Checkout.com, the London-based credit card processing company that ballooned its business model by servicing billions in crypto transactions for Binance clients, cut short its contract with the crypto giant this week, Forbes reported Friday. From the report: In a pair of letters sent to Binance on August 9 and 11, Checkout CEO Guillaume Pousaz terminated the company's relationship with its once-largest customer citing "reports of regulators actions and orders in relevant jurisdictions" and "inquiries from partners." The second letter, seen by Forbes and sent two days after the first, cited additional concerns over Binance's anti-money laundering, sanctions and compliance controls, and said the termination would be effective August 17. Checkout spokesperson Lewis Jones confirmed to Forbes the company had ended its contract with Binance.

In response, Binance told Forbes it disagreed with Checkout's basis for terminating the contract, and said it was considering legal action. "We have come a long way to building an industry-leading compliance program and we hope to build more trust with regulators and partners," spokesperson Dewi Mustajab said in a statement. He added that Checkout's withdrawal would have "no impact on our services."

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 1995, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates sent a memo calling the internet a "tidal wave" that would be crucial to every part of the company's business. Nearly two decades later, Microsoft's current leader, Satya Nadella, said he believes the impact of artificial intelligence will be just as profound. "The Bill memo in 1995, it does feel like that to me," Nadella said on this week's episode of The Circuit With Emily Chang. "I think it's as big." Central to the latest attempt to transform Microsoft is OpenAI, a startup whose generative AI technology has created so much buzz that it snagged a $13 billion commitment from the software giant.

"We have a great relationship," OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman said on The Circuit. "These big, major partnerships between tech companies usually don't work. This is an example of it working really well. We're super grateful for it." The alliance has plenty of critics. The loudest is Elon Musk, who co-founded OpenAI with Altman and then split from the company, citing disagreements over its direction and the addition of a for-profit arm. He has said OpenAI is now "effectively controlled by Microsoft." In response to a question about Musk's critiques and the prospect that Microsoft could acquire OpenAI, Altman said, "Company is not for sale. I don't know how to be more clear than that."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Gizmodo editor-in-chief Daniel Ackerman has sued Apple and other parties over the 2023 Apple TV Plus film Tetris, alleging it rips off his 2016 book The Tetris Effect. Ackerman claims Apple, Tetris rightsholder the Tetris Company, the Tetris film's producers, and screenwriter Noah Pink copied "the exact same feel, tone, approach, and scenes" from The Tetris Effect -- particularly its framing of the game's release as a "Cold War spy thriller." Initially reported by Reuters, Ackerman's lawsuit (PDF) outlines a yearslong correspondence with the Tetris Company as he wrote The Tetris Effect. He claims that the Tetris Company was aware of his work and threatened him with legal action for trying to pursue film and TV adaptations of his own book, only to draw heavily from his framing of the Tetris story. "The film liberally borrowed numerous specific sections and events of the book," claims Ackerman.

Apple and the Tetris Company did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Verge. But Ackerman's case may be difficult given the fact that Tetris and The Tetris Effect both draw on real historical facts, which are not generally protected by copyright law. As a result, the suit relies heavily on arguing that Tetris copies the feel of The Tetris Effect. (He also argues that some potential inventions of the film -- like a guide who turns out to be a secret KGB agent -- are based on speculations in his narrative.) "Ackerman's book took a unique approach to writing about the real history of Tetris, as it not only applied the historical record, but also layered his own original research and ingenuity to create a compelling narrative non-fiction book in the style of a Cold War spy thriller," the suit says. "Mr. Ackerman's literary masterpiece, unlike other articles and writings, dispelled of the emphasis on the actual gameplay and fans, and instead concentrated on the surrounding narrative, action sequences, and adversarial relationship between the players ... This was the identical approach Defendants adopted for the Tetris Film, without notable material distinction."

Ackerman says that he reached out after the Tetris trailer's release and unsuccessfully requested Apple and the other defendants address legal issues before the film's release. His suit alleges copyright infringement and unfair competition, among other offenses.

The tech giant and the Wall Street titan went from "the most successful credit card launch ever" to Goldman trying to exit the partnership. From a report: Apple and Goldman Sachs were in test runs before embarking publicly on one of the biggest-name partnerships ever between tech and finance. Engineers from the Silicon Valley giant and the Wall Street titan were pulling an all-nighter a few months before launch, scrambling to find a solution to a problem that had cropped up: Tim Cook couldn't get approved for an Apple Card.

Apple and Goldman had struck the powerful alliance as they set out to build a revolutionary digital-first credit card with designs on expanding into other consumer finance products. For Goldman, it was a key opportunity to grow the consumer business it had jumped into as it sought to diversify away from the old-school Wall Street revenue model of trading and advising on deals. For Apple, it was a way to bolster its services business, broaden its finance offerings -- which began with Apple Pay -- and, maybe most importantly, prompt people to buy more iPhones.

