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• 'Music Copyright Lawsuits Are Scaring Away New Hits', Argues Rolling Stone (Slashdot)
  A new article in Rolling Stone argues that the forgotten 2013 hit song "Blurred Lines", which a court later ruled infringed on a 1977 song by Marvin Gaye, turned copyright law into "a minefield" -- for the music industry. While copyright laws used to protect only lyrics and melodies (a prime example is the Chiffons' successful suit against George Harrison in 1976 for the strong compositional similarities between his "My Sweet Lord" and their "He's So Fine"), the "Blurred Lines" case raised the stakes by suggesting that the far more abstract qualities of rhythm, tempo, and even the general feel of a song are also eligible for protection -- and thus that a song can be sued for feeling like an earlier one. Sure enough, a jury in 2019 ruled that Katy Perry owed millions for ostensibly copying the beat of her hit "Dark Horse" from a little-known song by Christian rapper Flame, stunning both the music business and the legal community. "They're trying to own basic building blocks of music, the alphabet of music that should be available to everyone," Perry's lawyer Christine Lepera warned in the case's closing arguments. That case, which Perry's team is currently in the process of appealing, suggests a second point: Plaintiffs in copycat cases are largely targeting megahit songs because they've seen where the money is, and the increasing frequency of those court battles in headlines is causing an avalanche effect of further infringement lawsuits.... While some record labels may have the budget to hire on-call musicologists who vet new releases for potential copyright claims, smaller players who can't afford that luxury are turning toward a tried-and-true form of protection: insurance. Lucas Keller -- the founder of music management company Milk and Honey, which represents writers and producers who've worked with everyone from Alessia Cara and Carrie Underwood to 5 Seconds of Summer and Muse -- recently began encouraging all his songwriter clients to purchase errors-and-omissions insurance, which protects creative professionals from legal challenges to their intellectual property. "We all feel like the system has failed us," Keller says. "There are a lot of aggressive lawyers filing lawsuits and going ham on people." (He's particularly critical of publishers whose rosters are heavier on older catalogs than new acts: "Heritage publishers who aren't making a lot of money are coming out of the woodwork and saying, âWe're going to take a piece of your contemporary hit....'â") Artists are understandably reluctant to publicly disclose that they have copyright insurance, which could open them up to an increase in lawsuits. But music attorney Bob Celestin, who's helped represent acts like Pusha T and Missy Elliott, says it is safe to assume that the majority of artists who show up in Top 10 chart positions are covered in this way... The popularity of cheap music-production software, which offers the same features to every user, has added another layer of risk. "Music is now more similar than it is different, for the first time," says Ross Golan, a producer and songwriter who has released songs with stars like Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber. "People are using the same sample packs, the same plug-ins, because it's efficient." Then there's the issue of the finite number of notes, chord progressions, and melodies available...

  

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• The End of Windows 7 'Marks the End of the PC Era Too' (Slashdot)
  ZDNet's UK editor-in-chief Steve Ranger argues the end of Windows 7 "marks the end of the PC era, too." When Windows 7 launched, the iPhone and its app store were around but were still novelties, while the iPad hadn't arrived yet. If you wanted to get work -- or pretty much anything -- done on a computer, you needed a PC. Just over a decade later, the picture is much more complicated. PC sales have been in decline for the last seven years; a slide which only ended with a small increase last year, largely because businesses needed to buy new PCs to run Windows 10, after bowing to the inevitable and upgrading. In many scenarios and use cases the PC has been superseded by the smartphone, the tablet or digital assistants embodied in various other devices. And it's not just the PC -- Windows is no longer the defining product for Microsoft that it once was. That's not to say the PC is dead, of course: I'm typing on one now, and it will remain the primary device I use to do my job for the foreseeable future. Many office and knowledge workers will feel the same. But there are now plenty of other options: I could be using a tablet or dictating to my phone... And outside of work I barely touch a PC at all. And even the definition of the PCs is getting blurry. PC makers have come up with a late burst of creativity that has delivered all manner of weird and occasionally wonderful new shapes and sizes. Microsoft's Surface is a PC that looks a lot like a tablet; Lenovo's X1 Fold is a folding screen that can be a tablet, or a mini laptop or a desktop. Folding and detachable PCs are now mainstream.

