"When you do computer programming, what sort of mental work are you doing?" asks science/tech journalist Clive Thompson: For a long time, folks have speculated on this. Since coding involves pondering hierarchies of symbols, maybe the mental work is kinda like writing or reading? Others have speculated it's more similar to the way our brains process math and puzzles. A group of MIT neuroscientists recently did fMRI brain-scans of young adults while they were solving a small coding challenge using a textual programming language (Python) and a visual one (Scratch Jr.). The results?

The brain activity wasn't similar to when we process language. Instead, coding seems to activate the "multiple demand network," which — as the scientists note in a public-relations writeup of their work — "is also recruited for complex cognitive tasks such as solving math problems or crossword puzzles."

So, coding is more like doing math than processing language?

Sorrrrrrt of ... but not exactly so. The scientists saw activity patterns that differ from those you'd see during math, too.

The upshot: Coding — in this (very preliminary!) work, anyway — looks to be a little different from either language or math. As the note, in a media release...

"Understanding computer code seems to be its own thing...."

Just anecdotally — having interviewed hundreds of coders and computer scientists for my book CODERS — I've met amazing programmers and computer scientists with all manner of intellectual makeups. There were math-heads, and there were people who practically counted on their fingers. There were programmers obsessed with — and eloquent in — language, and ones gently baffled by written and spoken communication. Lots of musicians, lots of folks who slid in via a love of art and visual design, then whose brains just seized excitedly on the mouthfeel of algorithms.

Volkswagen AG Chief Executive Officer Herbert Diess said cash-rich technology giants invading the auto industry pose a much bigger challenge for the German manufacturer than traditional rivals like Toyota Motor. From a report: "We look forward to new competitors who will certainly accelerate the change in our industry and bring in new skills," Diess said in a LinkedIn post when asked about reports that Apple is developing a self-driving car. "The unbelievable valuation and the practically unlimited access to resources instill a lot of respect in us." [...] Diess mapped out a plan during an internal meeting last week to pit VW's huge Wolfsburg plant against Tesla's factory that's under construction outside Berlin. The electric-car maker's new site in Gruenheide is bound to stoke competition for engineers, workers and customers on VW's home turf. "I've said it before: the most valuable company in the world will again be a mobility company," Diess said. "It could be Tesla, Apple or Volkswagen." Further reading: Elon Musk Says He Once Considered Selling Tesla To Apple, Tim Cook Didn't Want To Take a Meeting

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) will open up access to more data from Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments. Under an updated policy, data will be released around five years after it's collected and CERN hopes to release the full dataset publicly "by the close of the experiment concerned." Core LHC collaborators ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb all endorsed the move. From a report: CERN will make level 3 data available, which will allow anyone to conduct "high-quality analysis" on information obtained from Large Hadron Collider experiments. Level 3 relates to "calibrated reconstructed data with the level of detail useful for algorithmic, performance and physics studies," according to CERN. The organization won't release raw data, however. The open data policy states that it's "not practically possible to make the full raw dataset from the LHC experiments usable in a meaningful way outside its collaborations." That's because of the complexity of the data, software and metadata and access issues to the vast troves of stored information, among other factors. LHC collaborators don't have general access to the raw data either. Instead, the assembly of level 3 data "is performed centrally."

Yes, Torvalds said he'd love to have one of the new M1-powered Apple laptops, but it won't run Linux and, in an exclusive interview he explains why getting Linux to run well on it isn't worth the trouble. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes via ZDNet: Recently, on the Real World Technologies forum, Linux's creator Linus Torvalds was asked what he thought of the new M1-powered Apple laptops. Torvalds replied, "I'd absolutely love to have one if it just ran Linux." You may think, "what's the problem? Doesn't Linux run on practically every processor on the planet from 80386s to IBM s390x to the ARM family of which Apple's M1 chip is a child?" Well, yes, yes it does. But it takes more than a processor to run a computer.

