"Local politics are a bigger problem for renewable energy growth than competition from fossil fuels," warns a Bloomberg columnist: It's getting harder to get permission to erect the turbine towers. Local regulations are getting stricter. Bavaria decided back in 2014 that the distance between a wind turbine and the nearest housing must be 10 times the height of the mast, which, given the density of dwellings, makes it hard to find a spot anywhere. Wind energy development is practically stalled in the state now. Brandenburg, the state surrounding Berlin, passed a law this year demanding that wind-farm operators pay 10,000 euros ($11,100) per turbine each year to communities within 3 kilometers of the windmills. Wind projects are also often rejected or stalled because they're deemed to interfere with military communications, air traffic control or broadcast radio stations.

Besides, local opponents of the wind farms often go to court to stall new developments or even have existing towers dismantled. According to the wind-industry lobby BWE, 325 turbine installations with a total capacity of more than 1 gigawatt (some 2% of the country's total installed capacity) are tied up in litigation. The irony is that the litigants are often just as "green" as the wind-energy proponents -- one is the large conservation organization NABU, which says it's not against wind energy as such but merely demands that installations are planned with preserving nature in mind. Almost half of the complaints are meant to protect various bird and bat species; others claim the turbines make too much noise or emit too much low-frequency infrasound. Regardless of the validity of such claims, projects get tied up in the courts even after jumping through the many hoops necessary to get a permit.

Another reason for local resistance to the wind farms is a form of Nimbyism: People hate the way the wind towers change landscapes. There's even a German word for it, Verspargelung, roughly translated as pollution with giant asparagus sticks... This nasty political and regulatory climate creates too much uncertainty for investors, just as the German government prepares to phase out wind-energy subsidies...

Without technological breakthroughs -- for example, in energy storage, which would make fewer new turbines necessary -- Germany, and then other countries that try to build up renewable energy generation as it has done, will be hard put to push production to the level required to reach climate goals.

ScienceAlert reports on a new study published in the journal eLife that explains for the first time how ants are immune to traffic jams, even under crowded conditions. From the report: By cooperating in a self-organized system, researchers have found that Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) can adapt to different road conditions and prevent clogging from ever occurring. All it takes is a little selflessness and restraint - something we humans should maybe consider. Filming 170 repeat experiments, researchers observed how this particular species of ant moved along a bridge between their nest and a food source. The experiments included different widths of bridge (5 mm, 10 mm, and 20 mm), holding anywhere between 400 and 25,600 ants. Throughout the process, data was collected on traffic flow, the speed of the ants, and the number of collisions that occurred. What the authors found was surprising: these ants appeared to be immune to traffic jams.

"The exact nature of the mechanisms used by Argentine ants to keep the traffic flowing in this study remains elusive," they write, "yet when density on the trail increases, ants seemed to be able to assess crowding locally, and adjusted their speed accordingly to avoid any interruption of traffic flow." In fact, compared to humans, these ants could load up the bridge with twice the capacity without slowing down. When humans are walking or driving, the flow of traffic usually begins to slow when occupancy reaches 40 percent. Argentine ants, on the other hand, show no signs of slowing, even when the bridge occupancy reached 80 percent. And they do this through self-imposed speed regulation. When it's moderately busy, for instance, the authors found the ants actually speed up, accelerating until a maximum flow or capacity is reached. Whereas, when a trail is overcrowded, the ants restrained themselves and avoided joining until things thinned out. Plus, at high density times like this, the ants were found to change their behavior and slow down to avoid more time-wasting collisions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Since the World Health Organization proposed new diagnoses for "hazardous gaming" and "gaming disorder" last year, there's been an ongoing scientific debate about which way the causation for these issues really goes. Does an excessive or addictive relationship with gaming actually cause psychological problems, or are people with existing psychological problems simply more likely to have an unhealthy relationship with gaming? A recent study by Oxford's Internet Institute, published in the open access journal Clinical Psychological Science, lends some support to the latter explanation. But it also highlights just how many of the game industry's most devoted players may also be driven by some unmet psychological needs.

