The GNOME Foundation, a non-profit organization supporting the GNOME desktop environment, has been operating at a deficit for several years, depleting its financial reserves. Robert McQueen, the foundation's president, has announced plans to increase fundraising efforts in a new blog post.

McQueen adds: As you may be aware, the GNOME Foundation has operated at a deficit (nonprofit speak for a loss -- ie spending more than we've been raising each year) for over three years, essentially running the Foundation on reserves from some substantial donations received 4-5 years ago. The Foundation has a reserves policy which specifies a minimum amount of money we have to keep in our accounts. This is so that if there is a significant interruption to our usual income, we can preserve our core operations while we work on new funding sources. We've now "hit the buffers" of this reserves policy, meaning the Board can't approve any more deficit budgets -- to keep spending at the same level we must increase our income.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: TSMC announced its leading-edge 1.6nm-class process technology today, a new A16 manufacturing process that will be the company's first Angstrom-class production node and promises to outperform its predecessor, N2P, by a significant margin. The technology's most important innovation will be its backside power delivery network (BSPDN). Just like TSMC's 2nm-class nodes (N2, N2P, and N2X), the company's 1.6nm-class fabrication process will rely on gate-all-around (GAA) nanosheet transistors, but unlike the current and next-generation nodes, this one uses backside power delivery dubbed Super Power Rail. Transistor and BSPDN innovations enable tangible performance and efficiency improvements compared to TSMC's N2P: the new node promises an up to 10% higher clock rate at the same voltage and a 15%-20% lower power consumption at the same frequency and complexity. In addition, the new technology could enable 7%-10% higher transistor density, depending on the actual design.

The most important innovation of TSMC's A16 process, which was unveiled at the company's North American Technology Symposium 2024, is the introduction of the Super Power Rail (SPR), a sophisticated backside power delivery network (BSPDN). This technology is tailored specifically for AI and HPC processors that tend to have both complex signal wiring and dense power delivery networks. Backside power delivery will be implemented into many upcoming process technologies as it allows for an increase in transistor density and improved power delivery, which affects performance. Meanwhile, there are several ways to implement a BSPDN. TSMC's Super Power Rail plugs the backside power delivery network to each transistor's source and drain using a special contact that also reduces resistance to get the maximum performance and power efficiency possible. From a production perspective, this is one of the most complex BSPDN implementations and is more complex than Intel's Power Via. Volume production of A16 is slated for the second half of 2026. "Therefore, actual A16-made products will likely debut in 2027," notes the report. "This timeline positions A16 to potentially compete with Intel's 14A node, which will be Intel's most advanced node at the time."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: The fertility rate in the United States has been trending down for decades, and a new report shows that another drop in births in 2023 brought the rate down to the lowest it's been in more than century. There were about 3.6 million babies born in 2023, or 54.4 live births for every 1,000 females ages 15 to 44, according to provisional data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics. After a steep plunge in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, the fertility rate has fluctuated. But the 3% drop between 2022 and 2023 brought the rate just below the previous low from 2020, which was 56 births for every 1,000 women of reproductive age.

The birth rate fell among most age groups between 2022 and 2023, the new report shows. The teen birth rate reached another record low of 13.2 births per 1,000 females ages 15 to 19, which is 79% lower than it was at the most recent peak from 1991. However, the rate of decline was slower than it's been for the past decade and a half. Meanwhile, births continued to shift to older mothers. Older age groups saw smaller decreases in birth rates, and the birth rate was highest among women ages 30 to 34 -- with about 95 births for every 1,000 women in this group in 2023. Women 40 and older were the only group to see an increase in birth rate, although -- at less than 13 births for every 1,000 women -- it remained lower than any other age group.

Abstract of a paper on National Bureau of Economic Research: Physicians commonly receive marketing-related transfers from drug firms. We examine the impact of these relationships on the prescribing of physician-administered cancer drugs in Medicare. We find that prescribing of the associated drug increases 4\% in the twelve months after a payment is received, with the increase beginning sharply in the month of payment and fading out within a year. A marketing payment also leads physicians to begin treating cancer patients with lower expected mortality. While payments result in greater expenditure on cancer drugs, there are no associated improvements in patient mortality.

