Chevrolet is introducing a feature, specifically for teen drivers, that will temporarily block the auto from shifting into gear if their seat belt isn't buckled. A message will alert the driver to buckle up in order to shift into gear. After 20 seconds, the vehicle will operate normally. NPR reports: The feature, which Chevrolet says is an industry first, will come standard in the 2020 models of the Traverse SUV, Malibu sedan and Colorado pickup truck. It will be part of the "Teen Driver" package, which can also be used to set speed alerts and a maximum speed, among other controls, and give parents "report cards" tracking a teen's driving behavior. Chevrolet explains how it works: "To use Teen Driver mode, a parent can enable the feature by creating a PIN in the Settings menu that allows them to register their teen's key fob. The Teen Driver settings are turned on only when a registered key fob is used to start the vehicle."

A week ago bitcoin was trading at $6,000. Today Forbes reports bitcoin "which has been swinging wildly throughout this week, has suddenly rallied back to over $8,000 per bitcoin, somewhat putting to rest investor and trader fears the recent bitcoin bull run may have already ended": The bitcoin price has risen around 50% over the last 30 days, pulling many other major cryptocurrencies with it, including ethereum, Ripple's XRP, bitcoin cash, litecoin, EOS and binance coin... The total bitcoin and cryptocurrency market capitalization, which lost some $30 billion in a matter of minutes on Friday morning, has now recovered almost all of that value and is back around $250 billion, according to data from CoinMarketCap which tracks most major cryptocurrencies...

The bitcoin and cryptocurrency sector has been celebrating a raft of positive news all this week, from retail adoption [at Starbucks, Nordstrom And Whole Foods] to legendary investor support. Bitcoin and cryptocurrency technical data is also showing the bitcoin price could be heading higher, with well-known bitcoin trader Eric Choe saying he expects the digital token to reach $22,600 sometime in 2020, which would be a fresh bitcoin all-time.
Mark Mobius, the investor cofounder of Mobius Capital Partners who once branded bitcoin a "real fraud", now says instead that in the future bitcoin will be "alive and well."

Freshly Exhumed writes: An intentional kernel change in Linux kernel 4.20 for enhanced Spectre mitigation is unfortunately causing Intel Linux performance to be much slower than with 4.19. That change is 'STIBP' (Single Thread Indirect Branch Predictors), which allows for preventing cross-hyperthread control of decisions that are made by indirect branch predictors. It affects Intel systems that have up-to-date microcode and CPU Hyper Threading enabled. Phoronix gives the evidence.

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."

Some users who upgraded to an iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max over the weekend have reported poor cell and Wi-Fi reception and noticeably slower speeds when comparing their new phones to their older models. The Verge: According to users on Apple's support forum, MacRumors forums, and Reddit, the issue appears to be widespread across the country and not limited to any specific carrier. It's a frustrating issue, especially considering that the iPhone XS is supposed to have significantly faster data speeds on Wi-Fi and LTE compared to the iPhone X, according to data tests conducted by SpeedSmart. There's even a new antenna line running along the bottom of the phone as discovered by a recent iFixit teardown, which should have helped with reception. Additionally, folks at r/Apple, the most popular subreddit for iPhone and other Apple related discussions on the site, have corroborated the claims.

The Document Foundation said on Wednesday it is releasing LibreOffice 6.1, the latest major update to its productivity suite. It is available to download for Linux, Windows, and macOS platforms. The new version offers, among other features, Colibre, a new icon theme for Windows based on Microsoft's icon design guidelines, which it says, makes the office suite visually appealing for users coming from the Microsoft environment. The Document Foundation also reworked the image handling feature on LibreOffice to make it "significantly faster and smoother thanks to a new graphic manager and an improved image lifecycle, with some advantages also when loading documents in Microsoft proprietary formats." Other new features and changes include: The reorganization of Draw menus with the addition of a new Page menu, for better UX consistency across the different modules. A major improvement for Base, only available in experimental mode: the old HSQLDB database engine has been deprecated, though still available, and the new Firebird database engine is now the default option (users are encouraged to migrate files using the migration assistant from HSQLDB to Firebird, or by exporting them to an external HSQLDB server). Significant improvements in all modules of LibreOffice Online, with changes to the user interface to make it more appealing and consistent with the desktop version. An improved EPUB export filter, in terms of link, table, image, font embedding and footnote support, with more options for customizing metadata. Online Help pages have been enriched with text and example files to guide the users through features, and are now easier to localize.