  

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• Linux 5.5-rc6 Released With Some Notable Radeon Graphics Fixes Plus Other Random Work (Phoronix)
  Linus Torvalds has just issued Linux 5.5-rc6 as the latest test release ahead of the stable Linux 5.5 kernel due out in a few weeks...
• Internet Pioneers Fight For Control of .Org Registry By Forming a Nonprofit Alternative (Slashdot)
  Reuters reports that a group of "prominent internet pioneers" now has a plan to block the $1.1 billion sale of the .org internet domain registry to Ethos Capital. The group has created their own nonprofit cooperative to offer an alternative: "There needs to be a place on the internet that represents the public interest, where educational sites, humanitarian sites, and organizations like Wikipedia can provide a broader public benefit," said Katherine Maher, the CEO of Wikipedia parent Wikimedia Foundation, who signed on to be a director of the new nonprofit. The crowd-sourced research tool Wikipedia is the most visited of the 10 million .org sites registered worldwide... Hundreds of nonprofits have already objected to the transaction, worried that Ethos will raise registration and renewal prices, cut back on infrastructure and security spending, or make deals to sell sensitive data or allow censorship or surveillance... "What offended me about the Ethos Capital deal and the way it unfolded is that it seems to have completely betrayed this concept of stewardship," said Andrew McLaughlin, who oversaw the transfer of internet governance from the U.S. Commerce Department to ICANN, completed in 2016. Maher and others said the idea of the new cooperative is not to offer a competing financial bid for .org, which brings in roughly $100 million in revenue from domain sales. Instead, they hope that the unusual new entity, formally a California Consumer Cooperative Corporation, can manage the domain for security and stability and make sure it does not become a tool for censorship. The advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which previously organized a protest over the .org sale that drew in organizations including the YMCA of the United States, Greenpeace, and Consumer Reports, is also supporting the cooperative. "It's highly inappropriate for it to be turned over to a commercial venture at all, much less one that's going to need to recover $1 billion," said EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn.

  

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• Apple's Stock Rose 86% in 2019 -- Partly Because Of AirPods (Slashdot)
  "Shares of Apple gained 86.2% in 2019, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence," reports the Motley Fool: The tech stock's share price tracked relatively closely with momentum for the broader market for much of the year and then dramatically outperformed from September through December thanks to strong performance for its wearables products. iPhone Sales were down from 2018, but they still came in ahead of expectations, and the company's business was lifted by strong performance for its wearables segment... Growth for Apple's services segment (which includes revenue generated from the company's mobile app store and subscription-based offerings like Apple Music) also slowed in the year. However, explosive growth for AirPods, promising momentum for the Apple Watch, and the promise of a bigger tech and feature leap for the iPhone line in 2020 powered a great year for Apple stock. Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst at Bernstein Research, estimates that AirPod sales came in at roughly $6 billion in 2019 and nearly doubled compared to 2018. The Bernstein analyst projects that AirPod revenue will hit $15 billion in 2020.

  

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• After Mishap with Boeing Spacecraft, NASA Faces a Dilemma (Slashdot)
  An anonymous reader quotes the Washington Post: As it probes why Boeing's Starliner spacecraft suffered a serious setback during a flight test last month that forced the cancellation of its planned docking with the International Space Station, NASA faces a high-stakes dilemma: Should the space agency require the company to repeat the uncrewed test flight, or allow the next flight to proceed, as originally planned, with astronauts on board? The answer could have significant ramifications for the agency, and put astronauts' lives on the line, at a time when NASA is struggling to restore human spaceflight from the United States since the Space Shuttle fleet was retired in 2011. Forcing Boeing to redo the test flight without anyone on board would be costly, possibly requiring the embattled company, already struggling from the consequences of two deadly crashes of its 737 Max airplane, to spend tens of millions of dollars to demonstrate that its new spacecraft is capable of meeting the space station in orbit. But if NASA moves ahead with the crewed flight, and something goes wrong that puts the astronauts in danger, the agency would come under withering criticism that could plague it for years to come... For now, NASA is moving cautiously. It has formed an independent team with Boeing to examine what went wrong with the Starliner during last month's test flight. NASA also is reviewing data to help it determine if the capsule achieved enough objectives during its truncated flight to assure NASA that its astronauts will be safe.... If NASA does force Boeing to perform another test flight, it's not clear who would have to pay the tens of millions of dollars such a mission would cost.

