Linus Torvalds has delivered the first release candidate for version 6.5 of the Linux kernel, but warned this release may not go entirely smoothly. From a report: Torvalds's headline assessment of rc1 is "none of it looks hugely unusual." "The biggest single mention probably goes to what wasn't merged, with the bcachefs pull request resulting in a long thread (we didn't hit a hundred emails yet, but it's not far away)." As The Register reported in 2022, bcachefs is a filesystem that's been in development for nigh on a decade without being added to the kernel.

Kernel-watching outlet Phoronix on Sunday wrote that the filesystem is in good shape but debate over "code changes needed to the kernel outside of the kernel module itself" have proved contentious. As a result, conversation on the Linux kernel mailing list is "often becoming heated" when the topic turns to bcachefs. In his announcement post for rc1, Torvalds wrote "Let's calm this party down."

Workers at Sega of America have voted to unionize. Engadget reports: In a union representation election with the National Labor Relations Board, the workers voted 91-26 in favor of their unit, which is called the Allied Employees Guild Improving Sega (AEGIS-CWA). Nineteen ballots were challenged, while three were void. As a result, the group has now officially organized with the Communication Workers of America.

The unit comprises more than 200 workers in various departments across the company, including the brand marketing, games as a service, localization, marketing services, product development, sales and quality assurance teams. While it's hardly the first games union in North America, the workers say it's "the largest multi-department union of organized workers in the entire gaming industry." However, ZeniMax Workers United/CWA includes around 300 quality assurance workers at ZeniMax Studios.

AEGIS-CWA plans to push for improved base pay and benefits, more staff to "eliminate overwork patterns" and more balanced workloads. The workers are also seeking remote work options, clearly defined responsibilities for each role and more.

Vietnam understands the value of education and manages its teachers well. From a report: Their children go through one of the best schooling systems in the world, a status reflected in outstanding performances in international assessments of reading, maths and science. The latest data from the World Bank show that, on aggregate learning scores, Vietnamese students outperform not only their counterparts in Malaysia and Thailand but also those in Britain and Canada, countries more than six times richer. Even in Vietnam itself, student scores do not exhibit the scale of inequality so common elsewhere between the genders and different regions. A child's propensity to learn is the result of several factors -- many of which begin at home with parents and the environment they grow up in. But that is not enough to explain Vietnam's stellar performance. Its distinctive secret lies in the classroom: its children learn more at school, especially in the early years.

In a study in 2020, Abhijeet Singh of the Stockholm School of Economics gauged the greater productivity of Vietnam's schools by examining data from identical tests taken by students in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam. He showed that between the ages of five and eight Vietnamese children race ahead. One more year of education in Vietnam increases the probability that a child can solve a simple multiplication problem by 21 percentage points; in India the uplift is six points. Vietnamese schools, unlike those in other poor countries, have improved over time. A study published in 2022 by researchers at the Centre for Global Development, a think-tank based in Washington, dc, found that in 56 of 87 developing countries the quality of education had deteriorated since the 1960s. Vietnam is one of a small minority of countries where schools have consistently bucked this trend.

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

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

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

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

Massachusetts lawmakers are weighing a near total ban on buying and selling of location data drawn from consumers' mobile devices in the state, in what would be a first-in-the-nation effort to rein in a billion-dollar industry. From a report: The legislature held a hearing last month on a bill called the Location Shield Act, a sweeping proposal that would sharply curtail the practice of collecting and selling location data drawn from mobile phones in Massachusetts. The proposal would also institute a warrant requirement for law-enforcement access to location data, banning data brokers from providing location information about state residents without court authorization in most circumstances.

Location data is typically collected through mobile apps and other digital services and doesn't include information such as a name or a phone number. But often, a device's movement patterns are enough to derive a possible identity of its owner. For example, where a phone spends its evening and overnight hours is usually the owner's home address and can be cross-checked against other databases for additional insight. The Massachusetts proposal is part of a flurry of state-level activity to better protect the digital privacy of residents in the absence of a comprehensive national law. Ten states have enacted privacy laws in recent years under both Republican and Democratic-controlled legislatures. Several bipartisan proposals are under consideration in Congress but have failed to gain traction.

