An anonymous reader quotes The New Stack: While there are some who may never get over the fact that the Istio service mesh, originally created by Google and IBM, will not be handed over to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the project took a big step this past week to assuage those who critiqued the project for being under a Google-majority control: Istio has introduced a new Istio steering committee.

According to the blog post, the new steering committee will consist of 13 seats, with four "elected Community Seats" and nine "proportionally allocated Contribution Seats," a change they say "solidifies our commitment to open governance, ensuring that the community around the project will always be able to steer its direction, and that no one company has majority voting control over the project." This final point is really the key to the announcement here, with them further and more explicitly clarifying later that "no single vendor, no matter how large their contribution, has majority voting control over the Istio project." To this end, they write, they have "implemented a cap on the number of seats a company can hold, such that they can neither unanimously win a vote, or veto a decision of the rest of the committee."

As for how those seats are allocated, the four Community Seats will consist of four representatives from four different organizations and will be chosen in an annual election. The nine Contribution Seats will be assigned to a minimum of three different companies "in proportion to contributions made to Istio in the previous 12 months," with this year's metric being merged pull requests.
But not everyone was satisfied. On Twitter AWS engineer Matthew S. Wilson called it "a crappy way to build a community," objecting to the way it's recognizing and rewarding open source contributions by company rather than by the individuals.

And Knative co-founder Matt Moore called it "what you get when a company wants to 'play community', but treat its employees as interchangeable cogs."

Long-time Slashdot reader xonen quotes the Verge: YouTube plans to discontinue its community captions feature, which allowed viewers to add subtitles to videos, because it was "rarely used and had problems with spam/abuse," the company announced. It says it's removing the captions and will "focus on other creator tools." The feature will be removed as of September 28th.

"You can still use your own captions, automatic captions and third-party tools and services," YouTube said in an update on its help page. But deaf and hard-of-hearing creators say removing the community captions feature will stifle accessibility, and they want to see the company try to fix the issues with volunteer-created captions, rather than doing away with them entirely. Deaf YouTuber Rikki Poynter said on her channel in May that community captions were an "accessibility tool that not only allowed deaf and hard of hearing people to watch videos with captions, but allowed creators that could not afford to financially invest in captions." She tweeted Thursday that she was disappointed with YouTube's decision.

YouTuber JT, whose channel has more than 550,000 subscribers, highlighted the downside of the community captions feature last year, showing how viewers were adding abusive comments to videos by popular creators. But many creators say they relied on the captions not only to better reach deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers, but to help translate their videos into other languages, giving them a larger audience.
YouTube is offering a free six-month subscription to a subtitling service for regular users of the community contribution feature — but not everyone is satisfied, according to the Verge. A petition calling on Google to reverse the decision has now garnered more than 155,000 signatures.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: At the "Online Platforms and Market Power" virtual antitrust hearing today, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos spoke about a policy that is meant to prevent the company from using seller specific data to help it determine what products it should manufacture and sell itself. "What I can tell you is, we have a policy against using seller specific data to aid our private label business," Bezos said. "But I can't guarantee you that that policy has never been violated." In July 2019, an Amazon lawyer told the subcommittee that the company didn't tap data from individual third-party merchants to determine what new products to create. In April, the Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon did just that. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), who was the first to question Bezos at the hearing, cited the article. "I'm familiar with the Wall Street Journal article that you're talking about," Bezos said. "And we continue to look into that very carefully. I'm not yet satisfied that we've gotten to the bottom of it, and we're going to keep looking at it. It's not as easy as you would think because some of the sources in the article are anonymous, but we continue to look into it."

Bezos then tried to play up the fact that Amazon didn't have to have such a policy. "The fact that we have such a policy is voluntary," Bezos said. "I think no other retailer even has such a policy. We would treat that like any internal policy, and if we found that someone violated it, we would take action against them." "Well, there's numerous reports, and the committee has conducted interviews with former employees who confirm that there are employees who do have access to that data and are using it," Jayapal responded. "So my next question was going to be: If you thought you were actually enforcing these rules, do you think that that's working? And again, I would just say that there's credible reporting that's documented breaches of these rules that you have put into place. And the committee has interviewed employees that typically say that these breaches typically occur."