  

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• Equifax's Stock Rose More Than 50% In 2019 (Slashdot)
  "There's still time to file a claim for a share of the $425 million that Equifax agreed to cough up after hosing almost half of the country in its massive data breach a few years ago," writes a Pennyslvania newspaper columnist, pointing victims to equifaxbreachsettlement.com. "But unless you can prove you were an identity theft victim who lost money, or had to waste time cleaning up the mess, don't expect much of a payout. Victims are being hosed again." The breach affected an estimated 147 million Americans. Hackers exploited a known but unpatched website vulnerability and gained access to names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, driver's license numbers and credit card numbers. Facing lawsuits from federal and state consumer protection agencies, Equifax agreed to a settlement. It offered several ways for people to file claims, with a deadline of Jan. 22. The option that applies to most people is 10 years of free credit monitoring, or a cash payout of up to $125 for those who already have monitoring. But you aren't going to get anywhere near $125. The settlement called for a pot of only $31 million for those payouts. And based on the number of people who have applied, that's not enough to cover the maximum payment. You may not even get enough to buy a decent sandwich, according to Ted Frank, director of litigation for Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, which includes the Center for Class Action Fairness. "That's down to $6 or $7 now," Frank told CNBC in December. "Maybe even less than that." Frank spoke after the federal judge overseeing the settlement awarded $77.5 million of the $425 million settlement fund to the attorneys who represented consumers against Equifax. His organization had opposed that award as being too much. Meanwhile, the Motley Fool notes that in 2019 Equifax's stock rose 50.5% -- after dropping 21% in 2018 and remaining "relatively flat" in 2017. "The credit-reporting company's stock rose thanks to a series of earnings beats and with the shadow of the big 2017 data breach receding further into the rear view...."

  

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• Microsoft's Azure Cloud Service Is Becoming More Popular Than Amazon's AWS At Big Companies (Slashdot)
  Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been focusing the company on cloud services -- and CNBC reports on the results: A Goldman Sachs survey of technology executives at large companies last month showed that Microsoft remained the most popular supplier of public cloud services, even as Amazon leads the market overall in terms of revenue. Goldman Sachs based its latest findings on an information-technology spending survey of 100 IT executives at Global 2000 companies. It performs the survey each June and December. The latest survey showed that 56 executives are using Azure for cloud infrastructure, versus 48 using AWS. Across cloud infrastructure and platform as a service put together, Microsoft's lead has been increasing since December 2017, according to the analysts. Additionally, more respondents expect their companies to be using Azure than any other cloud in three years, the analysts wrote... The results lead the analysts to conclude that about 23% of IT workloads are now on public clouds, up from 19% in June, and they expect the percentage to reach 43% in three years. That leaves plenty of room for growth for other contenders, like Google, for example... About 91% of analysts surveyed by FactSet have the equivalent of buy ratings on Microsoft stock, including Goldman Sachs. In the original submission Slashdot reader soldersold wonders if it's pre-existing business relationships with Microsoft (plus a workforce that's already been trained and certified in their technologies). Another caveat: The survey only included large companies. It'd be interesting to hear from Slashdot readers working in the cloud about whether they're using AWS or Azure?

  