Torvalds would like to run Linux on these next-generation Macs. As he said, "I've been waiting for an ARM laptop that can run Linux for a long time. The new Air would be almost perfect, except for the OS. And I don't have the time to tinker with it, or the inclination to fight companies that don't want to help." Aye, there's the rub. In an exclusive interview, Torvalds expanded on why he can't see porting Linux to the M1-based Macs. "The main problem with the M1 for me is the GPU and other devices around it, because that's likely what would hold me off using it because it wouldn't have any Linux support unless Apple opens up."

Still, while Torvalds knows Apple opening up their chipsets "seems unlikely, but hey, you can always hope." Even if that "wasn't an issue," Torvalds continued, "My personal hope would be more cores. Even in a laptop, I don't care about 20-hour battery life (and I wouldn't get it building kernels anyway). I'd rather plug it in a bit more often, and have 8 big cores." As for the Mac's limited RAM -- no more than 16GBs on current models -- he can live with that. "16GBs is actually ok by me because I don't tend to do things that require a lot more RAM. All I do is read email, do git and kernel compiles. And yes, I have 64GB in my desktop, but that's because I have 32 cores and 64 threads, and I do hugely parallel builds. Honestly, even then 32GB would be sufficient for my loads." That said, other developers and power users may want more from the new Macs, Torvalds thinks. "The people who really want tons of memory are the ones doing multiple VMs or huge RAW file photography and video."

An anonymous reader shared this skeptical opinion piece from Computerworld: Let's start with the name itself. There is no single "5G." There are, in fact, three different varieties, with very different kinds of performance... But, what most people want, what most people lust for is 1Gbps speeds with less than 10 milliseconds of latency... [T]o get that kind of speed you must have mmWave 5G — and it comes with a lot of caveats.

First, it has a range, at best, of 150 meters. If you're driving, that means, until 5G base stations are everywhere, you're going to be losing your high-speed signal a lot. Practically speaking, for the next few years, if you're on the move, you're not going to be seeing high-speed 5G. And, even if you are in range of a 5G base station, anything — and I mean anything — can block its high-frequency signal. Window glass, for instance, can stop it dead. So, you could have a 5G transceiver literally on your street corner and not be able to get a good signal. How bad is this? NTT DoCoMo, Japan's top mobile phone service provider, is working on a new kind of window glass, just so their mmWave 5G will work. I don't know about you, but I don't want to shell out a few grand to replace my windows just to get my phone to work.

Let's say, though, that you've got a 5G phone and you're sure you can get 5G service — what kind of performance can you really expect? According to Washington Post tech columnist Geoffrey A. Fowler, you can expect to see a "diddly squat" 5G performance... ["roughly the same as on 4G LTE," while some places "actually have been slower."] It wasn't just him, since he lives in that technology backwater known as the San Francisco bay area. He checked with several national firms tracking 5G performance. They found that all three major U.S. telecom networks' 5G isn't that much faster than 4G. Indeed, OpenSignal reports that U.S. 5G users saw an average speed of 33.4Mbps. Better than 4G, yes, but not "Wow! This is great!" speeds most people seem to be dreaming of. It's also, I might add, much worse than any other country using 5G, with the exception of the United Kingdom.

Early this year, Google pushed out a seemingly tiny tweak to how it displays search ads for desktop computers. From a report: Previously, the search engine had marked paid results with the word "Ad" in a green box, tucked beneath the headline next to a matching green display URL. Now, all of a sudden, the "Ad" and the URL shifted above the headline, and both were rendered in discreet black; the box disappeared. The organic search results underwent a similar makeover, only with a new favicon next to the URL instead of the word "Ad." The result was a general smoothing: Ads looked like not-ads. Not-ads looked like ads. This was not Google's first time fiddling with the search results interface. In fact, it had done so quite regularly over the last 13 years, as handily laid out in a timeline from the news site Search Engine Land. Each iteration whittled away the distinction between paid and unpaid content that much more. Most changes went relatively unnoticed, internet residents accepting the creep like the apocryphal frog in a slowly boiling pot.