Later in the hearing, Kelly Armstrong (R-ND) asked whether Amazon allows the use of aggregate data to inform its private label brands when there are only three sellers for a product and then again when there are only two competitors. Bezos said "yes, sir" to both. Armstrong then asked about Amazon's internal investigation on the use of third party data. "We're basically trying to understand some of the anecdotes that we saw in the Wall Street Journal article," Bezos responded. He committed to informing the committee on the outcome of that investigation.

John Gruber, writing at DaringFireball: Feel free to file Google's release this week of an update to their iPad Gmail app with support for split-screen multitasking under "better late than never," but this is so late it borders on the absurd. It's like the difference between showing up fashionably late and showing up a week after the party. Split-screen multitasking was introduced for the iPad back in 2015 with iOS 9. Five years to add support for a foundational element of the iPad user experience. And an email client is near the top of the list of the type of apps where someone would want to use split-screen. Five years. Google makes a lot of software with terrible user experiences for users who have poor taste. Their iOS software, in particular, has for the most part never suggested that it was designed by people who like -- or even use -- iOS. It's the blind leading the blind. But yet the Gmail app is currently the number one free app in the Productivity category in the App Store.

On the surface, it's tempting to blow this off. To each their own. Whatever floats their boat. Who cares if millions of iPad users are satisfied using an email client that is a poor iPad app, so long as actual good iPad email clients are available to those who do care? But what about those stuck using the Gmail app not because they want to, but because they have to? Who can help them but Apple? I worry that it's not tenable in the long run to expect Apple to continue striving to create well-crafted -- let alone insanely great -- software when so many of its users not only settle for, but perhaps even prefer, software that is, to put it kindly, garbage. There have always been popular Mac and iPhone apps that are objectively terrible apps -- where by "popular" I mean much-used, not much-loved. But what made Apple users Apple users is that they complained vociferously if they had to use a terrible app. Word 6 was a sack of dog shit Microsoft dropped off and set aflame on Mac users' porch, but we all knew it was a flaming bag of dog shit, and even those of us who didn't even use Word were angry about it because it was an insult.

I worry that this sort of "Who cares, it's better than nothing" attitude has seeped into Apple itself, and explains how we wound up with barely modified iPad apps shipping as system apps on the Mac. But more than anything I worry that this exemplifies where Apple has lost its way with the App Store. What exactly is the point of running a strict approval process for apps if not, first and foremost, to ensure that they're good apps? An iPad email app that doesn't support split-screen multitasking for five years is, by definition, not a good app. I'd like to see all the vim, vigor, and vigilance Apple applies to making sure no app on the App Store is making a dime without Apple getting three cents applied instead to making sure there aren't any scams or ripoffs, and that popular apps support good-citizen-of-the-platform features within a reasonable amount of time after those features are introduced in the OS. I don't know exactly how long "reasonable" is, but five fucking years for split-screen support ain't it.

The former editor-in-chief of the Linux Journal just published an annotated version of Zoom's privacy policy. Searls calls it "creepily chummy with the tracking-based advertising biz (also called adtech). I'll narrow my inquiry down to the "Does Zoom sell Personal Data?" section of the privacy policy, which was last updated on March 18. The section runs two paragraphs, and I'll comment on the second one, starting here:

Zoom does use certain standard advertising tools which require Personal Data ...

What they mean by that is adtech. What they're also saying here is that Zoom is in the advertising business, and in the worst end of it: the one that lives off harvested personal data. What makes this extra creepy is that Zoom is in a position to gather plenty of personal data, some of it very intimate (for example with a shrink talking to a patient) without anyone in the conversation knowing about it. (Unless, of course, they see an ad somewhere that looks like it was informed by a private conversation on Zoom.)

