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Slashdot readers hyperclocker and Hallux-F-Sinister have shared news about Walmart's new strategy to take on Amazon. In a nutshell, Walmart will use more of Microsoft's cloud services and work with the company on AI and machine learning projects. The goal is to reduce its energy consumption and improve its delivery systems. Hyperclocker shares an excerpt from a report: Today, Walmart announced that it has established a strategic partnership with Microsoft to, "further accelerate Walmart's digital transformation in retail, empower its associates worldwide and make shopping faster and easier for millions of customers around the world." What that means in reality is, Walmart is embracing Microsoft's cloud services and will run its digital operations by taking full advantage of Microsoft Azure and Office 365. The partnership agreement lasts for five years and starts with a team of Walmart and Microsoft engineers working together to transition the retailer to Microsoft's ecosystem. Hallux-F-Sinister provides some commentary: According to CNN Money, Walmart and Microsoft are ganging up on Amazon.com. I found myself wondering if this was more like Lex Luthor teaming up with the Joker to fight Sinestro, or Bruce Wayne letting Tony Stark use the Bat Computer to fight against the thing Richard Pryor's character designed in whichever godawful nineteen eighties-era Superman sequel he was in. The story itself would bore an accountant to tears, I am convinced, so I did not dare read it for fear of being rendered insensate; but here is the URL if you find you are in desperate need of sleep. Perhaps this other bit of news will wake you up: Walmart is also contemplating starting its own streaming service to compete with Amazon and Netflix. According to GeekWire, citing The Information, "Walmart is considering various ways to stand out, including undercutting Amazon and Netflix on price or offering an ad-supported free service."

Rep. Mike Coffman (R-CO) today announced his support for a bill that would institute the basic outlines of the FCC's 2015 Open Internet order, which banned the throttling and blocking of content as well as harmful paid prioritization practices. He is also the first Republican to sign on to the Democrat-led discharge petition, which aims to force a vote on the House floor to roll back the FCC's December decision to repeal net neutrality. The Verge reports: The 21st Century Internet Act aims to restructure the current framework by which the internet has been governed since the '90s. Coffman's bill moves past this argument by amending the 1934 Telecommunications Act and adding the new Title VIII. This new classification would "permanently codify into law the 'four corners' of net neutrality" by banning providers from controlling traffic quality and speed and forbidding them from participating in paid prioritization programs or charging access fees from edge providers.

On top of providing stable ground for net neutrality rules to be upheld in the future, the legislation also makes it illegal for providers to participate in "unfair or deceptive acts or practices." It directs the FCC to investigate claims of anticompetitive behavior on behalf of consumers after receiving their complaints. Transparency requirements are heightened for providers as well, as companies must publicly disclose information regarding their network practices to allow consumers to "make informed choices regarding use of such services."

Communist-run Cuba has started providing internet on the mobile phones of select users as it aims to roll out the service nationwide by year-end, in a further step toward opening one of the Western Hemisphere's least connected countries. From a report: Journalists at state-run news outlets were among the first this year to get mobile internet, provided by Cuba's telecoms monopoly, as part of a wider campaign for greater internet access that new President Miguel Diaz-Canel has said should boost the economy and help Cubans defend their revolution. Analysts said broader web access will also ultimately weaken the government's control of what information reaches people in the one-party island state that has a monopoly on the media. Cuba frowns on public dissent and blocks access to dissident websites.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Munro & Associates, a small Detroit-area firm that disassembles new cars and analyzes them down to the nuts and bolts, came out in April with damning findings that the Model 3 was poorly built and -- even worse for Tesla's long-term outlook -- costly to build. On that second point, at least, founder Sandy Munro has reversed course. Upon further analysis, his firm has found that the sedan can be profitable. It may even have the potential to make a 30 percent margin, which would be unmatched by any other other battery-powered vehicle. Munro said the systems that impressed him most were the tight integration of circuit board components, which he calls "a symphony of engineering," and the efficiency of the battery developed by Tesla and Panasonic Corp. Munro also pointed to a comprehensive side-by-side comparison of the parts and materials used by the Model 3, General Motors Co.'s Chevrolet Bolt, and BMW AG's i3, in which the Model 3 comes out favorably. The report echoes a teardown published in June by German magazine WirtschaftsWoche, which found that the Model 3 costs about $28,000 to build -- $18,000 for materials and $10,000 for production.

Netflix shares plunged by more than 14% on Monday, after the firm reported disappointing subscriber growth. While the entertainment service added 5.2 million subscribers last quarter, it forecasted a growth of 6.2 million. BBC reports: Investors are worried about Netflix's growth potential in the face of increased competition from tech giants such as Apple, YouTube and Amazon, as well as traditional firms, which have started to invest more in online streaming. Disney, for example, plans to launch its own streaming service and stop licensing some of its material to Netflix.

In a letter to investors, Netflix called it a "strong but not stellar quarter," ending with about 130 million subscribers globally. The firm added just 670,000 subscribers in the U.S. -- far short of the more than one million it added in the second quarter of 2017. It added 4.5 million subscribers internationally, fewer than the two most recent quarters but up 8% year-on-year. However, it said its finances were strong. The company reported $3.9 billion in quarterly revenue, up 40% compared to the second quarter of 2017. Profits totaled $384.3 million, almost six times the figure during the same period a year ago.

Netflix shares plunged by more than 14% on Monday, after the firm reported disappointing subscriber growth. While the entertainment service added 5.2 million subscribers last quarter, it forecasted a growth of 6.2 million. BBC reports: Investors are worried about Netflix's growth potential in the face of increased competition from tech giants such as Apple, YouTube and Amazon, as well as traditional firms, which have started to invest more in online streaming. Disney, for example, plans to launch its own streaming service and stop licensing some of its material to Netflix.

In a letter to investors, Netflix called it a "strong but not stellar quarter," ending with about 130 million subscribers globally. The firm added just 670,000 subscribers in the U.S. -- far short of the more than one million it added in the second quarter of 2017. It added 4.5 million subscribers internationally, fewer than the two most recent quarters but up 8% year-on-year. However, it said its finances were strong. The company reported $3.9 billion in quarterly revenue, up 40% compared to the second quarter of 2017. Profits totaled $384.3 million, almost six times the figure during the same period a year ago.

Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says Samsung will launch the Galaxy S10 in three different sizes: 5.8 inches, 6.1 inches, and 6.4 inches. They are nearly the same sizes that Kuo expects Apple's next series of iPhones to come in. The Verge reports: The larger two S10 models will include in-display fingerprint sensors, Kuo says, while the smaller model will include a fingerprint sensor on the side. That suggests the smaller model will be Samsung's entry-level offering, while the larger two will potentially have higher-end specs and features. Another recent rumor says the S10 might include five cameras, adding an additional wide angle option to the back and another lens to the front for capturing portrait effects. It's very likely plans will change between now and when the Galaxy S10 launches, which should be early next year. The next flagship smartphone to come from the South Korean company will be the Galaxy Note 9. It's expected to make its appearance at an event on August 9th.

After determining that a "small percentage" of 2015-2017 MacBook and MacBook Pro keyboards may experience sticky keys, Apple initiated a Keyboard Service Program. The company has been servicing affected keyboards for free, but the fix doesn't guarantee the problem won't emerge again. The new 2018 MacBook Pros feature third-generation keyboards that are intended to prevent the keys from getting stuck. "For this reason, some customers have been hoping that Apple will start swapping out second-generation keyboards with third-generation keyboards, as part of its service program, but MacRumors has learned that isn't the plan." From the report: When asked if Apple Stores and Apple Authorized Service Providers will be permitted to replace second-generation keyboards on 2016 and 2017 MacBook Pro models with the new third-generation keyboards, if necessary, Apple said, no, the third-generation keyboards are exclusive to the 2018 MacBook Pro. Hopefully, in that case, it means that Apple has quietly tweaked the second-generation keyboard to be more reliable. It wouldn't really make sense for Apple to replace keyboards with ones that are just as prone to break again, especially if the third-generation keyboards offer a fix.

One possibility is that the third-generation keyboards aren't backwards compatible with 2016 and 2017 MacBook Pro models to begin with. The keyboard is actually one part of a larger component called the "top case," which also has a glued-in battery, and the internal design could be tweaked in 2018 models.

After determining that a "small percentage" of 2015-2017 MacBook and MacBook Pro keyboards may experience sticky keys, Apple initiated a Keyboard Service Program. The company has been servicing affected keyboards for free, but the fix doesn't guarantee the problem won't emerge again. The new 2018 MacBook Pros feature third-generation keyboards that are intended to prevent the keys from getting stuck. "For this reason, some customers have been hoping that Apple will start swapping out second-generation keyboards with third-generation keyboards, as part of its service program, but MacRumors has learned that isn't the plan." From the report: When asked if Apple Stores and Apple Authorized Service Providers will be permitted to replace second-generation keyboards on 2016 and 2017 MacBook Pro models with the new third-generation keyboards, if necessary, Apple said, no, the third-generation keyboards are exclusive to the 2018 MacBook Pro. Hopefully, in that case, it means that Apple has quietly tweaked the second-generation keyboard to be more reliable. It wouldn't really make sense for Apple to replace keyboards with ones that are just as prone to break again, especially if the third-generation keyboards offer a fix.

One possibility is that the third-generation keyboards aren't backwards compatible with 2016 and 2017 MacBook Pro models to begin with. The keyboard is actually one part of a larger component called the "top case," which also has a glued-in battery, and the internal design could be tweaked in 2018 models.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Jeff Bezos is the richest person in modern history. The Amazon founder's net worth broke $150 billion in New York on Monday morning, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That's about $55 billion more than Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, the world's second-richest person. Bezos, 54, has now topped Gates in inflation-adjusted terms. The $100 billion mark that Gates hit briefly in 1999 at the height of the dot-com boom would be worth about $149 billion in today's dollars. That makes the Amazon chief executive officer richer than anyone else on earth since at least 1982, when Forbes published its inaugural wealth ranking. Bezos crossed the threshold just as Amazon prepares to kick off its 36-hour summer sales event, Prime Day. The company's share price was $1,825.73 at 11:10 a.m. in New York, extending its 2018 gain to 56 percent and giving Bezos a $150.8 billion fortune. A little more than a week ago, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg overtook Warren Buffett to become the world's third-richest person.

It's not just you. Amazon Prime Day started 15 minutes ago, and so far, it's not going well for Amazon. From a report: The landing page for Prime Day does not work. When most links are clicked, readers are sent to an error page or to a landing page that sends readers back to the main landing page. Direct links to the product pages, either from outside links or the single product placement on the landing page, seem to work fine. This is a huge blow to Amazon and its faux holiday Prime Day. The retailer has been pushing this event for weeks and there are some great deals to be had. It's not a good look for the world's largest retailer. Both the desktop website and mobile app are facing glitches, users said. Prime Day, which began just now, is a 36-hour shopping event. CNBC reports: Some users saw an error page featuring the "dogs of Amazon" and were never able to enter the site. Some got caught in a loop of pages urging them to "Shop all deals." Clicking the entry link for a specific category returned the user to the first page urging them to "Shop all deals." Some users successfully added items to their cart, only to receive an error message when trying to checkout and complete the purchase. Business Insider reports that several customers are threatening Amazon that they would cancel their Prime membership if the company is unable to resolve the glitches soon. Bloomberg offers some context on the significance of the any outrages on Amazon's website today: Trouble on the site spiked when the event began at 3 p.m. Eastern time, according to Downdetector.com, which monitors web trouble. Shoppers were expected to spend $3.4 billion on the site during the event, up more than 40 percent from a year earlier, according to Coresight Research.