LibreOffice 6.1's new features have been developed by a large community of code contributors: 72% of commits are from developers employed by companies sitting in the Advisory Board like Collabora, Red Hat and CIB and by other contributors such as SIL and Pardus, and 28% are from individual volunteers. In addition, there is a global community of individual volunteers taking care of other fundamental activities such as quality assurance, software localization, user interface design and user experience, editing of help system text and documentation, plus free software and open document standards advocacy at a local level. You can read the full changelog here. Here's a video that walks through the new features and changes that LibreOffice is receiving with v6.1.

Less than a week ago, if you searched for the California Republican Party on Google, you might have read that the political party's ideologies included conservatism, market liberalism, and nazism. The latter listing has since been removed, and Google is blaming the results on Wikipedia "vandalism." From a report: Vice first reported the inclusion of "Nazism" under ideologies in Google's knowledge panel -- the box that shows up to the right of search results. It's unclear how long the term had been there, but the tech giant removed it after being notified by the publication. "We regret that vandalism on Wikipedia briefly appeared on our search results," Google tweeted on Thursday in response to California congressman and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy. "This was not the the result of a manual change by Google. We have systems in place that catch vandalism before it impacts search results, but occasionally errors get through, and that happened here."

An anonymous reader quotes GeekWire: The first Amazon Go grocery and convenience store will open to the public Monday in Seattle -- letting any person with an Amazon account, the Amazon Go app and a willingness to give up more of their personal privacy than usual simply grab anything they want and walk out, without going through a checkout line... After shoppers check in by scanning their unique QR code, overhead cameras work with weight sensors in the shelves to precisely track which items they pick up and take with them. When they leave, they just leave. Amazon Go's systems automatically debit their accounts for the items they take, sending the receipt to the app. In my first test of Amazon Go this past week, my elapsed time in the store was exactly 23 seconds -- from scanning the QR code at the entrance to exiting with my chosen item...

The company says the tracking is precise enough to distinguish between multiple people standing side-by-side at a shelf, detecting which one picked up a yogurt or cupcake, for example, and which one was merely browsing. The system also knows when people pick up items and put them back, ensuring that Amazon doesn't dock anyone's account for milk or chips when they simply wanted to read the label. The idea is to "push the boundaries of computer vision and machine learning" to create an "effortless experience for customers," said Dilip Kumar, Amazon Go vice president of technology, after taking GeekWire through the store this past week... Apart from the kitchen staff preparing fresh food at the back, we saw only two workers in the 1,800-square-foot Amazon Go store during our visit: one at the beer and wine section to check IDs, and another just inside the entrance to greet customers.
TechCrunch calls it "Amazon's surveillance-powered no-checkout convenience store," adding "the system is made up of dozens and dozens of camera units mounted to the ceiling, covering and recovering every square inch of the store from multiple angles."

The Seattle Times reports that the store "was also criticized by grocery-store workers' unions, which feared an effort to automate the work done by cashiers, the second-most-common job in the U.S."

harrymcc writes: In the era before the web, the forums on CompuServe were indispensable for everything from getting tech questions answered to chatting about movies. They still exist, albeit in diminished form. But Oath, which owns AOL, which owns what's left of CompuServe, is about to finally shut them down. I wrote about the sad news for Fast Company.

Apple has started to ship the iPhone X across the United States, but some new iPhone X owners say they aren't able to start using their new phones due to carrier activation issues and congestion. From a report: A number of iPhone X owners on Twitter have reported having issues activating their new phones. The issue seems to be affecting some AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint users in the last few hours as they try to get service on Apple's $1,000 phone. When users try to activate the device, a message pops up saying, "The activation server is temporarily unavailable."

A reader shares a report: We talk about time like it's money, and that may explain why we say "Daylight Savings Time," capitalizing the concept to emphasize its awesomeness. After all, who wouldn't want to be able to save hours like cash? The phrase "Daylight Savings Time," though commonly used in Australia, Canada, and the US, is technically incorrect. Time and Date, a website devoted to all things chronological, posits that the plural "savings" became popular because it's used in everyday contexts, like "savings account." The grammatically correct usage is "daylight saving time." The expression is singular and not capitalized, according to the US Government Publishing Office style guide. The GPO provides the guidance, "d.s.t., daylight saving (no 's') time."

Data for the month of August 2017 from reliable market analytics firm Net Applications is here, and it suggests that Linux has finally surpassed the three percent mark, quite possibly for the first time in recent years. According to Net Applications, the desktop market share of Linux jumped from 2.53 percent in July to 3.37 percent in August. There's no explanation for what accounted for this growth.