To study how so-called "dysfunctional gaming" relates to psychological needs and behaviors, the Oxford researchers surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1,004 UK adolescents and their caregivers. They asked the caregivers to evaluate their adolescents' levels of "psychosocial functioning:" how well the adolescents are able to internalize or externalize problems in their lives as evidenced by their behavior. [...] Of the 1,004 adolescents surveyed, 525 said they played online games daily for an average of about three hours per day. Among that group, over 55% showed at least one of the nine indicators for Internet Gaming Disorder, and even 23% showed at least three indicators. Those reported "dysregulated gaming" effects showed a significant positive correlation with the amount of time spent playing, as well as a significant negative correlation with the reported psychosocial evaluations from caregivers. In other words, those with "dysregulated" gaming habits were more likely to spend more time playing each day and less likely to be able to handle problems in their lives in a healthy way. Crucially, though, the measured effect of the dysregulated gaming variable in the study "accounted for a practically insignificant share of variability in key outcomes... as compared with the role played by basic psychological needs," as the study authors write. "This evidence suggests that having information about the extent to which an adolescent's video-game play is dysregulated provides no practically useful incremental information when viewed in light caregivers' assessments of emotional, behavioral, peer, or conduct difficulties."

"So while so-called adolescent 'problem gamers' are more likely to show behavioral problems, that fact in and of itself is much less important in predicting those problems than other measures of whether those adolescents' psychological needs are being met," reports Ars Technica. "That suggests that both dysregulated gaming and psychosocial behavior problems are both potential signs of more fundamental underlying psychological frustrations rather than excessive gaming causing problems in and of itself."

An anonymous reader shares a report: By default, Google collects a vast amount of data on users' behavior, including a lifelong record of web searches, locations, and YouTube views. But amid a privacy backlash and ongoing regulatory threats, the company has started to hype its recently released privacy tools, like the ability to automatically delete some of the data it collects about you -- data that helps power its $116 billion ad business. [...] In reality, these auto-delete tools accomplish little for users, even as they generate positive PR for Google. Experts say that by the time three months rolls around, Google has already extracted nearly all the potential value from users' data, and from an advertising standpoint, data becomes practically worthless when it's more than a few months old. "Anything up to one month is extremely valuable," says David Dweck, the head of paid search at digital ad firm WPromote. "Anything beyond one month, we probably weren't going to target you anyway." Dweck says that in the digital ad industry, recent activity is essential. If you start searching on Google for real estate or looking up housing values, for instance, Google might lump you into a "prospective home buyers" category for advertisers. That information becomes instantly valuable to realtors, appraisers, and lenders for ad targeting, and it could remain valuable for a while as other companies, such as painters or appliance brands, try to follow up on your home buying. Still, it's unusual for advertisers to target users based on their activity from months earlier, Dweck says.

appedology.pk quotes Popular Mechanics: Warp drive is one of the many futuristic ideas proposed in Star Trek, allowing for faster-than-light travel across the galaxy. Einstein's Theory of Relativity prevents anything from moving faster than light. In 1994, a theoretical physicist proposed a workaround: creating a bubble within space-time that would twist distances, allowing anything within the bubble to travel long distances. Many think it makes theoretical sense, but is practically unworkable. An undergrad at the University of Alabama wants to restart the conversation, and he's focused on how much energy such a bubble would need...

"Mathematically, if you fulfill all the energy requirements, they can't prove that it doesn't work," he recently said at a standing-room only talk on the subject.... "People used to say, 'You're dealing in something that would be great, but it takes the mass of the entire universe to do it,'" Agnew said. "Now, we're down to where it is still an immense amount of energy and exotic matter is still a problem, but if we had that energy, we could do it."

After five to eight years of theoretical work, Agnew said, "it's been reduced by many, many orders of magnitude."

This week Richard Stallman responded to "a certain amount of speculation and rumor" about his recent talk at Microsoft, addressing dark suggestions that, for example, Microsoft might've hoped to seduce Stallman away from the free software cause. "I resisted Steve Jobs's snow job in 1989 or 1990; I am no easy mark for those who want me to change my views....

"[T]he fact that people make nonfree software is no reason not to show them reasons why software should be free." I don't think Microsoft invited me with a view to seduction, or opposition research, or trickery, or misrepresention. I think some Microsoft executives are seriously interested in the ethical issues surrounding software. They may also be interested in carrying out some of the specific suggestions/requests I presented. I started with a list of actions that would help the free software community, and which I thought Microsoft might be amenable to, before stating the free software philosophy in the usual way. I think there is a chance that Microsoft might change some practices in ways that would help the Free World practically, even if they do not support us overall.