In October 2019, a couple of months after customers began signing up, Goldman CEO David Solomon described it as "the most successful credit card launch ever." Less than four years later -- and only a handful of months after the two companies extended their contract through the end of the decade -- the Apple-Goldman deal is teetering. Some of the partnership's shortcomings have blemished both companies' world-class reputations, and a falling-out could threaten future collaboration between Wall Street and tech at large. Goldman has been trying to get out of the pact because it won't be profitable enough for the bank in the near term, according to people familiar with the matter, and it has shopped the relationship to credit card issuer American Express.

Last weekend in Portland, Oregon, the Software Freedom Conservancy hosted a new conference called the Free and Open Source Software Yearly.

And long-time free software activist Bradley M. Kuhn (currently a policy fellow/hacker-in-residence for the Software Freedom Conservancy) hosted a lively panel discussion on "the recent change" to public source code releases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux which shed light on what may happen next. The panel also included:

• benny Vasquez, the Chair of the AlmaLinux OS Foundation
• Jeremy Alison, Samba co-founder and software engineer at CIQ (focused on Rocky Linux). Allison is also Jeremy Allison - Sam Slashdot reader #8,157.
• James (Jim) Wright, Oracle's chief architect for Open Source policy/strategy/compliance/alliances

"Red Hat themselves did not reply to our repeated requests to join us on this panel... SUSE was also invited but let us know they were unable to send someone on short notice to Portland for the panel."

One interesting audience question for the panel came from Karsten Wade, a one-time Red Hat senior community architect who left Red Hat in April after 21 years, but said he was "responsible for bringing the CentOS team onboard to Red Hat." Wade argued that CentOS "was always doing a clean rebuild from source RPMS of their own..." So "isn't all of this thunder doing Red Hat's job for them, of trying to get everyone to say, 'This thing is not the equivalent to RHEL.'"

In response Jeremy Alison made a good point. "None of us here are the arbiters of whether it's good enough of a rebuild of Red Hat Linux. The customers are the arbiters." But this led to an audience member asking a very forward-looking question: what are the chances the community could adopt a new (and open) enterprise Linux standard that distributions could follow. AlmaLinux's Vasquez replied, "Chances are real high... I think everyone sees that as the obvious answer. I think that's the obvious next step. I'll leave it at that." And Oracle's Wright added "to the extent that the market asks us to standardize? We're all responsive."

When asked if they'd consider adding features not found in RHEL ("such as high-security gates through reproducible builds") AlmaLinux's Vasquez said "100% -- yeah. One of the things that we're kind of excited about is the opportunities that this opens for us. We had decided we were just going to focus on this north star of 1:1 Red Hat no matter what -- and with that limitation being removed, we have all kinds of options." And CIQ's Alison said "We're working on FIPS certification for an earlier version of Rocky, that Red Hat, I don't believe, FIPS certified. And we're planning to release that."

AlmaLinux's Vasquez emphasized later that "We're just going to build Enterprise Linux. Red Hat has done a great job of establishing a fantastic target for all of us, but they don't own the rights to enterprise Linux. We can make this happen, without forcing an uncomfortable conversation with Red Hat. We can get around this."

And Alison later applied a "Star Wars" quote to Red Hat's predicament. "The more things you try and grab, the more things slip through your fingers." That is, "The more somebody tries to exert control over a codebase, the more the pushback will occur from people who collaborate in that codebase." AlmaLinux's Vasquez also said they're already "in conversations" with independent software vendors about the "flow of support" into non-Red Hat distributions -- though that's always been the case. "Finding ways to reduce the barrier for those independent software vendors to add official support for us is, like, maybe more cumbersome now, but it's the same problem that we've had..."

Early in the discussion Oracle's Jim Wright pointed out that even Red Hat's own web site defines open source code as "designed to be publicly accessible — anyone can see, modify, and distribute the code as they see fit." ("Until now," Wright added pointedly...) There was some mild teasing of Oracle during the 50-minute discussion -- someone asked at one point if they'd re-license their proprietary implementation of ZFS under the GPL. But at the end of the panel, Oracle's Jim Wright still reminded the audience that "If you want to work on open source Linux, we are hiring."

Read Slashdot's transcript of highlights from the discussion.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Reddit is publicly extending an olive branch to the moderator community that it largely enraged over recent weeks. In a post on Wednesday, a Reddit employee detailed outreach efforts from the company, including new weekly feedback sessions, that it hopes can help repair ties with the social media platform and over 50,000 volunteer mods that it relies on. But as you might expect, mods remain skeptical. A Reddit admin going by Go_JasonWaterfalls on the site and claiming the title of Reddit VP of community acknowledged the shattered relationship between mods -- who spend thousands of hours providing free labor and have recently engaged in variously disruptive forms of protest over API pricing on the site -- and Reddit -- which has responded to said protests by ousting some protesting moderators from their posts.