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you have any interest in retro-computing, you know it can be difficult to round up the last official bug fixes and updates available for early Internet-era versions of Windows like 95, 98, and NT 4.0. A new independent project called "Windows Update Restored" is aiming to fix that, hosting lightly modified versions of old Windows Update sites and the update files themselves so that fresh installs of these old operating systems can grab years' worth of fixes that aren't present on old install CDs and disks. These old versions of Windows relied primarily on a Windows Update web app to function rather than built-in updaters like the ones used in current Windows versions. Microsoft took down the version of the site that could scan and update Windows 95 and 98 sometime in mid-2011. The Windows Update Restored site is a lightly modified version of Microsoft's original code, and the site itself doesn't use any kind of SSL or TLS encryption, so ancient Internet Explorer versions can still access it without modification. You'll need at least Internet Explorer 5 to access the Windows Update Restored update sites; that browser is no longer available directly from Microsoft, but the Windows Update Restored site offers download links to IE5 and IE5.5 in all supported languages.

Chinese customs have apprehended a man attempting the biggest on-the-person CPU smuggling feat we have seen reported. From a report: The perp was stopped at Qingmao Port as he sought to cross from Macau to mainland China with 306 CPUs fashioned into a girdle around his waist. According to China's People's Daily, the smuggler gave himself away as he "was walking in an abnormal posture." We aren't surprised if the smuggler wasn't comfortable, as 306 CPUs weighing 50 g per unit would be over 15 kg (about 33 pounds). Moreover, we have to factor in paper and tape packaging materials, as shown in the images. Another report on this smuggling attempt, posted by Hong Kong's On News, says that the male passenger didn't just wear the CPU 'girdle' around his waist. Some of the 306 CPU payload was taped to his legs. In the images, you can see the slim passenger wearing a black loose-fitting sports shirt. The topmost image shows the shirt rolled up from the waist.

The U.K.'s largest NHS trust has confirmed it's investigating a ransomware incident as the country's public sector continues to battle a rising wave of cyberattacks. From a report: Barts Health NHS Trust, which runs five London-based hospitals and serves more than 2.5 million patients, was recently added to the dark web leak site of the ALPHV ransomware gang. The gang, also known as BlackCat, says it has stolen 70 terabytes of sensitive data in what it claims is the biggest breach of healthcare data in the United Kingdom. Samples of the allegedly stolen data, seen by TechCrunch, include employee identification documents, including passports and driver licenses, and internal emails labeled "confidential."

When asked by TechCrunch, a Barts Health spokesperson did not dispute that it was affected by a security incident that involved the exfiltration of data, nor did they dispute the legitimacy of the stolen data samples shared by ALPHV. "We are aware of claims of a ransomware attack and are urgently investigating," the spokesperson, who did not provide their name, told TechCrunch.

The Video Game History Foundation: The Video Game History Foundation, in partnership with the Software Preservation Network, has conducted the first ever study on the commercial availability of classic video games, and the results are bleak. 87% of classic video games released in the United States are critically endangered. Imagine if the only way to watch Titanic was to find a used VHS tape, and maintain your own vintage equipment so that you could still watch it. And what if no library, not even the Library of Congress, could do any better -- they could keep and digitize that VHS of Titanic, but you'd have to go all the way there to watch it. It sounds crazy, but that's the reality we live in with video games, a $180 billion industry, while the games and their history disappear.

For accessing nearly 9 in 10 classic games, there are few options: seek out and maintain vintage collectible games and hardware, travel across the country to visit a library, or... piracy. None of those options are desirable, which means that most video games are inaccessible to all but the most diehard and dedicated fans. That's pretty grim! This is where libraries and archives should come in. Anyone should be able to easily explore, research and play classic video games, in the same way that they can read classic novels, listen to classic albums, and watch classic movies. But outdated copyright laws are preventing institutions like ours from doing our jobs.