A person whose personal data is being shed on Zoom doesn't know that's happening because Zoom doesn't tell them. There's no red light, like the one you see when a session is being recorded. If you were in a browser instead of an app, an extension such as Privacy Badger could tell you there are trackers sniffing your ass. And, if your browser is one that cares about privacy, such as Brave, Firefox or Safari, there's a good chance it would be blocking trackers as well. But in the Zoom app, you can't tell if or how your personal data is being harvested.

(think, for example, Google Ads and Google Analytics).

There's no need to think about those, because both are widely known for compromising personal privacy. (See here. And here. Also Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger's Re-Engineering Humanity and Shoshana Zuboff's In the Age of Surveillance Capitalism.)
Zoom claims it needs personal data to "improve" its users "experience" with ads -- though Searls isn't satisfied. ("Nobody goes to Zoom for an 'advertising experience,' personalized or not. And nobody wants ads aimed at their eyeballs elsewhere on the Net by third parties using personal information leaked out through Zoom.") His conclusion?

"What Zoom's current privacy policy says is worse than 'You don't have any privacy here.' It says, 'We expose your virtual necks to data vampires who can do what they will with it.'"

Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig sued the New York Times for defamation on Monday, claiming a story about Jeffrey Epstein's donations to MIT that referenced Lessig amounted to "clickbait." The Wrap reports: The story in question was published on Sept. 14, 2019 under the headline, "A Harvard Professor Doubles Down: If You Take Epstein's Money, Do It in Secret." Its lede, or introduction, read, "It is hard to defend soliciting donations from the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. But Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law professor, has been trying." The lawsuit, filed in Massachusetts, states, 'Defendants' actions here are part of a growing journalistic culture of clickbaiting: the use of a shocking headline and/or lede to entice readers to click on a particular article, irrespective of the truth of the headline. Defendants are fully aware that many, if not most, readers never read past the clickbait and that their takeaway concerning the target of the headline is limited to what they read in the headline." It also states that Lessig asked the paper to change the headline and lede, but his request was not granted.

In a Medium blog post published concurrently with the lawsuit, Lessig contended that an essay he wrote, which was the central conversation piece for the interview the Times' story was based on, calls soliciting money from convicted sex offenders a "mistake." Lessig argues that the Times' headline suggests the exact opposite. His essay argued if institutions take money from such individuals, the donors should be anonymous. He added that the "mistake" he wrote about would result in "the kind of harm it would trigger in both victims and women generally." A Times spokesperson told TheWrap that "senior editors reviewed the story after Professor Lessig complained and were satisfied that the story accurately reflected his statements. We plan to defend against the claim vigorously."

Over 20,000 developers have shared what are their favorite JavaScript features, front-end frameworks and back-end frameworks in a new annual survey. The figures come from the fourth State of JavaScript survey, which included responses from 21,717 developers around the world. On the flavors front -- languages that compile to JavaScript -- most developers were satisfied with Microsoft-backed open-source JavaScript superset, TypeScript, followed by Reason, Elm, ClosureScript, and PureScript. But TypeScript also came out on top when ranking developers' interest as well as awareness. Some 58% of developers reported having used TypeScript and that they would use it again, compared to less than 5% for all other flavors of JavaScript.

Harper's profiles sys-admin Chris Monteiro, who moonlights as a white-hat hacker monitoring dark web sites claiming to offer murder-for-hire services. For example, he tipped off one local police department to a $5,000 bitcoin payment someone made to try to arrange the murder of a teenaged girl on a site run by someone named "Yura". [U]sers set up an anonymous account, select from a drop-down menu the kind of violence they would like inflicted, upload the photo and address of their intended target, and wait to hear back through the messaging system. Users often have questions for Yura: How do I know you're for real? Can you make it look like an accident? When they are satisfied, the user transfers bitcoin into a special wallet on the site, where it will ostensibly be held until the job is completed. Instead, Yura takes the money immediately, and makes no attempt to complete the job. The user complains; Yura says he needs more money to hire a better hit man; the user either pays again or asks for a refund; and Yura either disappears or attempts to extort the user by threatening to turn information over to the authorities...