Researchers in Canada got most of what they were hoping for in the country's 2024 federal budget, with a big boost in postgraduate pay and more funding for research and scientific infrastructure. From a report: "We are investing over $5 billion in Canadian brainpower," said finance minister Chrystia Freeland in her budget speech on 16 April. "More funding for research and scholarships will help Canada attract the next generation of game-changing thinkers."

Postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers have been advocating for higher pay for the past two years through a campaign called Support Our Science. They requested an increase in the value, and number, of federal government scholarships, and got more than they asked for. Stipends for master's students will rise from Can$17,500 (US$12,700) to $27,000 per year, PhDs stipends that ranged from $20,000 to $35,000 will be set to a uniform annual $40,000 and most postdoctoral-fellowship salaries will increase from $45,000 to $70,000 per annum. The number of scholarships and fellowships provided will also rise over time, building to around 1,720 more per year after five years.

"We're very thrilled with this significant new investment, the largest investment in graduate students and postdocs in over 21 years," says Kaitlin Kharas, a PhD student at the University of Toronto, Canada, and executive director of Support Our Science. "It will directly support the next generation of researchers." Although only a small proportion of students and postdoctoral fellows receive these federal scholarships, other funders tend to use them as a guide for their own stipends. Many postgraduates said that low pay was forcing them to consider leaving Canada to pursue their scientific career, says Kharas, so this funding should help to retain talent in the country.

U.S. lawmakers have moved closer to enacting a countrywide ban on TikTok. From a report: Last month, the House of Representatives passed a bill by a wide margin that would ban distribution of TikTok in U.S. unless TikTok's Chinese parent, ByteDance, sells its ownership in the app within 165 days of the law's enactment. On Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson issued a new proposal that would extend the sale requirement deadline to nine months, with a potential for a 90-day extension -- addressing a key concern of Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), chair of the Senate's Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, that the divestiture timeline was too short.

The revised TikTok ban proposal is tied to a broader bill providing emergency aid for Ukraine and Israel; the House is expected to vote on the measure Saturday, and if it passes would move to the Senate. President Biden has said he will sign the TikTok divest-or-ban legislation into law. On Wednesday evening, Cantwell said she supported the revised TikTok ban bill. "I'm very happy that Speaker Johnson and House leaders incorporated my recommendation to extend the ByteDance divestment period from six months to a year," she said in a statement. "As I've said, extending the divestment period is necessary to ensure there is enough time for a new buyer to get a deal done. I support this updated legislation."

An anonymous reader shares a report: A storm hit the United Arab Emirates and Oman this week bringing record rainfall that flooded highways, inundated houses, grid-locked traffic and trapped people in their homes. [...] In the UAE, a record 254 millimetres (10 inches) of rainfall was recorded in Al Ain, a city bordering Oman. It was the largest ever in a 24-hour period since records started in 1949. Rainfall is rare in the UAE and elsewhere on the Arabian Peninsula, that is typically known for its dry desert climate. Summer air temperatures can soar above 50 degrees Celsius. But the UAE and Oman also lack drainage systems to cope with heavy rains and submerged roads are not uncommon during rainfall.

Following Tuesday's events, questions were raised whether cloud seeding, a process that the UAE frequently conducts, could have caused the heavy rains. Cloud seeding is a process in which chemicals are implanted into clouds to increase rainfall in an environment where water scarcity is a concern. The UAE, located in one of the hottest and driest regions on earth, has been leading the effort to seed clouds and increase precipitation. But the UAE's meteorology agency told Reuters there were no such operations before the storm. The huge rainfall was instead likely due to a normal weather system that was exacerbated by climate change, experts say. A low pressure system in the upper atmosphere, coupled with low pressure at the surface had acted like a pressure 'squeeze' on the air, according to Esraa Alnaqbi, a senior forecaster at the UAE government's National Centre of Meteorology. That squeeze, intensified by the contrast between warmer temperatures at ground level and colder temperatures higher up, created the conditions for the powerful thunderstorm, she said.

