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Submission + - Why Desktop Linux Is Finally Growing In Popularity (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Why is Linux finally growing? That's a good question. While Windows is the king of the hill with 72.13% and MacOS comes in a distant second at 15.46%, it's clear that Linux is making progress. Below I'll go over the five reasons why I think it's growing [...].

1. Microsoft isn't that interested in Windows
If you think Microsoft is all about the desktop and Windows, think again. Microsoft's profits these days come from its Azure cloud and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Microsoft 365 in particular. Microsoft doesn't want you to buy Windows; the Redmond powerhouse wants you to subscribe to Windows 365 Cloud PC. And, by the way, you can run Windows 365 Cloud PC on Macs, Chromebooks, Android tablets, iPads, and, oh yes, Linux desktops.

2. Linux gaming, thanks to Steam, is also growing
Gaming has never been a strong suit for Linux, but Linux gamers are also a slowly growing group. I suspect that's because Steam, the most popular Linux gaming platform, also has the lion's share of the gaming distribution market

3. Users are finally figuring out that some Linux distros are easy to use
Even now, you'll find people who insist that Linux is hard to master. True, if you want to be a Linux power user, Linux will challenge you. But, if all you want to do is work and play, many Linux distributions are suitable for beginners. For example, Linux Mint is simple to use, and it's a great end-user operating system for everyone and anyone.

4. Finding and installing Linux desktop software is easier than ever
While some Linux purists dislike containerized application installation programs such as Flatpak, Snap, and AppImage, developers love them. Why? They make it simple to write applications for Linux that don't need to be tuned just right for all the numerous Linux distributions. For users, that means they get more programs to choose from, and they don't need to worry about finicky installation details.

5. The Linux desktop is growing in popularity in India
India is now the world's fifth-largest economy, and it's still growing. Do you know what else is growing in India? Desktop Linux. In India, Windows is still the number one operating system with 70.37%, but number two is Linux, with 15.23%. MacOS is way back in fourth place with 3.11%. I suspect this is the case because India's economy is largely based on technology. Where you find serious programmers, you find Linux users. So stay tuned. Heck, if Microsoft continues to move away from the old-school desktop in favor of Windows as a Service, maybe we will have a year of the Linux desktop! It could happen!

Submission + - Communications of the ACM is Now Open Access

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "CACM [Communications of the ACM] Is Now Open Access," proclaims the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in its tear-down-this-CACM-paywall announcement. "More than six decades of CACM's renowned research articles, seminal papers, technical reports, commentaries, real-world practice, and news articles are now open to everyone, regardless of whether they are members of ACM or subscribe to the ACM Digital Library."

Ironically, clicking on Google search results for older CACM articles on Aaron Swartz currently returns page-not-found error messages and the CACM's own search can't find Aaron Swarz either, so perhaps there's some work that remains to be done with the transition to CACM's new website. ACM plans to open its entire archive of over 600,000 articles when its five-year transition to full Open Access is complete (January 2026 target date).

Submission + - Data forensic expert got election rig claimers to frame themselves in court (politico.com) 1

Submitted by Tablizer
Tablizer writes: [Mike] Lindell had given us about 50 gigabytes of additional data to plow through. There were four new files, but when I looked at them, they were essentially the same types as the first day’s files except with a spreadsheet containing 121,128 lines of generic information about internet service providers around the world plus their locations, their latitudes and longitudes, their IP addresses, and other miscellaneous information. I determined that nothing in the file was related to the 2020 presidential election, and wondered what my competitors were seeing.

Then came another giant batch of 509 files, comprising many more gigabytes. This was how Lindell planned to keep anyone from winning the [prove-us-wrong] challenge, I figured. Just inundate us with files and not nearly enough time to analyze them. That $5 million [prize] suddenly seemed to have slipped through my fingers in a way that felt very unfair...

On the third and final day of the [challenge] symposium, an idea hit me. I decided to scan the file modification dates for all of the latest files we’d been given and, lo and behold, most of the dates were August 2021, right before the symposium. In other words, the data were obviously modified right before we examined them. They could not possibly accurately represent data from the November 2020 election...