Skype's redesign launched last year was met with mixed reviews, but the company is forging ahead by rolling out a number of its new features to other platforms, including the desktop. From a report: Microsoft today is launching Skype version 8.0 that will replace version 7.0 (aka Skype classic), the latter which will no longer function after September 1, 2018. The new release introduces a variety of features, including HD video and screen-sharing in calls, support for @mentions in chats, a chat media gallery, file and media sharing up to 300 MB, and more. It will also add several more features this summer, including most notably, supported for encrypted audio calls, texts, and file sharing as well as built-in call recording. The 8.0 release follows on the update to Skype desktop that rolled out last fall, largely focusing on upgrading the visual elements of new design, like the color-coding in chat messages and "reaction" emojis. This release also included the chat media gallery and file sharing support, which are touted as new today, but may have already hit your desktop.

Skype's redesign launched last year was met with mixed reviews, but the company is forging ahead by rolling out a number of its new features to other platforms, including the desktop. From a report: Microsoft today is launching Skype version 8.0 that will replace version 7.0 (aka Skype classic), the latter which will no longer function after September 1, 2018. The new release introduces a variety of features, including HD video and screen-sharing in calls, support for @mentions in chats, a chat media gallery, file and media sharing up to 300 MB, and more. It will also add several more features this summer, including most notably, supported for encrypted audio calls, texts, and file sharing as well as built-in call recording. The 8.0 release follows on the update to Skype desktop that rolled out last fall, largely focusing on upgrading the visual elements of new design, like the color-coding in chat messages and "reaction" emojis. This release also included the chat media gallery and file sharing support, which are touted as new today, but may have already hit your desktop.

Speaking on the sidelines of the Surface Go launch, Microsoft's Panos Panay, who heads the Surface division, once again very much reiterated that the company has moved past its smartphone ambitions. From a report: In an interview with Wired, Microsoft's Surface head Panos Panay confirmed that the company is working on new form factors. When questioned about whether this would include a new Surface Phone, Panay stated that the Surface Phone was not one that they are thinking about at this time. "I wouldn't say that it includes a Surface Phone," Panos answered in the interview. "I think you have to think about where is that unmet need when you're thinking about your product road-map," he replied. "Of course, we're always inventing, of course, we're thinking about new form factors," Panos added. "The way people will communicate in the future will change. The form factors will wrap around that. And so when you say the phone form factor changes, I would flip it a little bit and say that communication changes."

An anonymous reader writes: "Login passwords for tens of thousands of Dahua devices have been cached inside search results returned by ZoomEye, a search engine for discovering Internet-connected devices (also called an IoT search engine)," reports Bleeping Computer. A security researcher has recently discovered that instead of just indexing IoT devices, ZoomEye is also sending an exploitation package to devices and caching the results, which also include cleartext DDNS passwords that allow an attacker remote access to these devices. Searching for the devices is trivial and simple queries can unearth tens of thousands of vulnerable Dahua DVRs. According to the security researcher who spotted these devices, the trick has been used in the past year by the author of the BrickerBot IoT malware, the one who was on a crusade last year, bricking unsecured devices in an attempt to have them go offline instead of being added to IoT botnets.

Last week, Apple refreshed the 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pro models, bringing newer Intel processors and quieter keyboards. The new 13-inch MacBook Pro also just so happens to feature the fastest SSD ever in a laptop, according to benchmarks from Laptop Mag. Mac Rumors summarizes the findings: The site's tests were performed on the $2,499 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar equipped with a 2.7GHz quad-core 8th-generation Core i7 processor, 16GB RAM, Intel Iris Plus 655, and a 512GB SSD. A file copy test of the SSD in the new MacBook Pro, which Apple says supports sequential read speeds of up to 3.2GB/s and sequential write speeds up to 2.2GB/s, led Laptop Mag to declare the SSD in the MacBook Pro "the fastest ever" in a laptop. Higher capacity SSDs may see even faster speeds on disk speeds tests. A BlackMagic Disk Speed test was also conducted, resulting in an average write speed of 2,682 MB/s.

On a Geekbench 4 CPU benchmark, the 13-inch MacBook Pro earned a score of 18,055 on the multi-core test, outperforming 13-inch machines from companies like Dell, HP, Asus, and Microsoft. That score beats out all 2017 MacBook Pro models and is faster than some iMac configurations. 15-inch MacBook Pro models with 6-core 8th-generation Intel chips will show even more impressive speeds. With that said, the 13-inch MacBook Pro didn't quite measure up to other machines when it came to GPU performance. "The 13-inch 2018 MacBook Pro uses Intel's Iris Plus Graphics 655 with 128MB of embedded DRAM and was unable to compete in a Dirt 3 graphics test, getting only 38.8 frames per second," reports Mac Rumors. "All Windows-based machines tested offered much better performance."

ArenaNet narrative designer Jessica Price was fired last week after she accused a Twitter user of "mansplaining", and adding later "Don't expect me to pretend to like you here." (Her employer characterized this as "attacks on the community.")

So what happened in the week that followed? An anonymous reader writes: A Reddit user indicated he'd been speaking satirically when he posted that "We can probably fire anyone on the GW2 dev team as long we make a big enough stink," and expressed surprise later that no one had disagreed with him. But another female developer told Kotaku she saw a real call to action on 4chan, and that it was followed by angry letters to the game studio she freelances for calling for her firing too, complaining their games had declined since she was hired (along with another woman). The letters also complained her Twitter account set "a bad example for the letter-writer's children, who supposedly play this game." The company's CEO received "a three-digit number's" worth of angry letters -- though "Fifty or so of them glitched out with a lot of variables exposed, including %FEMALENAME."

"A deeper look at the names and emails associated with the letters went to Facebook bot profiles and people whose profiles indicated associations with Gamergate or 4chan," reports Kotaku -- and Brianna Wu made a similar charge on Twitter last week, citing research by a team of volunteers. "The overwhelming majority of people harassing Jessica Price today on Twitter are bots and sock puppets. These are throwaway accounts that are used as toys. Almost no one claiming to be upset is an established, normal Twitter user." The Verge reports that Wu monitored Jessica Price's account, and found harassment "as bad as she's ever seen," blocking at least 600 different accounts.

Another female narrative designer at Arkane Studios says her employer was messaged with a complaint that she'd "verbally abused" a Twitter user -- and discovered a (since-deleted) online petition calling for her firing. And an angry message was also sent to Opaque Space (collaborating with NASA on VR games and training), complaining the company should take responsibility for the "man hating ideals...spread through social media accounts" by their game design lead. "I know MANY people like me, especially women, who have frequent experience with people calling for their employers to fire them for speaking up, speaking out," she posted on Twitter.
The latest furor began with an accusation of mansplaining which a YouTube streamer defended as "my obvious attempt at creating dialogue and discussion", calling it "disheartening" that Jessica Price didn't "correct me in my false assumptions."

Thursday Elon Musk gave a surprisingly candid interview about Tesla's massive push to increase production of Model 3 sedans to 5,000 a week. An anonymous reader quotes Musk's remarks to Bloomberg: I spent almost the entire time in the factory the final week, and yeah, it was essentially three months with a tiny break of like one day that I wasn't there. I was wearing the same clothes for five days. Yeah, it was really intense. And everybody else was really intense, too... I think we had to prove that we could make 5,000 cars in a week -- 5,000 Model 3s and at the same time make 2,000 S and X's, so essentially show that we could make 7,000 cars. We had to prove ourselves. The number of people who thought we would actually make it is very tiny, like vanishingly small. There was suddenly the credibility of the company, my credibility, you know, the credibility of the whole team. It was like, "Can you actually do this or not?"

There were a lot of issues that we had to address in order to do it. You know, we had to create the new general assembly line in basically less than a month -- to create it and get to an excess of a 1,000-cars-a-week rate in like four weeks... A lot of the hoped-for automation was counterproductive. It's not like we knew it would be bad, because why would we buy a ticket to hell...? A whole bunch of the robots are turned off, and it was reverted to a manual station because the robots kept faulting out. When the robot faults out -- like the vision system can't figure out how to put the object in -- then you've got to reset the system. You've got to manually seat the components. It stops the whole production line while you sort out why the robot faults out.
When the interviewer asks why that happens, Musk replies, "Because we were huge idiots and didn't know what we were doing. That's why."

An anonymous reader quotes PCWorld: The critical Meltdown and Spectre bugs baked deep into modern computer processors will have ramifications on the entire industry for years to come, and Chrome just became collateral damage. Google 67 enabled "Site Isolation" Spectre protection for most users, and the browser now uses 10 to 13 percent more RAM due to how the fix behaves.

"Site Isolation does cause Chrome to create more renderer processes, which comes with performance tradeoffs," Googleâ(TM)s Charlie Reis says. "On the plus side, each renderer process is smaller, shorter-lived, and has less contention internally, but there is about a 10-13% total memory overhead in real workloads due to the larger number of processes. Our team continues to work hard to optimize this behavior to keep Chrome both fast and secure." It's a significant performance hit, especially for a browser battling a reputation for being a memory hog, but a worthwhile one nonetheless.
Chrome's Spectre-blocking site isolation "is now enabled by default for 99 percent of Chrome users on all platforms."

You asked questions, we've got the answers!

Christine Peterson is a long-time futurist who co-founded the nanotech advocacy group the Foresight Institute in 1986. One of her favorite tasks has been contacting the winners of the institute's annual Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology, but she also coined the term "Open Source software" for that famous promotion strategy meeting in 1998.

Christine took some time to answer questions from Slashdot readers.
What exactly happened in 1998?
by Anonymous Coward

Prior to 1998, had you heard anyone using the phrase "open source" before? Or was it something you came up with on your own as the only logical set of words to describe source code which is openly shared.

Starting earlier, our non-profit, Foresight Institute, had been holding a series of small invitational meetings at our office in Los Altos, focused on our free software project and the field in general. One topic of discussion that came up now and then was the problem of the name free software and how it confused newcomers into thinking that the main point was the price because, sadly, in English our word for "free as in freedom" and "free as in price" are the same. (In Spanish they wisely use different words for these two concepts.) But nothing had yet been suggested that seemed good enough to catch on.

Sometime after that the term "open source software" popped into my mind, and my immediate thought was "that's good enough." Not ideal, not great, but good enough to solve the problem. I ran it by a few friends including Mark Miller and Eric Drexler, and they agreed it was probably good enough. One other friend, who worked in PR, thought that "open" had already been overused in the software field, which was true, but it seemed appropriate in this context so I decided to go ahead with the idea anyway.

Eric Raymond came to visit Silicon Valley in connection with the transition of the Netscape code from proprietary to publicly available, so we met again to discuss these new developments. While there Eric took a call from two people from Netscape, and when he was done I asked to speak to them, a man and a woman (possibly Mitchell Baker?). I mentioned the name problem and they agreed, but none of us then had a better term to suggest.

