Slashdot Mirror

Bruce66423 brings word that a terrorist's WhatsApp message has been decrypted "using techniques that 'cannot be disclosed for security reasons', though 'sources said they now have the technical expertise to repeat the process in future.'" The Economic Times reports: U.K. security services have managed to decode the last message sent out by Khalid Masood before he rammed his high-speed car into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge and stabbed to death a police officer at the gates of Parliament on March 22. The access to Masood's message was achieved by what has been described by security sources as a use of "human and technical intelligence"...

The issue of WhatsApp's encrypted service, which is closed to anyone besides the sender and recipient, had come under criticism soon after the attack. "It's completely unacceptable. There should be no place for terrorists to hide. We need to make sure that organisations like WhatsApp, and there are plenty of others like that, don't provide a secret place for terrorists to communicate with each other," U.K. home secretary Amber Rudd had said.
Security sources say the message showed the victim's motive was military action in Muslim countries, while the article adds that though ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack, "no evidence has emerged to back this up."

Last week there were reports that the EPA climate change website was set to be taken down, though later the EPA denied that. On Friday evening, however, the Environmental Protection Agency announced its website would be "undergoing changes" to better represent the new direction the agency is taking, triggering the removal of several agency websites containing detailed climate data and scientific information (paywalled; alternative source). From a report on The Washington Post: One of the websites that appeared to be gone had been cited to challenge statements made by the EPA's new administrator, Scott Pruitt. Another provided detailed information on the previous administration's Clean Power Plan, including fact sheets about greenhouse gas emissions on the state and local levels and how different demographic groups were affected by such emissions. The changes came less than 24 hours before thousands of protesters were set to march in Washington and around the country in support of political action to push back against the Trump administration's rollbacks of former president Barack Obama's climate policies.

Sergio Canavero, the Italian surgeon who plans to perform the world's first human head transplant within the next year, says he is preparing to reawaken cryogenically frozen brains and transplant them into someone else's skull. "In an interview with a German-language magazine, Canavero says he will attempt to bring the first brains frozen in liquid nitrogen at an Arizona-based cryogenics bank back to life 'not in 100 years,' but three years at the latest," reports National Post. From the report: Transplanting a brain only -- and not an entire head -- gets around formidable rejection issues, Canavero said, since there will be no need to reconnect and stitch up severed vessels, nerves, tendons and muscles as there is when a new head is fused onto a brain-dead donor body. Canavero allows that one "problematic" issue with brain transplants, however, would be that "no aspect of your original external body remains the same." "Your head is no longer there, your brain is transplanted into an entirely different skull," he told OOOM magazine, published by the same company that handles the Italian brain surgeon's public relations. The flamboyant neuroscientist who some ethicists have decried as "nuts" rattled the transplant world when he first outlined his plans for a human head transplant two years ago in the journal, Surgical Neurology International. Bioethicist Arthur Caplan called Canavero's latest proposal to merge head transplants with "resurrecting" the frozen dead beyond ridiculous. "People have their own doubts about whether anything can be salvaged from these frozen heads or bodies because of the damage freezing does," said Caplan, head of ethics at NYU Langone Medical Centre in New York City. "Then saying that he has some technique for making this happen, that has never been demonstrated in frozen animals, is absurd."

schwit1 quotes a report from Zero Hedge: As the latest installment of it's "Vault 7" series, WikiLeaks has just dropped a user manual describing a CIA project known as "Scribbles" (a.k.a. the "Snowden Stopper"), a piece of software purportedly designed to allow the embedding of "web beacon" tags into documents "likely to be stolen." The web beacon tags are apparently able to collect information about an end user of a document and relay that information back to the beacon's creator without being detected. Per WikiLeaks' press release. But, the "Scribbles" user guide notes there is just one small problem with the program: it only works with Microsoft Office products. So, if end users use other programs such as OpenOffice of LibreOffice then the CIA's watermarks become visible to the end user and their cover is blown.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed new details about his futuristic tunnel-boring project during his TED talk on Friday. Ina Fried, writing for Axios: In an appearance at the TED conference in Vancouver, Musk showed off a new video visualization of electric skates transporting cars in a narrow tunnel, then raising them back to street level in a space as small as two parking spaces. Inside the tunnels, Musk said cars could travel as fast as 200 kilometers per hour (roughly 130 MPH). "You should be able to go from say Westwood to LAX in 5-6 minutes," the Tesla and SpaceX founder said, adding he is spending only 2-3 percent on the tunnel effort. The Boring Company is currently building a demo tunnel in SpaceX's parking lot, but will need permits from the city of Los Angeles to extend beyond the property line. Musk added, "I'm not trying to be anyone's savior. I'm just trying to think about the future and not be sad." You can watch the video here.

