Roughly three weeks ahead of the scheduled release of Ubuntu Linux 18.10 "Cosmic Cuttlefish", the latest major update for the popular Linux distro, beta of all of its flavors -- desktop, cloud and server -- is now available for download. From a report: Codenamed 'Cosmic Cuttlefish,' 18.10 continues Ubuntu's proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. The team has been hard at work through this cycle, introducing new features and fixing bugs," says Adam Conrad, Software Engineer, Canonical. Conrad further says, "This beta release includes images from not only the Ubuntu Desktop, Server, and Cloud products, but also the Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, UbuntuKylin, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Studio, and Xubuntu flavours. The beta images are known to be reasonably free of showstopper CD build or installer bugs, while representing a very recent snapshot of 18.10 that should be representative of the features intended to ship with the final release expected on October 18th, 2018." Further reading: Canonical Shares Desktop Plans For Ubuntu 18.10.

Michael Larabel, writing for Phoronix: Apple announced the Magic Trackpad 2 almost three years ago to the day while the mainline Linux kernel will finally be supporting this multi-touch device soon. The Magic Trackpad 2 is a wired/wireless touchpad with haptic feedback support and is a much larger touchpad compared to the original Magic Trackpad. There unfortunately hasn't been any mainline Linux kernel support for the Magic Trackpad 2, but some out-of-tree options. [...] However, as seen by this bug report there have been plenty of people since 2015 interested in using the Magic Trackpad 2 on Linux. Fortunately, Sean O'Brien of Google's Chrome OS team has been working on Magic Trackpad 2 support with a focus on getting it mainlined. The patch, which was also reviewed by other Google/ChromeOS developers, is now up to its third and perhaps final revision.

MX Player, a video app which has been downloaded more than 500 million times across the globe, kickstarted its OTT (online video streaming) service in India, one of its largest markets, this week. MX Player, which is popular worldwide, has earned a loyal user base over the years for being the app that can run any video file you throw at it, even if your smartphone, tablet, or Android TV box doesn't have high-end specs or updated software. It was acquired by Times Internet, an India-based conglomerate this June, and now the big giant is beginning to show what it intends to do with the app. From a report: [...] All of these titles, including those produced by Times Internet, are now available to MX Player users in India at no charge, Karan Bedi, CEO of MX Player, told VentureBeat in an interview. Like most of Times Internet's properties, which include several TV channels and newspapers, MX Player will count on ads to generate revenue. Betting on ad-driven business model, a popular path in developing markets, could help MX Player quickly convince its existing user base to give the streaming offerings a try as it begins to compete in the Indian market. Star India's ad-supported service Hotstar, which offers about 80 percent of its catalog to customers for free, currently leads the video streaming market in the country.

Going forward, Bedi said, the company remains committed to making investments in what made MX Player so popular among customers: The ability to play a plethora of video files on low-end devices. The company won't be bringing its new streaming offerings to the paid version of the MX Player app, MX Pro, he said. Additionally, MX Player's streaming offerings are limited to India, one of its largest markets, for now, although Bedi said the company is working on the right content catalog for other regions. Over at Android sub-reddit, where this story has been discussed, dozens of users expressed their concerns on the direction MX Player appears to be headed.

Brian Fagioli, writing for BetaNews: When you buy a System76 computer today, you aren't buying a machine manufactured by the company. Instead, the company works with other makers to obtain laptops, which it then loads with a Linux-based operating system -- Ubuntu or its own Pop!_OS. There's nothing really wrong with this practice, but still, System76 wants to do better. The company is currently working to manufacture its own computers ("handcrafted") right here in the USA. By doing this, System76 controls the entire customer experience -- software, service, and hardware.

This week, the company announces that the fruits of its labor -- an "open-source computer" -- will be available to pre-order in October. Now, keep in mind, this does not mean the desktop will be available next month. Hell, it may not even be sold in 2018. With that said, pre-ordering will essentially allow you to reserve your spot. To celebrate the upcoming computer, System76 is launching a clever animated video marketing campaign.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2014, in a bid to replace the more than 11,000 aging payphones scattered across New York City's pedestrian walkways with more functional fixtures, Mayor Bill de Blasio launched a competition -- the Reinvent Payphones initiative -- calling on private enterprises, residents, and nonprofits to submit designs for replacements. In the end, LinkNYC -- a plan proposed by consortium CityBridge -- secured a contract from the city, beating out competing proposals with electricity-generating piezoelectric pressure plates and EV charging stations. The plan was to spend $200 million installing as many as 10,000 kiosks, or Links, that would supply free, encrypted gigabit Wi-Fi to passers-by within 150 feet. They would have buttons that link directly to 911 and New York's 311 service and free USB charging stations for smartphones, plus wired handsets that would allow free calls to all 50 states and Washington, D.C. And perhaps best of all, they wouldn't cost the city a dime; advertising would subsidize expansion and ongoing maintenance.