When Eric Raymond visited again, he needed to have other local meetings and doesn't drive, so I offered to drive him around. That's when I found myself sitting in on the meeting at VA Research that included Larry Augustin, Sam Ockman, and "maddog" by phone; I wasn't invited to it. Probably the others thought I was Eric's chauffeur or even his girlfriend. Prior to the meeting I had discussed the "open source software" idea with Todd Anderson, who was also at this meeting, but not with Eric himself, whom I didn't know as well at this point. Being a non-programmer, I had pretty much zero status at this meeting, except with the two who already knew me, so I didn't feel it would work to just say "Hey, here's why you guys all need to use my terminology for your field." The meeting was primarily on broader free software topics anyway, so I just listened and didn't see an opening. Fortunately, Todd was on the ball and tried an interesting tactic: he just used the term casually, not introducing it formally but just throwing it out there in another context. Of course then I perked up and started paying closer attention to see what would happen, if anything. A few minutes later someone else, who hadn't been informed in advance, spontaneously used it, again in a context unrelated to a change in terminology. Todd and I looked at each other and smiled: the meme had jumped successfully!

Later in the meeting, as a rather minor matter compared to the rest of it, the group had a brief discussion and agreed that open source software would be a useful term. No attention was paid then to who suggested it originally, which was fine with me. Later on, Eric even briefly thought it was he himself who came up with it (which would be quite a plausible thing for him to do), but Todd took the initiative to let him know that it was me, and immediately Eric was super gracious about correcting the record on that.

At the time, Todd told me that someday I would be glad to have credit for this, and he was quite right about that. So thank you Todd, wherever you are (and please get in touch).

I don't recall hearing the phrase before it popped into my head, though I found out later that it has long been widely used in the "intelligence" (i.e., spy) field to refer to publicly available information content, so the usage is similar enough to not be a problem. Since the recent coverage of the 20th anniversary, a couple of previous uses in a software context have turned up also. But since I was neither in software nor in intelligence, I probably did not see any of these uses.

I've seen a couple of commenters suggesting that I should defend a claim to having coined the term. Fortunately for me, I don't need to do this, because that decision is not based on my current input or comments. It's an open source community decision based on past experiences, and as a non-programmer I don't even get a vote on this. I just have to accept whatever the community decides, which is why I waited twenty years to let things settle out before publishing my own account.

For a more of the history, see my longer version at Opensource.com. (The OSI history page lists Michael Tiemann also at the VA Research meeting, which is probably correct though I don't recall it. It also has the meeting dated two days earlier than my notes indicate; sadly my calendar data from those days is not accessible format-wise anymore.)

What was it like in 1998?
by DevNull127

As someone who worked closely with Eric Raymond (and had interactions with Jon "maddog" Hall), what were they like in 1998? I'm curious what the whole "mood" of the development community was like in 1998 at that historic meeting. Maybe you could also talk about how things changed -- what they were like before the Open Source movement revved into high gear, and what they were like after.

And how does it all compare to when you first joined the tech scene in the 1980s?

CP: When I arrived in Silicon Valley in 1985, we were still in the early days of the personal computer. Most people did not have an email address or even a fax machine. Only visionaries like Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart were talking about hypertext and the future of online personal computing. At that time, working on Nelson's Xanadu Hypertext Project was one of the few ways available to move toward that future, and it was through that project that I met many very smart software people including Mark S. Miller and Dean Tribble (who have just started a new company, Agoric, to advance secure smart contracts). It was an exciting time in terms of knowing the potential, but frustrating because the underlying chips were still slow, with little memory or graphics functionality, and online communications were done over regular phone lines using modems, painfully slow.

I vividly recall when Martin Haeberli came to the Foresight office to show us an early MOSAIC browser. It wasn't super impressive at that time, but he explained that this was the start of what would become a world of online hypertext, and he was right. The early days of the World Wide Web were extremely exciting to those of us who had been inspired by Nelson's and Engelbart's visions of hypertext. FINALLY we got to make links! But also they had an undercurrent of intense frustration, because so many of the visionary features were missing, such as automatic micropayments to authors for their original publications and even their quotes used elsewhere online. But the term micropayment was seen by many as anathema, because "information should be free." Even back then, some of us knew that there was no such thing as a free lunch, and that expenses must be paid somehow. It's this lack of micropayments to content providers that has led to today's ubiquitous business model of selling users' personal information and manipulating them using highly-targeted ads, and the negative effects of that on society.

At the time, the open-sourcing of Netscape was seen as yet another innovative Silicon Valley company succumbing to unfair pressure by the all-powerful behemoth Microsoft. This sad situation had the silver lining of bringing an exciting browser project into the free software world. But the small startups trying to do support for free software were having a heck of a time explaining to customers why they should have to pay anything at all to use "free software". (And of course they don't, if they are good enough at dealing with code...which most people, including me, are not.) This awkwardness is what led to the addition of "open source software" to the original -- and still useful -- name "free software".

I did not get to know maddog, but in 1998 Eric Raymond was the one who was most active in doing public outreach, especially media, on behalf of open source. He worked very hard for months or years, unpaid to my knowledge, to promote these ideas and the community. There were many others of course, including Bruce Perens who with Eric co-founded Open Source Initiative to defend the ideas and approve licenses that met the new Open Source Criteria they wrote. Tim O'Reilly played a key role by convening and hosting the community in meetings to make group decisions. And of course we should remember Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, which had been and still are doing similar work under the original term.

To me as a relative outsider, it seemed that there was a big change when the new term was introduced, which happened very close in time to the Netscape open-sourcing. I had been reading Slashdot occasionally, mainly to admire the way it was designed and enabled users to interact much more effectively that other systems I'd seen. But when the new term arrived, it seemed that suddenly there was a fast ramp-up of attention and especially media coverage of the field. For a while it seemed like every day there was a new exciting development in "open source", which often appeared in quotes because it was so new. And these were appearing in non-programmer publications, ultimately in mainstream news media. Reading Slashdot became a daily necessity, especially for me, since I was getting some kind of thrilling brain chemistry surge every time I saw the term used. I still do, but it's smaller now: a nano surge.

Nanotech Prognosis / Open Source Utopia
by qaute

What's the current outlook for nanotechnology? Technically speaking, do we get Star Trek replicators soon, or is that still a 25+ year thing?

The ultimate dream in nanotechnology is a molecular assembler (atomic 3D printer) on every desktop, with a widespread community of hardware designers/developers analogous to open source software today. You'll be able to, say, download files to build a new car from GitHub. Hackaday has a good writeup. Suppose that someone finally figures out how to build such a molecular assembler. Chances are it'll be patent-encumbered and NDA'd. How can we [get] from here to there...? Politically, how do regulations, industry, and patents look?

Socially, is it generally viewed as positive or negative these days?

CP: Let's say that the goal is an open-source molecular 3D printer able to construct molecular machinery, plus a large library of open-source designs to use with the device. Let's divide this into the hardware components and software components.

It's taken decades and billions of dollars investment to get us where we are today in conventional hardware chips. That kind of investment has not been made yet in molecular machinery. I think eventually we would get there using human chemists, but it appears that instead there will be a shortcut. Progress in artificial intelligence is moving faster now, and I expect that instead of human chemists and human designers of molecular machinery and associated construction pathways, this work will be done faster via AI. We do not need AGI (artificial general intelligence) to do this. Targeted knowledge of chemistry and design engineering are what is needed, and that's coming sooner than AGI. So it could well be sooner than 25+ years depending on AI progress, but (and here's the catch) if that happens, the world will be changing in many other ways also, both positive and negative, to the extent that we may have other issues to deal with instead of having the opportunity of focusing on writing open source code for atomically-precise manufacturing.

Regarding regulations and patents: there's no particular regulatory focus on molecular machinery just now, and there probably won't be much until an actual problem crops up. As an example, consider the recent hearings on Facebook: the US legislators are not educated enough on those issues to grapple effectively with them. Patents seem likely to continue to be used whenever a company does the work, unless it sees a strategic advantage to open-sourcing the work.

I don't think that nanotech or atomically-precise manufacturing is on the public radar these days, either positive or negative. The nanotech term itself has become a marketing term for anything with at least one nanoscale dimension, so the average person who hears it probably thinks that we already have nanotech and therefore it's not a big deal. But it's not clear that we need or want the average person to be paying attention to atomically-precise manufacturing just now anyway, so maybe that's just as well.

Open source or free software
by Jim Hall

Some people prefer one term over the other. I'm curious: all these years later, do you still prefer the term open source software or are you more aligned to Free software?

CP: I use both terms, depending on context. When I'm with longtime hackers such as John Gilmore who naturally use the earlier term, I use it too. And of course if one is at a meeting of the Free Software Foundation, it's polite to use their preferred terminology.

However in dealing with non-software people or young people, I believe that the open source term is much clearer and therefore more useful. I tried doing a search on the two terms, and they are both in active use, but I found more "open source software" than "free software" usages. (This is a very crude measure and may be wrong, of course.)

Probably in Spanish-speaking countries, where they have the words gratis and libre to distinguish our two meanings for the English word free, there is less reason to use the new term. Someone could do a PhD dissertation comparing how the new term spread in the English-speaking world vs. the Spanish-speaking world. That would enable us to tease apart how much the newer term spread due to the free/free confusion problem vs. any more intrinsic value it may have, e.g., implying that the source code is open to public view.

Open source and medicine
by AmiMoJo

How can we get more open source medical software? Given that medical devices are so heavily regulated it seems like it will be hard to get, say, an open source pacemaker system that users can hack, or at least audit.

Radio software seems to be in a similar state - cellular modems, wifi chipsets etc. are all heavily regulated and closed source, with signed code required for updates.

CP: As far as I can tell, the Internet of Things world is still using the "security through obscurity" model. Given that, regulators are naturally going to favor closed source code, since that seems to be a way to reduce the likelihood of attacks.

If we want regulators to approve open source software for important devices, we need to show that it's as secure, or preferably more secure, than closed source code.

Although I am not a programmer, I have paid enough attention to this general issue to be intrigued with object capabilities (ocaps) as a path forward toward more secure code, whether closed and open source.

Currently the most serious effort I'm aware of in this area is Agoric.

There are (at least) two problems that ocaps does not solve. Social engineering will continue to be an issue, though my understanding is that ocaps reduces the damage that these can cause. Finally, there is the problem of compromised hardware: deliberate back doors designed into our computer chips; this is a huge problem with only very expensive solutions; see the hardware question below for more on this.

For more on security, see the paper Cyber, Nano, and AGI Risks: Decentralized Approaches to Reducing Risks, by myself, Mark S. Miller, and Allison Duettmann, from the proceedings of UCLA's First International Colloquium on Catastrophic and Existential Risk (2017).

Pollution
by lhowaf

Nano-materials, in general, seem to be becoming a significant source of hard-to-cleanup pollution. Do you see nano-tech heading in the same direction?

CP: The long-term goal of atomically-precise nanotech is the complete control of the structure of matter (to the extent we care about that structure). This would include extremely advanced abilities to clean up the natural environment. The question is what the pathway looks like to get there, and how clean can we make that pathway? This last question is a matter of what we decide to do. If society decides that preventing nanoscale pollution is a priority, then we'll do much better than if we don't try. It's at least possible to consider how to make this happen commercially, through traditional regulatory mechanisms. The more difficult challenge is military use, and use in regions which don't prioritize environmental values. No easy answers here. But the ultimate goal, at least, is a very clean environment, and it should be achievable eventually. It was this prospect that drew me into trying to advance this field in the first place.

How to deal with nanotech hype problem?
by Goldsmith

I am a nanotechnologist. I've done great academic research, worked for the government, managed a few grants, and started a few companies. It's very easy to hype the potential of nanotechnology. On the other hand, it's very hard to get attention put on results from serious commercial efforts. Granting agencies and our community are not good at supporting companies that do what we all tell each other needs to get done (i.e. NanoIntegris). We are great at supporting academic research groups that have a patina of commercial application (i.e. IBM).