"So, we've all had a... time on Reddit lately," Go_JasonWaterfalls wrote. "And I'm here to recognize it, acknowledge that our relationship has been tested, and begin the 'now what?' conversation." Noting that Reddit's "role is facilitation" and to give mods a platform they "can rely on," including necessary tools and resources, Go_JasonWaterfalls emphasized the need for "consistent, inclusive, and direct connection" with mods before detailing outreach efforts, like Weekly Mod Feedback Sessions. The sessions will take place every Tuesday and Thursday through October and "continue into the future as valuable," the Reddit admin said. Redditors have to fill out a form of interest to participate. Reddit can easily turn away those with inactive accounts or who it views as currently being in violation of Reddit's mod or content policies. Go_JasonWaterfalls said Reddit will share notes from feedback sessions in the r/modnews subreddit. Go_JasonWaterfalls also underscored Reddit's Mod Council and Partner Communities programs, the next monthly meeting for the Accessibility Feedback Group, and upcoming in-person events in the US, Brazil, Canada, England, France, and India.

Mods, meanwhile, traumatized by a tumultuous past couple of months, have very low expectations of Reddit's efforts. Ars spoke with some who have already participated in similar efforts, like feedback sessions or the Mod Council, and claimed mixed results in regard to Reddit making actual moves in response to mod critiques and suggestions. "The Reddit Mod Council in particular has been one where they will yo-yo on whether or not they listen to moderators. Sometimes they do, most times they don't," Alyssa Videlock, a mod for numerous subreddits, including large ones like r/tumblr and r/lgbt, told Ars. Reddit is refusing to give way on virtually any of the mods' demands, which has included things like more accessible API pricing or more time to adjust to the new pricing for apps they value and broader exemption for apps used by users (including mods) with accessibility needs. Reddit's removal of troubling mods has also helped to obliterate Reddit community trust.

Roblox is offering developers another way to earn money by allowing them to offer subscriptions within their experiences, according to a blog post published Tuesday. The Verge reports: Roblox already offers developers a lot of ways to monetize their experiences, including the ability to sell virtual items in an experience or on the Roblox marketplace, offering in-experience passes to certain content and gating experiences behind paid access. However, those examples are all one-time fees, and Roblox argues that subscriptions would offer a way for developers to "establish a recurring economic relationship with their users and potentially increase the predictability of their earnings." (Other monetization options include subscriptions to private servers, engagement-based payouts, and slotting in Roblox's "Immersive Ads.")

Subscriptions would also give Roblox another thing it can point to as a reason to develop for its metaverse platform instead of others. Epic Games' new system for Fortnite, for example, rewards creators based on factors like how long people play their experiences but doesn't allow creators to directly sell virtual goods or subscriptions inside those experiences. Developers looking for more flexibility in how they monetize might choose Roblox instead.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The European Commission today decided it is safe for personal data to be transferred from the European Union to US-based companies, handing a victory to firms like Facebook and Google despite protests from privacy advocates who worry about US government surveillance. The commission announced that it "adopted its adequacy decision for the EU-US Data Privacy Framework," concluding "that the United States ensures an adequate level of protection -- comparable to that of the European Union -- for personal data transferred from the EU to US companies under the new framework. On the basis of the new adequacy decision, personal data can flow safely from the EU to US companies participating in the Framework, without having to put in place additional data protection safeguards."

In May, Facebook-owner Meta was fined 1.2 billion euros for violating the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) with transfers of personal data to the United States and was ordered to stop storing European Union user data in the US within six months. But Meta said at the time that if the pending data-transfer pact "comes into effect before the implementation deadlines expire, our services can continue as they do today without any disruption or impact on users." The data-transfer deal "is expected to face a legal challenge from European privacy advocates, who have long said that the US needs to make substantial changes to surveillance laws," a Wall Street Journal report said today. "Transfers of data from Europe to the US have been in question since an EU court ruled in 2020 that a previous deal allowing trans-Atlantic data flows was illegal because the US didn't give EU individuals an effective way to challenge surveillance of their data by the US government."

The EC's announcement said the new framework has "binding safeguards to address all the concerns raised by the European Court of Justice, including limiting access to EU data by US intelligence services to what is necessary and proportionate, and establishing a Data Protection Review Court (DPRC), to which EU individuals will have access." The new court "will be able to order the deletion" of data that is found to have been collected in violation of the new rules. The framework will be administered and monitored by the US Department of Commerce and the "US Federal Trade Commission will enforce US companies' compliance," the EC announcement said. EU residents who challenge data collection will have free access to "independent dispute resolution mechanisms and an arbitration panel." US companies can join the EU-US framework "by committing to comply with a detailed set of privacy obligations, for instance the requirement to delete personal data when it is no longer necessary for the purpose for which it was collected, and to ensure continuity of protection when personal data is shared with third parties," the European Commission said. The latest deal is expected to get challenged, according to the WSJ. European Parliament member Birgit Sippel, who is in Germany's Social Democratic Party, said the "framework does not provide any meaningful safeguards against indiscriminate surveillance conducted by US intelligence agencies," according to The New York Times.