It is only a chance; I would not try to estimate the probability. Microsoft did not give me any promises to change; I did not ask for any.

What I can say now is that we should judge Microsoft's future actions by their nature and their effects. It would be a mistake to judge a given action more harshly if done by Microsoft than we would if some other company did the same thing. I've said this since 1997. That page describes some hostile things that Microsoft famously did. We should not forget them, but we should not maintain a burning grudge over actions that ended years ago. We should judge Microsoft in the future by what it does then.

Another thing I've said for years, about various companies, is that when a company does several different things, it is best to judge each thing on its own, provided they are separable. Actions that benefit freedom are good, and we should say so, while being careful not to let a small good distract us from a large evil.... Time will show us whether Microsoft begins to do substantial activities that we can judge as good. Let's encourage that in all prudent ways.
Stallman's 10 suggestions included urging Microsoft to "help make the web usable with Javascript deactivated" -- and he also called on Microsoft to release the source code of Windows under the GNU general public license.

"I know that is a stretch, but from what I heard there. it isn't totally impossible."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Kevin Buzzard, a number theorist and professor of pure mathematics at Imperial College London, believes that it is time to create a new area of mathematics dedicated to the computerization of proofs. The greatest proofs have become so complex that practically no human on earth can understand all of their details, let alone verify them. He fears that many proofs widely considered to be true are wrong. Help is needed. What is a proof? A proof is a demonstration of the truth of a mathematical statement. By proving things and learning new techniques of proof, people gain an understanding of math, which then filters out into other fields.

To create a proof, begin with some definitions. For example, define a set of numbers such as the integers, all the whole numbers from minus infinity to positive infinity. Write this set as: ... , -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, ... Next, state a theorem, for example, that there is no largest integer. The proof then consists in the logical reasoning that shows the theorem to be true or false, in this case, true. The logical steps in the proof rely on other, prior truths, which have already been accepted and proven. For example, that the number 1 is less than 2. New proofs by professional mathematicians tend to rely on a whole host of prior results that have already been published and understood. But Buzzard says there are many cases where the prior proofs used to build new proofs are clearly not understood. For example, there are notable papers that openly cite unpublished work. This worries Buzzard. "I'm suddenly concerned that all of published math is wrong because mathematicians are not checking the details, and I've seen them wrong before," Buzzard told Motherboard while he was attending the 10th Interactive Theorem Proving conference in Portland, Oregon, where he gave the opening talk.

"I think there is a non-zero chance that some of our great castles are built on sand," Buzzard wrote in a slide presentation. "But I think it's small."

A man named Roger was surprised to hear from an old college friend after all these years, reports the Philippine Daily Inquirer -- and even more surprised to find out why. What she wanted to know was why he gave her number to an online lending company that was hounding him at that time. The company told her that he was in debt and needed to pay up. Roger took out a loan using the company's app back in May, after seeing an ad on Facebook. His payment had been overdue for a week when the company contacted his college friend. But in fact he didn't give the company her number. The company tapped his contact list, then messaged his college friend to get him to make good on his debt. The company also called his wife and threatened to report him to his boss so he would lose his job. Roger, 26, has since paid back the loan. And he vowed to never use the app again...

Roger is not alone. The National Privacy Commission (NPC) has reported receiving 921 formal complaints since July 2018 about online lending companies who publicly shame borrowers to get them to pay up... Three companies are facing cases filed by the NPC for violating the Data Privacy Act of 2012... Privacy Commissioner Raymund Enriquez Liboro earlier released copies of the investigators' fact-finding reports, which recommended criminal prosecution of the board members of the three companies. "The investigation determined that their business practice specifically targets the privacy of persons, practically making a profit out of people's fear of losing face and dignity. These unethical practices simply have no place in a civilized society and must stop," Liboro then said...

