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Submission + - HashiCorp CEO predicts OSS-free Silicon Valley (www.thestack.technology)

Submitted by Striek
Striek writes: That is, unless the "open-source" model evolves. (The entire The Stack title couldn't fit in a Slashdot title). On August 10th, 2023, HashiCorp made the controversial decision to change licenses from the Mozilla Public License to MariaDB's Business Source Licesne. The key difference between these two licenses is that the BSL limits its grant to "non-production use". In an interview, HashiCorp CEO Dave McJannet says

there would be “no more open source companies in Silicon Valley” unless the community rethinks how it protects innovation, as he defended the firm’s license switch at its user conference this month.

the Linux Foundation’s adoption of Open Tofu raised serious questions. “What does it say for the future of open source, if foundations will just take it and give it a home. That is tragic for open source innovation. I will tell you, if that were to happen, there'll be no more open source companies in Silicon Valley.

Considering OSS's long history in Silicon Valley, this is a rather bold claim.

Submission + - The Next Big Solar Storm Could Fry the Grid (wsj.com) 1

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: The odds are low that in any given year a storm big enough to cause effects this widespread will happen. And the severity of those impacts will depend on many factors, including the state of our planet’s magnetic field on that day. But it’s a near certainty that some form of this catastrophe will happen someday, says Ian Cohen, a chief scientist who studies heliophysics at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

To get ahead of this threat, a loose federation of U.S. and international government agencies, and hundreds of scientists affiliated with those bodies, have begun working on how to make predictions about what our Sun might do. And a small but growing cadre of scientists argue that artificial intelligence will be an essential component of efforts to give us advance notice of such a storm.

The most dangerous of these solar storms is known as a coronal mass ejection, when a gargantuan blob of charged particles is catapulted from the Sun’s atmosphere by rapidly shifting magnetic fields, at speeds in excess of 8,000 times that of sound. These happen often, but we’re rarely aware of them because they only affect us when they happen to strike earth.

What makes these huge blasts of particles so dangerous to our power grid and electronics is that, when they collide with Earth, the interaction of the sun’s magnetic field with our own can induce large currents in power lines on Earth. If you’ve ever moved a magnet back and forth across a copper wire to illuminate a lightbulb in science class, this is the same effect–but on a global scale. A solar storm can induce currents in power lines that are strong enough to trip safety mechanisms–or even seriously damage parts of our power-distribution infrastructure.

And while the undersea fiber-optic cables for internet data don’t carry electricity, they do have electrical signal-repeaters within them. These repeaters boost the optical signal as it travels the length of the cable. If they’re disabled, the cable ceases to function.

Solar storms can also pose a threat for satellites in higher orbits around earth–such as the ones that make up our GPS system–by bringing a spike in so-called killer electrons that can damage and, in extreme cases, disable the satellites. Closer to Earth, solar storms can heat the atmosphere, causing it to expand in a way that increases drag, which can cause some satellites in lower orbits to crash to the surface. This happened in February 2022, leading to the destruction of 40 Starlink satellites.

Solar storms have already struck again and again. In 1859, a now-legendary storm known as the Carrington Event hit, well before we built a civilization dependent on electronic devices that it could wreck. It caused auroras as far south as the Caribbean, made telegraph lines spark, caused fires at some telegraph stations, and shut down parts of the telegraphy network in the northern hemisphere.

Submission + - IRS says Microsoft may owe more than $29 billion in back taxes (cnbc.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft

received Notices of Proposed Adjustment from the Internal Revenue Service for an additional tax payment of $28.9 billion, the company said in an 8-K filing Wednesday.

Microsoft said the dispute concerns the company's allocated profits between countries and jurisdictions between 2004 and 2013. It said up to $10 billion in taxes that the company has already paid are not reflected in the proposed adjustments made by the IRS.

Submission + - 'Dream' AI Girlfriend Randomly Turns Into Nude Jennifer Lopez, Has Four Legs (404media.co) 1

Submitted by samleecole
samleecole writes: DreamGF, a service that allows users to generate AI girlfriends that chat with them and send them AI generated nudes, is randomly making some girlfriends look like Jennifer Lopez and other celebrities without their consent. DreamGF users are also complaining that their AI girlfriends will abruptly demand they climax and will sometimes send them nudes of deformed bodies.

Not only are users not doing this on purpose, they actively don't want it. The news is yet another example of an AI tool that’s behaving in a way developers are unable to control, despite it violating their own policies, customers’ desires, and in some instances, the law. It also proves a nightmare scenario previously only imagined by AI researchers, where an AI image generator will spit out non-consensual pornography of real people even if it’s not asked to, just because their images were included in the datasets the AI was trained on. This is something that can happen to anyone whose image is online.

Comment All electric is the way to go (Score 1) 240

by denisbergeron (#63886133) Attached to: Nissan To Go All-Electric By 2030 Despite UK's Petrol Ban Delay

I had a plugin hybrid (Toyota Prius Prime) that was the worst car in my live, by a big mesure, but that was because it was a Toyota, not because it was a Hybrd.