A group of more than 800 startups has sent a letter to the FCC chairman Ajit Pai saying they are "deeply concerned" about his decision to kill net neutrality -- reversing the Title II classification of internet service providers. The group, which includes Y Combinator, Etsy, Foursquare, GitHub, Imgur, Nextdoor, and Warby Parker, added that the decision could end up shutting their businesses. They add, via an article on The Verge: "The success of America's startup ecosystem depends on more than improved broadband speeds. We also depend on an open Internet -- including enforceable net neutrality rules that ensure big cable companies can't discriminate against people like us. We're deeply concerned with your intention to undo the existing legal framework. Without net neutrality, the incumbents who provide access to the Internet would be able to pick winners or losers in the market. They could impede traffic from our services in order to favor their own services or established competitors. Or they could impose new tolls on us, inhibiting consumer choice. [...] Our companies should be able to compete with incumbents on the quality of our products and services, not our capacity to pay tolls to Internet access providers."

The IT workers from the University of California's San Francisco campus who were replaced by an offshore outsourcing firm late last year intend to file a lawsuit challenging their dismissal. "It will allege that the tech workers at the university's San Francisco campus were victims of age and national origin discrimination," reports Computerworld. From the report: The IT employees lost their jobs in February after the university hired India-based IT services firm HCL. Approximately 50 full-time university employees lost their jobs, but another 30 contractor positions were cut as well. "To take a workforce that is overwhelmingly over the age of 40 and replace them with folks who are mainly in their 20s -- early 20s, in fact -- we think is age discrimination," said the IT employees' attorney, Randall Strauss, of Gwilliam Ivary Chiosso Cavalli & Brewer. The national origin discrimination claim is the result of taking a workforce "that reflects the diversity of California" and is summarily let go and is "replaced with people who come from one particular part of the world," said Strauss. The lawsuit will be filed in Alameda County Superior Court.

COBOL is a programming language invented by Hopper from 1959 to 1961, and while it is several decades old, it's still largely used by the financial sector, major corporations and part of the federal government. Mar Masson Maack from The Next Web interviews Daniel Doderlein, CEO of Auka, who explains why banks don't have to actively kill COBOL and how they can modernize and "minimize the new platforms' connections to the old systems so that COBOL can be switched out in a safe and cheap manner." From the report: According to [Doderlein], COBOL-based systems still function properly but they're faced with a more human problem: "This extremely critical part of the economic infrastructure of the planet is run on a very old piece of technology -- which in itself is fine -- if it weren't for the fact that the people servicing that technology are a dying race." And Doderlein literally means dying. Despite the fact that three trillion dollars run through COBOL systems every single day they are mostly maintained by retired programming veterans. There are almost no new COBOL programmers available so as retirees start passing away, then so does the maintenance for software written in the ancient programming language. Doderlein says that banks have three options when it comes to deciding how to deal with this emerging crisis. First off, they can simply ignore the problem and hope for the best. Software written in COBOL is still good for some functions, but ignoring the problem won't fix how impractical it is for making new consumer-centric products. Option number two is replacing everything, creating completely new core banking platforms written in more recent programming languages. The downside is that it can cost hundreds of millions and it's highly risky changing the entire system all at once. The third option, however, is the cheapest and probably easiest. Instead of trying to completely revamp the entire system, Doderlein suggests that banks take a closer look at the current consumer problems. Basically, Doderlein suggests making light-weight add-ons in more current programming languages that only rely on COBOL for the core feature of the old systems.

An anonymous reader writes from a report via Bleeping Computer: Two malware families battling for turf are most likely the cause of an outage suffered by Californian ISP Sierra Tel at the beginning of the month, on April 10. The attack, which the company claimed was a "malicious hacking event," was the work of BrickerBot, an IoT malware family that bricks unsecured IoT and networking devices. "BrickerBot was active on the Sierra Tel network at the time their customers reported issues," Janit0r told Bleeping Computer in an email, "but their modems had also just been mass-infected with malware, so it's possible some of the network problems were caused by this concomitant activity." The crook, going by Janit0r, tried to pin some of the blame on Mirai, but all the clues point to BrickerBot, as Sierra Tel had to replace bricked modems altogether, or ask customers to bring in their modems at their offices to have them reset and reinstalled. Mirai brought down over 900,000 Deutsche Telekom modems last year, but that outage was fixed within hours with a firmware update. All the Sierra Tel modems bricked in this incident were Zyxel HN-51 models, and it took Sierra Tel almost two weeks to fix all bricked devices.