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• Benchmarks Of LLVM Clang 6.0 Through Clang 10.0 Compilers (Phoronix)
  At the end of 2019 I ran some GCC 5 through GCC 10 compiler benchmarks while here are the similar tests conducted on the LLVM side for seeing how the Clang C/C++ compiler performance has evolved over the past few years...
• Thoughts on Our Possible Future Without Work (Slashdot)
  There's a new book called A World Without Work by economics scholar/former government policy adviser Daniel Susskind. The Guardian succinctly summarizes its prognostications for the future: It used to be argued that workers who lost their low-skilled jobs should retrain for more challenging roles, but what happens when the robots, or drones, or driverless cars, come for those as well? Predictions vary but up to half of jobs are at least partially vulnerable to AI, from truck-driving, retail and warehouse work to medicine, law and accountancy. That's why the former US treasury secretary Larry Summers confessed in 2013 that he used to think "the Luddites were wrong, and the believers in technology and technological progress were right. I'm not so completely certain now." That same year, the economist and Keynes biographer Robert Skidelsky wrote that fears of technological unemployment were not so much wrong as premature: "Sooner or later, we will run out of jobs." Yet Skidelsky, like Keynes, saw this as an opportunity. If the doomsayers are to be finally proven right, then why not the utopians, too...? The work ethic, [Susskind] says, is a modern religion that purports to be the only source of meaning and purpose. "What do you do for a living?" is for many people the first question they ask when meeting a stranger, and there is no entity more beloved of politicians than the "hard-working family". Yet faced with precarious, unfulfilling jobs and stagnant wages, many are losing faith in the gospel of work. In a 2015 YouGov survey, 37% of UK workers said their jobs made no meaningful contribution. Susskind wonders in the final pages "whether the academics and commentators who write fearfully about a world with less work are just mistakenly projecting the personal enjoyment they take from their jobs on to the experience of everyone else". That deserves to be more than an afterthought. The challenge of a world without work isn't just economic but political and psychological... [I]s relying on work to provide self-worth and social status an inevitable human truth or the relatively recent product of a puritan work ethic? Keynes regretted that the possibility of an "age of leisure and abundance" was freighted with dread: "For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy." The state, Susskind concedes with ambivalence, will need to smooth the transition. Moving beyond the "Age of Labour" will require something like a universal basic income (he prefers a more selective conditional basic income), funded by taxes on capital to share the proceeds of technological prosperity. The available work will also need to be more evenly distributed. After decades of a 40-hour week, the recent Labour manifesto, influenced by Skidelsky, promised 32 hours by 2030. And that's the relatively easy part. Moving society's centre of gravity away from waged labour will require visionary "leisure policies" on every level, from urban planning to education, and a revolution in thinking. "We will be forced to consider what it really means to live a meaningful life," Susskind writes, implying that this is above his pay grade. The review concludes that "if AI really does to employment what previous technologies did not, radical change can't be postponed indefinitely. "It may well be utopia or bust."

  

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• Are We Teaching Engineers the Wrong Way to Think? (Slashdot)
  Tech columnist Chris Matyszczyk summarizes the argument of four researchers who are warning about the perils of pure engineer thought: They write, politely: "Engineers enter the workforce with important analysis skills, but may struggle to 'think outside the box' when it comes to creative problem-solving." The academics blame the way engineers are educated. They explain there are two sorts of thinking -- convergent and divergent. The former is the one with which engineers are most familiar. You make a list of steps to be taken to solve a problem and you take those steps. You expect a definite answer. Divergent thinking, however, requires many different ways of thinking about a problem and leads to many potential solutions. These academics declare emphatically: "Divergent thinking skills are largely ignored in engineering courses, which tend to focus on a linear progression of narrow, discipline-focused technical information." Ah, that explains a lot, doesn't it? Indeed, these researchers insist that engineering students "become experts at working individually and applying a series of formulas and rules to structured problems with a 'right' answer." Oddly, I know several people at Google just like that. Fortunately, the researchers are also proposing this solution: "While engineers need skills in analysis and judgment, they also need to cultivate an open, curious, and kind attitude, so they don't fixate on one particular approach and are able to consider new data."

  

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• The Big Highlights Of Wine 5.0 From FAudio Integration To Vulkan 1.1 + A Ton Of Bug Fixes (Phoronix)
  Wine 5.0 is still going through weekly release candidates but the stable release of Wine 5 is expected to land in the back-half of January. With that imminent release, here is a look at the big changes to find with this annual Wine update...
• 'Top Programming Skills' List Shows Employers Want SQL (Slashdot)
  Former Slashdot contributor Nick Kolakowski is now a senior editor at Dice Insights, where he's just published a list of the top programming skills employers were looking for during the last 30 days. If you're a software developer on the hunt for a new gig (or you're merely curious about what programming skills employers are looking for these days), one thing is clear: employers really, really, really want technologists who know how to build, maintain, and scale everything database- (and data-) related. We've come to that conclusion after analyzing data about programming skills from Burning Glass, which collects and organizes millions of job postings from across the country. The biggest takeaway? "When it comes to programming skills, employers are hungriest for SQL." Here's their ranking of the top most in-demand skills: SQLJava"Software development""Software engineering"PythonJavaScriptLinuxOracleC#Git The list actually includes the top 18 programming skills, but besides languages like C++ and .NET, it also includes more generalized skills like "Agile development," "debugging," and "Unix." But Nick concludes that "As a developer, if you've mastered database and data-analytics skills, that makes you insanely valuable to a whole range of companies out there."