As a field we've missed celebrating a number of major commercialization milestones. CNT and graphene electronics are available commercially! Who knew? For five years or so, you could find commercial graphene electronics in cell phone screens in Shenzhen. For the last two years, you could find commercial graphene biosensors at many big pharma companies. For the last year, you could buy CNT based high power RF electronics.

If we were interested in showing the real potential of the field, wouldn't the leaders want to show everyone that it IS working? We have actually met the NNI timeline for commercialization set in the 1990s. The goals we set out with 20 years ago seem to mean nothing to the hype machine we've created.

Simply put, how do we deal with the addiction to hype in nanotechnology, and focus a bit more on substantive accomplishment?

CP: I'm speaking here from a US perspective. This problem is not unique to nanotechnology, or even to technology in general. It's part of a general decline that has at least two sources, the decline in education standards and the decline of serious journalism, resulting in a hype culture with hype consumers who cannot tell the difference among exciting current technologies, valid engineering prospects, and complete nonsense.

It takes substantial science background to understand why nanotech and atomically-precise manufacturing are interesting, and few in our society today have that background. Our K-12 system is largely broken. Many of our colleges and universities now optimize for student entertainment and enjoyment, rather than the hard road of learning science and engineering.

Serious journalism has been decimated -- worse than decimated, including science and technology journalism. Consumers want all their information for free, and in many cases, you get what you pay for in this area as in others. Could micropayments help? Perhaps something built into the browser sending pennies or fraction of pennies to content originators? I am not sure. It seems worth a try. It could at least help with the privacy problem.

As for the education problem: we need to admit the disaster and try some major experiments. For example, some blame the decline of university standards on deceptively easy loans to students who don't realize what they are getting into. Glenn Reynolds has written books worth reading on this general problem of educational decline in the US, and I would look to him for ideas on solutions.

To me, compared to earlier decades, US society overall seems kind of decadent, cynical, in a cultural decline. I hope we can turn this around somehow. People like Slashdot readers give me hope. And there are still many, many people truly working to make the world a better place, including here in Silicon Valley. My view of Silicon Valley has a positive bias because I meet people through Foresight Institute, which helps select for good folks. I invite you all to join our email list (use blue button on this page) and come to our events. Some are research workshops (e.g., application form for Atomic Precision for Longevity workshop) and some are more accessible, such as our salons and Vision Weekend (videos). If you like what you see, consider donating; we are entirely supported by individual donations from great folks like the open source community.

Why Nanotechnology, for Laypeople
by qaute

Integrated circuits, solar panels, and GMOs are some pretty big results in nanotech these days. What are some future benefits we can look forward to that help justify further research to non-techies?

CP: My own focus is on the long term, very advanced applications such as molecular repair of the human body, ending disease and even aging itself. To me this is highly motivating! That's on top of the original goal of restoring the environment that drew me in originally.

Coming up with near- and intermediate-term applications is harder. This is why venture capitalists make lots of money, when they do their job well. Picking winning new applications is so challenging, especially in getting the timing right.

I can say this: amazing new catalysts and filtration technologies are on the way. Sound boring? It is totally not. Huge energy savings, cheap clean water for everyone (this would even help prevent wars), even blood filtration to take out all the stuff that should not be there.

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Nanotech threat landscape
by bjorng

How concerned should we be about nanotechnology equivalents of the software threats we see today? I would hate to have my circulatory system held hostage for bitcoin.

The Nanotechnology Corollary to Metsploit
by Anonymous Coward

The Internet of Things (IoT) seems to be a ramp-up to Micro-Electromechanical Machines (MEMs), which, in turn, will prime another ramp into atomic-scale nanotechnology. But already, security is atrocious. Worse than Windows XP's exploitation, endless automatic updates and a constant avalanche of zero-day patches.

What will a metasploit framework and CVE database for IoT, MEMs and smaller systems look like? How will biomedical bug bounties, vulnerabilities, exploits and weaponized payloads play themselves out?
________________________________________________________________________________

CP: We should be very concerned and more important, very vigilant. We need to solve today's Internet of Insecure Things as soon as possible, before even more of our world is controlled by software. As mentioned above, I am placing my hope in Agoric and object capabilities in general. There are also suggestions for how to address the insecure chip problem, though they are expensive and have performance costs as well; see the question from AmiMoJo below.

Recent improvements in physical security
by AmiMoJo

Recently big gains have been made in physical security. Many phones are encrypted by default and relatively difficult for unauthorized persons to unlock. Encrypted storage is increasingly common for computers too, although open source support for technologies like OPALv2 seems to be lagging behind closed source systems. In 2017 AMD introduced encrypted RAM.

All of these rely on special hardware to protect encryption keys and perform encryption functions at speeds fast enough to avoid any significant performance loss. It seems like hardware is necessary for very high levels of physical security anyway, e.g. tamper-proof boot ROMs.

How can open source provide this level of security when high end hardware is increasingly difficult for individuals to fabricate? Should we be thinking about how we can fabricate our own security processors and key storage, or is there another way to achieve high levels of physical security?

CP: My understanding from Mark S. Miller is that yes, we need to be thinking about fabricating our own chips, if we want to get around the problem of deliberately-installed backdoors.

In the paper cited above we write, "In the near term one can imagine a technology example that can be secure against those risks: a good open source processor design for which there is a proof of security comparable to the proof of security of the seL4 software. There are many open source processor designs that are sufficiently high performance that, when run on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA), can run fast enough to be practical for many applications. By combining these well-designed processors with a layout algorithm that randomizes layout decisions, the processor could be randomly laid out for each individual hardware instance. Given this randomized layout, there is no feasible corruption of the FPGA hardware that can escape notice under electron microscopes and that would also be able to successfully corrupt most instances of the processor."

UPDATE: After writing the above, I met with Mark and he explained that another approach has been found to the problem of insecure chips. At the recent Zcon0 conference, a method was described using zkSnarks and/or Coda. It's not financially practical yet, and doesn't fix leakage of data, but addresses the integrity issue. This is way outside my area of expertise. Eventually, the Agoric website will have many relevant documents on these topics, but not yet.

50 years ahead
by EngineeringStudent

I heard a myth a few decades ago, that top-secret work in most fields is at least 50 years ahead of the current published state of the art. I can't begin to imagine what that would look like here. What sorts of things do you think are solidly plausible within the next 50 years of work in the field of nano-technology, and how would we detect them "in the field" today, if we were to look for them...?

I know there were published discussions about silicon based listening and transmitting devices, bugs, that were smaller than grains of salt. I also know that there was great published fervor over single-pixel cameras, and, in my personal opinion, I have seen a surprising gap in entangled non-return imaging. I expect "they" have working, single-photon, non-return-imaging cameras on grains of silicon too small for the eye to work with, so perhaps nano drone swarms used for data gathering/surveillance, where each drone is less than 0.1mm across?

When I look at robo-cat, and the alleged robo-squirrels or robo-insects, I think they have such swarms that can be ingested/injected/otherwise-implanted inside animals that don't realize they have become "listening posts". What would you do with a fully-functional jet-engine that was only a few microns across? I remember sub-cellular size bar-codes made by shooting proton based cylindrical holes in silicon, then lithographing layers of gold or other stuff to make the code, then removing the silicon substrate. Could we put markers into people to inform future medical reconstruction such as "non-invasive" 3d printing of organs in-vivo? How would we detect sub-cell-size tagging, or fabrication? I like the idea of nanotech-driven bio-energy harvesting. Why can't we turn trees into solar panels by hacking into their organic photosynthesis?

CP: These areas are above my pay grade, but for inspiration on what could be possible in 50 years I would look at high-quality hard science fiction. Some of those writers pay close attention to physical limits. Yes, the surveillance technology should be amazingly good (or bad, depending on one's point of view). I'm not sure we would need advance markers in the body in order to do great 3D printing of organs in vivo, but I could be wrong on that. Eventually I expect we will come up with physical barriers that only allow understood molecular structures to pass though, to avoid having to detect sub-cell size tagging inside our bodies, when it's harder to find. But that's very long-term and ambitious.

Is physical security a political problem?
by Anonymous Coward

How to defend against molecule-sized machines is a question, but there is a meta-question there: will we be subject to constant false flag attacks and entrapment? Year 2030: Great Leader or Deep State accuses you of carrying a nanotech attack. You and perhaps people of your supporting network get disappeared into high security facilities, solitary confinement and all. Can we disprove the authorities' lies? Will people be able to know... Will there be anyone left to speak for you?

CP: Yes, this is a meta question and not about nanotech per se. If government is so dysfunctional and corrupt that the scenario above can take place, we have already lost. Our goal has to be to prevent that level of corruption from taking hold. Edmund Burke wrote, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." To take a US perspective, there have been various times in our country's history when the smartest and most civic-minded people have turned their attention to political matters, to get them straightened out for their own generation and those to come. Jefferson wrote, "We will be soldiers, so our sons may be farmers, so their sons may be artists." Sadly, it's looking like it's time to turn from being artists to being soldiers -- not physical soldiers, but soldiers in the fight for freedom, openness, and other values the open source community cares about.

You asked questions, we've got the answers!

Christine Peterson is a long-time futurist who co-founded the nanotech advocacy group the Foresight Institute in 1986. One of her favorite tasks has been contacting the winners of the institute's annual Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology, but she also coined the term "Open Source software" for that famous promotion strategy meeting in 1998.

Christine took some time to answer questions from Slashdot readers.
What exactly happened in 1998?
by Anonymous Coward

Prior to 1998, had you heard anyone using the phrase "open source" before? Or was it something you came up with on your own as the only logical set of words to describe source code which is openly shared.

Starting earlier, our non-profit, Foresight Institute, had been holding a series of small invitational meetings at our office in Los Altos, focused on our free software project and the field in general. One topic of discussion that came up now and then was the problem of the name free software and how it confused newcomers into thinking that the main point was the price because, sadly, in English our word for "free as in freedom" and "free as in price" are the same. (In Spanish they wisely use different words for these two concepts.) But nothing had yet been suggested that seemed good enough to catch on.

Sometime after that the term "open source software" popped into my mind, and my immediate thought was "that's good enough." Not ideal, not great, but good enough to solve the problem. I ran it by a few friends including Mark Miller and Eric Drexler, and they agreed it was probably good enough. One other friend, who worked in PR, thought that "open" had already been overused in the software field, which was true, but it seemed appropriate in this context so I decided to go ahead with the idea anyway.

Eric Raymond came to visit Silicon Valley in connection with the transition of the Netscape code from proprietary to publicly available, so we met again to discuss these new developments. While there Eric took a call from two people from Netscape, and when he was done I asked to speak to them, a man and a woman (possibly Mitchell Baker?). I mentioned the name problem and they agreed, but none of us then had a better term to suggest.

When Eric Raymond visited again, he needed to have other local meetings and doesn't drive, so I offered to drive him around. That's when I found myself sitting in on the meeting at VA Research that included Larry Augustin, Sam Ockman, and "maddog" by phone; I wasn't invited to it. Probably the others thought I was Eric's chauffeur or even his girlfriend. Prior to the meeting I had discussed the "open source software" idea with Todd Anderson, who was also at this meeting, but not with Eric himself, whom I didn't know as well at this point. Being a non-programmer, I had pretty much zero status at this meeting, except with the two who already knew me, so I didn't feel it would work to just say "Hey, here's why you guys all need to use my terminology for your field." The meeting was primarily on broader free software topics anyway, so I just listened and didn't see an opening. Fortunately, Todd was on the ball and tried an interesting tactic: he just used the term casually, not introducing it formally but just throwing it out there in another context. Of course then I perked up and started paying closer attention to see what would happen, if anything. A few minutes later someone else, who hadn't been informed in advance, spontaneously used it, again in a context unrelated to a change in terminology. Todd and I looked at each other and smiled: the meme had jumped successfully!