According to a new study from UC Berkeley's Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, AT&T has been focused on deploying fiber-to-the-home in the higher-income neighborhoods of California, giving wealthy people access to gigabit internet while others are stuck with DSL internet that doesn't even meet state and federal broadband standards. Ars Technica reports: California households with access to AT&T's fiber service have a median income of $94,208, according to "AT&T's Digital Divide in California," in which the Haas Institute analyzed Federal Communications Commission data from June 2016. The study was funded by the Communications Workers of America, an AT&T workers' union that's been involved in contentious negotiations with the company. By contrast, the median household income is $53,186 in California neighborhoods where AT&T provides only DSL, with download speeds typically ranging from 768kbps to 6Mbps. At the low end, that's less than 1 percent of the gigabit speeds offered by AT&T's fiber service. The median income in areas with U-verse VDSL, which ranges from 12Mbps to 75Mbps, is $67,021. In 4.1 million California households, representing 42.8 percent of AT&T's California service area, AT&T's fastest speeds fell short of the federal broadband definition of 25Mbps downloads and 3Mbps uploads, the report said.

An anonymous reader shares an article: When Uber first announced its crazy-sounding plan to explore "on-demand urban aviation" -- essentially a network of flying taxis that could be hailed via a smartphone app and flown from rooftop to rooftop -- the company made it clear that it never intended to go it alone. Today, as it kicked off its three-day Elevate conference in Dallas, Texas, the ride-hail company announced a slew of partnerships with cities, aviation manufacturers, real estate, and electric charging companies, in its effort to bring its dream of flying cars a little closer to reality. Uber said it will be teaming up with the governments of Dallas-Fort Worth and Dubai to bring its flying taxis to those cities first. It is also joining forces with real estate firm Hilwood Properties in Dallas-Fort Worth to identify sites where it will build takeoff and landing pads, which Uber calls "vertiports." It has signed contracts (or is in the midst of contract negotiations) with five aircraft manufacturers to work on the design and production of lightweight, electrically powered vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft. And it launched a partnership with an electric charging company called ChargePoint, to develop charging stations for Uber's flying taxis.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: BrickerBot, the botnet that permanently incapacitates poorly secured Internet of Things devices before they can be conscripted into Internet-crippling denial-of-service armies, is back with a new squadron of foot soldiers armed with a meaner arsenal of weapons. Pascal Geenens, the researcher who first documented what he calls the permanent denial-of-service botnet, has dubbed the fiercest new instance BrickerBot.3. It appeared out of nowhere on April 20, exactly one month after BrickerBot.1 first surfaced. Not only did BrickerBot.3 mount a much quicker number of attacks -- with 1,295 attacks coming in just 15 hours -- it used a modified attack script that added several commands designed to more completely shock and awe its targets. BrickerBot.1, by comparison, fired 1,895 volleys during the four days it was active, and the still-active BrickerBot.2 has spit out close to 12 attacks per day. Shortly after BrickerBot.3 began attacking, Geenens discovered BrickerBot.4. Together, the two newly discovered instances have attempted to attack devices in the research honeypot close to 1,400 times in less than 24 hours. Like BrickerBot.1, the newcomer botnets are made up of IoT devices running an outdated version of the Dropbear SSH server with public, geographically dispersed IP addresses. Those two characteristics lead Geenens to suspect the attacking devices are poorly secured IoT devices themselves that someone has compromised and used to permanently take out similarly unsecured devices. Geenens, of security firm Radware, has more details here.