During the leadup to the hearing with the three-person arbitration panel, his witnesses gave conflicting answers to critical questions like “What exactly was in the data you provided to the experts and how was it related to the November 2020 U.S. presidential election?”...

“Mr. Zeidman,” the arbitrators stated, “proved the data Lindell LLC provided unequivocally did not reflect November 2020 election data.”...

Lindell filed an appeal of the decision...My lawyers and I will continue to fight him in court. When and if I see the money, I [Bob Zeidman] plan to donate to a nonprofit to legitimately support voter integrity laws and processes.

Submission + - Ocean temperatues are rising. (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by mrflash818
mrflash818 writes:

“In the tropical eastern Atlantic, it’s four months ahead of pace—it’s looking like it’s already June out there,” says Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami. “It’s really getting to be strange that we’re just seeing the records break by this much, and for this long.”

Submission + - Your AI Girlfriend Is a Data-Harvesting Horror Show (gizmodo.com)

Submitted by michelcultivo
michelcultivo writes: A lot of that AI chatbots that you spend days talking too push hard on getting more and more private information from you.
"The privacy mess is troubling because the chatbots actively encourage you to share details that are far more personal than in a typical app."

Submission + - Spotify's Layoffs Put an End To a Musical Encyclopedia (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On a brutal December day, 17% of Spotify employees found out they had been laid off in the company’s third round of job cuts last year. Not long after, music fans around the world realized that the cult-favorite website Every Noise at Once (EveryNoise), an encyclopedic goldmine for music discovery, had stopped working. These two events were not disconnected. Spotify data alchemist Glenn McDonald, who created EveryNoise, was one of the 1,500 employees who was let go that day, but his layoff had wider-reaching implications; now that McDonald doesn’t have access to internal Spotify data, he can no longer maintain EveryNoise, which became a pivotal resource for the most obsessive music fans to track new releases and learn more about the sounds they love.

“The project is to understand the communities of listening that exist in the world, figure out what they’re called, what artists are in them and what their audiences are,” McDonald told TechCrunch. “The goal is to use math where you can to find real things that exist in listening patterns. So I think about it as trying to help global music self-organize.” If you work at a big tech company and get laid off, you probably won’t expect the company’s customers to write nine pages of complaints on a community forum, telling your former employer how badly they messed up by laying you off. Nor would you expect an outpouring of Reddit threads and tweets questioning how you could possibly get the axe. But that’s how fans reacted when they heard McDonald’s fate.

Submission + - New(ish) ZFS data corruption issue (phoronix.com)

Submitted by jd
jd writes: It turns out that ZFS has had a bug that corrupts data for some time, but the bug has largely gone unnoticed. The issue involves ZFS send/receive operations on encrypted partitions. The article goes on to say that ZFS encryption is not considered ready for enterprise use. Given that ZFS is considered the premiere enterprise FS, that's a little bit worrying, especially as Microsoft's RelFS is catching up in capabilities.

What, however, is perhaps more interesting is that bugs, old and new, are being catalogued and addressed much more quickly now that core development is done under Linux, even though it is not mainstreamed in the kernel.

Submission + - Nine US States Are Teaming Up To Accelerate the Adoption of Heat Pumps (wired.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Death is coming for the old-school gas furnace—and its killer is the humbleheat pump. They’re alreadyoutselling gas furnaces in the US,and now a coalition of states has signed an agreement to supercharge the gas-to-electric transition by making it as cheap and easy as possible for their residents to switch. Nine states have signed a memorandum of understanding that says that heat pumps should make up at least 65 percent of residential heating, air conditioning, and water-heating shipments by 2030. (“Shipments” here means systems manufactured, a proxy for how many are actually sold.) By 2040, these states—California, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, and Rhode Island—are aiming for 90 percent of those shipments to be heat pumps.