The Computer & Communications Industry Association, which represents major tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta, said: "Today's decision means that EU and US businesses will soon have full legal certainty again to transfer personal data across the Atlantic... Data flows are vital to transatlantic trade and the EU-US economic relationship, which is worth 5.5 trillion euros per year. Nevertheless, the two economies had been left without guidelines for data transfers after an EU Court ruling invalidated the previous framework back in 2020."

Stephen Clark writes via Ars Technica: When India's ambassador to the US signed up his country to the Artemis Accords last month, it signaled the world's most populous nation -- with a growing prowess in spaceflight -- could be turning toward the United States as a partner in space exploration. India became the 27th country to sign the Artemis Accords, a non-binding set of principles among like-minded nations guiding a vision for peaceful and transparent exploration of space. The accords cover the international registration of human-made space objects, the open release of scientific data, and an agreement for nations not to claim territory on the Moon or other planetary bodies, among other tenets.

Details about future cooperation between the US and India remain scarce. Nelson plans to travel to India later this year for meetings and discussions with Indian space officials. One objective of Nelson's trip will be to hammer out broad objectives for a "strategic framework" for human spaceflight cooperation. Despite the name of the Artemis Accords, there's no guarantee that India will play a significant role in NASA's Artemis program to return astronauts to the Moon and eventually send humans to Mars. "There's no implication of a signatory to the Artemis accords also being part of the Artemis program," Nelson told Ars.

But none of the other 26 signatories to the Artemis Accords -- a list that includes European space powers and Japan -- has their own human spaceflight program. India is developing a human-rated spacecraft called Gaganyaan that could be ready to fly people into low-Earth orbit in 2025, several years later than originally planned. "The fact that they are a nation that intends in the future to fly own their own astronauts, is that significant? The answer is yes," Nelson said. "I think it's of significance that a major country that's not considered aligned with the US (is) a signatory." "I've described India as a sleeping giant and one that is quickly awakening," Gold told Ars. "India is absolutely vital to global space development, and Artemis in particular, since the country is active with lunar programs, Martian programs, and now even human spaceflight." "Where India might fit into the Artemis program is still to be determined," writes Clark. "The partnership between the US and India in space could take a step forward next year with the flight of an Indian astronaut to the International Space Station. NASA has agreed to provide advanced training to Indian astronauts at the Johnson Space Center in Houston before a flight opportunity to the space station in low-Earth orbit."

India's space program has "held closer ties with Russia in the past," notes Clark. "Russia provided upper-stage engines for India's GSLV Mk.II rocket until India developed its own engine for the job. And four Indian astronauts slated for the Gaganyaan program completed more than a year of training at Russia's Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center near Moscow in 2021, according to Indian media."

"Despite India's overture toward a closer relationship with NASA, the Asian power remains linked with Russia," adds Clark. "India still imports significant amounts of Russian oil and has not officially condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine."

Mark Zuckerberg is in hot water in China-- again. From a report: An influential social media account affiliated with the official Beijing Daily on Wednesday raked the Meta Platforms founder over the coals for his previous criticisms of Chinese censorship and alleged intellectual property theft. The lengthy editorial emerged after the Wall Street Journal reported Meta was in talks with Tencent Holdings about helping sell the Quest VR headset in China, despite a block on its mainstay social media services from Facebook to Instagram.

Zuckerberg "dropped a rock on his own foot," the Beijing Daily said in a WeChat post that garnered more than 100,000 views. "You smashed the wok, and now you want to enjoy a Chinese meal?" Zuckerberg's relationship with China has run hot and cold. The Meta CEO was famously pictured jogging through a smog-filled Beijing and greeting then internet-czar Lu Wei at the height of a campaign to court officials in the world's largest internet arena.

At Nintendo's 83rd annual shareholders meeting last week, president and CEO Shuntaro Furukawa said the company is hoping for a smooth transition from the Switch to its unannounced next game console, pointing to Nintendo Accounts as being key to the generational hand-off. From a report: Nintendo has pointed to its accounts as being integral to future business in the past, as in the Nintendo Account segment of a special report it released at the end of 2021.

In response to an investor asking if the company has any specific measures in place to make the leap to a Switch successor, Furukawa pointed to the difficulty of switching customers from one console to the next, saying in the past, the company had to rebuild a relationship with its customers each time. Furukawa noted that the more than 290 million Nintendo Accounts are cross-platform and can be used with console games as well as mobile apps. To close out his answer, he said that while moving onto the company's yet-unannounced next-generation console, Nintendo would do its best to make the transition smooth for customers.