MojoKid writes: Intel has officially launched its Optane Memory line of Solid State Drives today, lifting embargo on performance benchmark results as well. Optane Memory is designed to accelerate the storage subsystem on compatible machines, to improve transfer speeds, and reduce latency. It is among the first products to leverage 3D XPoint memory technology that was co-developed by Intel and Micron, offering many of the same properties as NAND flash memory, but with higher endurance and certain performance characteristics that are similar to DRAM. The SSD can be paired to the boot drive in a system, regardless of the capacity or drive type, though Optane Memory will most commonly be linked to slower hard drives. Optane Memory is used as a high-speed repository, as usage patterns on the hard drive are monitored and the most frequently accessed bits of data are copied from the boot drive to the Optane SSD. Since the SSD is used as a cache, it is not presented to the end-user as a separate volume and works transparently in the background. Paired with an inexpensive SATA hard drive, general system performance is more in line with an NVMe SSD. In benchmark testing, Intel Optane Memory delivers a dramatic lift in overall system performance. Boot times, application load time, file searches, and overall system responsiveness are improved significantly. Setting up Intel Optane Memory is also quick and easy with "set it and forget it" type of solution. Optane Memory modules will hit retail this week in 16GB and 32GB capacities, at $44 and $77, respectively.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: Tesla says it will double the number of electric vehicle chargers in its network this year as the automaker prepares for the production of its mass-market vehicle the Model 3. The plan, announced Monday in a blog post on the company's website, will grow its global network of Superchargers from more than 5,400 today to more than 10,000 by the end of the year. Tesla, which had previously announced in its annual shareholder letter plans to double the network in North America, did not disclose the cost of such an ambitious expansion. Many sites will soon enter construction to open in advance of the summer travel season, according to Tesla. The company says it will add charging locations within city centers as well as highway sites this year. The goal is to make "charging ubiquitous in urban centers," Tesla says in its blog post. The company says it will build larger sites along busy travel routes to accommodate several dozen Teslas simultaneously. These larger sites will also have customer service centers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Uber has another lawsuit on its hands. This time, it's about Uber's alleged use of a program called "Hell." The plaintiff, Michael Gonzales, drove for Lyft during the time Uber allegedly used the software. He's seeking $5 million in a class action lawsuit. As the story goes, Uber allegedly tracked Lyft drivers using a secret software program internally referred to as "Hell." It allegedly let Uber see how many Lyft drivers were available to give rides, and what their prices were. Hell could allegedly also determine if people were driving for both Uber and Lyft. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges Uber broadly invaded the privacy of the Lyft drivers, specifically violated the California Invasion of Privacy Act and Federal Wiretap Act and engaged in unfair competition. Uber has not confirmed nor outright denied the claims.

Earlier this year, telecommunications giants like T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon and Sprint were battling to see who could release the best unlimited data plan(s). T-Mobile started the domino chain reaction with the launch of its "One" unlimited plan in August. But the competition became especially fierce in February when Verizon introduced unlimited data plans of their own, causing Sprint and AT&T to unveil new unlimited data plans that same week, both of which have their own restrictions and pricing. Each of the four major carriers have since continued to tweak their plans to ultimately undercut their competitors and retain as many customers are possible.

Given how almost everyone has a smartphone these days and the thirst for data has never been higher, we'd like to ask you about your current wireless carrier and plan. Which wireless carrier and plan do you have any why? Is there any one carrier or unlimited data plan that stands out from the others? T-Mobile, for example, recently announced that it added 1.1 million customers in Q1 2017, which means that it has added more than 1 million customers every quarter for the past four years. Have they managed to earn your business? MyRatePlan has a good breakdown of the current unlimited data plans on the market today.

Earlier this year, telecommunications giants like T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon and Sprint were battling to see who could release the best unlimited data plan(s). T-Mobile started the domino chain reaction with the launch of its "One" unlimited plan in August. But the competition became especially fierce in February when Verizon introduced unlimited data plans of their own, causing Sprint and AT&T to unveil new unlimited data plans that same week, both of which have their own restrictions and pricing. Each of the four major carriers have since continued to tweak their plans to ultimately undercut their competitors and retain as many customers are possible.

Given how almost everyone has a smartphone these days and the thirst for data has never been higher, we'd like to ask you about your current wireless carrier and plan. Which wireless carrier and plan do you have any why? Is there any one carrier or unlimited data plan that stands out from the others? T-Mobile, for example, recently announced that it added 1.1 million customers in Q1 2017, which means that it has added more than 1 million customers every quarter for the past four years. Have they managed to earn your business? MyRatePlan has a good breakdown of the current unlimited data plans on the market today.

Earlier this year, telecommunications giants like T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon and Sprint were battling to see who could release the best unlimited data plan(s). T-Mobile started the domino chain reaction with the launch of its "One" unlimited plan in August. But the competition became especially fierce in February when Verizon introduced unlimited data plans of their own, causing Sprint and AT&T to unveil new unlimited data plans that same week, both of which have their own restrictions and pricing. Each of the four major carriers have since continued to tweak their plans to ultimately undercut their competitors and retain as many customers are possible.