Anyway, I change for a Ford Mach-e last month and already put more than 6000km on the counter by doing big trip on the weekend, once you got your way with how managing the charge stop, it's a real game changer to run on electricity. It cost me arround 5 by km instead of 50 by km on gas for a comparable car, and the cost of the car are comparable to a gaz car RFN and Ford dealers have the cars in their showrooms, you can just walkin and leave with one.

Buying a gaz car in 2023 is stupid, and more it's go, more it's stupidest

Submission + - Raspberry Pi 5 announced (raspberrypi.com) 1

Submitted by jizmonkey
jizmonkey writes: Today the Raspberry Pi 5 was announced, to ship at the end of October. The new version is priced at $60 for the 4GB variant, and $80 for its 8GB sibling, and virtually every aspect of the platform has been upgraded. The new CPU is twice as fast and new features include simultaneous 5.0 Gbps USB 3.0 ports and a PCIe 2.0 x1 interface which can be used for an m.2 storage. Priority will be given to individual buyers through the end of the year.

Submission + - Inverse Vaccine stops Autoimmune Diseases (biorxiv.org) 1

Submitted by laughingskeptic
laughingskeptic writes: An "inverse vaccine" has been created that takes advantage of how the liver naturally marks molecules from broken-down cells with “do not attack” flags to prevent autoimmune reactions to cells that die by natural processes. “In the past, we showed that we could use this approach to prevent autoimmunity,” Jeffrey Hubbell, UChicago's Eugene Bell Professor in Tissue Engineering and lead author of the new paper, said in the statement. “But what is so exciting about this work is that we have shown that we can treat diseases like multiple sclerosis after there is already ongoing inflammation, which is more useful in a real-world context.” News release: https://scitechdaily.com/new-v... Preprint linked in title.

Submission + - Password-Stealing Linux Malware Served For 3 Years and No One Noticed (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A download site surreptitiously served Linux users malware that stole passwords and other sensitive information for more than three years until it finally went quiet, researchers said on Tuesday. The site, freedownloadmanager[.]org, offered a benign version of a Linux offering known as the Free Download Manager. Starting in 2020, the same domain at times redirected users to the domain deb.fdmpkg[.]org, which served a malicious version of the app. The version available on the malicious domain contained a script that downloaded two executable files to the /var/tmp/crond and /var/tmp/bs file paths. The script then used the cron job scheduler to cause the file at /var/tmp/crond to launch every 10 minutes. With that, devices that had installed the booby-trapped version of Free Download Manager were permanently backdoored.

After accessing an IP address for the malicious domain, the backdoor launched a reverse shell that allowed the attackers to remotely control the infected device. Researchers from Kaspersky, the security firm that discovered the malware, then ran the backdoor on a lab device to observe how it behaved. “This stealer collects data such as system information, browsing history, saved passwords, cryptocurrency wallet files, as well as credentials for cloud services (AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Azure),” the researchers wrote in a report on Tuesday. “After collecting information from the infected machine, the stealer downloads an uploader binary from the C2 server, saving it to /var/tmp/atd. It then uses this binary to upload stealer execution results to the attackers’ infrastructure.”

Submission + - DoJ's anti-trust lawsuit against Google risks bankrupting Mozilla

Submitted by sinkskinkshrieks
sinkskinkshrieks writes: Mozilla depends on an income of $500 M/year, mostly from Google search. If the DoJ were to enjoin Google from paying Mozilla because Google is "using its influence", it's likely to have the unintended consequence of risking the viability of Firefox.

Submission + - The IM1 meteorite was of extrasolar composition

Submitted by Okian Warrior
Okian Warrior writes: An update to a previous slashdot article.

Spherules recovered from the IM1 meteorite by Avi Loeb have been analyzed, and found to be of extrasolar composition.

Technical details can be found here, and a readable accounting of the analysis and results can be found on Avi Loeb's blog.

An interesting read. The next step is to go back and see if large chunks of the meteorite can be retrieved.

Submission + - What resources on Linux for an old Windows user? 2

Submitted by Leading Edge Boomer
Leading Edge Boomer writes: A retired friend whose personal computing has always been with Windows was just gifted a laptop running some version of Linux. Probably he's not even aware that there are different distributions for different purposes. He seems open to learning about this different world. What recommendations might /. readers have to bring him up to speed as a competent Linux user? I really don't want to hold his hand, and he's smart enough to learn on his own.

Submission + - US bans sale of top Nvidia and AMD AI chips to the Middle East (techspot.com) 1

Submitted by jjslash
jjslash writes: The US government has limited the sale of Nvidia's and AMD's high-end AI chips to certain Middle Eastern countries to prevent their resale to China. From the report:

Nvidia wrote in a regulatory filing that the US government had informed the company of a licensing requirement for a subset of A100 and H100 products destined for certain customers and regions, including some countries in the Middle East. It wasn't specified which countries in the area would be affected by the restrictions, and Nvidia said the controls would not "affect a meaningful portion of our revenue."

A person familiar with the matter told Reuters that AMD also received a letter informing the company of similar restrictions. Team Red said that the move has no material impact on its revenue.

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The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the `social sciences' is: some do, some don't. -- Ernest Rutherford

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