The European Union (EU) is seeking closer cooperation with Japan in areas such as artificial intelligence to reduce reliance on China. CNBC reports: EU Commissioner Thierry Breton is meeting with the Japanese government on Monday, and artificial intelligence will be "very high" on his agenda, he said in a video posted on Twitter on Sunday. "I will engage with [the] Japanese government ... on how we can organize our digital space, including AI based on our shared value," Breton said.

Breton also said there will be an EU-Japan Digital Partnership council, to discuss areas including quantum and high-performance computing. The EU held a similar council with South Korea last week, in which the two sides agreed to cooperate on technologies such as AI and cybersecurity. Partnerships with key Asian countries with strong technology sectors come as the EU looks to "de-risk" from China -- a different approach from that of the U.S., which has sought to decouple its economy from Beijing. Part of that EU strategy involves deepening the relationship with allied countries around technology.

Breton told Reuters on Monday that the bloc and Japan will cooperate in the area of semiconductors. Japan is a key country in the semiconductor supply chain, and Tokyo has been looking to strengthen its domestic industry. Last week, a fund backed by the Japanese government proposed to buy domestic chipmaking firm JSR for around 903.9 billion yen ($6.3 billion). The EU has also been looking to strengthen its own semiconductor industry across the bloc.

Reactions continue to Red Hat's announcement that they'd start limiting access to Red Hat Enterprise Linux sources, reports Ars Technica: Rocky Linux, launched by CentOS co-founder Greg Kurtzer as a replacement RHEL-compatible distro, announced Thursday that it believes Red Hat's moves "violate the spirit and purpose of open source." Using a few different methods (Universal Base Image containers, pay-per-use public cloud instances), Rocky Linux intends to maintain what it considers legitimate access to RHEL code under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and make the code public as soon as it exists.
"These methods are possible because of the power of GPL," explains Rocky Linux's blog post. "No one can prevent redistribution of GPL software. To reiterate, both of these methods enable us to legitimately obtain RHEL binaries and SRPMs without compromising our commitment to open source software or agreeing to TOS or EULA limitations that impede our rights. Our legal advisors have reassured us that we have the right to obtain the source to any binaries we receive, ensuring that we can continue advancing Rocky Linux in line with our original intentions.... [O]ur unwavering dedication and commitment to open source and the Enterprise Linux community remain steadfast."

"In the unfortunate event that Red Hat decides to ramp up efforts to negatively impact the community, Rocky Linux will persist to continue serving the best interests of the entire open source community. As a reminder, we welcome everyone to contribute to our efforts. You can learn more about how you can join us and all of the various ways to contribute on our wiki."

Ars Technica notes that AlmaLinux is "also working to keep providing RHEL-compatible updates and downstream rebuilds." "The process is more labor intensive as we require gathering data and patches from several sources, comparing them, testing them, and then building them for release," wrote Jack Aboutboul, community manager for AlmaLinux, in a blog post. "But rest assured, updates will continue flowing just as they have been."

The Software Freedom Conservancy's Bradley M. Kuhn weighed in last week with a comprehensive overview of RHEL's business model and its tricky relationship with GPL compliance. Red Hat's business model "skirts" GPL violation but had only twice previously violated the GPL in newsworthy ways, Kuhn wrote. Withholding Complete Corresponding Source (CCS) from the open web doesn't violate the GPL itself, but by doing so, Red Hat makes it more difficult for anyone to verify the company's GPL compliance.

Kuhn expressed sadness that "this long road has led the FOSS community to such a disappointing place."
Red Hat argued that they "do not find value in a RHEL rebuild." Rocky Linux dismissed this view as "narrow-minded," and RHEL-derived AlmaLinux even responded with specific examples, also noting its contributions to the RHEL and CentOS communities. AlmaLinux's community manager wrote "When executed properly, downstream rebuilds provide tremendous value and are a tremendous asset to upstream projects."

And ITWire shares one more reaction: German open source vendor SUSE says it will not be making any changes to its policies on source code access, emphasising "that the freedom to access, modify, and distribute software should remain open to all".

"CentOS Stream will now be the sole repository for public RHEL-related source code releases..." Red Hat posted this week on its blog, arguing that "The engagement around CentOS Stream, the engineering levels of investment, and the new priorities we're addressing for customers and partners now make maintaining separate, redundant, repositories inefficient."

Long-time Slashdot reader slack_justyb notes this means patches and changes will now hit CentOS Stream before actually hitting RHEL, which "will make it difficult for other distributions such as Alma Linux, Rocky Linux, and Oracle Linux to provide assured binary compatibility as their only source now will be ahead of what RHEL is actually using."

"Some commentators are pointing out that it's possible to sign up for a free Red Hat Developer account, and obtain the source code legitimately that way," writes the Register. "This is perfectly true, but the problem is that the license agreement that you have to sign to get that account prevents you from redistributing the software." Hackaday notes that beyond the the GPL v2 license on the kernel, Red Hat also has "an additional user agreement that terminates access to updates if the code is re-published."