The Links wouldn't just get urbanites online and let them juice their phones, though. The idea was to engage users, too, principally with twin 55-inch high-definition displays and tethered Android tablets with map functions. Mike Gamaroff, head of innovation at Kinetic, characterized the Links in 2016 as "first and foremost a utility for the people of the city, that also doubles up as an advertising network." Two years after the deployment of prototypical kiosks in Manhattan, Intersection -- a part of the aforementioned CityBridge, which with Qualcomm and CIVIQ Smartscapes manages the kiosks -- is ready to declare them a success. The roughly 1,600 Links recently hit three milestones: 1 billion sessions, 5 million users, and 500,000 phone calls a month. Recommended reading: Free Municipal Wi-Fi May Be the Next Front In the War Against Privacy.

Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web, thinks it's broken and he has a plan to fix it. The British computer scientist has announced a new project that he hopes will radically change his creation by giving people full control over their data. Tim Berners-Lee: This is why I have, over recent years, been working with a few people at MIT and elsewhere to develop Solid, an open-source project to restore the power and agency of individuals on the web. Solid changes the current model where users have to hand over personal data to digital giants in exchange for perceived value. As we've all discovered, this hasn't been in our best interests. Solid is how we evolve the web in order to restore balance -- by giving every one of us complete control over data, personal or not, in a revolutionary way. Solid is a platform, built using the existing web. It gives every user a choice about where data is stored, which specific people and groups can access select elements, and which apps you use. It allows you, your family and colleagues, to link and share data with anyone. It allows people to look at the same data with different apps at the same time. Solid unleashes incredible opportunities for creativity, problem-solving and commerce. It will empower individuals, developers and businesses with entirely new ways to conceive, build and find innovative, trusted and beneficial applications and services. I see multiple market possibilities, including Solid apps and Solid data storage.

Solid is guided by the principle of "personal empowerment through data" which we believe is fundamental to the success of the next era of the web. We believe data should empower each of us. Imagine if all your current apps talked to each other, collaborating and conceiving ways to enrich and streamline your personal life and business objectives? That's the kind of innovation, intelligence and creativity Solid apps will generate. With Solid, you will have far more personal agency over data -- you decide which apps can access it. In an interview with Fast Company, he shared more on Solid and its creation: "I have been imagining this for a very long time," says Berners-Lee. He opens up his laptop and starts tapping at his keyboard. Watching the inventor of the web work at his computer feels like what it might have been like to watch Beethoven compose a symphony: It's riveting but hard to fully grasp. "We are in the Solid world now," he says, his eyes lit up with excitement. He pushes the laptop toward me so I too can see. On his screen, there is a simple-looking web page with tabs across the top: Tim's to-do list, his calendar, chats, address book. He built this app -- one of the first on Solid -- for his personal use. It is simple, spare. In fact, it's so plain that, at first glance, it's hard to see its significance. But to Berners-Lee, this is where the revolution begins. The app, using Solid's decentralized technology, allows Berners-Lee to access all of his data seamlessly -- his calendar, his music library, videos, chat, research. It's like a mashup of Google Drive, Microsoft Outlook, Slack, Spotify, and WhatsApp. The difference here is that, on Solid, all the information is under his control. Every bit of data he creates or adds on Solid exists within a Solid pod -- which is an acronym for personal online data store. These pods are what give Solid users control over their applications and information on the web. Anyone using the platform will get a Solid identity and Solid pod. This is how people, Berners-Lee says, will take back the power of the web from corporations.

Starting this week, developers around the world will be able to start building their own decentralized apps with tools through the Inrupt site. Berners-Lee will spend this fall crisscrossing the globe, giving tutorials and presentations to developers about Solid and Inrupt. "What's great about having a startup versus a research group is things get done," he says. These days, instead of heading into his lab at MIT, Berners-Lee comes to the Inrupt offices, which are currently based out of Janeiro Digital, a company he has contracted to help work on Inrupt. For now, the company consists of Berners-Lee; his partner John Bruce, who built Resilient, a security platform bought by IBM; a handful of on-staff developers contracted to work on the project; and a community of volunteer coders. Later this fall, Berners-Lee plans to start looking for more venture funding and grow his team. The aim, for now, is not to make billions of dollars. The man who gave the web away for free has never been motivated by money. Still, his plans could impact billion-dollar business models that profit off of control over data. It's not likely that the big powers of the web will give up control without a fight.