Despite the repulsive intent, there's an element of black comedy to some of the logs from Yura's sites. For one thing, the users' eagerness to believe the service is real leads them to ignore obvious signs that they are being scammed. Yura's marketplaces, for example, use stock photos of assassins or photos pulled from Google image searches. His poor English and poorer knowledge of U.S. geography result in glaring slipups, and the language he employs can make him sound like a customer service representative channeling a B-grade Mafia film. During the back-and-forth on one recent order, the user Happynewyear asked Yura if he could send hit men to Hawaii. "Yes," Yura responded, "we have someone in a nearby state. He can drive to the location with a stolen car and do the job with no problems." Overlooking the fact that the nearest state is 2,500 miles and a considerable swath of the Pacific Ocean away, the user paid him around three thousand dollars.

Reading through the kill orders, it's easy to spot the online disinhibition effect -- the psychologist John Suler's theory of why and how human behavior changes when we log on... So far, according to Monteiro, eight people have been arrested for ordering murders through Yura's websites, on the basis of evidence Monteiro passed to law enforcement. One of them, a young Californian named Beau Brigham, had paid less than $5 toward a hit on his stepmother. Nevertheless, he was found guilty of soliciting murder and sentenced to three years in prison.
One attempted murder was arranged by a man described as "an I.T. professional and elder in the United Church of God," raising an adopted teenaged son with his wife Amy. "[H]e'd been arranging affairs through the infidelity website Ashley Madison but could not consider divorce because of his position in the church." In the end he'd simply carried out the murder himself, but "His exchanges with Yura would prove central to the state's investigation into Amy's death: the bitcoin signature of the payment...matched the key that authorities found on Stephen's hard drive at home. Stephen had attempted to make the death look like a suicide, and the bitcoin key was proof it was not. In January 2018, he was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison."

The article's author, Brian Merchant, writes that it was hard to research. "There is no easy way to say, 'Hello, I found your name on a kill list on the dark net, and while the site is a scam the order is not; someone you likely know wants you dead badly enough to pay thousands of dollars to an impossibly shady website. Give me a ring back anytime'... Of those I was able to contact, about half said they had never been alerted by the police." (Though Monteiro says America's Department of Homeland Services now plans to investigate everyone who's made transactions on Yura's site.)

The article also notes the first known instance of a murder ordered on the dark web and then successfully carried out -- this March, on a different dark web site.

Aggrieved that their matches aren't "quality" enough, some men share techniques to cheat the dating app's algorithm and raise their status. An anonymous reader shares a report: Like most apps that have a pay function, the easiest path to a better Tinder experience is with cash. Super Likes, according to the app, will triple your chances of getting a match as they're a manual override of the algorithm, forcing you to the head of someone's swipe queue. You still have to earn a right swipe, but the person is all but guaranteed to see your profile. Then, of course, there's the various DIY swipe combos and techniques, like my friend's, that people are convinced will result in better matches. "I cracked Tinder," redditor joikol exclaimed on the Tinder subreddit a year ago [sic throughout]. "I had cracked how to not only get the hottest girls to appear, but also how to make my profile appear on their Tinder. The trick: for every girl you like, reject 5 girls. Or, in simple terms, have very high standards for liking girls. The Tinder algorithm will see that you're not satisfied with the lot you've gotten and improve its delivery. It will also think that you're some hotshot and make you appear more on girls' Tinder."