Cloudflare, in a blog post: Key insights from the first quarter of 2024 include:
1. 2024 started with a bang. Cloudflare's defense systems automatically mitigated 4.5 million DDoS attacks during the first quarter -- representing a 50% year-over-year (YoY) increase.
2. DNS-based DDoS attacks increased by 80% YoY and remain the most prominent attack vector.
3. DDoS attacks on Sweden surged by 466% after its acceptance to the NATO alliance, mirroring the pattern observed during Finland's NATO accession in 2023.

We've just wrapped up the first quarter of 2024, and, already, our automated defenses have mitigated 4.5 million DDoS attacks -- an amount equivalent to 32% of all the DDoS attacks we mitigated in 2023. Breaking it down to attack types, HTTP DDoS attacks increased by 93% YoY and 51% quarter-over-quarter (QoQ). Network-layer DDoS attacks, also known as L3/4 DDoS attacks, increased by 28% YoY and 5% QoQ. When comparing the combined number of HTTP DDoS attacks and L3/4 DDoS attacks, we can see that, overall, in the first quarter of 2024, the count increased by 50% YoY and 18% QoQ. In total, our systems mitigated 10.5 trillion HTTP DDoS attack requests in Q1. Our systems also mitigated over 59 petabytes of DDoS attack traffic -- just on the network-layer.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Dropout's Dungeons & Dragons actual play show, Dimension 20, is getting pretty close to selling out a 19,000-seat venue just hours after ticket sales opened to the general public. To the uninitiated, it may seem absurd to go to a massive sports arena and watch people play D&D. As one Redditor commented, "This boggles my mind. When I was playing D&D in the early eighties, I would have never believed that there was a future where people would watch live D&D at Madison Square Garden. It's incomprehensible to me." It is indeed bizarre, albeit fun. But in this monumental moment for the actual play genre, the triumph is eclipsed by the biggest frustration that links sports, music and now D&D fans: Ticketmaster. As Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan said amid the Taylor Swift-Ticketmaster scandal, the company's failures "ended up converting more Gen Zers into anti-monopolists overnight than anything [she] could have done."

In the case of Taylor Swift's Eras tour, fans were upset because demand was so high that Ticketmaster's system couldn't handle the traffic. For Dimension 20, the culprit is Ticketmaster's dynamic pricing. As more people try to buy tickets, the price of the tickets increase. About an hour after the Madison Square Garden tickets went on sale, the few dozen upper bowl tickets left were $800. Three hours after, these tickets are around $330, which is still very inflated. "Went onto the presale, tickets were $500+ for the worst ones, we assumed they were scalpers and that the actual sale today would have normal priced tickets $2000 for the lower bowl!? I know it's not dropout setting the price but wow is that a LOT of cash," a Redditor posted. And as a commenter astutely pointed out, thanks to dynamic pricing, Ticketmaster itself is actually the scalper. Of course, Dimension 20 fans are frustrated, especially since the show's content is overtly anti-capitalist. Despite the pricing debacle, the demand for the show is a great sign for both actual play shows and the creator economy at large.

China is rapidly advancing its space capabilities to challenge the United States' dominance in space, as evidenced by its significant increase in on-orbit intelligence and reconnaissance satellites and the development of sophisticated counterspace weapons. Space.com reports: "Frankly, China is moving at a breathtaking speed. Since 2018, China has more than tripled their on-orbit intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance satellites," Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of U.S. Space Command, said here on Tuesday, during a talk at the 39th Space Symposium. "And with these systems, they've built a kill web over the Pacific Ocean to find, fix, track and, yes, target United States and allied military capabilities," he added. And that's not all. China has also "built a range of counterspace weapons, from reversible jamming all the way up to kinetic hit-to-kill direct-ascent and co-orbital ASATs," Whiting said.