  

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• NASA's SLS Heavy-Lift Moon Rocket Core Leaves For Testing (Slashdot)
  "The first core stage for the Space Launch System, intended to get us back to the moon by 2024, has left Boeing's manufacturing center in New Orleans for launch readiness test," writes long-time Slashdot reader Excelcia: This is very good news for the troubled project which has been plagued by delays and cost overruns. Back when it was thought the system would launch in 2017, the cost estimate was $19-$22 billion for the program. But now the race is on in earnest to see who can get super-heavy lift into orbit, and it looks like NASA is finally out of the starting gate. The next step is a full-power burn of the four Space Shuttle RS-25 engines. "Some in the space community believe it would be better to launch deep space missions on commercial rockets," reports the BBC. "But supporters of the programme say that NASA needs its own heavy-lift launch capability... The SLS was designed to re-use technology originally developed for the space shuttle programme, which ran from 1981-2011." All I know is that's an amazing photo of the enormous core stage -- the largest one ever built in NASA's Louisiana factory -- heading down a Louisiana highway.

  

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• Project Trident Reaches Beta For Its ZFS-Based Void Linux Powered OS (Phoronix)
  Making rounds in Q4 of last year was the little known Project Trident open-source operating system switching from its TrueOS/FreeBSD base to in turn moving to Void Linux as a base for their platform. Towards the end of the year they offered some initial images of their reborn OS while now Project Trident based on Void Linux has reached beta...

• Charter's Spectrum Kills Home Security Business, Refuses Refunds on Now-Worthless Equipment (Slashdot)
  Charter Comunications' Spectrum cable service includes a home security service, and -- whoops. No it doesn't. "Spectrum customers who are also users of the company's home security service are about a month away from being left with a pile of useless equipment that in many cases cost them hundreds of dollars," reports Gizmodo: On February 5, Spectrum will no longer support customers who've purchased its Spectrum Home Security equipment. None of the devices -- the cameras, motion sensors, smart thermostats, and in-home touchscreens -- can be paired with other existing services. In a few weeks, it'll all be worthless junk. While some of the devices may continue to function on their own, customers will soon no longer be able to access them using their mobile devices, which is sort of the whole point of owning a smart device... Spectrum is hoping to smooth things over with "exclusive offers" from other home security companies, including Ring, which is owned by Amazon... Spectrum apparently believes it can afford to aggravate these customers, some if not most of whom will have no choice but to continue paying Spectrum for internet service. Spectrum "inherited" the business after acquiring Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks in 2016, Gizmodo reports. "It's not offering refunds, though... The firmware on the devices doesn't allow switching to other services, either."

  

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• What Happens When a Nobel Prize-Winning Scientist Retracts A Paper? (Slashdot)
  An American scientist who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry just retracted their latest paper on Monday. Professor Arnold had shared the prize with George P Smith and Gregory Winter for their 2018 research on enzymes, reports the BBC (in an article shared by omfglearntoplay): It has been retracted because the results were not reproducible, and the authors found data missing from a lab notebook... "It is painful to admit, but important to do so. I apologize to all. I was a bit busy when this was submitted, and did not do my job well." That same day, Science published a note outlining why it would be retracting the paper, which Professor Arnold co-authored with Inha Cho and Zhi-Jun Jia. "Efforts to reproduce the work showed that the enzymes do not catalyze the reactions with the activities and selectivities claimed. Careful examination of the first author's lab notebook then revealed missing contemporaneous entries and raw data for key experiments. The authors are therefore retracting the paper." Professor Arnold is being applauded for acknowledging the mistake -- and has argued that science suffers when there's pressures not to: "It should not be so difficult to retract a paper, and it should not be considered an act of courage to publicly admit it... We should just be able to do it and set the record straight... The very quick and widespread response to my tweets shows how strong the fear of doing the right thing is (especially among junior scientists). However, the response also shows that taking responsibility is still appreciated by most people." Those remarks come from a Forbes article by the Professor of Health Policy and Management at the City University of New York. His own thoughts? What the heck happened with scientific research? Exploring, making and admitting mistakes should be part of the scientific process. Yet, Arnold's retraction and admission garnered such attention because it is a rare thing to do these days... If you need courage to do what should be a routine part of science, then Houston and every other part of the country, we've got a problem. And this is a big, big problem for science and eventually our society... [T]ruly advancing science requires knowing about the things that didn't work out and all the mistakes that happened. These shouldn't stay hidden deep within the recesses of laboratories and someone's notebook.