But alas, he continued, "Then I realized that this strategy was a fail because when you do this, you need to be 11/10 as well. The hot girls won't swipe right on you, and the average ones won't be available as you swipe left on them." Two other popular alleged algorithm hacks: 1. Resetting your account (especially via a Google number or burner phone), since Tinder gives new users a first-day boost. (This can definitely backfire, though, since it's something Tinder knows people are doing and punishes them for it with a shadowban.) 2. Changing your location or expanding your geographical range. "I used to have it so that my distance was like 200 kilometers and then leave it like that for a few hours," says 24-year-old Kelly from Canada. "Then I'd change it back to 10-kilometers distance. I'd immediately get a ton of guys who were 10 kilometers away swiping right on me! It was quite the confidence booster!"

Ars Technica's security editor re-visits the story of two security penetration testers from Coalfire who were arrested one midnight in the county courthouse in Adel, Iowa (population 3,682): "They were crouched down like turkeys peeking over the balcony," Dallas County Sheriff Chad Leonard said in an interview. "Here we are at 12:30 in the morning confronted with this issue -- on September 11, no less. We have two unknown people in our courthouse -- in a government building -- carrying backpacks that remind me and several other deputies of maybe the pressure cooker bombs." After more deputies arrived, Justin Wynn, 29 of Naples, Florida, and Gary De Mercurio, 43 of Seattle, slowly proceeded down the stairs with hands raised. They then presented the deputies with a letter that explained the intruders weren't criminals but rather penetration testers who had been hired by Iowa's State Court Administration to test the security of its court information system. After calling one or more of the state court officials listed in the letter, the deputies were satisfied the men were authorized to be in the building...

When Leonard arrived on the scene, the mood quickly changed. Leonard read the letter and sized the men up. It said the men were authorized to perform "physical social engineering to attempt to gain access" to courthouse systems... The letter also listed tasks that should not be performed, including alarm subversion, force-opening doors, and accessing environments that require personal protective equipment. The pentesters had already said they used a tool to open the front door. Leonard took that to mean the men had violated the restriction against forcing doors open. Leonard also said the men attempted to turn off the alarm -- something Coalfire officials vehemently deny. In Leonard's mind that was a second violation. Another reason for doubt: one of the people listed as a contact on the get-out-of-jail-free letter didn't answer the deputies' calls, while another said he didn't believe the men had permission to conduct physical intrusions. The sheriff also said he and his deputies smelled alcohol on the breath of one of the men. (Leonard, who didn't identify which Coalfire employee it was, said a test later showed the pentester had a blood alcohol content of 0.05, the equivalent of one or two drinks. It is below the 0.08 threshold for an operating while intoxicated conviction.) Leonard promptly had the men arrested on felony third-degree burglary charges...

The charges have since been reduced to misdemeanor trespassing charges. Trial is scheduled for April. Meanwhile, the sheriff's department in nearby Polk County is conducting a criminal investigation into a September 10 break-in on its courthouse under the same arrangement with the State Judicial Administration.... The get-out-of-jail-free letter "said you won't manipulate doors," Leonard said. "Well, they picked four doors. It said they won't manipulate the alarm system. They went right up to the alarm and tried to shut it off. The biggest issue is they were only supposed to work from 6AM to 6PM. They came out in the middle of the night and broke in." Equally important, Leonard said, is what he believed to be the overstepping of Iowa officials who retained Coalfire. When the sheriff confronted the men that night, he said: "The State of Iowa has no authority to allow you to break into a county building. You're going to jail."

Oculus CTO John Carmack announced Wednesday that he is stepping down from the augmented-reality company to focus his time on artificial general intelligence. The Verge reports: Carmack will remain in a "consulting CTO" position at Oculus, where he will "still have a voice" in the development work at the company, he wrote. Recent comments from Carmack suggest he may have soured on VR. Carmack was a champion of phone-based VR for years at Oculus, but in October, he delivered a "eulogy" for Oculus' phone-based Gear VR. And in a video for receiving a lifetime achievement award this week at the VR Awards, he said that "I really haven't been satisfied with the pace of progress that we've been making" in VR.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Once upon a time, back when we all had mainframes and then servers in our offices, we had edge computing. Our compute power was literally down the hall. Then, along came the cloud, and all that changed. Computers were hundreds of miles but milliseconds away. Now, with the rise of IoT, 5G, and our never-satisfied need for speed, edge computing is coming back with a vengeance. Indeed, at his keynote at Open Networking Summit in Belgium, Arpit Joshipura, The Linux Foundation's general manager of networking, said "edge computing will overtake cloud computing" by 2025.