But in January, amid rising antitrust drumbeats and general exhaustion with Big Tech, people noticed. Interface designers, marketers, and Google users alike decried the change, saying it made paid results practically indistinguishable from those that Google's search algorithm served up organically. The phrase that came up most often: "dark pattern," a blanket term coined by UX specialist Harry Brignull to describe manipulative design elements that benefit companies over their users. That a small design tweak could inspire so much backlash speaks to the profound influence Google and other ubiquitous platforms have -- and the responsibility that status confers to them. "Google and Facebook shape realities," says Kat Zhou, a product designer who has created a framework and toolkit to help promote ethical design. "Students and professors turn to Google for their research. Folks turn to Facebook for political news. Communities turn to Google for Covid-19 updates. In some sense, Google and Facebook have become arbiters of the truth. That's particularly scary when you factor in their business models, which often incentivize blurring the line between news and advertisements."

Google's not the only search engine to blur this line. If anything, Bing is even more opaque, sneaking the "Ad" disclosure under the header, with only a faint outline to draw attention. [...] But Google has around 92 percent of global search marketshare. It effectively is online search. Dark patterns are all too common online in general, and January wasn't the first time people accused Google of deploying them. In June of 2018, a blistering report from the Norwegian Consumer Council found that Google and Facebook both used specific interface choices to strip away user privacy at almost every turn. The study details how both platforms implemented the least privacy-friendly options by default, consistently "nudged" users toward giving away more of their data, and more. It paints a portrait of a system designed to befuddle users into complacency. [...] That confusion reached its apex a few months later, when an Associated Press investigation found that disabling Location History on your smartphone did not, in fact, stop Google from collecting your location in all instances.

Slashdot reader sciencehabit tells the strange story of a 4.5-billion-year-old meteor from "the cold void beyond Jupiter" that sent "blazing fireballs and rocks raining down on farms and fields." On 23 April 2019, a space rock the size of a washing machine broke up in the skies over Aguas Zarcas, a village carved out of Costa Rica's rainforest. The falling fragments, which crashed through roofs and doghouses, set off a frenzy of hunting — for this rare meteorite soon became more valuable than gold.

Meteorites are not uncommon: Every year, tens of thousands survive the plunge through Earth's atmosphere. But meteorite falls, witnessed strikes that take their name from where they land, are rare — just 1,196 have been documented. And even among that exclusive group, there was something extraordinary about this particular meteorite: The dull stone was, as far as rocks go, practically alive. Aguas Zarcas, as the fragments would soon collectively be called, is a carbonaceous chondrite, a pristine remnant of the early Solar System. The vast majority of meteorites are lumps of stone or metal. But carbonaceous chondrites are rich in carbon — including organic molecules as complex as amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. They illustrate how chemical reactions in space give rise to complex precursors for life; some scientists even believe rocks like Aguas Zarcas gave life a nudge when they crashed into a barren Earth 4.5 billion years ago.

Since WannaCry and NotPetya struck the internet just over three years ago, the security industry has scrutinized every new Windows bug that could be used to create a similar world-shaking worm. Now one potentially "wormable" vulnerability -- meaning an attack can spread from one machine to another with no human interaction -- has appeared in Microsoft's implementation of the domain name system protocol, one of the fundamental building blocks of the internet. From a report: As part of its Patch Tuesday batch of software updates, Microsoft today released a fix for a bug discovered by Israeli security firm Check Point, which the company's researchers have named SigRed. The SigRed bug exploits Windows DNS, one of the most popular kinds of DNS software that translates domain names into IP addresses. Windows DNS runs on the DNS servers of practically every small and medium-sized organization around the world. The bug, Check Point says, has existed in that software for a remarkable 17 years. Check Point and Microsoft warn that the flaw is critical, a 10 out of 10 on the common vulnerability scoring system, an industry standard severity rating. Not only is the bug wormable, Windows DNS software often runs on the powerful servers known as domain controllers that set the rules for networks. Many of those machines are particularly sensitive; a foothold in one would allow further penetration into other devices inside an organization.