Some two dozen central banks across emerging and advanced economies are expected to have digital currencies in circulation by the end of the decade, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) found in a survey published on Monday. From a report: Central banks around the globe have been studying and working on digital versions of their currencies for retail use to avoid leaving digital payments to the private sector amid an accelerating decline of cash. Some are also looking at wholesale versions for transactions between financial institutions.

Most of the new Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) will emerge in the retail space, where eleven central banks could join peers in the Bahamas, the Eastern Caribbean, Jamaica and Nigeria which already run live digital retail currencies, the BIS found in its survey of 86 central banks conducted late 2022. On the wholesale side, which in future could allow financial institutions to access new functionalities thanks to tokenisation, nine central banks could launch CBDCs, the BIS said. "Enhancing cross-border payments is among the key drivers of central banks' work on wholesale CBDCs," the authors of the report wrote.

A new series in China tells the story of a scrappy startup developing the advanced chipmaking technology that multinational trade sanctions today are keeping out of the country. From a report: Airing on Alibaba's Netflix-like Youku from Monday, My Chinese Chip hits on a priority issue for the Beijing government -- semiconductor leadership and self-sufficiency -- and depicts a state-supported firm successfully building lasers for deep ultraviolet lithography machines. An escalating trade war between the US and China has barred the best such DUV gear, provided by ASML, from being sold in the Asian country. My Chinese Chip shows a domestic company overcoming a plethora of challenges to nevertheless succeed. Its trailer opens with a single line in English: "We are executing a lithography machine trading war against China's government." The title can also be read as a pun on My Chinese Heart, as "chip" and "heart" sound the same in Chinese. Its official name in English is The Best Chip.

Comedian Sarah Silverman and two authors have filed copyright infringement lawsuits against Meta and OpenAI for allegedly using their content without permission to train artificial intelligence language models. From a report: The proposed class action lawsuits filed by Silverman, Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden in San Francisco federal court Friday allege Facebook parent company Meta and ChatGPT maker OpenAI used copyrighted material to train chat bots. The lawsuits underscore the legal risks developers of chat bots face when using troves of copyrighted material to create apps that deliver realistic responses to user prompts. Silverman, Kadrey and Golden allege Meta and OpenAI used their books without authorization to develop their so-called large language models, which their makers pitch as powerful tools for automating tasks by replicating human conversation. In their lawsuit against Meta, the plaintiffs allege that leaked information about the company's artificial intelligence business shows their work was used without permission.

Taiwan's Foxconn has withdrawn from a $19.5 billion semiconductor joint venture with Indian metals-to-oil conglomerate Vedanta, it said on Monday in a setback to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's chipmaking plans for India. From a report: Foxconn, the world's largest contract electronics maker, and Vedanta signed a pact last year to set up semiconductor and display production plants in Modi's home state of Gujarat. "Foxconn has determined it will not move forward on the joint venture with Vedanta," a Foxconn statement said without elaborating on the reasons.

The company said it had worked with Vedanta for more than a year to bring "a great semiconductor idea to reality", but they had mutually decided to end the joint venture and it will remove its name from an entity that is now fully owned by Vedanta. Modi has made chipmaking a top priority for India's economic strategy in pursuit of a "new era" in electronics manufacturing and Foxconn's move represents a blow to his ambitions of luring foreign investors to make chips locally for the first time.

As an "ambassador" for FTX, football quarterback Tom Brady appeared at the company's conference in the Bahamas, and in TV commercials promoting the exchange as "the most trusted" institution in crypto, remembers the New York Times. And it was all about to go very bad...

"His money was also at stake. As part of an endorsement agreement Brady signed in 2021, FTX had paid him $30 million, a deal that consisted almost entirely of FTX stock, three people with knowledge of the contract said. Brady's wife at the time, supermodel Gisele Bündchen, was paid $18 million in FTX stock, one of the people said." Now FTX is bankrupt, and Bankman-Fried is facing criminal fraud charges. Brady, 45, and Bündchen, 42, have been sued by a group of FTX customers seeking compensation from the celebrities who endorsed the exchange. On top of it all, the terms of the deal would have required the former couple, who divorced last year, to pay taxes on at least some of their now worthless FTX stock, two people familiar with the endorsement deal said. Their situation is the highest-profile example of a humiliating reckoning facing the actors, athletes, and other celebrities who rushed to embrace the easy money and online hype of cryptocurrencies...