Indeed, China demonstrated direct-ascent ASAT, or anti-satellite, weapon technology back in January 2007, when it destroyed one of its defunct weather satellites with a missile. That test was widely decried as irresponsible, for it generated thousands of pieces of debris, many of which are still cluttering up Earth orbit. Such activities show that China is now treating space as a war-fighting domain, Whiting said. And so, he added, is Russia, which has also conducted ASAT tests recently, including a destructive one in November 2021. Russia has also been aggressively building out its orbital architecture; since 2018, the nation has more than doubled its total number of active satellites, according to Whiting. The U.S. government has taken notice of these trends.

"We are at a pivotal moment in history," Troy Meink, principal deputy director of the National Reconnaissance Office, which builds and operates the United States' fleet of spy satellites, said during a different talk on Tuesday here at the symposium. "For the first time in decades, U.S. leadership in space and space technology is being challenged," Meink added. "Our competitors are actively seeking ways to threaten our capabilities, and we see this every day." The U.S. must act if it wishes to beat back this challenge, Meink and Whiting stressed; it cannot rely on the inertia of past success to do the job. For example, Meink highlighted the need to innovate with the nation's reconnaissance satellites, to make them more numerous, more agile and more resilient. U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Heidi Shyu also emphasized the importance of increasing resilience, a goal that she said could be achieved by diversifying the nation's space capabilities. "We must assess ways to incorporate radiation-hardened electronics, novel orbits, varied communication pathways, advancements in propulsion technologies and increased cooperation with our allies," Shyu said in another talk on Tuesday at the symposium.

The Motion Picture Association is going off on piracy again. During CinemaCon in Las Vegas, MPA CEO Charles Rivkin announced that the organization plans on working with Congress to pass rules blocking websites with pirated content. The Verge: The MPA is a trade association representing Hollywood studios, including Paramount, Sony, Universal, and Disney (it's also behind the ratings board that gives you an R if you say curse words too often). It has long lobbied for anti-piracy laws, but it seems the battle is heating up again. In his speech on Tuesday, Rivkin highlights what a major problem piracy in the US has become, saying it costs "hundreds of thousands of jobs" and "more than one billion in theatrical ticket sales."

It's true: piracy has gone up in recent years. A report from piracy data analytics company Muso revealed that video piracy websites around the globe received 141 billion visits in 2023, making for a 12 percent increase when compared to 2019. The US and India made up most of these visits. But at the same time, the price to subscribe to a streaming service is higher than ever, and so is the cost of a movie ticket. The solution to stopping piracy, at least in Rivkin's eyes, is to prevent users from accessing piracy websites altogether.

An anonymous reader writes: More books were called to be banned in 2023 across US schools and libraries than any other year on record, according to a new report from the American Library Association (ALA). Building on a surge that started in 2021, some 4,240 unique book titles were challenged last year -- a 65% increase from 2022, and the highest figure documented in over 20 years of tracking.

Although the number of affected titles has grown dramatically, as groups increasingly target multiple books at once, overall censorship demands dropped slightly, down 2% to 1,247. Literature concerning race and gender was particularly contested, with autobiographical graphic novel Gender Queer named the most challenged library book of the year.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Owners of Intel's latest 13th and 14th Gen Core i9 desktop processors have been noticing an increase in game crashes in recent months. It's happening in games like The Finals, Fortnite, and Tekken 8, and has even led Epic Games to issue a support notice to encourage Intel Core i9 13900K and 14900K owners to adjust BIOS settings. Now, Intel says it's investigating the reports. "Intel is aware of problems that occur when executing certain tasks on 13th and 14th generation core processors for desktop PCs, and is analyzing them with major affiliates," says an Intel spokesperson in a statement to ZDNet Korea.

The crashes vary in severity depending on the game, with some titles producing an "out of memory" error, others simply exiting out to the desktop, and some locking up a machine entirely. Most of the games affected seem to be based on the Unreal Engine, which could point to a stability issue that Intel needs to address. The only workarounds that seem to improve stability involve manually downclocking or undervolting Intel's processors. Epic Games has suggested changing the SVID behavior to Intel Fail Safe in the BIOS settings of Asus, Gigabyte, or MSI motherboards. Custom PC builders Power GPU recommend reducing the performance core ratio limit, which seems to help with stability in certain games.