  

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• Linux In 2020 Can Finally Provide Sane Monitoring Of SATA Drive Temperatures (Phoronix)
  Here is another long overdue kernel change... For more than a decade there have been patches trying to get SATA/SCSI drive temperature monitoring working nicely within the Linux kernel but none of that work ever made it through for mainlining. That has left various user-space tools to provide the functionality, but in doing so that has required root access and not to mention the need to first install said utilities. Well, with Linux 5.6 in 2020, there is finally a proper drive temperature driver for disks and solid-state drives with temperature sensors...
• Marvell Is Plumbing Octeon TX2 Support Into The GCC Compiler (Phoronix)
  Marvell has been preparing the Octeon TX2 processor support for the GCC compiler, their next-generation version of the (originally Cavium) infrastructure/network processors now based on their ThunderX2 line...
• Steam's December Numbers Point To A Lower Linux Marketshare But With More Oddities (Phoronix)
  I refrained from writing about Valve's Steam Survey numbers at the start of January when they were posted for December as the numbers didn't seem up to scratch. But half-way through the month now, the same numbers are up with no edits by Valve, as we've seen in some months when they refine their measurements...

• It's 2020 And GCC Has Finally Converted From SVN To Git (Phoronix)
  I reported a few days ago GCC was hoping to transition to Git this weekend from their large SVN repository. Going into this weekend I wasn't going to be the least bit surprised if this transition got delayed again given all of the months of delays already, but actually, they went ahead and migrated to Git!..
• How Facebook Tried To Defend Its Privacy Policies at CES (Slashdot)
  Slashdot reader Tekla Perry found some interesting quotes in IEEE Spectrum's "View From the Valley" blog: Apple, Facebook, and Proctor & Gamble executives faced some tough questions about privacy during a CES panel, and pushback from U.S. FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter. In one exchanged, Facebook's representative argued that Apple's model of adding noise to data to keep it anonymous and avoiding sending too much data to the cloud wouldn't work for Facebook. "If you come to Facebook, you want to share," she said, continuing: "I take issue with the idea that the advertising we serve involves surveilling people. "We don't do surveillance capitalism, that by definition is surreptitious; we work hard to be transparent." The Facebook representative argued later that "we provide real value to people in terms of the advertising we deliver and we do it in a privacy protected way." But Apple's senior director of global privacy had already said "I don't think we can ever say we are doing enough." Despite the fact that Apple has "teams" of privacy lawyers as well as privacy engineers who consider every product, "We always have to be pushing the envelope, and figure out how to put the consumer in control of their data." "Everything that she said about Apple holds for Facebook," replied the Facebook representative. "But the question is what do people expect..." And at one point, Proctor & Gamble's representative even said "We collect the data to serve people."

  

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• KDE Devs Fix Several Wayland Bugs, Annoying KWin Issues Plus Easier To Toggle Night Color (Phoronix)
  KDE developers fixed a number of Wayland and KWin bugs this week along with a number of other annoying bugs as well as making several other noteworthy refinements to the growing KDE ecosystem...
• Australia's Wildfires Have Created More Emissions Than 116 Nations (Slashdot)
  "The wildfires raging along Australia's eastern coast have already pumped around 400 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere," reports MIT's Technology Review, "further fueling the climate change that's already intensifying the nation's fires." That's more than the total combined annual emissions of the 116 lowest-emitting countries, and nine times the amount produced during California's record-setting 2018 fire season. It also adds up to about three-quarters of Australia's otherwise flattening greenhouse-gas emissions in 2019. And yet, 400 million tons isn't an unprecedented amount nationwide at this point of the year in Australia, where summer bush fires are common, the fire season has been growing longer, and the number of days of "very high fire danger" is increasing. Wildfires emissions topped 600 million tons from September through early January during the brutal fire seasons of 2011 and 2012, according to the European Union's Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service. But emissions are way beyond typical levels in New South Wales, where this year's fires are concentrated. More than 5.2 million hectares (12.8 million acres) have burned across the southeastern state since July 1, according to a statement from the NSW Rural Fire Service... The situation grew more dangerous in recent days, as hot and windy conditions returned. Two giant fires merged into a "megafire" straddling New South Wales and Victoria, and covering some 600,000 hectares (1.5 million acres). The article also argues that wildfires are releasing carbon stored in the vegetation dried by warming temperatures. "That creates a vicious feedback loop, as the very impacts of climate change further exacerbate it, complicating our ability to get ahead of the problem."