Long-time Slashdot reader davidwr and a reader both submitted this story about "a paint-like coating that facilitates what is known as 'passive daytime radiative cooling,' or PDRC for short...when a surface can efficiently radiate heat and reflect sunlight to a degree that it cools itself even if it's sitting in direct sunlight." BGR reports on research from the Columbia School of Engineering: Their newly-invented coating has "nano-to-microscale air voids that acts as a spontaneous air cooler," which is a very technical and fancy way of saying that the coating is great at keeping itself cool all on its own. "The air voids in the porous polymer scatter and reflect sunlight, due to the difference in the refractive index between the air voids and the surrounding polymer," Columbia writes in a post. "The polymer turns white and thus avoids solar heating, while its intrinsic emittance causes it to efficiently lose heat to the sky."

It sounds great, but the best news is that it can be applied to just about anything, from cars to spaceships and even entire buildings. The team believes their invention would be an invaluable resource for developing countries in sweltering climates where air conditioning is impractical or unavailable.

Mads Torgersen, the lead designer of C# at Microsoft, remembers "Project Roslyn," which built an open-source, cross-platform compiler for C# and Visual Basic.NET "in the deepest darkness of last decade's corporate Microsoft: We would build a language engine! A unified, public API to C# code: We would redefine the meaning of "compiler". Of course, once you are building an API for the broad C# community, it is kind of a slam-dunk that it should be a .NET API, implemented in C#. So, the old dream of "bootstrapping" C# in C# was fulfilled almost as an accidental side benefit. Roslyn was thus born out of an openness mindset: sharing the inner workings of the C# language for the world to programmatically consume.

This in and of itself was a bit of a bold proposition in what was still a pervasively closed culture at Microsoft: We would share this intellectual property for free? We would empower tool builders that weren't us to better compete with us? The arguments that won the day for us here were about strengthening the ecosystem and becoming the best tooled language on the planet. They were about long-term growth of C# and .NET, versus short term monetization and protection of assets for Microsoft. So even without having mentioned open source, signing up for the cost and risk of the Roslyn project was a big and bold step for Microsoft....

F# released already in 2010 with an open source license and its own foundation -- the F# Software Foundation. The vibrant community that grew up around it soon became the envy of us all. Our team pushed strongly to have an open source production license for Roslyn, and finally a company-wide infrastructure emerged to make it real. By 2012, Microsoft had created Microsoft Open Tech; an organization specifically focused on open source projects. Roslyn moved under Microsoft Open Tech and officially became open source... C# language design and compiler implementation are now completely open processes, with lots of non-Microsoft participation, including whole language features being built by external contributors.
Torgersen's article says C# now enjoys "the scaling of effort via contribution of features and bug fixes, but also the insight and course correction we get through the instant, daily feedback loop that open source provides.

"It's been a long and wild journey, and one that to me is symbolic of the massive changes that Microsoft has undergone over the last decade."

"Imagine an artificial-intelligence-driven military drone capable of autonomously patrolling the perimeter of a country or region and deciding who lives and who dies, without a human operator. Now do the same with tanks, helicopters and biped/quadruped robots." A United Nations conference recently decided not to ban these weapons systems outright, but to revisit the topic in November.

So a MarketWatch columnist looked at how these weapons systems could go bad -- and argues the risks are greater than simply fooling the AI into malfunctioning. What about hijacking...? In warfare, AI units can function autonomously, but in the end they need a way to communicate with one another and to transfer data to a command center. This makes them vulnerable to hacking and hijacking. What would happen if one of these drones or robots was hijacked by an opposite faction and started firing on civilians? A hacker would laugh. Why? Because he wouldn't hijack just one. He would design a self-propagating virus that would spread throughout the AI network and infect all units in the vicinity, as well as those communicating with them. In a split second, an entire squad of lethal autonomous weapons systems would be under enemy control... Every machine can be overridden, tricked, hijacked and manipulated with an efficiency that's unheard of in the realm of human-operated traditional weaponry.

However, the U.S. government remains oblivious. DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has already announced a $2 billion development campaign for the next wave of technologically advanced AI (dubbed "AI Next"). One of the goals is to have the machines "acquire human-like communication and reasoning capabilities, with the ability to recognize new situations and environments and adapt to them." I may be overreaching here, but the UN meeting on one end and this announcement on the other, make me think that the U.S. government isn't just pro-robotic -- it may already have a lethal autonomous weapons ace up its sleeve.
The article ends with a question: What do you think about killer robots replacing human combatants?

And what would happen if killer robots got hijacked?