Later in the meeting, as a rather minor matter compared to the rest of it, the group had a brief discussion and agreed that open source software would be a useful term. No attention was paid then to who suggested it originally, which was fine with me. Later on, Eric even briefly thought it was he himself who came up with it (which would be quite a plausible thing for him to do), but Todd took the initiative to let him know that it was me, and immediately Eric was super gracious about correcting the record on that.

At the time, Todd told me that someday I would be glad to have credit for this, and he was quite right about that. So thank you Todd, wherever you are (and please get in touch).

I don't recall hearing the phrase before it popped into my head, though I found out later that it has long been widely used in the "intelligence" (i.e., spy) field to refer to publicly available information content, so the usage is similar enough to not be a problem. Since the recent coverage of the 20th anniversary, a couple of previous uses in a software context have turned up also. But since I was neither in software nor in intelligence, I probably did not see any of these uses.

I've seen a couple of commenters suggesting that I should defend a claim to having coined the term. Fortunately for me, I don't need to do this, because that decision is not based on my current input or comments. It's an open source community decision based on past experiences, and as a non-programmer I don't even get a vote on this. I just have to accept whatever the community decides, which is why I waited twenty years to let things settle out before publishing my own account.

For a more of the history, see my longer version at Opensource.com. (The OSI history page lists Michael Tiemann also at the VA Research meeting, which is probably correct though I don't recall it. It also has the meeting dated two days earlier than my notes indicate; sadly my calendar data from those days is not accessible format-wise anymore.)

What was it like in 1998?
by DevNull127

As someone who worked closely with Eric Raymond (and had interactions with Jon "maddog" Hall), what were they like in 1998? I'm curious what the whole "mood" of the development community was like in 1998 at that historic meeting. Maybe you could also talk about how things changed -- what they were like before the Open Source movement revved into high gear, and what they were like after.

And how does it all compare to when you first joined the tech scene in the 1980s?

CP: When I arrived in Silicon Valley in 1985, we were still in the early days of the personal computer. Most people did not have an email address or even a fax machine. Only visionaries like Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart were talking about hypertext and the future of online personal computing. At that time, working on Nelson's Xanadu Hypertext Project was one of the few ways available to move toward that future, and it was through that project that I met many very smart software people including Mark S. Miller and Dean Tribble (who have just started a new company, Agoric, to advance secure smart contracts). It was an exciting time in terms of knowing the potential, but frustrating because the underlying chips were still slow, with little memory or graphics functionality, and online communications were done over regular phone lines using modems, painfully slow.

I vividly recall when Martin Haeberli came to the Foresight office to show us an early MOSAIC browser. It wasn't super impressive at that time, but he explained that this was the start of what would become a world of online hypertext, and he was right. The early days of the World Wide Web were extremely exciting to those of us who had been inspired by Nelson's and Engelbart's visions of hypertext. FINALLY we got to make links! But also they had an undercurrent of intense frustration, because so many of the visionary features were missing, such as automatic micropayments to authors for their original publications and even their quotes used elsewhere online. But the term micropayment was seen by many as anathema, because "information should be free." Even back then, some of us knew that there was no such thing as a free lunch, and that expenses must be paid somehow. It's this lack of micropayments to content providers that has led to today's ubiquitous business model of selling users' personal information and manipulating them using highly-targeted ads, and the negative effects of that on society.

At the time, the open-sourcing of Netscape was seen as yet another innovative Silicon Valley company succumbing to unfair pressure by the all-powerful behemoth Microsoft. This sad situation had the silver lining of bringing an exciting browser project into the free software world. But the small startups trying to do support for free software were having a heck of a time explaining to customers why they should have to pay anything at all to use "free software". (And of course they don't, if they are good enough at dealing with code...which most people, including me, are not.) This awkwardness is what led to the addition of "open source software" to the original -- and still useful -- name "free software".

I did not get to know maddog, but in 1998 Eric Raymond was the one who was most active in doing public outreach, especially media, on behalf of open source. He worked very hard for months or years, unpaid to my knowledge, to promote these ideas and the community. There were many others of course, including Bruce Perens who with Eric co-founded Open Source Initiative to defend the ideas and approve licenses that met the new Open Source Criteria they wrote. Tim O'Reilly played a key role by convening and hosting the community in meetings to make group decisions. And of course we should remember Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, which had been and still are doing similar work under the original term.

To me as a relative outsider, it seemed that there was a big change when the new term was introduced, which happened very close in time to the Netscape open-sourcing. I had been reading Slashdot occasionally, mainly to admire the way it was designed and enabled users to interact much more effectively that other systems I'd seen. But when the new term arrived, it seemed that suddenly there was a fast ramp-up of attention and especially media coverage of the field. For a while it seemed like every day there was a new exciting development in "open source", which often appeared in quotes because it was so new. And these were appearing in non-programmer publications, ultimately in mainstream news media. Reading Slashdot became a daily necessity, especially for me, since I was getting some kind of thrilling brain chemistry surge every time I saw the term used. I still do, but it's smaller now: a nano surge.

Nanotech Prognosis / Open Source Utopia
by qaute

What's the current outlook for nanotechnology? Technically speaking, do we get Star Trek replicators soon, or is that still a 25+ year thing?

The ultimate dream in nanotechnology is a molecular assembler (atomic 3D printer) on every desktop, with a widespread community of hardware designers/developers analogous to open source software today. You'll be able to, say, download files to build a new car from GitHub. Hackaday has a good writeup. Suppose that someone finally figures out how to build such a molecular assembler. Chances are it'll be patent-encumbered and NDA'd. How can we [get] from here to there...? Politically, how do regulations, industry, and patents look?

Socially, is it generally viewed as positive or negative these days?

CP: Let's say that the goal is an open-source molecular 3D printer able to construct molecular machinery, plus a large library of open-source designs to use with the device. Let's divide this into the hardware components and software components.

It's taken decades and billions of dollars investment to get us where we are today in conventional hardware chips. That kind of investment has not been made yet in molecular machinery. I think eventually we would get there using human chemists, but it appears that instead there will be a shortcut. Progress in artificial intelligence is moving faster now, and I expect that instead of human chemists and human designers of molecular machinery and associated construction pathways, this work will be done faster via AI. We do not need AGI (artificial general intelligence) to do this. Targeted knowledge of chemistry and design engineering are what is needed, and that's coming sooner than AGI. So it could well be sooner than 25+ years depending on AI progress, but (and here's the catch) if that happens, the world will be changing in many other ways also, both positive and negative, to the extent that we may have other issues to deal with instead of having the opportunity of focusing on writing open source code for atomically-precise manufacturing.

Regarding regulations and patents: there's no particular regulatory focus on molecular machinery just now, and there probably won't be much until an actual problem crops up. As an example, consider the recent hearings on Facebook: the US legislators are not educated enough on those issues to grapple effectively with them. Patents seem likely to continue to be used whenever a company does the work, unless it sees a strategic advantage to open-sourcing the work.

I don't think that nanotech or atomically-precise manufacturing is on the public radar these days, either positive or negative. The nanotech term itself has become a marketing term for anything with at least one nanoscale dimension, so the average person who hears it probably thinks that we already have nanotech and therefore it's not a big deal. But it's not clear that we need or want the average person to be paying attention to atomically-precise manufacturing just now anyway, so maybe that's just as well.

Open source or free software
by Jim Hall

Some people prefer one term over the other. I'm curious: all these years later, do you still prefer the term open source software or are you more aligned to Free software?

CP: I use both terms, depending on context. When I'm with longtime hackers such as John Gilmore who naturally use the earlier term, I use it too. And of course if one is at a meeting of the Free Software Foundation, it's polite to use their preferred terminology.

However in dealing with non-software people or young people, I believe that the open source term is much clearer and therefore more useful. I tried doing a search on the two terms, and they are both in active use, but I found more "open source software" than "free software" usages. (This is a very crude measure and may be wrong, of course.)

Probably in Spanish-speaking countries, where they have the words gratis and libre to distinguish our two meanings for the English word free, there is less reason to use the new term. Someone could do a PhD dissertation comparing how the new term spread in the English-speaking world vs. the Spanish-speaking world. That would enable us to tease apart how much the newer term spread due to the free/free confusion problem vs. any more intrinsic value it may have, e.g., implying that the source code is open to public view.

Open source and medicine
by AmiMoJo

How can we get more open source medical software? Given that medical devices are so heavily regulated it seems like it will be hard to get, say, an open source pacemaker system that users can hack, or at least audit.

Radio software seems to be in a similar state - cellular modems, wifi chipsets etc. are all heavily regulated and closed source, with signed code required for updates.

CP: As far as I can tell, the Internet of Things world is still using the "security through obscurity" model. Given that, regulators are naturally going to favor closed source code, since that seems to be a way to reduce the likelihood of attacks.

If we want regulators to approve open source software for important devices, we need to show that it's as secure, or preferably more secure, than closed source code.

Although I am not a programmer, I have paid enough attention to this general issue to be intrigued with object capabilities (ocaps) as a path forward toward more secure code, whether closed and open source.

Currently the most serious effort I'm aware of in this area is Agoric.

There are (at least) two problems that ocaps does not solve. Social engineering will continue to be an issue, though my understanding is that ocaps reduces the damage that these can cause. Finally, there is the problem of compromised hardware: deliberate back doors designed into our computer chips; this is a huge problem with only very expensive solutions; see the hardware question below for more on this.

For more on security, see the paper Cyber, Nano, and AGI Risks: Decentralized Approaches to Reducing Risks, by myself, Mark S. Miller, and Allison Duettmann, from the proceedings of UCLA's First International Colloquium on Catastrophic and Existential Risk (2017).

Pollution
by lhowaf

Nano-materials, in general, seem to be becoming a significant source of hard-to-cleanup pollution. Do you see nano-tech heading in the same direction?

CP: The long-term goal of atomically-precise nanotech is the complete control of the structure of matter (to the extent we care about that structure). This would include extremely advanced abilities to clean up the natural environment. The question is what the pathway looks like to get there, and how clean can we make that pathway? This last question is a matter of what we decide to do. If society decides that preventing nanoscale pollution is a priority, then we'll do much better than if we don't try. It's at least possible to consider how to make this happen commercially, through traditional regulatory mechanisms. The more difficult challenge is military use, and use in regions which don't prioritize environmental values. No easy answers here. But the ultimate goal, at least, is a very clean environment, and it should be achievable eventually. It was this prospect that drew me into trying to advance this field in the first place.

How to deal with nanotech hype problem?
by Goldsmith

I am a nanotechnologist. I've done great academic research, worked for the government, managed a few grants, and started a few companies. It's very easy to hype the potential of nanotechnology. On the other hand, it's very hard to get attention put on results from serious commercial efforts. Granting agencies and our community are not good at supporting companies that do what we all tell each other needs to get done (i.e. NanoIntegris). We are great at supporting academic research groups that have a patina of commercial application (i.e. IBM).

As a field we've missed celebrating a number of major commercialization milestones. CNT and graphene electronics are available commercially! Who knew? For five years or so, you could find commercial graphene electronics in cell phone screens in Shenzhen. For the last two years, you could find commercial graphene biosensors at many big pharma companies. For the last year, you could buy CNT based high power RF electronics.