In an affidavit sent to the NPC, one complainant said Fast Cash threatened to post her selfies on Facebook. Another said the CashLending app changed her profile picture on Facebook to an obscene picture... None of these would have happened unless the users gave permission to these apps. But many users backed into a corner by circumstance didn't have a choice. Roger, for one, said he could not use the app unless he agreed that the company could access his contacts... [T]he NPC argued that although the users gave their approval, the lack of easily understandable and clear information, among other factors, meant that it was not a "valid" consent... Among the charges filed against the companies are noncompliance with the legal requirements of processing personal data, as well as malicious and unauthorized disclosure. Their operators may face imprisonment of up to seven years and fines of not more than P5 million [about $97,000 U.S. dollars] under the Data Privacy Act of 2012.
One person who filed a formal complaint with the government later received a discouraging text message from the company in question. "Before you sue us, we already [sent] a text blast to all of your contacts. We know your home address, your office and even your ugly face. Good luck with your privacy law."

In a recent interview with the Willamette Week, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) said that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg should face the possibility of a prison term for Facebook's privacy violations. Zuckerberg has Mark "repeatedly lied to the American people about privacy," said Wyden. "I think he ought to be held personally accountable, which is everything from financial fines to -- and let me underline this -- the possibility of a prison term." Zuckerberg, Wyden said, has "hurt a lot of people." Ars Technica reports: Wyden was talking to the Willamette Week about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 law that gives online platforms like Facebook broad immunity for content posted by their users. Wyden was the co-author of the law and has been one of its most ardent defenders ever since. The law has come under increasing criticism as concern has grown about toxic online content. Wyden isn't ready to scrap it, but he says that he's "looking for more ways to create market pressure on the big tech companies to take moderation more seriously."

Wyden worries that more aggressive efforts to root out toxic content online would effectively "throw the First Amendment in the trash can." "I still think the basic frame of the shield -- particularly for the little guy -- is essential," Wyden said of Section 230's immunity provisions. "And I'm looking very aggressively for ways to shore up the sword, to get at the slime." Technology companies, Wyden argued, have "done practically everything wrong since the 2016 election." He said he recently told technology companies: "If you don't get serious on moderation, you're going to have a lot of people coming after you."

AmiMoJo writes: WebKit, the open source HTML engine used by Apple's Safari browser and a number of others, has created a new policy on tracking prevention. The short version is that many forms of tracking will now be treated the same way as security flaws, being blocked or mitigated with no exceptions. While on-site tracking will still be allowed (and is practically impossible to prevent anyway), all forms of cross-site tracking and covert tracking will be actively and aggressively blocked.

Canonical's Martin Wimpress addresses Snaps, Flatpak, and other competing standards, and community unease around Canonical's control of the Snap store. intensivevocoder writes: With these advances in hardware support, the last significant challenge users face when switching from Windows or Mac to a Linux distribution is app distribution and installation. While distribution-provided repositories are useful for most open source software, the release model of distributions such as Ubuntu or Fedora lock in users to a major version for programs for the duration of a particular release. Because of differences in how they interact with the underlying system, certain configuration tasks are different between Snaps or Flatpaks than for directly-installed applications. Likewise, initial commits for the Snap and Flatpak formats were days apart -- while the formats were developed essentially in parallel, the existence of two 'universal' package formats has led to disagreement about competing standards. TechRepublic interviewed Martin Wimpress, engineering manager for Snapcraft at Canonical, about Ubuntu's long term plans for Snaps, its adoption and support in other Linux distributions, Canonical's position as the operator of the Snap Store, and the benefits Snaps provide over Flatpak. An excerpt from the interview: TechRepublic: Practically speaking, there are two competing standards for cross-platform application packaging -- three, if you count AppImage. What's the practical benefit that Canonical's Snap format offers over Flatpak or AppImage?
Martin Wimpress: If you look at the initial commits of both of those projects, Snaps have a lineage back to Click packages, which were developed for [Ubuntu Phone] originally. The Snap project developed out of what had been learned from doing the phones, with a view to solving problems in IoT. So, although technically snapd and xdg-apps -- and consequently Flatpak -- look like they emerged around the same time, Snaps can trace their lineage back to the Click project from several years previous. If we're looking at Flatpak specifically, we can probably include AppImage in most of these comparisons as well. Some of the similarities are that Snaps are self-contained software packages, which is something that Flatpak and AppImage strive to be as well. I think that Flatpak achieves that better than AppImage. I think AppImage still makes some assumptions on what's installed on the host operating system. It doesn't bundle everything inside the AppImage. Similarly, Snaps, Flatpak, and AppImage work across all the major Linux distributions without modification. We haven't all arrived at this solution by accident. We've clearly, independently, all realized that this is a problem that we need to solve in order to encourage software vendors to publish their applications on Linux, because Linux is a very broad platform to target. If you can lower the hurdles... to getting your software in front of users on Linux, then that's a good thing. And we're all aiming to do the same thing there.

