fossils, paleontologists have uncovered a tiny three-eyed predator nicknamed the 'sea moth'," reports CNN, "that swam in Earth's oceans 506 million years ago."

Tiny as in 15 to 61 mm in total body length. (That's 0.60 to 2.4 inches...) But check out the illustration in CNN's article... Mosura fentoni, as the species is known, belongs to a group called radiodonts, an early offshoot of the arthropod evolutionary tree, according to a new study published Tuesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science. While radiodonts are now extinct, studying their fossilized remains can illuminate how modern arthropods such as insects, spiders and crabs evolved. One of the most diverse animal groups, arthropods are believed to account for more than 80% of living animal species, said lead study author Dr. Joe Moysiuk, curator of paleontology and geology at the Manitoba Museum in Winnipeg.

Well-preserved specimens of the previously unknown Mosura fentoni also reveal something that's never been seen in any other radiodont: an abdomen-like body region with 16 segments that include gills at its rear. This part of the creature's anatomy is similar to a batch of segments bearing respiratory organs at the rear of the body found in distant modern radiodont relatives like horseshoe crabs, woodlice and insects, Moysiuk said.... No animal living today quite looks like Mosura fentoni, Moysiuk said, although it had jointed claws similar to those of modern insects and crustaceans. But unlike those critters, which can have two or four additional eyes used to help maintain orientation, Mosura had a larger and more conspicuous third eye in the middle of its head.

"Although not closely related, Mosura probably swam in a similar way to a ray, undulating its multiple sets of swimming flaps up and down, like flying underwater," Moysiuk said in an email. "It also had a mouth shaped like a pencil sharpener and lined with rows of serrated plates, unlike any living animal." About the size of an adult human's index finger, Mosura and its swimming flaps vaguely resemble a moth, which led researchers to call it the "sea moth."
The Royal Society publication notes the etymology of the species name (Mosura fentoni is "from the name of the fictional Japanese monster, or kaiju... also known as 'Mothra'...in reference to the moth-like appearance of the animal."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader walterbyrd for sharing the news.