If we were interested in showing the real potential of the field, wouldn't the leaders want to show everyone that it IS working? We have actually met the NNI timeline for commercialization set in the 1990s. The goals we set out with 20 years ago seem to mean nothing to the hype machine we've created.

Simply put, how do we deal with the addiction to hype in nanotechnology, and focus a bit more on substantive accomplishment?

CP: I'm speaking here from a US perspective. This problem is not unique to nanotechnology, or even to technology in general. It's part of a general decline that has at least two sources, the decline in education standards and the decline of serious journalism, resulting in a hype culture with hype consumers who cannot tell the difference among exciting current technologies, valid engineering prospects, and complete nonsense.

It takes substantial science background to understand why nanotech and atomically-precise manufacturing are interesting, and few in our society today have that background. Our K-12 system is largely broken. Many of our colleges and universities now optimize for student entertainment and enjoyment, rather than the hard road of learning science and engineering.

Serious journalism has been decimated -- worse than decimated, including science and technology journalism. Consumers want all their information for free, and in many cases, you get what you pay for in this area as in others. Could micropayments help? Perhaps something built into the browser sending pennies or fraction of pennies to content originators? I am not sure. It seems worth a try. It could at least help with the privacy problem.

As for the education problem: we need to admit the disaster and try some major experiments. For example, some blame the decline of university standards on deceptively easy loans to students who don't realize what they are getting into. Glenn Reynolds has written books worth reading on this general problem of educational decline in the US, and I would look to him for ideas on solutions.

To me, compared to earlier decades, US society overall seems kind of decadent, cynical, in a cultural decline. I hope we can turn this around somehow. People like Slashdot readers give me hope. And there are still many, many people truly working to make the world a better place, including here in Silicon Valley. My view of Silicon Valley has a positive bias because I meet people through Foresight Institute, which helps select for good folks. I invite you all to join our email list (use blue button on this page) and come to our events. Some are research workshops (e.g., application form for Atomic Precision for Longevity workshop) and some are more accessible, such as our salons and Vision Weekend (videos). If you like what you see, consider donating; we are entirely supported by individual donations from great folks like the open source community.

Why Nanotechnology, for Laypeople
by qaute

Integrated circuits, solar panels, and GMOs are some pretty big results in nanotech these days. What are some future benefits we can look forward to that help justify further research to non-techies?

CP: My own focus is on the long term, very advanced applications such as molecular repair of the human body, ending disease and even aging itself. To me this is highly motivating! That's on top of the original goal of restoring the environment that drew me in originally.

Coming up with near- and intermediate-term applications is harder. This is why venture capitalists make lots of money, when they do their job well. Picking winning new applications is so challenging, especially in getting the timing right.

I can say this: amazing new catalysts and filtration technologies are on the way. Sound boring? It is totally not. Huge energy savings, cheap clean water for everyone (this would even help prevent wars), even blood filtration to take out all the stuff that should not be there.

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Nanotech threat landscape
by bjorng

How concerned should we be about nanotechnology equivalents of the software threats we see today? I would hate to have my circulatory system held hostage for bitcoin.

The Nanotechnology Corollary to Metsploit
by Anonymous Coward

The Internet of Things (IoT) seems to be a ramp-up to Micro-Electromechanical Machines (MEMs), which, in turn, will prime another ramp into atomic-scale nanotechnology. But already, security is atrocious. Worse than Windows XP's exploitation, endless automatic updates and a constant avalanche of zero-day patches.

What will a metasploit framework and CVE database for IoT, MEMs and smaller systems look like? How will biomedical bug bounties, vulnerabilities, exploits and weaponized payloads play themselves out?
________________________________________________________________________________

CP: We should be very concerned and more important, very vigilant. We need to solve today's Internet of Insecure Things as soon as possible, before even more of our world is controlled by software. As mentioned above, I am placing my hope in Agoric and object capabilities in general. There are also suggestions for how to address the insecure chip problem, though they are expensive and have performance costs as well; see the question from AmiMoJo below.

Recent improvements in physical security
by AmiMoJo

Recently big gains have been made in physical security. Many phones are encrypted by default and relatively difficult for unauthorized persons to unlock. Encrypted storage is increasingly common for computers too, although open source support for technologies like OPALv2 seems to be lagging behind closed source systems. In 2017 AMD introduced encrypted RAM.

All of these rely on special hardware to protect encryption keys and perform encryption functions at speeds fast enough to avoid any significant performance loss. It seems like hardware is necessary for very high levels of physical security anyway, e.g. tamper-proof boot ROMs.

How can open source provide this level of security when high end hardware is increasingly difficult for individuals to fabricate? Should we be thinking about how we can fabricate our own security processors and key storage, or is there another way to achieve high levels of physical security?

CP: My understanding from Mark S. Miller is that yes, we need to be thinking about fabricating our own chips, if we want to get around the problem of deliberately-installed backdoors.

In the paper cited above we write, "In the near term one can imagine a technology example that can be secure against those risks: a good open source processor design for which there is a proof of security comparable to the proof of security of the seL4 software. There are many open source processor designs that are sufficiently high performance that, when run on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA), can run fast enough to be practical for many applications. By combining these well-designed processors with a layout algorithm that randomizes layout decisions, the processor could be randomly laid out for each individual hardware instance. Given this randomized layout, there is no feasible corruption of the FPGA hardware that can escape notice under electron microscopes and that would also be able to successfully corrupt most instances of the processor."

UPDATE: After writing the above, I met with Mark and he explained that another approach has been found to the problem of insecure chips. At the recent Zcon0 conference, a method was described using zkSnarks and/or Coda. It's not financially practical yet, and doesn't fix leakage of data, but addresses the integrity issue. This is way outside my area of expertise. Eventually, the Agoric website will have many relevant documents on these topics, but not yet.

50 years ahead
by EngineeringStudent

I heard a myth a few decades ago, that top-secret work in most fields is at least 50 years ahead of the current published state of the art. I can't begin to imagine what that would look like here. What sorts of things do you think are solidly plausible within the next 50 years of work in the field of nano-technology, and how would we detect them "in the field" today, if we were to look for them...?

I know there were published discussions about silicon based listening and transmitting devices, bugs, that were smaller than grains of salt. I also know that there was great published fervor over single-pixel cameras, and, in my personal opinion, I have seen a surprising gap in entangled non-return imaging. I expect "they" have working, single-photon, non-return-imaging cameras on grains of silicon too small for the eye to work with, so perhaps nano drone swarms used for data gathering/surveillance, where each drone is less than 0.1mm across?

When I look at robo-cat, and the alleged robo-squirrels or robo-insects, I think they have such swarms that can be ingested/injected/otherwise-implanted inside animals that don't realize they have become "listening posts". What would you do with a fully-functional jet-engine that was only a few microns across? I remember sub-cellular size bar-codes made by shooting proton based cylindrical holes in silicon, then lithographing layers of gold or other stuff to make the code, then removing the silicon substrate. Could we put markers into people to inform future medical reconstruction such as "non-invasive" 3d printing of organs in-vivo? How would we detect sub-cell-size tagging, or fabrication? I like the idea of nanotech-driven bio-energy harvesting. Why can't we turn trees into solar panels by hacking into their organic photosynthesis?

CP: These areas are above my pay grade, but for inspiration on what could be possible in 50 years I would look at high-quality hard science fiction. Some of those writers pay close attention to physical limits. Yes, the surveillance technology should be amazingly good (or bad, depending on one's point of view). I'm not sure we would need advance markers in the body in order to do great 3D printing of organs in vivo, but I could be wrong on that. Eventually I expect we will come up with physical barriers that only allow understood molecular structures to pass though, to avoid having to detect sub-cell size tagging inside our bodies, when it's harder to find. But that's very long-term and ambitious.

Is physical security a political problem?
by Anonymous Coward

How to defend against molecule-sized machines is a question, but there is a meta-question there: will we be subject to constant false flag attacks and entrapment? Year 2030: Great Leader or Deep State accuses you of carrying a nanotech attack. You and perhaps people of your supporting network get disappeared into high security facilities, solitary confinement and all. Can we disprove the authorities' lies? Will people be able to know... Will there be anyone left to speak for you?

CP: Yes, this is a meta question and not about nanotech per se. If government is so dysfunctional and corrupt that the scenario above can take place, we have already lost. Our goal has to be to prevent that level of corruption from taking hold. Edmund Burke wrote, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." To take a US perspective, there have been various times in our country's history when the smartest and most civic-minded people have turned their attention to political matters, to get them straightened out for their own generation and those to come. Jefferson wrote, "We will be soldiers, so our sons may be farmers, so their sons may be artists." Sadly, it's looking like it's time to turn from being artists to being soldiers -- not physical soldiers, but soldiers in the fight for freedom, openness, and other values the open source community cares about.

Chris Reeve writes: The MeerKAT radio telescope was inaugurated in South Africa this past Friday, revealing the clearest view yet of the center of the Milky Way. What is especially surprising about the produced image are the numerous prominent filaments which seem to appear in the foreground.

Herschel made a similar announcement just three years prior that "Observations with ESA's Herschel space observatory have revealed that our Galaxy is threaded with filamentary structures on every length scale." Intriguingly, close inspection of yesterday's SKA image show these filaments twisting around one another, yet without combining — a phenomenon observable in most novelty plasma globes when the filaments are conducting electricity... The SKA telescopes is one of the first telescopes to witness these filaments because it is 50 times more powerful than any former telescope, but also because it is apparently one of the few telescopes which can observe dark mode plasmas. For these reasons, the SKA telescope will inevitably revive the debate over the underlying physical reasons for filaments which exhibit coherent thin magnetic structure over light-year distances.
The original submission included a comment with more information about the theory of a plasma universe.

Long-time Slashdot reader reifman writes: If you're eagerly awaiting your city's selection for HQ2, you may want to check out GeekWire's photo gallery of anti-Amazon graffiti images from around Seattle. Animosity towards Amazon has grown in the wake of its threats over a per head tax on employees, which the city council passed and then repealed shortly after. The tax would have increased the budget for services for our 12,000+ homeless. Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos also fought the state income tax on the wealthy in 2010.

An anonymous reader quotes VentureBeat: It's been more than 20 months since our last browser benchmark battle, and we really wanted to avoid letting two years elapse before getting a fresh set of a results. Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Microsoft Edge have all improved significantly over the past year and a half, and as I've argued before, the browser wars are back. You can click on the individual test to see the results:

SunSpider: Edge wins!
Octane: Chrome wins!
Kraken: Firefox wins!
JetStream: Edge wins!
MotionMark: Edge wins!
Speedometer: Chrome wins!
BaseMark: Chrome wins!
WebXPRT: Firefox wins!
HTML5Test: Chrome wins!

Chrome looks to be ahead of the pack according to these tests. That said, browser performance was solid across all three contestants, and it shouldn't be your only consideration when picking your preferred app for consuming internet content.
Chrome wins in four tests, beating Edge's three wins, and Firefox's two wins.

The U.S. Commerce Department has lifted the export ban on Chinese telecommunications giant ZTE now that it has met all the terms required to get a full reprieve. "Officials confirmed that ZTE had put $400 million in escrow on top of other requirements, including the payment of a $1 billion fine, replacing key leadership and accepting outside monitors that will ensure it honors U.S. export controls," reports Engadget. From the report: Strictly speaking, this more of a probation -- as with the last time, the Commerce Department is suspending its ban rather than removing it entirely. The monitors will keep watch over ZTE during the entire 10-year period of the suspension, so it won't have much choice but to fly straight if it wants to avoid another ban. The earlier ban would have "only" lasted seven years. The Senate recently passed a bill that would reinstate U.S. sanctions on the company, but the White House has vowed to squash it before it becomes law.