Natural historian, English broadcaster and 93-year-old national treasure David Attenborough has spoken. Whether you like his chosen topic of climate change or not, the naturalist has an effortless and coercive way with words. From a report: Speaking to a Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee meeting in London on Tuesday morning, local time, Attenborough gave evidence on the radical action required to tackle the climate crisis. "We cannot be radical enough in dealing with the issues that face us at the moment," he said, the full talk detailed by The Guardian. "The question is: what is practically possible? How can we take the electorate with us in dealing with these things?" The UK has committed to net zero carbon emissions by 2050. But that target, according to Attenborough, "is not the way of focusing on the problem." Attenborough did acknowledge the lively efforts young people had put in to "recognising that their world is the future."

"The most encouraging thing that I see, of course, is that the electors of tomorrow are already making themselves and their voices very, very clear," he said. "And that is a source of great comfort in a way, but also the justification, the reality, that these young people are recognising that their world is the future." Attenborough compared our attitudes toward climate change with the transformation of slavery. "There was a time in the 19th century when it was perfectly acceptable for civilised human beings to think that it was morally acceptable to actually own another human being for a slave. And somehow or other, in the space of 20 or 30 years, the public perception of that totally transformed."

Bloomberg remembers the launch of Bing ten years ago -- "It was all a little sad". There was even a jingle-writing contest in which song-a-day writer Jonathan Mann won a $500 gift card for his song "Bing Goes the Internet". (After TechCrunch called it "awful" and compared it to the sound of dying cows, the songwriter released a second song which consisted of nothing but the text of TechCrunch's article.)

Now Bloomberg asks, "How did Bing go from a joke to generating nearly three times the advertising revenue of Twitter?" What seemed like a typical Microsoft reaction to fear of Google has become -- with the help of blood, sweat, tears and the Nadellaissance -- a nice business. Microsoft now generates about $7.5 billion in annual revenue from web search advertising. That is a pipsqueak compared with Google's $120 billion in ad sales over the last 12 months. But it's more revenue brought in by either Microsoft's LinkedIn professional network or the company's line of Surface computers and other hardware...

Microsoft in recent years outsourced chunks of its advertising business and stuck Bing in spots that Microsoft controls or that Google couldn't grab. Importantly, Microsoft made Bing front and center for people using search boxes on Windows computers and Office software, practically guaranteeing that a healthy share of PC owners would wittingly or unwittingly use the "decision engine." Research firm comScore estimates Microsoft accounts for a little under one-quarter of U.S. web searches conducted on desktop computers. Microsoft's market share is far smaller outside the U.S. and practically nonexistent on smartphones... [T]his year it struck a deal to handle searches and ads tied to searches on Yahoo, AOL and other Verizon Communications Inc. internet properties. Those aren't glamorous corners of the internet, but they have a lot of traffic and therefore a lot of people searching for running shoes and local dentists. All that helps use of Bing and lifts the ad revenue that flows through Microsoft's accounts.

Microsoft has also pared costs to the point where Bing stopped bleeding red ink... Bing at least stands on its own two feet, and company executives have said that Microsoft has learned from the search business how to run big data-collecting and crunching technologies.
The article argues that Bing's success has been good for Google, since it keeps them from looking like a monopoly.

"Netflix has 175 days left to pull off a miracle... or it's all over," argues a headline at Forbes for an article by the chief analyst at disruption research firm RiskHedge: Netflix is not the future of TV. Netflix changed how we watch TV, but it didn't really change what we watch... Netflix has achieved its incredible growth by taking distribution away from cable companies. Instead of watching The Office on cable, people now watch The Office on Netflix. This edge isn't sustainable.