Last year 80,000 Americans died of the flu -- and 900,000 more were hospitalized, according to estimates by the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention. NBC News reports: The numbers were shocking. Until now, CDC has said flu kills anywhere between 12,000 and 56,000 people a year, depending on how bad the flu season is, and that it puts between 250,000 and 700,000 into the hospital with serious illness. The numbers for the 2017-2018 flu season go far beyond that... Usually, flu hits first in one region and then another, but this past season saw widespread flu activity all at once, for weeks on end.
Coincidentally, it's the 100-year anniversary of the great flu pandemic of 1918, according to an article shared by schwit1: Up to 500 million people -- about one-third of the world's population -- became infected with the influenza virus, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. As many as 50 million died, or one out of every 30 human beings on the planet, killing more American troops than those that died on World War I battlefields. The intensity and speed with which it struck were almost unimaginable, the worst global pandemic in modern history.
The article asks the ultimate question: Could it happen again? Top health and science groups, such as the World Health Organization, the National Academy of Sciences and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, predict influenza pandemics are nearly certain to recur. "Influenza viruses, with the vast silent reservoir in aquatic birds, are impossible to eradicate," the World Health Organization warned. "With the growth of global travel, a pandemic can spread rapidly globally with little time to prepare a public health response." A pandemic could also arise if a strain mutates with or develops directly from animal flu viruses, the CDC said...

In a near worst-case scenario, a new, lethal and highly infectious flu virus would break out in a crowded, unprepared megacity that lacks public health infrastructure, according to Johns Hopkins' Bloomberg School of Public Heath. Such a fast-moving virus could burst from a city and catch a ride with international travelers before public health officials realize what is happening.
The article points out that today there's now safeguards to detect and counteract influenza outbreaks that didn't exist in 1918 (including outbreak-detecting systems, as well as better antiviral drugs and the ability to develop vaccines more rapidly). But it also reminds us that the 1918 flu pandemic killed more people in two years than the plague did in an entire century.

The CDC recommends that every year, anyone six months of age or older should get a flu vaccine. But I'd be curious to hear from Slashdot's readers. Have you gotten your 2018 flu shot?

This week InfoWorld unveiled their annual list of "the leading open source projects for software development, cloud computing, big data, and machine learning." [E]ven as we grapple with the likes of microservice architecture, distributed data processing frameworks, deep neural networks, and "dapps," we remain steadfast in our commitment to bring you -- this year and every year -- the best that open source has to offer.

In this year's edition, you'll find our picks for the best open source software development tools, cloud computing platforms, databases and data analytics tools, and machine learning and deep learning libraries. From Kubernetes and Docker to TensorFlow and PyTorch (49 projects in all), these are the projects that are ushering in the next stage of enterprise computing.
An anonymous reader writes: Their choices for the best open source software for software development include .NET Core, Microsoft's Visual Studio Code, and Jenkins, as well as programming languages like Kotlin, Julia, and Rust. ("By now it's something of a cliche to talk about Rust as the next step beyond C and C++. So be it...") And their final award for best open source development software went, surprisingly, to Vanilla JS.

"Some clever wag created a website that promises that the Vanilla JS library will be the smallest JS framework you'll ever use and then delivers a zip file with zero bytes of code along with the suggestion that you should just use the built-in function calls in JavaScript to manipulate the DOM."

Soon after it was reported that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Elon Musk for making false statements related to his abandoned efforts to take Tesla private, the SEC announced today that Elon Musk has agreed to settle the fraud charges. In a press release, the SEC says "Musk and Tesla have agreed to settle the charges against them without admitting or denying the SEC's allegations." The settlements, which are subject to court approval, require the following:

- Musk will step down as Tesla's Chairman and be replaced by an independent Chairman. Musk will be ineligible to be re-elected Chairman for three years;
- Tesla will appoint a total of two new independent directors to its board;
- Tesla will establish a new committee of independent directors and put in place additional controls and procedures to oversee Musk's communications;
- Musk and Tesla will each pay a separate $20 million penalty. The $40 million in penalties will be distributed to harmed investors under a court-approved process.

Slashdot reader Rei writes: In the wake of initially refusing a settlement offer over the wording, Elon Musk has now settled today with the SEC, concerning his tweets about taking Tesla private. As per the settlement agreement, there is 1) no admission of wrongdoing; 2) Musk and Tesla will each pay a $20 million fine; 3) Musk will remain as CEO of Tesla; 4) Musk will be prohibited from serving as chairman of Tesla for three years; and 5) Tesla must appoint two new members to its board of directors. An additional clause seems apropos: Musk must "comply with all mandatory procedures implemented by Tesla, Inc [...] regarding (i) the oversight of communications relating to the Company made in any format, including, but not limited to, posts on social media..."

Long-time Slashdot reader necro81 writes: Reported in the NYTimes and in Phys.org: NantEnergy, a company backed by California billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, announced Wednesday that it has developed a rechargeable zinc-air battery that can store energy at far less cost than lithium-ion. The technology avoids some of the downsides of li-ion, like flammability and the use of cobalt.

Unlike many battery-related announcements, this one is backed by real-world use. Over the past several years, NantEnergy has deployed their batteries for stationary, micro-grid and cell-tower use in nine countries — about 55 MWh of capacity so far. They claim they can now take commercial orders, for delivery next year, at less than $100/kWh of capacity, which is one-half to one-fifth the cost of available lithium-ion grid storage.