The U.S. Commerce Department has lifted the export ban on Chinese telecommunications giant ZTE now that it has met all the terms required to get a full reprieve. "Officials confirmed that ZTE had put $400 million in escrow on top of other requirements, including the payment of a $1 billion fine, replacing key leadership and accepting outside monitors that will ensure it honors U.S. export controls," reports Engadget. From the report: Strictly speaking, this more of a probation -- as with the last time, the Commerce Department is suspending its ban rather than removing it entirely. The monitors will keep watch over ZTE during the entire 10-year period of the suspension, so it won't have much choice but to fly straight if it wants to avoid another ban. The earlier ban would have "only" lasted seven years. The Senate recently passed a bill that would reinstate U.S. sanctions on the company, but the White House has vowed to squash it before it becomes law.

The U.S. Commerce Department has lifted the export ban on Chinese telecommunications giant ZTE now that it has met all the terms required to get a full reprieve. "Officials confirmed that ZTE had put $400 million in escrow on top of other requirements, including the payment of a $1 billion fine, replacing key leadership and accepting outside monitors that will ensure it honors U.S. export controls," reports Engadget. From the report: Strictly speaking, this more of a probation -- as with the last time, the Commerce Department is suspending its ban rather than removing it entirely. The monitors will keep watch over ZTE during the entire 10-year period of the suspension, so it won't have much choice but to fly straight if it wants to avoid another ban. The earlier ban would have "only" lasted seven years. The Senate recently passed a bill that would reinstate U.S. sanctions on the company, but the White House has vowed to squash it before it becomes law.

Earlier this month, The New York Times reported that a number of smart TV makers include services from companies that track a range of viewer information about their customers. Now, two Democratic US senators are asking the Federal Trade Commission to investigate privacy problems related to Internet-connected televisions. From a report: "Many Internet-connected smart TVs are equipped with sophisticated technologies that can track the content users are watching and then use that information to tailor and deliver targeted advertisements to consumers," Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) wrote in a letter yesterday to FTC Chairman Joseph Simons. "Regrettably, smart TV users may not be aware of the extent to which their televisions are collecting sensitive information about their viewing habits." The letter asked the FTC to "launch an investigation into the privacy policies and practices of smart TV manufacturers." When contacted by Ars, an FTC spokesperson confirmed that the agency received the letter from Markey and Blumenthal, but the FTC offered no further comment.

Addressing a growing concern by privacy advocates and users alike over the usage of facial recognition by government bodies, Microsoft urged the US government on Friday to start thinking about what limits should be set on the use of such technologies. From a report: In a blog post, Microsoft also said it is consulting with outside groups to help set its own policies for how it will use and sell such technology. Face recognition can be used for a range of purposes, from reuniting missing kids to mass surveillance. Currently, there are few rules for those using or selling the technology. "The only effective way to manage the use of technology by a government is for the government proactively to manage this use itself," Microsoft president Brad Smith said in a blog post. "And if there are concerns about how a technology will be deployed more broadly across society, the only way to regulate this broad use is for the government to do so." For its own part, Smith said Microsoft is going to move slowly on commercial use of face recognition while it explores what its own policies should be.

As user growth slows in developed markets, Silicon Valley companies are increasingly looking at developing markets such as India for new customers. The playbook of many of these companies is similar: make services work on low-cost devices that are increasingly popular among new users in these nations. Facebook, Microsoft, Uber, Twitter, Google, and Amazon have all released "lite" apps (they usually have fewer features, but are comparatively less resource intensive) for these markets, with some also offering their services as progressive web app (that mimic app-esque behavior on a website, but don't require installation of any special app for access). But how do these apps fare on the low-cost devices? And what is it like to live on a low-cost smartphone? A reporter ditched his iPhone for a $60 Android handset to find out: The phone is, well, basic. It comes with a slow-as-molasses processor, so little memory that I kept having to remove and reinstall apps to keep the thing running, a camera that would have been at home on the first iPhone, a two-year-old version of Android, about a dozen pre-installed Google apps that take up hundreds of megabytes, and a single, measly gigabyte of usable storage. Imagine your favorite Android phone, except with a waaay crappier screen, cameras, storage, and battery to get an idea.

What I bumped into immediately after turning on the Bharat 2 for the first time was the lack of storage, and this limitation entirely defined what I used my phone for. I had to start off by uninstalling the pre-installed bloatware before I actually installed any apps, because the first thing I got after switching on the phone was a low storage notification.

Slack went out the window because it was too bloated; Outlook, my email app of choice, was too big to install; and pretty much everything else -- banking apps, shopping apps, games, and more -- was a luxury I'd live without. Even Google Maps Go, a lightweight browser version of Google Maps that the company said is "designed to run quickly and smoothly on devices with limited memory," was crippled, allowing me to look up a location only to prompt me to download the full version of Google Maps when I asked for turn-by-turn directions.

So I boiled down to the essentials: staying in touch with people, catching up on news, ordering cabs, and watching videos (which went shockingly well, and supports the huge popularity of video here), pretty much the same as the Next Billion. Further reading: Shitphone: A Love Story (2015).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The FCC announced today that it'll bolster the country's Emergency Alert System to prevent unexpected false alarms, like the one that happened in Hawaii earlier this year. State and local officials will now be able to conduct "live code" tests that'll use the same alert codes and processes that would be required in an actual emergency. The idea is that officials will better learn the system while the public will get used to responding to alerts and know what to expect. Everyone in the area will get a test message, like a real alert. The agency also says that public service announcements about the Emergency Alert System will now be able to use the same alert sounds as an actual emergency. (The alerts will include a disclaimer about what's happening, and officials will have to actually tell people beforehand.) Finally, anyone who uses the emergency system will be required to tell the FCC if it accidentally triggers a false alert.

hackingbear shares a report from Popular Science: China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC), China's foremost military electronics company, announced that its groundbreaking quantum radar has achieved capability of tracking high altitude objects, likely by increasing the coherence time entangled photons. CETC envisions that its quantum radar will be used in the stratosphere to track objects in "the upper atmosphere and beyond" (including space). Quantum can identify the position, radar cross section, speed, direction and even "observe" on the composition of the target such as differentiating between an actual nuclear warhead against inflatable decoys. [...] Importantly, attempts to spoof the quantum radar would be easily noticed since any attempt to alter or duplicate the entangled photons would be detected by the radar. The news is an important illustration of a larger trend of Chinese advancement in the new, crucial area of quantum research. Other notable projects in China's quantum technology include the Micius satellite, and advances by Alibaba and the Chinese University of Science and Technology in a world record of entangling 18 photons (a quantum supercomputer would require about 50 entangled photons), such that China arguably leads the world in quantum technologies.

After multiple lawsuits have been filed over the butterfly-switch keyboards found on the MacBook Pro and MacBook lineups, you would think Apple would fix this issue by including a keyboard in the new MacBook Pros that can't be damaged by a little dust. Unfortunately, while the new 2018 MacBook Pro does have an updated third-generation keyboard, Apple tells CNET it doesn't include any new engineering or tweaks to address the sticky key issue. CNET reports: Instead, the third-generation keyboard's tweaks are about making it quieter. In a brief typing test, CNET's long-time MacBook reviewer Dan Ackerman says it isn't "whisper-quiet" but does "lack the sharp click of the previous design." Technically, Apple has admitted only that "a smaller percentage of the keyboards in certain MacBook and MacBook Pro models" have demonstrated the sticky key issue. If you buy one, you may likely never have that problem. But it's worth noting that when the company launched its free keyboard repair program in June, it made literally every single model of MacBook Pro with the "butterfly switch" keyboard eligible.

After multiple lawsuits have been filed over the butterfly-switch keyboards found on the MacBook Pro and MacBook lineups, you would think Apple would fix this issue by including a keyboard in the new MacBook Pros that can't be damaged by a little dust. Unfortunately, while the new 2018 MacBook Pro does have an updated third-generation keyboard, Apple tells CNET it doesn't include any new engineering or tweaks to address the sticky key issue. CNET reports: Instead, the third-generation keyboard's tweaks are about making it quieter. In a brief typing test, CNET's long-time MacBook reviewer Dan Ackerman says it isn't "whisper-quiet" but does "lack the sharp click of the previous design." Technically, Apple has admitted only that "a smaller percentage of the keyboards in certain MacBook and MacBook Pro models" have demonstrated the sticky key issue. If you buy one, you may likely never have that problem. But it's worth noting that when the company launched its free keyboard repair program in June, it made literally every single model of MacBook Pro with the "butterfly switch" keyboard eligible.

After multiple lawsuits have been filed over the butterfly-switch keyboards found on the MacBook Pro and MacBook lineups, you would think Apple would fix this issue by including a keyboard in the new MacBook Pros that can't be damaged by a little dust. Unfortunately, while the new 2018 MacBook Pro does have an updated third-generation keyboard, Apple tells CNET it doesn't include any new engineering or tweaks to address the sticky key issue. CNET reports: Instead, the third-generation keyboard's tweaks are about making it quieter. In a brief typing test, CNET's long-time MacBook reviewer Dan Ackerman says it isn't "whisper-quiet" but does "lack the sharp click of the previous design." Technically, Apple has admitted only that "a smaller percentage of the keyboards in certain MacBook and MacBook Pro models" have demonstrated the sticky key issue. If you buy one, you may likely never have that problem. But it's worth noting that when the company launched its free keyboard repair program in June, it made literally every single model of MacBook Pro with the "butterfly switch" keyboard eligible.

The now-dormant news and gossip website Gawker.com was sold on Thursday to Bryan Goldberg, the founder of Bustle and co-founder of Bleacher Report. According to CNN, the site sold for less than $1.5 million. From the report: Goldberg founded the sports website Bleacher Report along with three other people in 2005; in 2012, they sold it to Turner, which like CNN is owned by AT&T. He launched Bustle, a website focused on women's issues, in 2013. Goldberg addressed the Gawker sale in a Bustle internal email on Thursday, saying the site will be acquired "under a new holding company, separate from Bustle."

"You are probably wondering what happens next," he said in the email, which was obtained by CNN. "The short is this -- not much. We have no immediate plans to re-launch Gawker. For now, things will stay as they are. I'm very excited about the possibilities for the future of Gawker. I will share more in the months ahead." The sale includes an archive of hundreds of thousands of Gawker stories and social media accounts affiliated with the site. Gawker Media was sold to Univision in 2016 for $135 million and renamed Gizmodo Media Group after the company declared bankruptcy, "the result of a legal assault waged by the former pro wrestler Hulk Hogan that was secretly subsidized by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, a longtime Gawker adversary," reports CNN.

The now-dormant news and gossip website Gawker.com was sold on Thursday to Bryan Goldberg, the founder of Bustle and co-founder of Bleacher Report. According to CNN, the site sold for less than $1.5 million. From the report: Goldberg founded the sports website Bleacher Report along with three other people in 2005; in 2012, they sold it to Turner, which like CNN is owned by AT&T. He launched Bustle, a website focused on women's issues, in 2013. Goldberg addressed the Gawker sale in a Bustle internal email on Thursday, saying the site will be acquired "under a new holding company, separate from Bustle."