When Joshipura is talking about edge computing, he means compute and storage resources that are five to 20 milliseconds away. He also means edge computing should be an open, interoperable framework. This framework should be independent of hardware, silicon, cloud, or operating system. Open-edge computing should also work with any edge-computing use case: Internet of Things (IoT) edge, a telecom edge, cloud edge, or enterprise edge, whatever, "Our goal here is to unify all of these." This is being done via LF Edge. This Linux Foundation organization seeks to bring all edge computing players under one umbrella with one technology. Its purpose is to create a software stack that unifies a fragmented edge market around a common, open vision for the future of the industry. To make this happen, Joshipura announced two more projects were being incorporated into LF Edge: Baetyl and Fledge.

U.S. officials are seeking to block an undersea cable backed by Google, Facebook, and a Chinese partner, in a national-security review that could rewrite the rules of internet connectivity between the U.S. and China, WSJ reported Wednesday [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], citing people involved in the discussions. From the report: The Justice Department, which leads a multiagency panel that reviews telecommunications matters, has signaled staunch opposition to the project because of concerns over its Chinese investor, Beijing-based Dr. Peng Telecom & Media Group, and the direct link to Hong Kong the cable would provide, the people said. Ships have already draped most of the 8,000-mile Pacific Light Cable Network across the seafloor between the Chinese territory and Los Angeles, promising faster connections for its investors on both sides of the Pacific. The work so far has been conducted under a temporary permit expiring in September. But people familiar with the review say it is in danger of failing to win the necessary license to conduct business because of the objections coming from the panel, known as Team Telecom. Team Telecom has consistently approved past cable projects, including ones directly linking the U.S. to mainland China or involving state-owned Chinese telecom operators, once they were satisfied the company responsible for its U.S. beachhead had taken steps to prevent foreign governments from blocking or tapping traffic.

An anonymous Slashdot reader shares a report about Japan's virtual YouTubers or VTubers that act as live performers, corporate PR officials and even surrogate children. From The Wall Street Journal: Ryosei Takehisa, 24 years old, doesn't have any children -- unless you count an animated character with elfin ears called Mikuriya Kuon. In live appearances on YouTube, the kimono-clad Kuon character, voiced by an actor hired by Mr. Takehisa, dispenses advice about the latest video games and plays rock-paper-scissors with her fans. The creator says he considers Kuon his "real daughter" even though she "resides within pixels." While others may compete for fame or page views, "for me, I'm totally satisfied just with the fact that she was born and is continuing to live life in good health," says Mr. Takehisa. Digital avatars with human traits have long carved out a role on social media, on Instagram in particular. Japan, as it often does, has taken the idea and run with it, with its virtual characters now estimated to number more than 3,000.

Technology allows Kuon and her peers to have more direct engagement with fans -- and sometimes a family-like relationship with their own creators. The characters, known as virtual YouTubers or VTubers because many are active on YouTube, sing and dance at live performances and answer questions on webcasts. VTubers are so embedded in Japanese culture that one of them serves as a face of the Japanese government's tourism campaign. Another presented earnings results for game-site operator Gree Inc. in August last year, informing investors that "we will aggressively invest in strengthening our three earnings pillars." "VTubers are an evolution in Japan's long tradition of manga and anime, giving real-time interactivity to the sort of characters earlier depicted in comic books and on television screens," the report says. "The next step could be artificial intelligence to allow the VTubers to sing, dance and be mischievous without any backstage human help."