The Federal Communications Commission chair decided not to impose Universal Service fees on Internet service, rejecting arguments for new assessments to shore up an FCC fund that subsidizes broadband network expansions and provides discounts to low-income consumers. From a report: The $8 billion-a-year Universal Service Fund (USF) pays for FCC programs such as Lifeline discounts and Rural Digital Opportunity Fund deployment grants for ISPs. Phone companies must pay a percentage of their revenue into the fund, and telcos generally pass those fees on to consumers with a "Universal Service" line item on telephone bills.

Imposing similar assessments on broadband could increase the Universal Service Fund's size and/or reduce the charges on phone service, spreading the burden more evenly across different types of telecommunications services. Some consumer advocates want the FCC to increase the fund in order to replace the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), a different government program that gives $30 monthly broadband discounts to people with low incomes but is about to run out of money because of inaction by Congress. The Universal Service funding question is coming up now because, on April 25, the FCC is scheduled to vote on reclassifying broadband as a telecommunications service in order to re-impose the net neutrality rules scrapped during the Trump era. Imposing Universal Service charges on broadband would likely result in ISPs adding those costs to monthly bills and would make the net neutrality proceeding even more of a political minefield than it already is. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel's net neutrality proposal takes the same stance against requiring Universal Service contributions that the FCC took in 2015 when it first imposed the net neutrality rules.

It's the world's most widely used vulnerability database, reports SC Magazine, offering standards-based data on CVSS severity scores, impacted software and platforms, contributing weaknesses, and links to patches and additional resources.

But "there is a growing backlog of vulnerabilities" submitted to America's National Vulnerability Database and "requiring analysis", according to a new announcement from the U.S. Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards. "This is based on a variety of factors, including an increase in software and, therefore, vulnerabilities, as well as a change in interagency support." From SC Magazine: According to NIST's website, the institute analyzed only 199 of 3370 CVEs it received last month. [And this month another 677 came in — of which 24 have been analyzed.]

Other than a short notice advising it was working to establish a new consortium to improve the NVD, NIST had not provided a public explanation for the problems prior to a statement published [April 2]... "Currently, we are prioritizing analysis of the most significant vulnerabilities. In addition, we are working with our agency partners to bring on more support for analyzing vulnerabilities and have reassigned additional NIST staff to this task as well."

NIST, which had its budget cut by almost 12% this year by lawmakers, said it was committed to continuing to support and manage the NVD, which it described as "a key piece of the nation's cybersecurity infrastructure... We are also looking into longer-term solutions to this challenge, including the establishment of a consortium of industry, government and other stakeholder organizations that can collaborate on research to improve the NVD," the statement said. "We will provide more information as these plans develop..."

A group of cybersecurity professionals have signed an open letter to Congress and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo in which they say the enrichment issue is the result of a recent 20% cut in NVD funding.
The article also cites remarks from NVD program manager Tanya Brewer (reported by Infosecurity Magazine) from last week's VulnCon conference on plans to establish a NVD consortium. "We're not going to shut down the NVD; we're in the process of fixing the current problem. And then, we're going to make the NVD robust again and we'll make it grow."

Thanks to Slashdot reader spatwei for sharing the article.

This week America's Department of Energy announced "a comprehensive plan to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from buildings by 65% by 2035 and 90% by 2050." The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) led the Blueprint's development in collaboration with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Environmental Protection Agency, and other federal agencies. The Blueprint is the first sector-wide strategy for building decarbonization developed by the federal government... "America's building sector accounts for more than a third of the harmful emissions jeopardizing our air and health..." said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. "As part of a whole-of-government approach, the Department of Energy is outlining for the first time ever a comprehensive federal plan to reduce energy in our homes, schools, and workplaces — lowering utility bills and creating healthier communities while combating the climate crisis."