"You are probably wondering what happens next," he said in the email, which was obtained by CNN. "The short is this -- not much. We have no immediate plans to re-launch Gawker. For now, things will stay as they are. I'm very excited about the possibilities for the future of Gawker. I will share more in the months ahead." The sale includes an archive of hundreds of thousands of Gawker stories and social media accounts affiliated with the site. Gawker Media was sold to Univision in 2016 for $135 million and renamed Gizmodo Media Group after the company declared bankruptcy, "the result of a legal assault waged by the former pro wrestler Hulk Hogan that was secretly subsidized by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, a longtime Gawker adversary," reports CNN.

The now-dormant news and gossip website Gawker.com was sold on Thursday to Bryan Goldberg, the founder of Bustle and co-founder of Bleacher Report. According to CNN, the site sold for less than $1.5 million. From the report: Goldberg founded the sports website Bleacher Report along with three other people in 2005; in 2012, they sold it to Turner, which like CNN is owned by AT&T. He launched Bustle, a website focused on women's issues, in 2013. Goldberg addressed the Gawker sale in a Bustle internal email on Thursday, saying the site will be acquired "under a new holding company, separate from Bustle."

"You are probably wondering what happens next," he said in the email, which was obtained by CNN. "The short is this -- not much. We have no immediate plans to re-launch Gawker. For now, things will stay as they are. I'm very excited about the possibilities for the future of Gawker. I will share more in the months ahead." The sale includes an archive of hundreds of thousands of Gawker stories and social media accounts affiliated with the site. Gawker Media was sold to Univision in 2016 for $135 million and renamed Gizmodo Media Group after the company declared bankruptcy, "the result of a legal assault waged by the former pro wrestler Hulk Hogan that was secretly subsidized by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, a longtime Gawker adversary," reports CNN.

The now-dormant news and gossip website Gawker.com was sold on Thursday to Bryan Goldberg, the founder of Bustle and co-founder of Bleacher Report. According to CNN, the site sold for less than $1.5 million. From the report: Goldberg founded the sports website Bleacher Report along with three other people in 2005; in 2012, they sold it to Turner, which like CNN is owned by AT&T. He launched Bustle, a website focused on women's issues, in 2013. Goldberg addressed the Gawker sale in a Bustle internal email on Thursday, saying the site will be acquired "under a new holding company, separate from Bustle."

"You are probably wondering what happens next," he said in the email, which was obtained by CNN. "The short is this -- not much. We have no immediate plans to re-launch Gawker. For now, things will stay as they are. I'm very excited about the possibilities for the future of Gawker. I will share more in the months ahead." The sale includes an archive of hundreds of thousands of Gawker stories and social media accounts affiliated with the site. Gawker Media was sold to Univision in 2016 for $135 million and renamed Gizmodo Media Group after the company declared bankruptcy, "the result of a legal assault waged by the former pro wrestler Hulk Hogan that was secretly subsidized by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, a longtime Gawker adversary," reports CNN.

After announcing new MacBook Pro models today, Apple has removed the 2015 MacBook Pro from the Mac section of its website. Ars Technica reports: Beloved by many, the 2015 MacBook Pro had a number of features that have since been changed or have disappeared entirely from new MacBook Pro models. Arguably the most polarizing among these tweaks is the butterfly keyboard -- the 2015 MacBook Pro predates that mechanism, making its traditional keyboard a preferred alternative for many users. The 2015 MacBook Pro also contained legacy ports that Apple has since abandoned in the newest models: USB-A, HDMI, and Thunderbolt 2 ports, and an SD card slot. All of the newest MacBook Pros exclusively feature Thunderbolt 3 ports, which some will appreciate but all will scowl at when they're forced to buy multiple dongles to connect legacy accessories. Currently, Apple has a few 2015 MacBook Pro models listed in its online clearance section, but it's likely that Apple will not have more to sell after those are gone.

India has just adopted tough new rules guaranteeing an open and fair internet for nearly half a billion people. From a report: The government has taken an "unambiguous stand" on the issue by endorsing net neutrality rules proposed last November, India's telecom regulator said on Thursday. Net neutrality rules require internet providers to treat all online content the same, preventing them from favoring -- or withholding -- access to certain websites, services or apps. The principle is under attack in America, where the Trump administration repealed federal laws last month, but has been staunchly defended in India in the face of attempts by global tech companies such as Facebook to offer stripped-down internet access.

India has just adopted tough new rules guaranteeing an open and fair internet for nearly half a billion people. From a report: The government has taken an "unambiguous stand" on the issue by endorsing net neutrality rules proposed last November, India's telecom regulator said on Thursday. Net neutrality rules require internet providers to treat all online content the same, preventing them from favoring -- or withholding -- access to certain websites, services or apps. The principle is under attack in America, where the Trump administration repealed federal laws last month, but has been staunchly defended in India in the face of attempts by global tech companies such as Facebook to offer stripped-down internet access.

The Justice Department will appeal the AT&T-Time Warner merger approval, according to a court document filed Thursday. In one of the largest U.S. antitrust cases in decades, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon ruled last month that the merger could go on despite the government's resistance. The feds did not seek a stay that would have prevented the merger from taking place, and AT&T and Time Warner closed the deal directly after Leon's ruling.

The Justice Department will appeal the AT&T-Time Warner merger approval, according to a court document filed Thursday. In one of the largest U.S. antitrust cases in decades, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon ruled last month that the merger could go on despite the government's resistance. The feds did not seek a stay that would have prevented the merger from taking place, and AT&T and Time Warner closed the deal directly after Leon's ruling.

After almost 30 years of overseeing the development of the world's most popular language, Python, its founder and "Benevolent Dictator For Life" (BDFL), Guido van Rossum, has decided to remove himself entirely from the decision process. From a report: Van Rossum isn't leaving Python entirely. He said, "I'll still be there for a while as an ordinary core dev, and I'll still be available to mentor people -- possibly more available." It's clear from van Rossum's note he's sick and tired of running the organization. He wrote, "I don't ever want to have to fight so hard for a PEP (Python Enhancement Proposals) [PEP 572 Assignment Expressions] and find that so many people despise my decisions." In addition, van Rossum hints he's not been well. "I'm not getting younger... (I'll spare you the list of medical issues.)" So, "I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL, and you all will be on your own." From the email: I am not going to appoint a successor. So what are you all going to do? Create a democracy? Anarchy? A dictatorship? A federation? I'm not worried about the day to day decisions in the issue tracker or on GitHub. Very rarely I get asked for an opinion, and usually it's not actually important. So this can just be dealt with as it has always been. At Slashdot, we had the privilege of interviewing Guido van Rossum, a Computer History Museum honoree, in 2013.

After almost 30 years of overseeing the development of the world's most popular language, Python, its founder and "Benevolent Dictator For Life" (BDFL), Guido van Rossum, has decided to remove himself entirely from the decision process. From a report: Van Rossum isn't leaving Python entirely. He said, "I'll still be there for a while as an ordinary core dev, and I'll still be available to mentor people -- possibly more available." It's clear from van Rossum's note he's sick and tired of running the organization. He wrote, "I don't ever want to have to fight so hard for a PEP (Python Enhancement Proposals) [PEP 572 Assignment Expressions] and find that so many people despise my decisions." In addition, van Rossum hints he's not been well. "I'm not getting younger... (I'll spare you the list of medical issues.)" So, "I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL, and you all will be on your own." From the email: I am not going to appoint a successor. So what are you all going to do? Create a democracy? Anarchy? A dictatorship? A federation? I'm not worried about the day to day decisions in the issue tracker or on GitHub. Very rarely I get asked for an opinion, and usually it's not actually important. So this can just be dealt with as it has always been. At Slashdot, we had the privilege of interviewing Guido van Rossum, a Computer History Museum honoree, in 2013.

theodp writes: In a Monday blog post, the outgoing Head of Education for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's Chan Zuckerberg Initiative made the claim that "we've made investments that enabled our partners to double the number of Black and Latinx students and girls taking AP Computer Science." The claim is an apparent reference to the highly-promoted and wildly-successful new AP Computer Science Principles course (dubbed "Coding Lite" by the NY Times), which the NSF and College Board began development on in 2009. Zuckerberg's CZI LLC was created in late 2015.

theodp writes: In a Monday blog post, the outgoing Head of Education for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's Chan Zuckerberg Initiative made the claim that "we've made investments that enabled our partners to double the number of Black and Latinx students and girls taking AP Computer Science." The claim is an apparent reference to the highly-promoted and wildly-successful new AP Computer Science Principles course (dubbed "Coding Lite" by the NY Times), which the NSF and College Board began development on in 2009. Zuckerberg's CZI LLC was created in late 2015.

Apple said on Thursday it is refreshing the 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pro models. Neither machines are getting major redesigns, but the innards are getting a spec update. For starters, both the models are powered by the 8th-generation Intel processors and house more cores than before -- a maximum of six cores on the 15-inch model (compared to four in last year's models) and four in the 13-inch model (compared to two). That means faster performance for many use cases. Maximum SSD capacity is also doubled, and the MacBook Pro line offers DDR4 RAM for the first time. ArsTechnica: The laptops also borrow some features from the iMac Pro and the iPad Pro -- the T2 chip and True Tone, respectively -- and feature a revised butterfly keyboard, the third generation of the design Apple introduced in 2016 (the revision is a little more significant this time around). Apart from those tweaks to the keyboard, the basic design of the MacBook Pro is unchanged. The top configuration of the 15-inch model includes an 8th-generation, six-core Intel Core i9 CPU clocked at 2.9GHz. Six-core Intel Core i7 processors are also options. The 2017 iteration of the MacBook Pro featured DDR3 memory with a maximum configuration of 16GB. This time, it's DDR4, and the maximum is 32. The faster memory uses more energy, so a bigger battery is now included -- but Apple's battery life estimate remains the same as last year's. The GPU in the top standard configuration is listed as an AMD Radeon Pro 555X.

The 13-inch model has different specs, of course. It still only offers integrated Intel graphics, for one thing -- Intel Iris Plus 655, this time with 128MB of eDRAM. But the maximum number of cores are again doubled -- in this case to four -- in 8th-generation Intel Core i5 or Core i7 CPUs, which run at up to 2.7GHz. Maximum SSD capacity is also doubled; it's now 2TB. The maximum memory is still 16GB. Apple claims the 13-inch model is up to twice as fast as its predecessor, though it will of course depend on the application. ArsTechnica says the keyboard on the new MacBook Pro models, though look similar to the one in the predecessor lineup, feel a little different to type on. The price of 13-inch starts at $1,799 while the 15-inch starts at $2,399.

Brian Schrader, an independent software developer, writes: It's been a little over 5 years since Google Reader shut down and the world of RSS readers was tossed into the junk drawer of collective memory. But, looking back on it today, I'd actually argue that RSS and Feeds as a whole never really disappeared, only the Feed Readers did. In building Pine, and as a long time Feed Reader user, I've been pleasantly surprised over these last 5 years to see that most sites still have RSS feeds. Sure, Facebook and Twitter don't support them, but YouTube, Reddit, Squarespace, Wordpress and so many more do by default. Feeds of all kinds still exist, nearly forgotten, in the markup of most websites, and this means that Feed Readers can, and will, make a comeback someday. The foundations are already laid; the hard work is done. RSS Feeds became a standard, and were built into the tools we use to make the web today. It's almost as if we laid the tracks and built the trains for a trans-continental railroad, but we've just forgotten how to sell tickets.