Sony is trying to further extend one of their latest pop sensations, a VTuber called Kaguya Luna, by building on its virtual-reality technology. "It has already staged concerts by Luna that fans view through a VR headset," reports The WSJ. "Next the company is looking into haptic technology -- which can convey vibrations and force -- to allow fans to get up close and personal with Luna."

A new report (XLSX) from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas says wind power has surpassed coal for the first time in the state. CNN reports: Wind has generated 22% of the state's electrical needs this year. It just edged out coal, which provided 21% of the Lone Star State's power, according to the Electrical Reliability Council of Texas, which manages electrical flow on about 90% of the Texan grid. Sixteen years ago, in 2003, wind made up just 0.8% of the state's power, and coal satisfied 40% of electrical needs, the council documents show. By 2010, wind accounted for 8% of the state's energy, and it steadily inched forward to 19% last year and now 22% in the first half of 2019. At the same time, coal's portion of the energy mix has declined over the past several years, from 37% in 2013 to 24% last year and just 21% this year. Yet while wind has soared and coal-generated power has cooled, natural gas still accounts for the largest share of the state's energy mix, generating 46% of its power in 2003 and staying strong at 44% last year.

Nuclear power plant manufacturers, such as Westinghouse and Framatome, are developing safer nuclear reactors that use so-called accident-tolerant fuels that are less likely to overheat -- and if they do, will produce very little or no hydrogen. As Scientific American reports, commercial reactors use small pellets of uranium dioxide stacked inside long cylindrical rods made of zirconium alloy, which "allows the neutrons generated from fission in the pellets to readily pass among the many rods submerged in water inside a reactor core, supporting a self-sustaining, heat-producing nuclear reaction." The problem is that if the zirconium overheats, it can react with water and produce hydrogen, which can explode. From the report: In some of the variations, the zirconium cladding is coated to minimize reactions. In others, zirconium and even the uranium dioxide are replaced with different materials. The new configurations could be slipped into existing reactors with little modification, so they could be phased in during the 2020s. Thorough in-core testing, which has begun, would have to prove successful, and regulators would have to be satisfied. In a bonus, the new fuels could help plants run more efficiently, making nuclear power more cost-competitive -- a significant motivation for manufacturers and electric utilities because natural gas, solar and wind energy are less expensive.

Russia is also deploying other safety measures; recent installations at home and abroad by the state-run company Rosatom have newer "passive" safety systems that can squelch overheating even if electrical power at the plant is lost and coolant cannot be actively circulated. Westinghouse and other companies have incorporated passive safety features into their updated designs as well. Manufacturers are also experimenting with "fourth generation" models that use liquid sodium or molten salt instead of water to transfer heat from fission, removing the possibility of dangerous hydrogen production. China reportedly intends to connect a demonstration helium-cooled reactor to its grid this year.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: An independent tribunal sitting in London has concluded that the killing of detainees in China for organ transplants is continuing, and victims include imprisoned followers of the Falun Gong movement. The China Tribunal, chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, who was a prosecutor at the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, said in a unanimous determination at the end of its hearings it was "certain that Falun Gong as a source -- probably the principal source -- of organs for forced organ harvesting."

Among those killed, it has been alleged, are members of religious minorities such as Falun Gong. Persecution of the group began in 1999 after it had attracted tens of millions of followers and came to be seen as a threat to the communist party. There is less evidence about the treatment of Tibetans, Uighur Muslims and some Christian sects. China announced in 2014 that it would stop removing organs for transplantation from executed prisoners and has dismissed the claims as politically-motivated and untrue. "The conclusion shows that very many people have died indescribably hideous deaths for no reason, that more may suffer in similar ways and that all of us live on a planet where extreme wickedness may be found in the power of those, for the time being, running a country with one of the oldest civilizations known to modern man," said Sir Geoffrey Nice QC. He added: "There is no evidence of the practice having been stopped and the tribunal is satisfied that it is continuing."

