AT&T is the first major ISP to confirm that it will be suspending all broadband usage caps as millions of Americans bunker down in a bid to slow the rate of COVID-19 expansion. Consumer groups and a coalition of Senators are now pressuring other ISPs to follow suit. From a report: Telecom experts told Motherboard this morning that broadband caps and overage fees don't serve any real technical purpose, and are little more than a glorified price hike on uncompetitive markets. We in turn reached out to ten of the nation's biggest ISPs, only one of which (Mediacom) was willing to go on the record. In the wake of that report, AT&T has confirmed to Motherboard that the company will be suspending all usage caps until further notice. "Many of our AT&T Internet customers already have unlimited home internet access, and we are waiving internet data overage for the remaining customers," a company spokesperson said.

An anonymous reader shares a column: Almost a decade ago, Warren Buffett made a claim that would become famous. He said that he paid a lower tax rate than his secretary, thanks to the many loopholes and deductions that benefit the wealthy. His claim sparked a debate about the fairness of the tax system. In the end, the expert consensus was that, whatever Buffett's specific situation, most wealthy Americans did not actually pay a lower tax rate than the middle class. "Is it the norm?" the fact-checking outfit Politifact asked. "No." Time for an update: It's the norm now. For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans last year paid a lower total tax rate -- spanning federal, state and local taxes -- than any other income group, according to newly released data. That's a sharp change from the 1950s and 1960s, when the wealthy paid vastly higher tax rates than the middle class or poor. Since then, taxes that hit the wealthiest the hardest -- like the estate tax and corporate tax -- have plummeted, while tax avoidance has become more common.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: MIT Technology Review's Karen Hao reports on China's grand experiment in AI education that could reshape how the world learns. "While academics have puzzled over best practices, China hasn't waited around," Hao writes. "It's the world's biggest experiment on AI in education, and no one can predict the outcome."

Profiled is Squirrel AI ("We Strive to Provide Every Student an AI Super Teacher!"), which has opened 2,000 learning centers in 200 cities and registered over a million students -- equal to New York City's entire public school system... Hao notes that the earliest efforts to "replicate" teachers date back to the 1970s, when computers first started being used in education. So, will AI-powered learning systems like Squirrel's deliver on the promise of PLATO's circa-1975 computer-assisted instruction?
From the article: Squirrel's innovation is in its granularity and scale. For every course it offers, its engineering team works with a group of master teachers to subdivide the subject into the smallest possible conceptual pieces. Middle school math, for example, is broken into over 10,000 atomic elements, or "knowledge points," such as rational numbers, the properties of a triangle, and the Pythagorean theorem. The goal is to diagnose a student's gaps in understanding as precisely as possible. By comparison, a textbook might divide the same subject into 3,000 points; ALEKS, an adaptive learning platform developed by US-based McGraw-Hill, which inspired Squirrel's, divides it into roughly 1,000.

Once the knowledge points are set, they are paired with video lectures, notes, worked examples, and practice problems. Their relationships -- how they build on each other and overlap -- are encoded in a "knowledge graph," also based on the master teachers' experience.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: California Governor Gavin Newsom proposed a "digital dividend" that would let consumers share in the billions of dollars made by technology companies in the most populous U.S. state. In his "State of the State" speech on Tuesday, Newsom said California is proud to be home to tech firms. But he said companies that make billions of dollars "collecting, curating and monetizing our personal data have a duty to protect it. Consumers have a right to know and control how their data is being used." He went further by suggesting the companies share some of those profits, joining other politicians calling for higher levies on the wealthy in U.S. society. "California's consumers should also be able to share in the wealth that is created from their data," Newsom said. "And so I've asked my team to develop a proposal for a new data dividend for Californians, because we recognize that data has value and it belongs to you." Newsom didn't describe what form the dividend might take, although he said "we can do something bold in this space." He also praised a tough California data-privacy law that will kick in next year.

Slashdot reader internet-redstar writes: The Tesla Hacker, Jasper Nuyens -- who uncovered Tesla's "unconfirmed lane change" last year -- now launched at FOSDEM an open-source project called "FreedomEV" to run on top of rooted Teslas. It adds new features to the vehicles, such as a "Hotspot Mode" for in-car Wi-Fi and a "Cloak Mode" to prevent all location tracking and more. It hopes to become available for other cars too. Full presentation video can be found here. The Github project and the website. He is looking for contributors and support from Tesla.

Engineers are building a prototype of a robotic factory that will create water, oxygen, and fuel on the surface of Mars. From a report: The year is 2038. After 18 months living and working on the surface of Mars, a crew of six explorers boards a deep-space transport rocket and leaves for Earth. No humans are staying behind, but work goes on without them: Autonomous robots will keep running a mining and chemical-synthesis plant they'd started years before this first crewed mission ever set foot on the planet. The plant produces water, oxygen, and rocket fuel using local resources, and it will methodically build up all the necessary supplies for the next Mars mission, set to arrive in another two years. This robot factory isn't science fiction: It's being developed jointly by multiple teams across NASA. One of them is the Swamp Works Lab at NASA's John F. Kennedy Space Center, in Florida, where I am a team lead. Officially, it's known as an in situ resource utilization (ISRU) system, but we like to call it a dust-to-thrust factory, because it turns simple dust into rocket fuel. This technology will one day allow humans to live and work on Mars -- and return to Earth to tell the story.