But last year's crash ended the celebrity crypto bonanza. In October, the Securities and Exchange Commission ordered Kim Kardashian to pay $1.26 million for failing to make adequate disclosures when she endorsed the EthereumMax crypto token. In December, a lawyer in California sued two crypto companies, MoonPay and Yuga Labs, accusing them of using a "vast network of A-list musicians, athletes and celebrity clients" to mislead investors about digital assets. In March, the S.E.C. charged the actress Lindsay Lohan, the online influencer Jake Paul and musicians including Soulja Boy and Lil Yachty with illegally promoting crypto assets. And in late May, after months of failed attempts, a process server delivered court papers to Shaquille O'Neal, the retired basketball star, who was sued for promoting FTX, according to legal filings. Mr. O'Neal was served while broadcasting from a National Basketball Association playoff game...

Brady has also faced legal trouble. In December, Adam Moskowitz and the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner filed a lawsuit in federal court in Florida accusing him and Bündchen of misleading investors. Among the other defendants are comedian Larry David, NBA star Steph Curry and tennis player Naomi Osaka, all of whom endorsed FTX. "None of these defendants performed any due diligence prior to marketing these FTX products to the public," the lawsuit said.

"According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly 73% of businesses reported that their workers rarely or never engaged in remote work in 2022 — closing in on pre-pandemic levels," writes a Seattle Times business columnist. "But this minority of the civilian workforce working remotely casts a large shadow over our economy, especially central business districts."

The column's headline argues that Seattle "is still facing the reckoning from remote work" — which may also be true in other big tech cities. Kastle Systems, which tracks back-to-the-office moves, estimated 49.8% occupancy as of late June. Kastle uses a 10-city average ranging from New York to Los Angeles but doesn't include Seattle. In the latest report, Houston led at nearly 61% occupancy. San Jose, Calif., in the heart of Silicon Valley, where remote work flourishes, was the lowest at 38%. As of May, 48% of workers in Seattle's central core have returned to the office compared with 2019, according to the Downtown Seattle Association. The most significant boost has come from Amazon, which mandated employees must work in the office at least three days a week.

So, you can be an offices-half-full or an offices-half-empty kind of person.

Still, Capital Economics, an independent research firm, estimated this past month that remote work will shave 35% from the value of the U.S. office sector. In addition, it predicted many office buildings won't return to their previous peak values until 2040 or later... As loans come due for commercial real estate properties, many cities face a reckoning. Refinancing is difficult with high interest rates. In some cases, buildings are worth less than the land they occupy. Foreclosures and defaults are rising. This is already spilling over to hurt sectors that are dependent on offices, such as architects, cleaning services, construction and others. The Wall Street Journal estimates this accounts for a "multibillion-dollar ecosystem."

As a result, many American cities are struggling to convert office buildings unlikely to see workers again into other uses, especially apartments. Rigid zoning and building codes, the footprint of the structures, and resistance from nearby homeowners to increased density all make this difficult. Seattle is facing some of the same challenges. Mayor Bruce Harrell announced a "call for ideas" to alter some of the city's office space to residential or other uses...

Several trend lines are moving in the right direction — return of workers, number of residents, visitors and hotel occupancy are all going up, and crime is going down, with violent crime and property crime down the first five months of the year compared with 2022. Downtown has seen a 13.8% decrease in violent crime and a 35.1% drop in property crime over the same period... To be sure, we're in undiscovered territory. But giving up on downtown Seattle is not an option. It accounts for the majority of the city's business taxes and majority of its workers...

Whether remote or hybrid work remains for much of the local workforce or a gradual return to the office continues, the heart of the city must be healthy.