Boeing's promised software fix for its 737 Max planes involved in two deadly crashes since October has been pushed back several weeks after an internal review by engineers not connected to the aircraft raised additional safety questions. "The results of the 'non-advocate' review have not been revealed, but the Federal Aviation Administration confirmed on April 1 that the software needed additional work," reports Ars Technica. From the report: "The FAA expects to receive Boeing's final package of its software enhancement over the coming weeks for FAA approval," an FAA spokesperson said in a statement. "Time is needed for additional work by Boeing as the result of an ongoing review of the 737 MAX Flight Control System to ensure that Boeing has identified and appropriately addressed all pertinent issues." Just how far back the delivery of the MCAS patch has been pushed is uncertain. The New York Times reports that the update's schedule has been pushed back "several weeks." And after its delivery, an FAA spokesperson said, "the FAA will subject Boeing's completed submission to a rigorous safety review. The FAA will not approve the software for installation until the agency is satisfied with the submission."

This means it could be months before grounded Boeing 737 MAX aircraft are once again deemed airworthy. And that means more flight cancellations for airlines that have the aircraft in their inventory. Southwest Airlines, Boeing's largest 737 MAX customer, canceled all of its flights dependent on its 34 737 MAX aircraft through April 20 so far -- about 150 flights per day. And Boeing's delivery of new 737 MAX aircraft -- the company's best-seller -- has been indefinitely delayed.

Consumer Reports is pulling its recommendation of the Tesla Model 3, citing reliability issues with the car. "Tesla buyers are more likely to be satisfied with their car than customers of any other brand, according to Consumer Reports," reports CNN. "Yet the publication says many customers reported problems with the Model 3, including loose body trim and glass defects." From the report: "Consumers expect their cars to last -- and not be in the repair shop. That's why reliability is so important," said Jake Fisher, senior director of automotive testing at Consumer Reports. Tesla pointed to its overall customer satisfaction rating from Consumer Reports and said it has corrected many of the problems found in the survey. "We take feedback from our customers very seriously and quickly implement improvements any time we hear about issues," said the company statement. It said the survey was conducted from July through September, "so the vast majority of these issues have already been corrected through design and manufacturing improvements, and we are already seeing a significant improvement in our field data." Last May, the product testing website failed to give the Model 3 a recommendation due to issues with braking, but ultimately reversed its decision after Tesla released a firmware update improving the car's breaking distance by nearly 20 feet.

"Motherboard spoke to the Barcelona Supercomputing Center about how it outfitted a deconsecrated 19th century chapel to host the MareNostrum 4 -- the 25th most powerful supercomputer in the world," writes Slashdot reader dmoberhaus. From the report: Heralded as the "most beautiful data center in the world," the MareNostrum supercomputer came online in 2005, but was originally hosted in a different building at the university. Meaning "our sea" in Latin, the original MareNostrum was capable of performing 42.35 teraflops -- 42.35 trillion operations per second -- making it one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe at the time. Yet the MareNostrum rightly became known for its aesthetics as much as its computing power. According to Gemma Maspoch, head of communications for Barcelona Supercomputing Center, which oversees the MareNostrum facility, the decision to place the computer in a giant glass box inside a chapel was ultimately for practical reasons.

"We were in need of hundreds of square meters without columns and the capacity to support 44.5 tons of weight," Maspoch told me in an email. "At the time there was not much available space at the university and the only room that satisfied our requirements was the Torre Girona chapel. We did not doubt it for a moment and we installed a supercomputer in it." According to Maspoch, the chapel required relatively few modifications to host the supercomputer, such as reinforcing the soil around the church so that it would hold the computer's weight and designing a glass box that would house the computer and help cool it. The supercomputer has been beefed up over the years. Most recently, the fourth iteration came online in 2017 "with a peak computing capacity of 11 thousand trillion operations per second (11.15 petaflops)," reports Motherboard. "MareNostrum 4 is spread over 48 server racks comprising a total of 3,456 nodes. A node consists of two Intel chips, each of which has 24 processors."