On top of all of that, says Check Point's head of vulnerability research Omri Herscovici, the Windows DNS bug can in some cases be exploited with no action on the part of the target user, creating a seamless and powerful attack. "It requires no interaction. And not only that, once you're inside the domain controller that runs the Windows DNS server, expanding your control to the rest of the network is really easy," says Omri Herscovici. "It's basically game over." Check Point found the SigRed vulnerability in the part of Windows DNS that handles a certain piece of data that's part of the key exchange used in the more secure version of DNS known as DNSSEC. That one piece of data can be maliciously crafted such that Windows DNS allows a hacker to overwrite chunks of memory they're not meant to have access to, ultimately gaining full remote code execution on the target server. (Check Point says Microsoft asked the company not to publicize too many details of other elements of the technique, including how it bypasses certain security features on Windows servers.)

In 1999, Ray Kurzweil made predictions about what the world would be like 20 years in the future. Last month the community blog LessWrong took a look at how accurate Kurzweil's predictions turned out to be: This was a follow up to a previous assessment about his predictions about 2009, which showed a mixed bag, roughly evenly divided between right and wrong, which I'd found pretty good for 10-year predictions... For the 2019 predictions, I divided them into 105 separate statements, did a call for volunteers [and] got 46 volunteers with valid email addresses, of which 34 returned their predictions... Of the 34 assessors, 24 went the whole hog and did all 105 predictions; on average, 91 predictions were assessed by each person, a total of 3078 individual assessments...

Kurzweil's predictions for 2019 were considerably worse than those for 2009, with more than half strongly wrong.
The assessors ultimately categorized just 12% of Kurzweil's predictions as true, with another 12% declared "weakly true," while another 10% were classed as "cannot decide." But 52% were declared "false" -- with another 15% also called "weakly false."

Among Kurzweil's false predictions for the year 2019:

• "Phone" calls routinely include high-resolution three-dimensional images projected through the direct-eye displays and auditory lenses... Thus a person can be fooled as to whether or not another person is physically present or is being projected through electronic communication.

• The all-enveloping tactile environment is now widely available and fully convincing.

"As you can see, Kurzweil suffered a lot from his VR predictions," explains the LessWrong blogpost. "This seems a perennial thing: Hollywood is always convinced that mass 3D is just around the corner; technologists are convinced that VR is imminent."

But the blog post also thanks Kurzweil, "who, unlike most prognosticators, had the guts and the courtesy to write down his predictions and give them a date. I strongly suspect that most people's 1999 predictions about 2019 would have been a lot worse."

And they also took special note of Kurzweil's two most accurate predictions. First, "The existence of the human underclass continues as an issue." And second:

"People attempt to protect their privacy with near-unbreakable encryption technologies, but privacy continues to be a major political and social issue with each individual's practically every move stored in a database somewhere."

According to a 13-page study from IT security vendor Positive Technologies, a whopping 97% of surveyed companies with at least 1,000 employees show evidence of suspicious activity in their network traffic and that 81% of the companies were being subject to malicious activity. TechRepublic reports: "In one in every three companies, there were traces of scans of its internal network, which could potentially mean that hackers are gathering intelligence inside the infrastructure. This includes network scans, multiple failed attempts to connect to hosts, and traces of collecting intelligence on active network sessions on a specific host or in the entire domain." Another alarming statistic from the research showed that 94% of the participating companies in the study suffered from noncompliance with their corporate security policies within their IT infrastructure systems, leaving them more vulnerable to successful cyberattacks, according to the report. Noncompliance with IT security policies "has a direct impact on security deterioration, by practically opening the door for the hackers to exploit," the report continued.