Given how almost everyone has a smartphone these days and the thirst for data has never been higher, we'd like to ask you about your current wireless carrier and plan. Which wireless carrier and plan do you have any why? Is there any one carrier or unlimited data plan that stands out from the others? T-Mobile, for example, recently announced that it added 1.1 million customers in Q1 2017, which means that it has added more than 1 million customers every quarter for the past four years. Have they managed to earn your business? MyRatePlan has a good breakdown of the current unlimited data plans on the market today.

msm1267 quotes a report from Threatpost: A little more than two weeks after the latest ShadowBrokers leak of NSA hacking tools, experts are certain that the DoublePulsar post-exploitation Windows kernel attack will have similar staying power to the Conficker bug, and that pen-testers will be finding servers exposed to the flaws patched in MS17-010 for years to come. MS17-010 was released in March and it closes a number of holes in Windows SMB Server exploited by the NSA. Exploits such as EternalBlue, EternalChampion, EternalSynergy and EternalRomance that are part of the Fuzzbunch exploit platform all drop DoublePulsar onto compromised hosts. DoublePulsar is a sophisticated memory-based kernel payload that hooks onto x86 and 64-bit systems and allows an attacker to execute any raw shellcode payload they wish. "This is a full ring0 payload that gives you full control over the system and you can do what you want to it," said Sean Dillon, senior security analyst at RiskSense. Dillon was the first to reverse-engineer a DoublePulsar payload, and published his analysis last Friday. "This is going to be on networks for years to come. The last major vulnerability of this class was MS08-067, and it's still found in a lot of places," Dillon said. "I find it everywhere. This is the most critical Windows patch since that vulnerability." Dan Tentler, founder and CEO of Phobos Group, said internet-net wide scans he's running have found about 3.1 percent of vulnerable machines are already infected (between 62,000 and 65,000 so far), and that percentage is likely to go up as scans continue. "This is easily describable as a bloodbath," Tentler said.

Artem Tashkinov writes: Today, a Canadian artificial intelligence startup named Lyrebird unveiled its voice imitation deep learning algorithm that can mimic a person's voice and have it read any text with a given emotion, based on the analysis of just a few dozen seconds of audio recording. The website features samples using the recreated voices of Donald Trump, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. A similar technology was created by Adobe around a year ago but it requires over 20 minutes of recorded speech. The company sets to open its APIs to the public, while the computing for the task will be performed in the cloud.

Reader epiphani writes: The Ontario Government will pilot universal basic income in a $50M program supporting 4,000 households over a 3 year period. While Slashdot has vigorously debated universal basic income in the past, and even Elon Musk has predicted it's necessity, experts continue to debate and gather data on the approach in the face of increasing automation. Ontario's plan will study three communities over three years, with participants receiving up to $17,000 annually if single, and $24,000 for families.

Reader epiphani writes: The Ontario Government will pilot universal basic income in a $50M program supporting 4,000 households over a 3 year period. While Slashdot has vigorously debated universal basic income in the past, and even Elon Musk has predicted it's necessity, experts continue to debate and gather data on the approach in the face of increasing automation. Ontario's plan will study three communities over three years, with participants receiving up to $17,000 annually if single, and $24,000 for families.

Last year, Bloomberg reported that Google co-founder Larry Page had put money in two "flying car" companies. One of those companies, Kitty Hawk, has published the first video of its prototype aircraft. From a report on The Verge: The company describes the Kitty Hawk Flyer as an "all-electric aircraft" that is designed to operate over water and doesn't require a pilot's license to fly. Kitty Hawk promises people will be able to learn to fly the Flyer "in minutes." A consumer version will be available by the end of this year, the company says. The video is part commercial and part test footage, starting with a lakeside conversation between friends about using the Flyer to meet up before switching to what The New York Times says are shots of an aerospace engineer operating the craft in Northern California.

The chief executive of email unsubscription service Unroll.me has said he is "heartbroken" that users felt betrayed by the fact that his company monetises the contents of their inbox by selling their data to companies such as Uber. Over the weekend, The New York Times published a profile of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, in which, among other things, it reported that following an acquisition by shopping app Slice in 2014, Unroll.me developed a side-business: selling aggregated data about users to the very apps they were unsubscribing from. Uber was one of Slice's big data arm Slice Intelligence's customers. CNET adds: While Unroll.me did not specifically admit to selling data to Uber, it has apologised for not being "explicit enough" in explaining how its free service worked. "It was heartbreaking to see that some of our users were upset to learn about how we monetize our free service," CEO Jojo Hedaya said on the Unroll.me blog. While reiterating that "all data is completely anonymous and related to purchases only," Hedaya admitted, "we need to do better for our users" by offering clearer information on its website.