Buildings account for more than one third of domestic climate pollution and $370 billion in annual energy costs... The Blueprint projects reductions of 90% of total greenhouse gas emissions from the buildings sector, which will save consumers more than $100 billion in annual energy costs and avoid $17 billion in annual health costs.
Just for example, the Department of Energy's Affordable Home Energy Shot program "aims to reduce the upfront cost of upgrading a home by at least 50% and reduce energy bills by 20% within a decade." (Meanwhile, the federal government's role in making more change happen faster includes financing, funding R&D on lower-cost technologies, expanding markets, and "supporting the development and implementation of emissions-reducing building codes and appliance standards.")

Besides the national blueprint, the Department also announced an expansion of its Better Buildings Commercial Building Heat Pump Accelerator initiative. In this program, "manufacturers will produce higher efficiency and life cycle cost-effective heat pump rooftop units and commercial organizations will evaluate and adopt next-generation heat pump technology."

U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm said the program "builds on more than a decade of public-private partnerships to get cutting edge clean technologies from lab to market, helping to slash harmful carbon emissions throughout our economy." On average, between 20% and 30% of the nation's energy is wasted, presenting a significant opportunity to increase energy efficiency. Through the Better Buildings Initiative, DOE partners with public and private sector stakeholders to pursue ambitious portfolio-wide energy, waste, water, and/or emissions reduction goals and publicly share solutions. By improving building design, materials, equipment, and operations, energy efficiency gains can be achieved across broad segments of the nation's economy.

The Accelerator initiative was developed with commercial end users like Amazon, IKEA, and Target, and already includes manufacturers AAON, Carrier Global Corp., Lennox International, Rheem Manufacturing Co., Trane Technologies, and York International Corp. The Accelerator aims to bring more efficient, affordable next-generation heat pump rooftop units to market as soon as 2027 — which will slash both emissions and energy costs in half compared to natural gas-fueled heat pumps. If deployed at scale, they could save American businesses and commercial entities $5 billion on utility bills every year.

According to the latest data from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, carbon dioxide and methane levels in the atmosphere reached historic highs last year, growing at near-record fast paces. The Associated Press reports: Carbon dioxide, the most important and abundant of the greenhouse gases caused by humans, rose in 2023 by the third highest amount in 65 years of record keeping, NOAA announced Friday. Scientists are also worried about the rapid rise in atmospheric levels of methane, a shorter-lived but more potent heat-trapping gas. Both jumped 5.5% over the past decade. The 2.8 parts per million increase in carbon dioxide airborne levels from January 2023 to December, wasn't as high as the jumps were in 2014 and 2015, but they were larger than every other year since 1959, when precise records started. Carbon dioxide's average level for 2023 was 419.3 parts per million, up 50% from pre-industrial times.

Last year's methane's jump of 11.1 parts per billion was lower than record annual rises from 2020 to 2022. It averaged 1922.6 parts per billion last year. It has risen 3% in just the past five years and jumped 160% from pre-industrial levels showing faster rates of increase than carbon dioxide, said Xin "Lindsay" Lan, the University of Colorado and NOAA atmospheric scientist who did the calculations. [...] The third biggest human-caused greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide, jumped 1 part per billion last year to record levels, but the increases were not as high as those in 2020 and 2021. Nitrous oxide, which lasts about a century in the atmosphere, comes from agriculture, burning of fuels, manure and industrial processes, according to the EPA.
"Studies of the specific isotopes of methane in the air show much of the increased methane is from microbes, pointing to spiking emissions from wetlands and perhaps agriculture and landfills, but not as much the energy industry, Lan said."

Isaac Schultz reports via Gizmodo: Nine years and 3.2 billion pixels later, it is complete: the LSST Camera stands as the largest digital camera ever built for astronomy and will serve as the centerpiece of the Vera Rubin Observatory, poised to begin its exploration of the southern skies. The Rubin Observatory's key goal is the 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), a sweeping, near-constant observation of space. This endeavor will yield 60 petabytes of data on the composition of the universe, the nature and distribution of dark matter, dark energy and the expansion of the universe, the formation of our galaxy, our intimate little solar system, and more. The camera will use its 5.1-foot-wide optical lens to take a 15-second exposure of the sky every 20 seconds, automatically changing filters to view light in every wavelength from near-ultraviolet to the near-infrared. Its constant monitoring of the skies will eventually amount to a timelapse of the heavens; it will highlight fleeting events for other scientists to train their telescopes on, and monitor changes in the southern sky.