In a world where you can watch practically anything whenever you want, dominance in distribution is very fragile. Because the internet has opened up a whole world of choice, featuring great exclusive content is now far more important than anything else... Netflix management knows content is king. The company spent $12 billion developing original shows last year... To fund its new shows, Netflix is borrowing huge sums of debt. It currently owes creditors $10.4 billion, which is 59% more than it owed this time last year. The problem is that no matter how much Netflix spends, it has no chance to catch up with its biggest rival...

in about 175 days, Disney is set to launch its own streaming service called Disney+. It's going to charge $6.99/month -- around $6 cheaper than Netflix. And it's pulling all its content off of Netflix. This is a big deal. Disney owns Marvel, Pixar Animations, Star Wars, ESPN, National Geographic, Modern Family, and The Simpsons. Not to mention all the classic characters like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. In six of the past seven years, Disney has produced the world's top-selling movie... Disney has shown it can produce movies and shows people want to watch. No competitor comes within 1,000 miles of Disney's world of content. Disney's ownership of iconic franchises like Star Wars gives it something no money can buy.

Meanwhile, Netflix will lose a lot of its best content -- and potentially millions of subscribers who switch to Disney+. While Netflix is running into debt "trying out" new shows, Disney already has the best of the best in its arsenal.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Gamers of a certain age probably remember being wowed by the quick, smooth scaling and rotation effects of the Super Nintendo's much-ballyhooed "Mode 7" graphics. Looking back, though, those gamers might also notice how chunky and pixelated those background transformations could end up looking, especially when viewed on today's high-end screens. Emulation to the rescue. A modder going by the handle DerKoun has released an "HD Mode 7" patch for the accuracy-focused SNES emulator bsnes. In their own words, the patch "performs Mode 7 transformations... at up to 4 times the horizontal and vertical resolution" of the original hardware.

The results, as you can see in the above gallery and the below YouTube video, are practically miraculous. Pieces of Mode 7 maps that used to be boxy smears of color far in the distance are now sharp, straight lines with distinct borders and distinguishable features. It's like looking at a brand-new game. Perhaps the most impressive thing about these effects is that they take place on original SNES ROM and graphics files; DerKoun has said that "no artwork has been modified" in the games since the project was just a proof of concept a month ago. That makes this project different from upscaling emulation efforts for the N64 and other retro consoles, which often require hand-drawn HD texture packs to make old art look good at higher resolutions.

At SUSECon in Nashville, Tennessee, European Linux power SUSE CEO Nils Brauckmann said his company would soon be the largest independent Linux company. "That's because, of course, IBM is acquiring Red Hat," reports ZDNet. "But, simultaneously, SUSE has continued to grow for seven-straight years." From the report: Brauckmann said, "We believe that makes our status as a truly independent open source company more important than ever. Our genuinely open-source solutions, flexible business practices, lack of enforced vendor lock-in, and exceptional service are more critical to customer and partner organizations, and our independence coincides with our single-minded focus on delivering what is best for them." Practically speaking, SUSE has been growing by focusing on delivering high-quality Linux and open-source programs and services to enterprise customers. Looking ahead Brauckmann said, "SUSE is better positioned to bring more innovation to customers and partners faster through both organic growth and acquisitions, keeping us on track to provide them with the open solutions that keep them ahead with their own customers in their own markets. We continue to adapt so our customers and partners can succeed."

Last year SUSE's revenue grew by 15 percent in fiscal year 2018, and the business is about to surpass the $400 million revenue mark for the first time. SUSE, which sees not quite half of its business in Europe, is also seeing revenue growth around the world. North America, for example, now accounts for almost 40 percent of SUSE's revenues. The company is also expanding. SUSE added more than 300 employees in the last 12 months. For the most part this has been in engineering followed by sales and services. SUSE staff is now approaching 1,750 globally and its plans on continuing to hire aggressively.

An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica: People who find security vulnerabilities commonly run into difficulties when reporting them to the responsible company. But it's less common for such situations to turn into tense trade-show confrontations -- and competing claims of assault and blackmail. Yet that's what happened when executives at Atrient -- a casino technology firm headquartered in West Bloomfield, Michigan -- stopped responding to two UK-based security researchers who had reported some alleged security flaws. The researchers thought they had reached an agreement regarding payment for their work, but nothing final ever materialized. On February 5, 2019, one of the researchers -- Dylan Wheeler, a 23-year-old Australian living in the UK -- stopped by Atrient's booth at a London conference to confront the company's chief operating officer.