Rocky Linux officially "remains confident in its ability to continue as a bug-for-bug compatible and freely available alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, despite changes in accessibility." While this decision does change the automation we use for building Rocky Linux, we have already created a short term mitigation and are developing the longer term strategy. There will be no disruption or change for any Rocky Linux users, collaborators, or partners... The project pledges to keep its promise to maintain the full life-span of support for Rocky 8 and 9, and to continue to produce future RHEL-compatible versions as long as the option remains, allowing organizations to maintain the flexibility, control, and freedom they rely upon for their critical infrastructure. This is the open source way.
Gregory Kurtzer, founder of the Rocky Linux project, calls Red Hat's move "a minor inconvenience for the Rocky Linux team," but with "no disruption to Rocky Linux users. Moving forward we are becoming even more stable, supported, and secure."

AlmaLinux also weighs in: Can you just use CentOS Stream sources?
No, we are committed to remaining a downstream RHEL clone, and using CentOS Stream sources would make us upstream of RHEL. CentOS Stream sources, while being upstream of RHEL, do not always include all patches and updates that are included in RHEL packages.

Is Red Hat trying to kill downstream clones?
We cannot speak to Red Hat's intentions, and can only point to the things they have said publicly. We have had an incredible working relationship with Red Hat through the life of AlmaLinux OS and we hope to see that continue.

Intel says its manufacturing business will work like a separate unit and will begin to generate a margin, but gave no clear timeline on when it will start scaling up, sending the chipmaker's shares down about 5%. From a report: The company also did not name a new external customer for the business as part of its foundry services, a key element of Intel's turnaround plans wherein it will offer its manufacturing services to other companies including its competitors. Intel's internal business units will now have a customer-supplier relationship with the manufacturing business, Chief Financial Officer David Zinsner said on an investor call. Based on that model, Intel will be the second largest foundry next year with manufacturing revenue of more than $20 billion, he said.

Trial lawyer Kyle Roche has led an interesting life, according to the New York Times. He once earned $100 million selling bitcoin. He helped win a case against Craig Wright (who claims to be Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto) through his law firm Roche Freedman. And Roche also founded a startup that lets people bet on the outcome of (civil) lawsuits, "to make access to justice more affordable."

But something very bad for his career happened in January of 2022 when two businessmen flew Roche from Miami to the U.K. to discuss an investment. When he woke up the next morning, Roche said, he felt groggy... The brain fog was odd because he didn't think he'd had all that much to drink. As he flew back to Miami a few days later, Roche couldn't shake the feeling that something was amiss.

Months passed. Then, one day last summer, Roche's world detonated. A website called Crypto Leaks posted two dozen videos of him that had been secretly recorded during his meetings with Villavicencio and Ager-Hanssen. The videos portrayed Roche and his law firm, Roche Freedman, as being in the pocket of one of their crypto clients [Ava Labs]... In other clips, Roche made it sound like his sole concern, even when representing other clients, was to promote Ava Labs' interests...

One after another, companies that Roche Freedman had sued filed motions to disqualify the firm from their cases. In October, the first of those motions succeeded: A federal judge in New York tossed Roche Freedman from a case it had filed against Tether, the operator of the world's most used "stablecoin." Within days, Roche was forced to resign from the law firm he had founded. With his career in tatters, he said, he enrolled in ethics classes and began to see a therapist.
Roche calls the recorded remarks baseless bluster to impress a prospective investor (and alleges in court there are signs of deep fake alterations). While Roche "was felled by his own loose lips and his overly cozy relationship with a client," the Times reports "he also was the victim of an elaborate international setup." On April 3, 2020, Roche Freedman filed lawsuits seeking class-action status against seven issuers of digital coins, alleging they had pumped what amounted to unregistered securities with false statements and then dumped them, leaving retail investors holding the bag... Those suits were just an opening salvo: Sixteen months later, Roche filed his biggest securities fraud case yet. It alleged that a British entrepreneur, Dominic Williams, and entities he controlled had swindled investors out of billions of dollars by aggressively promoting, and then dumping, a digital coin tied to a grandiose plan to revolutionize computing. Williams had boldly proclaimed that his Internet Computer blockchain — a decentralized network of computers powered by a digital token called ICP — would supplant the big cloud services offered by Amazon and Microsoft and become humanity's primary computing platform. But after an initial surge that briefly made it one of the most valuable cryptocurrencies, ICP had plummeted 92% — a collapse that Roche's lawsuit attributed to "massive" selling by Williams and other insiders. (Williams denied the allegations.)
The Times reports that Roche's prospective investor Ager-Hanssen, "in addition to running his venture capital firm, has long had a sideline digging up dirt on behalf of wealthy clients entangled in business disputes in Britain and Scandinavia. On multiple occasions, he has secretly recorded his targets. For example, in a 2014 interview, he recounted how he had snared the adversary of a Swedish financier with a hidden microphone and boasted that he employed former intelligence officers from the CIA, MI6 and Mossad..." Roche believes them because he thinks he knows who hired Ager-Hanssen: Williams, the British entrepreneur who was the target of Roche Freedman's biggest pump-and-dump lawsuit... On May 12, 2022, Williams wrote on Twitter that he was "coming for" his critics. That was the same day the cryptoleaks.info domain name was registered. That was the same day the cryptoleaks.info domain name was registered. Then, on June 9, 2022, the Crypto Leaks website went live. Billing itself as the defender of "the honest crypto community," it posted two reports that aligned with Williams' interests...