Also worrisome is that 81% of the participating companies are transmitting their sensitive data in clear text, or text that is not encrypted or meant to be encrypted, according to the research. By using only risky clear text, companies can enable potential hackers to search their network traffic for logins and passwords which are moving between and across corporate networks. Meanwhile, some 67% of the companies allow the use of remote access software, such as RAdmin, TeamViewer, and Ammyy Admin, which can also be compromised by attackers to move along the network while remaining undetected by security tools, the report states. In addition, workers in 44% of the companies use BitTorrent for data transfer, which dramatically can increase the risk of malware infection. Ultimately, 92% of these network security threats were detected inside the perimeters of the companies that were surveyed, according to the report, which reveals the depth of the problems and the need for constant internal network monitoring.

President Trump declared a national emergency on Friday afternoon, a move that would give him authority to use $40 billion allocated by Congress for disaster relief to address the coronavirus crisis. From a report: Cases in the U.S. have climbed past 1,700, even with sporadic and spare testing, and the death toll has risen to 41. Mr. Trump, according to a senior administration official, is expected to invoke the Stafford Act, a law that empowers the Federal Emergency Management Agency to coordinate disaster response and aid state and local governments. The president had indicated in recent days that he had been briefed on the law and could use it to address the pandemic, and Democratic lawmakers like Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, have been pressing him to invoke it. "We have very strong emergency powers under the Stafford Act," Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday. "I have it memorized, practically, as to the powers in that act. And if I need to do something, I'll do it. I have the right to do a lot of things that people don't even know about." Mr. Trump further said that he is waiving off the interest on student loan debt until further notice.

The New York Times reports: Some of Earth's plants have fallen in love with metal. With roots that act practically like magnets, these organisms -- about 700 are known -- flourish in metal-rich soils that make hundreds of thousands of other plant species flee or die....

The plants not only collect the soil's minerals into their bodies but seem to hoard them to "ridiculous" levels, said Alan Baker, a visiting botany professor at the University of Melbourne who has researched the relationship between plants and their soils since the 1970s. This vegetation could be the world's most efficient, solar-powered mineral smelters. What if, as a partial substitute to traditional, energy-intensive and environmentally costly mining and smelting, the world harvested nickel plants...?

On a plot of land rented from a rural village on the Malaysian side of the island of Borneo, Dr. Baker and an international team of colleagues have proved it at small scale. Every six to 12 months, a farmer shaves off one foot of growth from these nickel-hyper-accumulating plants and either burns or squeezes the metal out. After a short purification, farmers could hold in their hands roughly 500 pounds of nickel citrate, potentially worth thousands of dollars on international markets. Now, as the team scales up to the world's largest trial at nearly 50 acres, their target audience is industry. In a decade, the researchers hope that a sizable portion of insatiable consumer demand for base metals and rare minerals could be filled by the same kind of farming that produces the world's coconuts and coffee... [T]he technology has the additional value of enabling areas with toxic soils to be made productive...

Now, after decades behind the lock and key of patents, Dr. Baker said, "the brakes are off the system."
Long-time Slashdot reader necro81 adds "This process, called phytomining, cannot supplant the scale of traditional mining, but could make a dent in the world's demand for nickel, cobalt, and zinc.

"Small-holding farmers could earn more from phytomining than from coaxing food crops from metal-laden soils. Using these plants could also help clean brownfields left over from prior industrial use."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Food & Wine Magazine: Fried rice is one of those dishes where the name practically tells you how to make it. But the key to cooking perfect fried rice is in the details: not just the ingredients but also the equipment and technique. Traditionally, the dish is made in a wok with chefs continually tossing the rice to avoid caramelization and burning. It led a lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology to wonder, is there an optimal way to cook fried rice? Turns out, yes, and the pros have pretty much nailed it -- though the researchers do have a suggestion. Published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, the study "The physics of tossing fried rice" delivers on what the title promises -- analyzing the technique of five professional chefs to better understand their cooking technique.