What happened next is in dispute. Wheeler says that Atrient COO Jessie Gill got in a confrontation with him and yanked off his conference lanyard; Gill insists he did no such thing, and he accused Wheeler of attempted extortion.

The debacle culminated in legal threats and a lot of mudslinging, with live play-by-play commentary as it played out on Twitter.
Ars Technica calls the story "practically a case study in the problems that can arise with vulnerability research and disclosure," adding "the vast majority of companies have no clear mechanism for outsiders to share information about security gaps."

A security research director at Rapid7 joked his first reaction was "man, I wish a vendor would punch me for disclosure. Boy, that beats any bug bounty." But they later warned, "It's on us as an industry not only to train corporate America on how to take disclosure, but also we need to do a little more training for people who find these bugs -- especially today, in an era where bug outings are kind of normal now -- to not expect someone to be necessarily grateful when one shows up."

"A team of international astronomers have been hunting for ancient, supermassive black holes -- and they've hit the motherlode, discovering 83 previously unknown quasars," reports CNET: The Japanese team turned the ultra-powerful "Hyper Suprime-Cam", mounted to the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii, toward the cosmos' darkest corners, surveying the sky over a period of five years. By studying the snapshots, they've been able to pick potential quasar candidates out of the dark. Notably, their method of probing populations of supermassive black holes that are similar in size to the ones we see in today's universe, has given us a window into their origins.

After identifying 83 potential candidates, the team used a suite of international telescopes to confirm their findings. The quasars they've plucked out are from the very early universe, about 13 billion light years away. Practically, that means the researchers are looking into the past, at objects form less than a billion years after the Big Bang. "It is remarkable that such massive dense objects were able to form so soon after the Big Bang," said Michael Strauss, who co-authored the paper, in a press release. Scientists aren't sure how black holes formed in the early universe, so being able to detect them this far back in time provides new avenues of exploration.

A group of programmers and device hackers are working to bring proper support for Ubuntu to Arm-powered Windows laptops, starting with first-generation Snapdragon 835 systems, like the HP Envy x2 and Asus NovaGo. From a report: The aarch64-laptops project provides prebuilt images for the aforementioned notebook PCs, as well as the Lenovo Miix 630. Although Ubuntu and other Linux distributions support aarch64 (ARMv8) by default, various obstacles including the design and configuration of Qualcomm Snapdragon processors make these default images not practically usable. The aarch64-laptops project developers are aiming to address these difficulties, though work is still ongoing. Presently, the TouchPad does not work properly on the Asus, with all three lacking proper support for on-board storage and Wi-Fi, which rely on UFS support. According to their documentation, this is being worked on upstream.

Richard Stallman recently visited Mandya, a small town about 60 miles from Bengaluru, India, to give a talk. On the sidelines, Indian news outlet FactorDaily caught up with Stallman for an interview. In the wide-ranging interview, Stallman talked about companies that spy on users, popular Android apps, media streaming and transportation apps, smart devices, DRM, software backdoors, subscription software, and Apple and censorship. An excerpt from the interview: If you are carrying a mobile phone, it is always tracking your movements and it could have been modified to listen to the conversations around you. I call this product Stalin's dream. What would Stalin have wanted to hand out to every inhabitant of the former Soviet Union? Something to track that person's movements and listen to the person's conservations. Fortunately, Stalin could not do it because the technology didn't exist. Unfortunately for us, now it does exist and most people have been pressured or lured into carrying around such a Stalin's dream device, but not me.

I am suspicious of new digital technology. I expect it to have new malicious functionalities. It has happened so many times that I have learned to expect this, so I have always checked before I start using some new digital technology. I asked to find out what is nasty about it and I found out these two things. It was something like 20 years ago, and I decided it was my duty as a citizen to refuse, regardless of whatever convenience it might offer me. To surrender my freedom in this way was failing to defend a free society. This is why I do not have a portable phone. I refuse to carry a portable phone. I never have one and unless things change, I never will. I do use portable phones, lots of different ones. If I needed to call someone right now, I would ask one of you, "Could you please make a call for me?" If I am on a bus and it is late and I need to tell somebody that I am going to arrive late, there is always some other passenger in the bus who will make a call for me or send a text for me. Practically speaking, it is not that hard.