To do this, the team needed a Rolls Royce of a digital camera. Mind you, the camera actually cost many million times that of an actual Royce Royce, and at 6,200 pounds (2,812 kilograms), it weighs a lot more than a fancy car. Each of the 21 rafts that makes up the camera's focal plane is the price of a Maserati, and are worth every penny if they collect the sort of data scientists expect them to. "I'm personally most excited to study the expansion of the Universe using gravitational lenses to better understand Dark Energy," said Aaron Roodman, a physicist at SLAC and lead on the camera program, in an email to Gizmodo. "That means two things: 1) measuring the brightness in all six of our filters of literally billions of galaxies and very carefully measuring their shape, which has been subtly altered by the bending of light by matter, and 2) discovering and studying very special objects where a distant quasar is almost perfectly lined up with a more nearby galaxy."

Speaking through a SLAC release, Rodman said the camera's images could "resolve a golf ball from around 15 miles away, while covering a swath of the sky seven times wider than the full moon." The first images from the Rubin Observatory are slated to be publicly released in March 2025, which feels like a long way away. But several important agenda items still need to happen. For one, the SLAC team has to ship the LSST camera safely to Chile from its current lodgings in northern California. (Don't worry -- they've made a test run of the journey.) Then, the observatory's mirrors need to be readied for testing and the observatory's dome has to be completed, among some other tasks. But whenever all that is complete, the legacy survey will launch into a decade's worth of scientific discovery. Rubin Observatory estimates suggest that LSST could "increase the number of known objects by a factor of 10," according to a SLAC release.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google offers a VPN via its "Google One" monthly subscription plan, and while it debuted on phones, a desktop app has been available for Windows and Mac OS for over a year now. Since a lot of people pay for Google One for the cloud storage increase for their Google accounts, you might be tempted to try the VPN on a desktop, but Windows users testing out the app haven't seemed too happy lately. An open bug report on Google's GitHub for the project says the Windows app "breaks" the Windows DNS, and this has been ongoing since at least November.

A VPN would naturally route all your traffic through a secure tunnel, but you've still got to do DNS lookups somewhere. A lot of VPN services also come with a DNS service, and Google is no different. The problem is that Google's VPN app changes the Windows DNS settings of all network adapters to always use Google's DNS, whether the VPN is on or off. Even if you change them, Google's program will change them back. Most VPN apps don't work this way, and even Google's Mac VPN program doesn't work this way. The users in the thread (and the ones emailing us) expect the app, at minimum, to use the original Windows settings when the VPN is off. Since running a VPN is often about privacy and security, users want to be able to change the DNS away from Google even when the VPN is running.

"Subscribers of both Disney+ and Hulu can now access Hulu content through the Disney+ app," reports the Los Angeles Times, "as the Burbank media and entertainment giant launched its one-app integration of the two streaming services Wednesday..." The move is part of Disney's plan to increase viewer engagement and reduce churn on Disney+, which has 111.3 million subscribers globally. Disney has lost billions on its direct-to-consumer business as it tries to compete with Netflix, but the company has told investors that its streaming segment will begin to turn a profit by the end of fiscal 2024. Streaming losses have been a key component of a nasty activist shareholder campaign ahead of next week's annual meeting.

Disney+ has typically served up family-friendly content and major brands such as Pixar, Star Wars and Marvel, whereas Hulu's offering has been the streaming home of more adult-oriented programming. Disney executives described the combined app experience as the most extensive technical advancement to the Disney+ streaming platform since it launched in November 2019... The price of the bundle plan starts at $9.99 with ads... Upgrading to the bundle of Hulu on Disney+ will start at $2 more per month, Disney said.