[The] research confirmed that handling a wok is tough business. In the technique used by professionals, "The key is using the stove rim as the fulcrum of [a] see-saw motion," according to the paper, resulting in the rice being tossed at a rapid 2.7 times per second. "We show that the wok is always contacting the stove and getting support from it so that the chef wouldn't have to lift it," Hungtang Ko, a PhD student in Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech, who co-authored the study, stated. "Most importantly, we show that the wok motions adopted by the chefs are really some sort of optimal [motion] for the rice grains to jump the farthest." And yet, after developing a mathematical model that successfully described the wok tossing process, Ko and co-author David Hu, the professor who runs the lab, came up with some potential improvements. "Tossing is a combination of two independent motions, a side to side motion and a see-saw motion, allowing rice grains to slide around the wok as well as to jump off the surface," the conclusion of the paper states. "We identify two critical parameters that chefs can vary: the frequency of tossing and the phase lag between the two motions applied. By filming professional chefs, we found that, at the frequency chosen by chefs, the phase difference performed is optimal for mixing. We suggest that future chefs increase the frequency of motion, which may enable rice to jump further, and promote cooling and mixing." Ko and Hu point out that 64.5 percent of Chinese restaurant chefs complain of shoulder pain, likely in part to all that wok work.

As a result, Ko believes his research might help "guide the design of robots that can mix granular materials efficiently and rapidly." He adds: "It also paves ways for designing assistive robotic devices that chefs can wear to reduce the burden from the arm muscles."

Long-time Slashdot reader zoobab shares this update from the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure, a Munich-based non-profit opposing ratification of a "Unified Patent Court" by Germany. They argue such a court will "validate and expand software patents in Europe," and they've come up with a novel argument to stop it.

"Germany cannot ratify the current Unitary Patent due to Brexit..." The U.K. is now a "third state" within the meaning of AETR case-law, [which] makes clear that:

"Each time the Community, with a view to implementing a common policy envisaged by the Treaty, adopts provisions laying down common rules, whatever form they may take, the Member States no longer have the right, acting individually or even collectively, to undertake obligations with third countries which affect those rules or alter their scope..."

This practically means that the ratification procedure for the Agreement on the Unified Patent Court must now come to an end, as that Agreement no longer applies due to the current significant changes (i.e. Brexit) in the membership requirements of its own ratification rules.
The nonprofit also argues that the Unitary Patent "is a highly controversial and extreme issue, as it allows new international patent courts to have the last word on the development and application of patent law and industrial property monopolies including, more seriously, the validation and expansion of software patents, that is the key sector on which whole industries and markets depend."

ThreatPost reported on some big research last week: A proof-of-concept attack has been pioneered that "fully and practically" breaks the Secure Hash Algorithm 1 (SHA-1) code-signing encryption, used by legacy computers to sign the certificates that authenticate software downloads and prevent man-in-the-middle tampering.

The exploit was developed by Gaëtan Leurent and Thomas Peyrin, academic researchers at Inria France and Nanyang Technological University/Temasek Laboratories in Singapore. They noted that because the attack is much less complex and cheaper than previous PoCs, it places such attacks within the reach of ordinary attackers with ordinary resources.

"This work shows once and for all that SHA-1 should not be used in any security protocol where some kind of collision resistance is to be expected from the hash function," the researchers wrote. "Continued usage of SHA-1 for certificates or for authentication of handshake messages in TLS or SSH is dangerous, and there is a concrete risk of abuse by a well-motivated adversary. SHA-1 has been broken since 2004, but it is still used in many security systems; we strongly advise users to remove SHA-1 support to avoid downgrade attacks."

Given the footprint of SHA-1, Leurent and Peyrin said that users of GnuPG, OpenSSL and Git could be in immediate danger.
Long-time Slashdot reader shanen writes, "I guess the main lesson is that you can never be too sure how long any form of security will remain secure."