  

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• This Year's Y2K20 Bug Came Directly From 'A Lazy Fix' to the Y2K Bug (Slashdot)
  Slashdot reader The8re still remembers the Y2K bug. Now he shares a New Scientist article explaining how it led directly to this year's Y2020 bug -- which affected more than just parking meters: WWE 2K20, a professional wrestling video game, also stopped working at midnight on 1 January 2020. Within 24 hours, the game's developers, 2K, issued a downloadable fix. Another piece of software, Splunk, which ironically looks for errors in computer systems, was found to be vulnerable to the Y2020 bug in November. The company rolled out a fix to users the same week -- which include 92 of the Fortune 100, the top 100 companies in the US.... The Y2020 bug, which has taken many payment and computer systems offline, is a long-lingering side effect of attempts to fix the Y2K, or millennium bug. Both stem from the way computers store dates. Many older systems express years using two numbers -- 98, for instance, for 1998 -- in an effort to save memory. The Y2K bug was a fear that computers would treat 00 as 1900, rather than 2000. Programmers wanting to avoid the Y2K bug had two broad options: entirely rewrite their code, or adopt a quick fix called "windowing", which would treat all dates from 00 to 20, as from the 2000s, rather than the 1900s. An estimated 80 percent of computers fixed in 1999 used the quicker, cheaper option. "Windowing, even during Y2K, was the worst of all possible solutions because it kicked the problem down the road," says Dylan Mulvin at the London School of Economics.... Another date storage problem also faces us in the year 2038. The issue again stems from Unix's epoch time: the data is stored as a 32-bit integer, which will run out of capacity at 3.14 am on 19 January 2038.

  

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• NASA Has Discovered an Earth-Sized World in a Star's Habitable Zone (Slashdot)
  "NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered its first Earth-size planet in its star's habitable zone, the range of distances where conditions may be just right to allow the presence of liquid water on the surface," reports NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center: Scientists confirmed the find, called TOI 700 d, using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and have modeled the planet's potential environments to help inform future observations. TOI 700 is a small, cool M dwarf star located just over 100 light-years away in the southern constellation Dorado. It's roughly 40 of the Sun's mass and size and about half its surface temperature. The star appears in 11 of the 13 sectors TESS observed during the mission's first year, and scientists caught multiple transits by its three planets. The innermost planet, called TOI 700 b, is almost exactly Earth-size, is probably rocky and completes an orbit every 10 days. The middle planet, TOI 700 c, is 2.6 times larger than Earth -- between the sizes of Earth and Neptune -- orbits every 16 days and is likely a gas-dominated world. TOI 700 d, the outermost known planet in the system and the only one in the habitable zone, measures 20 larger than Earth, orbits every 37 days and receives from its star 86% of the energy that the Sun provides to Earth. All of the planets are thought to be tidally locked to their star, which means they rotate once per orbit so that one side is constantly bathed in daylight... While the exact conditions on TOI 700 d are unknown, scientists used current information, like the planet's size and the type of star it orbits, and modeled 20 potential environments for TOI 700 d to gauge if any version would result in surface temperatures and pressures suitable for habitability. One simulation included an ocean-covered TOI 700 d with a dense, carbon-dioxide-dominated atmosphere similar to what scientists suspect surrounded Mars when it was young. The model atmosphere contains a deep layer of clouds on the star-facing side. Another model depicts TOI 700 d as a cloudless, all-land version of modern Earth, where winds flow away from the night side of the planet and converge on the point directly facing the star.

  

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• Wine-Staging 5.0-RC5 Brings Fix For Far Cry 5 Plus Sound Bug With Proton/ESYNC (Phoronix)
  Wine-Staging 5.0-RC5 is out today as usual, arriving just one day after the upstream Wine 5.0-rc5 release...
• Killer Robots Reconsidered: Could AI Weapons Actually Save Lives? (Slashdot)
  "On the surface, who could disagree with quashing the idea of supposed killer robots?" writes Slashdot reader Lasrick. "Dr. Larry Lewis, who spearheaded the first data-based approach to protecting civilians in conflict, wants us to look a bit closer." From the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: The proponents of a UN ban are in some respects raising a false alarm. I should know. As a senior advisor for the State Department on civilian protection in the Obama administration, I was a member of the US delegation in the UN deliberations on lethal autonomous weapons systems... Country representatives have met every year since 2014 to discuss the future possibility of autonomous systems that could use lethal force. And talk of killer robots aside, several nations have mentioned their interest in using artificial intelligence in weapons to better protect civilians. A so-called smart weapon -- say a ground-launched, sensor-fused munition -- could more precisely and efficiently target enemy fighters and deactivate itself if it does not detect the intended target, thereby reducing the risks inherent in more intensive attacks like a traditional air bombardment. I've worked for over a decade to help reduce civilian casualties in conflict, an effort sorely needed given the fact that most of those killed in war are civilians. I've looked, in great detail, at the possibility that automation in weapons systems could in fact protect civilians. Analyzing over 1,000 real-world incidents in which civilians were killed, I found that humans make mistakes (no surprise there) and that there are specific ways that AI could be used to help avoid them. There were two general kinds of mistakes: either military personnel missed indicators that civilians were present, or civilians were mistaken as combatants and attacked in that belief. Based on these patterns of harm from real world incidents, artificial intelligence could be used to help avert these mistakes... Artificial intelligence may make weapons systems and the future of war relatively less risky for civilians than it is today. It is time to talk about that possibility.