“It’s a really strong signal from states that they’re committed to accelerating this transition to zero-emissions residential buildings,” says Emily Levin, senior policy adviser at the Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management (NESCAUM), an association of air-quality agencies, which facilitated the agreement. The states will collaborate, for instance, in pursuing federal funding, developing standards for the rollout of heat pumps, and laying out an overarching plan “with priority actions to support widespread electrification of residential buildings.”

Instead of burning planet-warming natural gas, a heat pump warms a building by transferring heat from the outdoor air into the interior space. Run it in the opposite direction, and it can cool the inside of a building—a heat pump is both a heater and AC unit. Because the system is electric, it can run off a grid increasingly powered by renewables like wind and solar. Even if you have to run a heat pump with electricity from fossil-fuel power plants, it’s much more efficient than a furnace, because it’s moving heat instead of creating it. A heat pump can save an average American household over $550 a year,according to one estimate. They’ve gotten so efficient that even when it’s freezing out,they can still extract warmthfrom the air to heat a home. You can even install a heat pump system that alsowarms your water.

Submission + - Fusion research facility's final tritium experiments yield new energy record (phys.org)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The Joint European Torus (JET), one of the world’s largest and most powerful fusion machines, has demonstrated the ability to reliably generate fusion energy, while simultaneously setting a world record in energy output.

These notable accomplishments represent a significant milestone in the field of fusion science and engineering.

In JET’s final deuterium-tritium experiments (DTE3), high fusion power was consistently produced for five seconds, resulting in a ground-breaking record of 69 megajoules using a mere 0.2 milligrams of fuel.

Submission + - EU Right To Repair: Sellers Will Be Liable For a Year After Products Fixed (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Europe's right-to-repair rules will force vendors to stand by their products an extra 12 months after a repair is made, according to the terms of a new political agreement. Consumers will have a choice between repair and replacement of defective products during a liability period that sellers will be required to offer. The liability period is slated to be a minimum of two years before any extensions. "If the consumer chooses the repair of the good, the seller's liability period will be extended by 12 months from the moment when the product is brought into conformity. This period may be further prolonged by member states if they so wish," a European Council announcement on Friday said.

The 12-month extension is part of a provisional deal between the European Parliament and Council on how to implement the European Commission's right-to-repair directive that was passed in March 2023. The Parliament and Council still need to formally adopt the agreement, which would then come into force 20 days after it is published in the Official Journal of the European Union. "Once adopted, the new rules will introduce a new 'right to repair' for consumers, both within and beyond the legal guarantee, which will make it easier and more cost-effective for them to repair products instead of simply replacing them with new ones," the European Commission said on Friday.

The rules require spare parts to be available at reasonable prices, and product makers will be prohibited from using "contractual, hardware or software related barriers to repair, such as impeding the use of second-hand, compatible and 3D-printed spare parts by independent repairers," the Commission said. The newly agreed-upon text "requires manufacturers to make the necessary repairs within a reasonable time and, unless the service is provided for free, for a reasonable price too, so that consumers are encouraged to opt for repair," the European Council said. There will be required options for consumers to get repairs both before and after the minimum liability period expires, the Commission said [...].

Submission + - Cloudflare Hacked by Suspected State-Sponsored Threat Actor (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: Web security and CDN giant Cloudflare said it was hacked by a threat actor using stolen credentials to access internal systems, code repositories, along with an AWS environment, as well as Atlassian Jira and Confluence. The goal of the attack, Cloudflare says, was to obtain information on the company’s infrastructure, likely to gain a deeper foothold.

According to Cloudflare, more than 5,000 individual production credentials were rotated following the incident, close to 5,000 systems were triaged, test and staging systems were physically segmented, and every machine within the Cloudflare global network was reimaged and rebooted.

Submission + - General Motors Bringing Back Plug-in Hybrids (autonews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: General Motors plans to sell plug-in hybrids in North America again, shifting its strategy to go "all-in" on fully electric vehicles after demand has been weaker than anticipated.

CEO Mary Barra on Tuesday said the automaker would continue to focus in 2024 on growing its EV portfolio but that hybrids would play a role in helping GM meet tightening emissions standards. She did not disclose which segments GM will target with plug-in technology or when.

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