A Microsoft program to transcribe and vet audio from Skype and Cortana, its voice assistant, ran for years with "no security measures," according to a former contractor who says he reviewed thousands of potentially sensitive recordings on his personal laptop from his home in Beijing over the two years he worked for the company. From a report: The recordings, both deliberate and accidentally invoked activations of the voice assistant, as well as some Skype phone calls, were simply accessed by Microsoft workers through a web app running in Google's Chrome browser, on their personal laptops, over the Chinese internet, according to the contractor. Workers had no cybersecurity help to protect the data from criminal or state interference, and were even instructed to do the work using new Microsoft accounts all with the same password, for ease of management, the former contractor said. Employee vetting was practically nonexistent, he added.

"There were no security measures, I don't even remember them doing proper KYC [know your customer] on me. I think they just took my Chinese bank account details," he told the Guardian. While the grader began by working in an office, he said the contractor that employed him "after a while allowed me to do it from home in Beijing. I judged British English (because I'm British), so I listened to people who had their Microsoft device set to British English, and I had access to all of this from my home laptop with a simple username and password login." Both username and password were emailed to new contractors in plaintext, he said, with the former following a simple schema and the latter being the same for every employee who joined in any given year.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: ICANN is reviewing the pending sale of the .org domain manager from a nonprofit to a private equity firm and says it could try to block the transfer. The .org domain is managed by the Public Internet Registry (PIR), which is a subsidiary of the Internet Society, a nonprofit. The Internet Society is trying to sell PIR to private equity firm Ethos Capital. ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) said last week that it sent requests for information to PIR in order to determine whether the transfer should be allowed. "ICANN will thoroughly evaluate the responses, and then ICANN has 30 additional days to provide or withhold its consent to the request," the organization said.

ICANN, which is also a nonprofit, previously told the Financial Times that it "does not have authority over the proposed acquisition," making it seem like the sale was practically a done deal. But even that earlier statement gave ICANN some wiggle room. ICANN "said its job was simply to 'assure the continued operation of the .org domain' -- implying that it could only stop the sale if the stability and security of the domain-name infrastructure were at risk," the Financial Times wrote on November 28. In its newer statement last week, ICANN noted that the .org registry agreement between PIR and ICANN requires PIR to "obtain ICANN's prior approval before any transaction that would result in a change of control of the registry operator." The registry agreement lets ICANN request transaction details "including information about the party acquiring control, its ultimate parent entity, and whether they meet the ICANN-adopted registry operator criteria (as well as financial resources, and operational and technical capabilities)," ICANN noted. ICANN's 30-day review period begins after PIR provides those details.

ICANN said it will apply "a standard of reasonableness" when determining whether to allow the change in control over the .org domain, but it "might ultimately have to be determined by the courts," notes Domain Name Wire.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Astronomers think our home galaxy -- the Milky Way -- is practically bursting with black holes, with estimates of up to 100 million of the invisible beasts hiding across the galactic neighborhood. It was generally assumed these black holes could reach a mass of up to 20 times that of the sun, but the discovery of a "monster" black hole, with about 70 times the mass of the sun, has surprised Chinese astronomers. In a new study, published in the journal Nature on Nov. 27, a research team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences peered across the galaxy with the Large sky Area Multi-Object fibre Spectroscopic Telescope (Lamost), based at Xinglong Observatory in China. Black holes don't emit light, so astronomers have to get crafty when they go hunting for them.

Usually, this involves looking for signs a black hole is feasting on a nearby star or the gas and dust that swirls around them. If the black hole isn't feasting and if it isn't surrounded by bright gas and dust, it becomes a little trickier to locate. But, using Lamost, the team examined the movement of stars across the sky, searching for those that seemed to be orbiting an invisible object. Follow-up observations with telescopes in Spain and the US helped the researchers discover a star about eight times bigger than the sun. Intriguingly, it was orbiting a "dark companion": The monster black hole, dubbed LB-1. "Black holes of such mass should not even exist in our galaxy, according to most of the current models of stellar evolution," said Liu Jifeng, astronomer at the National Astronomical Observatory of China and first author of the study, in a press release. "LB-1 is twice as massive as what we thought possible. Now theorists will have to take up the challenge of explaining its formation."