The first espoused a complicated theory about the ICP token crash that Williams had previously floated on Twitter. The second attacked the Times for an article it had published about the crash. Williams tweeted a link to that Crypto Leaks report, calling it "Gobsmacking." The Dfinity Foundation, a Swiss nonprofit that Williams created to oversee his blockchain, has since sued the Times for defamation in New York. The Times is seeking to dismiss the suit. The videos of Roche were the crux of Crypto Leaks' third exposé. After they were published, Williams and Dfinity filed a motion to disqualify Roche Freedman as plaintiffs' counsel in the pump-and-dump lawsuit, saying Roche's comments demonstrated "a disregard for the integrity of the judicial system...."

Last month, the judge overseeing the pump-and-dump case granted Williams' motion and disqualified Freedman Normand Friedland as plaintiffs' counsel.

"Compared to the website's average daily volume over the past month, the 52,121,649 visits Reddit saw on June 13th represented a 6.6 percent drop..." reports Engadget (citing data provided by internet analytics firm Similarweb). [A]s many subreddits continue to protest the company's plans and its leadership contemplates policy changes that could change its relationship with moderators, the platform could see a slow but gradual decline in daily active users. That's unlikely to bode well for Reddit ahead of its planned IPO and beyond.
In fact, the Financial Times now reports that Reddit "acknowledged that several advertisers had postponed certain premium ad campaigns in order to wait for the blackouts to pass." But they also got this dire prediction from a historian who helps moderate the subreddit "r/Askhistorians" (with 1.8 million subscribers).

"If they refuse to budge in any way I do not see Reddit surviving as it currently exists. That's the kind of fire I think they're playing with."

More people had the same same thought. The Reddit protests drew this response earlier this week from EFF's associate director of community organizing: This tension between these communities and their host have, again, fueled more interest in the Fediverse as a decentralized refuge... Unfortunately, discussions of Reddit-like fediverse services Lemmy and Kbin on Reddit were colored by paranoia after the company banned users and subreddits related to these projects (reportedly due to "spam"). While these accounts and subreddits have been reinstated, the potential for censorship around such projects has made a Reddit exodus feel more urgently necessary...
Saturday the EFF official reiterated their concerns when Wired asked: does this really signal the death of Reddit? "I can't see it as anything but that... [I]t's not a big collapse when a social media website starts to die, but it is a slow attrition unless they change their course. The longer they stay in their position, the more loss of users and content they're going to face."

Wired even heard a thought-provoking idea from Amy Bruckman, a regents' professor/senior associate chair at the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. Bruckman "advocates for public funding of a nonprofit version of something akin to Reddit."

Meanwhile, hundreds of people are now placing bets on whether Reddit will backtrack on its new upcoming API pricing — or oust CEO Steve Huffman — according to Insider, citing reports from online betting company BetUS.

CEO Huffman's complaint that the moderators were ignoring the wishes of Reddit's users led to a funny counter-response, according to the Verge. After asking users to vote on whether to end the protest, two forums saw overwhelming support instead for the only offered alternative: the subreddits "now only allow posts about comedian and Last Week Tonight host John Oliver."

Both r/pics (more than 30 million subscribers) and r/gifs (more than 21 million subscribers) offered two options to users to vote on... The results were conclusive:

r/pics: return to normal, -2,329 votes; "only allow images of John Oliver looking sexy," 37,331 votes.
r/gifs: return to normal, -1,851 votes; only feature GIFs of John Oliver, 13,696 votes...

On Twitter, John Oliver encouraged the subreddits — and even gave them some fodder. "Dear Reddit, excellent work," he wrote to kick off a thread that included several ridiculous pictures. A spokesperson for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver didn't immediately reply to a request for comment.

This week the Linux Foundation and the National Spectrum Consortium "announced formal collaboration" on developing software prototypes and demonstrations for Open RAN (open radio access network):

The two organizations have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to solidify their working relationship and commitment to minimizing barriers to further R&D necessary for OpenRAN acceleration within the United States.