  

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• 'Why I Finally Switched from Chrome to Firefox - and You Should Too' (Slashdot)
  In 2018 an associate technology editor at Fast Company's Co.Design wrote an article titled "Why I'm switching from Chrome to Firefox and you should too." Today shanen shared a similar article from Digital Trends. Their writer announces that after years of experimenting with both browsers, they've also finally switched from Chrome to Mozilla Firefox -- "and you should too." The biggest draw for me was, of course, the fact that Mozilla Firefox can finally go toe-to-toe with Google Chrome on the performance front, and often manages to edge it out as well... Today, in addition to being fast, Firefox is resource-efficient, unlike most of its peers. I don't have to think twice before firing up yet another tab. It's rare that I'm forced to close an existing tab to make room for a new one. On Firefox, my 2015 MacBook Pro's fans don't blast past my noise-canceling headphones, which happened fairly regularly on Chrome as it pushed my laptop's fans to their helicopter-like limits to keep things running. This rare balance of efficiency and performance is the result of the countless under-the-hood upgrades Firefox has rolled out in the last couple of years... Its Enhanced Tracking Protection framework keeps your identity safe by blocking trackers and cookies that otherwise follow you around the internet and collect sensitive information you probably didn't even know you were giving up. On top of that, Firefox can warn if a website is covertly mining cryptocurrency in the background. Most of these protections kick in by default and you have an exhaustive set of options to customize them the way you want. Firefox also lets you look into just how invasive a website is. It actively updates your personal privacy report so you can check how many trackers it has shut overall and for a specific website... What really clinched the switch to Mozilla Firefox was the fact that it's the only cross-platform browser that's not running Google's open-source Chromium platform. Microsoft's Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi -- each of these browsers run on Chromium, accelerating Google's dominance over the web even when you're not directly using a Chrome user. Firefox, on the other hand, is powered by Mozilla's in-house Gecko engine that's not dependent on Chromium in any way. It may not seem like as vital of a trait as I make it sound, but it truly is, even though Chromium is open-source. Google oversees a huge chunk of the web, including ads, browser, and search, and this supremacy has allowed the company to pretty much run a monopoly and set its own rules for the open internet... Mozilla as a company has, despite a rocky journey, often taken bold stances in complex situations. In the Cambridge Analytica aftermath, Mozilla announced it would no longer run Facebook advertisements, cutting off direct marketing to over 2 billion users. In a world of tech companies taking frail, facile shots at protecting user privacy and barely delivering on their commitments, Mozilla is a breath of fresh air and you no longer have to live with any compromises to support it.

  

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• How a Chunk of Human Brain Survived Intact For 2600 Years (Slashdot)
  sciencehabit quotes Science magazine: Nearly 2600 years ago, a man was beheaded near modern-day York, U.K. -- for what reasons, we still don't know -- and his head was quickly buried in the clay-rich mud. When researchers found his skull in 2008, they were startled to find that his brain tissue, which normally rots rapidly after death, had survived for millennia -- even maintaining features such as folds and grooves. Now, researchers think they know why. Using several molecular techniques to examine the remaining tissue, the researchers figured out that two structural proteins -- which act as the "skeletons" of neurons and astrocytes -- were more tightly packed in the ancient brain. In a yearlong experiment, they found that these aggregated proteins were also more stable than those in modern-day brains. In fact, the ancient protein clumps may have helped preserve the structure of the soft tissue for ages, the researchers report today in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

  

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