Long-time Slashdot reader jimminy_cricket shared Qz's report on some of "the highest-mileage Teslas in the world": Few have driven a Tesla to the point at which the vehicle really starts to show its age. But Tesloop, a shuttle service in Southern California composed of Teslas, was ticking the odometers of its cars well past 300,000 miles with no signs of slowing... These long days have pushed Tesla's engineering to the limit, making Tesloop an extreme testbed for the durability of Elon Musk's cars.Tesloop provided Quartz with five years of maintenance logs, where its vehicles racked up over more than 2.5 million miles, to understand how the electric vehicles (EV) are living up to the promise of cheaper vehicles with unprecedented durability compared to their conventional combustion-engine counterparts.

The results reveal Tesla to be a company still ironing out bugs in its products, but one that pushes the limits of what vehicles can do. "When we first started our company, we predicted the drive train would practically last forever," Tesloop founder Haydn Sonnad told Quartz. "That's proven to be relatively true." He notes that every car except one, a vehicle taken out of service after a collision with a drunk driver, is still running. "The cars have never died of old age," he added....

[T]he implications could be huge. Every year, corporations and rental car companies add more than 12 million vehicles in Europe and North America to their fleets. Adding EVs to the mix could see those cars lasting five times longer -- costing a fraction of conventional cars over the same period -- while feeding a massive new stream of used electric cars into the marketplace.... One of the first surveys done on EVs came this March when New York City revealed its first lifetime analysis of fuel and maintenance costs for its light-passenger fleet. It found conventional vehicle maintenance was two to four times higher than the $386 spent on EVs. That's before gas... If EVs continued to perform well past this point, the economics of the car market could change. Lower fuel prices and more durable vehicles could, theoretically, push total cost of ownership below conventional vehicles.
Several of the Teslas in their fleet have already driven nearly half a million miles.

Apple has started to make its products thicker in an effort to give people what they want: functionality over form. This is a good thing. There are two recent examples: this year's iPhones and the new 16-inch MacBook Pro. Todd Haselton writes via CNBC: This is a theory, but it seems this may be that there are some design changes being made after the departure of Apple's former chief design officer Jony Ive. Ive was known for creating gorgeous products but, sometimes as we've seen with the older MacBook keyboard, perhaps at the cost of functionality. Form over function, as they say. [...] If you look back at the iPhone 8, for example, the phone measured just 7.3-mm thick, an example of Apple's seeming obsession with creating devices that were as thin as possible but often at the cost of battery life. But this year, Apple put a huge focus on battery life because it knows that's one of top things people want from their phones (along with great cameras). As a result of the larger battery, this year's iPhone 11 is slightly fatter at 8.3-mm thick. It's barely noticeable but shows that Apple knows people are willing to sacrifice on thinness for a phone that lasts all day.

Then there's the 16-inch MacBook Pro that was announced on Wednesday. It's less than 1-mm thicker than the 15-inch MacBook Pro that it replaces, and it weighs 4.3 pounds instead of 4 pounds in the prior model. It's 2% larger than the 15-inch MacBook Pro, too. All of this helps Apple include what people want in a similar but slightly bigger form factor: a keyboard with keys that you can actually tap into and that works, instead of one that's practically flat with very little key travel. The flat so-called butterfly keyboard was prone to exposure to dust and debris, which could lead to keys not registering or repeating themselves and, ultimately, lots of typos. Apple also focused on battery life in its new laptop. It lasts an hour longer than last year's model and charges fully in just 2.5 hours. That's partly because Apple was able to increase the battery size, something that likely contributed to the larger and heavier form factor.