More open and flexible wireless networks ultimately increase vendor diversity and competition, prevent vendor lock-in, increase innovation in wireless networking technology, lower deployment and operational costs, and even increase security and energy efficiency. "We are eager to work with the NSC in creating a stable, open, secure reference stack for Open RAN," said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge & IoT, the Linux Foundation. "By combining resources, we'll accelerate access to Open RAN and wireless technology across the United States across verticals and into government, academia, and small business."
The collaborations goals include:

• Establish an open source reference software architecture for Open RAN that will kickstart academic and commercial R&D by lowering the cost and complexity of entry

• Rally support from industry with guidance and funds to leap forward in a true open and secure RAN

TV's streaming model is broken. It's also not going away. For Hollywood, figuring that out will be a horror show. From a report: Across the town, there's despair and creative destruction and all sorts of countervailing indicators. Certain shows that were enthusiastically green-lit two years ago probably wouldn't be made now. Yet there are still streamers burning mountains of cash to entertain audiences that already have too much to watch. Netflix has tightened the screws and recovered somewhat, but the inarguable consensus is that there is still a great deal of pain to come as the industry cuts back, consolidates, and fumbles toward a more functional economic framework. The high-stakes Writers Guild of America strike has focused attention on Hollywood's labor unrest, but the really systemic issue is streaming's busted math. There may be no problem more foundational than the way the system monetizes its biggest hits: It doesn't.

Just ask Shawn Ryan. In April, the veteran TV producer's latest show, the spy thriller The Night Agent, became the fifth-most-watched English-language original series in Netflix's history, generating 627 million viewing hours in its first four weeks. As it climbed to the heights of such platform-defining smashes as Stranger Things and Bridgerton, Ryan wondered how The Night Agent's success might be reflected in his compensation. "I had done the calculations. Half a billion hours is the equivalent of over 61 million people watching all ten episodes in 18 days. Those shows that air after the Super Bowl -- it's like having five or ten of them. So I asked my lawyer, 'What does that mean?'" recalls Ryan. As it turns out, not much. "In my case, it means that I got paid what I got paid. I'll get a little bonus when season two gets picked up and a nominal royalty fee for each additional episode that gets made. But if you think I'm going out and buying a private jet, you're way, way off."

Ryan says he'll probably make less money from The Night Agent than he did from The Shield, the cop drama he created in 2002, even though the latter ran on the then-nascent cable channel FX and never delivered Super Bowl numbers. "The promise was that if you made the company billions, you were going to get a lot of millions," he says. "That promise has gone away." Nobody is crying for Ryan, of course, and he wouldn't want them to. ("I'm not complaining!" he says. "I'm not unaware of my position relative to most people financially.") But he has a point. Once, in a more rational time, there was a direct relationship between the number of people who watched a show and the number of jets its creator could buy. More viewers meant higher ad rates, and the biggest hits could be sold to syndication and international markets. The people behind those hits got a cut, which is why the duo who invented Friends probably haven't flown commercial since the 1990s. Streaming shows, in contrast, have fewer ads (or none at all) and are typically confined to their original platforms forever. For the people who make TV, the connection between ratings and reward has been severed.

Bill Gates wrote a blog post this week recommending a novel about videogame development. Gates calls Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. "one of the biggest books of last year," telling the story of "two friends who bond over Super Mario Bros. as kids and grow up to make video games together." Although there are plenty of video games mentioned in the book — Oregon Trail is a recurring theme — I'd describe it more as a story about partnership and collaboration. When Sam and Sadie are in college, they create a game called Ichigo that turns out to be a huge hit. Their company, Unfair Games, becomes successful, but the two start to butt heads. Sadie is upset that Sam got most of the credit for Ichigo. Sam is frustrated that Sadie cares more about creating art than about making their company viable...

Most of the book is about how a creative partnership can be equal parts remarkable and complicated. I couldn't help but be reminded of my relationship with Paul Allen while I was reading it. Sadie believes that "true collaborators in this life are rare." I agree, and I was lucky to have one in Paul. An early chapter describing how Sam and Sadie worked until sunrise in a dingy apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, could have just as easily been about Paul and me coming up with the idea for Microsoft. Like Sam and Sadie, we worked together every day for years.

Paul's vision and contributions to the company were absolutely critical to its success, and then he chose to move on. We had a great relationship, but not without some of the complexities that success brings. Zevin really captures what it feels like to start a company that takes off. It's thrilling to know your vision is now real, but success brings a lot of new questions. Once you make money, do you still have something to prove? How does your relationship with your partner change once a lot more people get involved? How do you make the next idea as good as the last?

You can't help but wonder whether you would've been as successful if you started up at a different time... Paul and I were very lucky in terms of our timing with Microsoft. We got in when chips were just starting to become powerful but before other people had created established companies... Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow resonated with me for personal reasons, but I think Zevin's exploration of partnership and collaboration is worth reading no matter who you are. Even if you're skeptical about reading a book about video games, the subject is a terrific metaphor for human connection.
The book is now being adapted into a movie.