But why synthesize stuff on Mars instead of just shipping it there from Earth? NASA invokes the "gear-ratio problem." By some estimates, to ship a single kilogram of fuel from Earth to Mars, today's rockets need to burn 225 kilograms of fuel in transit -- launching into low Earth orbit, shooting off toward Mars, slowing down to get into Mars orbit, and finally slowing to a safe landing on the surface of Mars. We'd start with 226 kg and end with 1 kg, which makes for a 226:1 gear ratio. And the ratio stays the same no matter what we ship. We would need 225 tons of fuel to send a ton of water, a ton of oxygen, or a ton of machinery. The only way to get around that harsh arithmetic is by making our water, oxygen, and fuel on-site. Different research and engineering groups at NASA have been working on different parts of this problem. More recently, our Swamp Works team began integrating many separate working modules in order to demonstrate the entire closed-loop system. It's still just a prototype, but it shows all the pieces that are necessary to make our dust-to-thrust factory a reality. And although the long-term plan is going to Mars, as an intermediate step NASA is focusing its attention on the moon. Most of the equipment will be tried out and fine-tuned on the lunar surface first, helping to reduce the risk over sending it all straight to Mars.

SpaceX announced Thursday that it's booked the world's first private passenger to the moon. The private aerospace company said on Twitter the unnamed traveler would board its Big Falcon Rocket (BFR) to the moon, where only 24 people have ever traveled. Only 12 of those people actually walked on the moon. NBC New York reports: SpaceX didn't reveal any details about the potentially historic voyage but said it plans to reveal the traveler's identity and more on Monday, Sept. 17. The company called the plan "an important step toward enabling access for everyday people who dream of traveling to space." Musk shared the announcement on his personal page but remained tight-lipped as well. However, when asked if the passenger was him, Musk responded with an emoji of the Japanese flag.

New submitter rokahasch writes: Starting today, August 10th, most users of the Dropbox desktop app on Linux have been receiving notifications that their Dropbox will stop syncing starting November. Over at the Dropbox forums, Dropbox have declared that the only Linux filesystem supported for storage of the Dropbox sync folder starting the 7th of November will be on a clean ext4 file system. This basically means Dropbox drops Linux support completely, as almost all Linux distributions have other file systems as their standard installation defaults nowadays -- not to mention encryption running on top of even an ext4 file system, which won't qualify as a clean ext4 file system for Dropbox (such as eCryptfs which is the default in, for example, Ubuntu for encrypted home folders).

The thread is trending heavily on Dropbox' forums with the forum's most views since the thread started earlier today. The cries from a large amount of Linux users have so far remained unanswered from Dropbox, with most users finding the explanation given for this change unconvincing. The explanation given so far is that Dropbox requires a file system with support for Extended attributes/Xattrs. Extended attributes however are supported by all major Linux/Posix complaint file systems. Dropbox has, up until today, supported Linux platforms since their services began back in 2007. A number of users have taken to Twitter to protest the move. Twitter user troyvoy88 tweets: "Well, you just let the shitstorm loose @Dropbox dropping support for some linux FS like XFS and BTRFS. No way in hell im going to reformat my @fedora #development station and removing encryption no way!"

Another user by the name of daltux wrote: "It will be time to say goodbye then, @Dropbox. I won't store any personal files on an unencrypted partition."

"Attention geeks living in their parents' basements!" writes PolygamousRanchKid , sharing this story from NPR: The promise of adventure didn't do it. Neither did the lure of independence, or the weight of his 30 years. Instead, it took a judge to pry Michael Rotondo from his parents' home. The couple won an eviction order against their son, after a judge argued with Rotondo for 30 minutes. "I don't see why they can't just, you know, wait a little bit for me to leave the house," Rotondo told Donald Greenwood, a justice on the Onondaga County Supreme Court...

Christina and Mark Rotondo resorted to legal action after a series of notes to their son (starting on Feb. 2) failed to get him to move out of their home in Camillus, New York, a town west of Syracuse. Those notes followed discussions that began last October. The notes to Michael Rotondo ranged from orders to leave and encouragement to get a job, to offers of more than $1,000 and help in finding a place... The notes escalated into a formally worded notice for Rotondo to leave that set a 30-day deadline -- which lapsed on March 15...

In a legal filing cited by CNYCentral, Rotondo said that in the eight years he has lived at his parents' house, he "has never been expected to contribute to household expenses, or assisted with chores and the maintenance of the premises," and that those conditions are simply part of an informal agreement. When he was in his early 20s, Rotondo briefly lived on his own, but he moved back in with his parents after losing a job...

The case is being seen as an extreme example of a growing trend. As NPR reported in 2016, a Pew study found that, "For the first time in more than 130 years, Americans ages 18-34 are more likely to live with their parents than in any other living situation."

An anonymous reader writes: After recently switching on an old Windows Phone to create a silly April Fools' joke, The Verge's Tom Warren discovered just how much he missed Microsoft's mobile OS. Two of the biggest features that are hard to find/replicate on iOS and Android are the Metro design and Live Tiles. "Android and iOS still don't have system-wide dark modes, nearly 8 years after Windows Phone first introduced it," notes Warren. "Live Tiles were one of Windows Phone's most unique features. They enabled apps to show information on the home screen, similar to the widgets found on Android and iOS. You could almost pin anything useful to the home screen, and Live Tiles animated beautifully to flip over and provide tiny nuggets of information that made your phone feel far more personal and alive."

Some other neat features include the software keyboard, which Warren argues "is still far better than the defaults on iOS and Android," especially with the recently-added tracing feature that lets you swipe to write words. "Microsoft also experimented with features that were different to other mobile platforms, and some of the concepts still haven't really made their way to iOS or Android: Kid's Corner; Dedicated search button; Browser address bar; People hub; Unified messaging..." Aside from the competition aspect with Google and Apple, do you miss Windows Phone? What are some specific features you miss about the old mobile operating system?