Many Slashdot readers know Bryan Lunduke as the creator of the humorous "Linux Sucks" presentations at the annual Southern California Linux Exposition. He's now also a member of the OpenSUSE project board and an all-around open source guy. (In September, he released every one of his books, videos and comics under a Creative Commons license, while his Patreon page offers a tip jar and premiums for monthly patrons). But now he's also got a new "daily computing/nerd show" on YouTube, and last week -- using nothing but free software -- he interviewed the 64-year-old founder of the Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman. "We talk about everything from the W3C's stance on DRM to opinions on the movie Galaxy Quest," Lunduke explains in the show's notes.

Click through to read some of the highlights.
"Instead of the DMCA, which makes it a crime to show people how to break DRM, it should be a crime to make, import or lease or sell devices with DRM," Stallman says. "Both the players and the media. It should be a crime. The executives of the companies that are now pulling the strings of the W3C, they should go to jail for doing DRM. "

Asked about Sir Tim Berners-Lee's endorsement of DRM in HTML5, Stallman quipped that "The fact that he's a knight means he was of service to the empire. And now he's being of service to another empire...What's happening here is that Berners-Lee and Jeff Jaffee have convinced themselves that by making this a standard, they will make the injustice of DRM smoother and less annoying in minor ways. And they've convinced themselves that that's the purpose of their lives... "

"He should handle it by saying no. But he can't really. And the reason is he set up an organization which is controlled by the businesses that want to put in the most money... By structuring it so it's controlled by the businesses, they've structured it so it wouldn't defend us from those businesses."

Stallman calls Skype "a non-free program with a network effect" whose users are "victim co-perpetrators," and also says that "Nobody uses Facebook, Facebook uses them. Facebook doesn't have users. It has useds. If you have a Facebook account, Facebook is using you to get information about you and about other people you know..."

Stallman pans mobile devices "that are full of peripherals that require non-free software at the system level. So there's no way to free them and have them work, except lots of painstaking reverse engineering, which is proceeding slowly."

And Stallman reserves a special bile for "the internet of Stings", saying "I personally wouldn't tolerate anything in my home that was talking to the internet except for my computer. They're designed to mistreat you. And part of the way they're designed to mistreat you is that they contain non-free software. And as happens often in the non-free software world, they have malicious functionality... It's the act of folly to use such a device."

Citing evils including surveillance, DRM, and back doors, as well as censorship and tethering to a remote server, Stallman says "If any proprietary program nowadays has no malicious functionality, that's basically luck."

"With free software you can remove any malicious functionality [or] a few other users can get together and release their modified version, and you just have to use it. With free software the community of users can defend itself from malicious functionalities. With proprietary software, the users are defenseless. This is why the mere fact of being proprietary software is an injustice." At one point he even says that proprietary software is like a dangerous drug, and "we've got to teach people to get off of it."

His advice to others? "Reject products with DRM. Never use any product designed to restrict you unless you have, immediately to hand, what it takes to break the handcuffs."

Stallman says he's running Trisquel's GNU/Linux distro on a ThinkPad x60, "one of the models of computer that can run a free BIOS with no binary blobs in the BIOS or in Linux, no proprietary software at any level of the GNU system. This is basically what we were aiming for 34 years ago."

Lunduke asks Stallman how a staunch proponent of free software -- and a man who doesn't agree to EULAs -- gets his entertainment media? Stallman replies, "No movie or show or song is worth giving up my freedom for. So I don't. So the only ways I will get copies of publications is when there's an ethical way to do it, one that doesn't mistreat me, doesn't do injustice to those who are using it..." "I buy music on CDs from physical stores... The problem is in the U.S. it's hard to find such stores any more!"

As a recovering teenaged TV addict, he no longer owns a television -- he went cold turkey when he went to college -- but he loved The Prisoner, and quotes it. " 'I'm going to escape and come back and wipe this place off off the face of the earth' is an inspiration to me. You might say that spirit is the base of the Free Software Movement. I'm going to escape from proprietary software, and come back, and wipe proprietary software off the face of the earth."

Finally, Stallman says we need more free software champions to help with this great work, and when Lunduke conveys the thank-yous of many free software fans, Stallman replies, "The best way to thank me and the thousands of other people who've worked on GNU is by helping us advance. So look at GNU.org/help, and you'll see see dozens of different kinds of work you can do or contributions you can make. And it's not all programming..."

Many Slashdot readers know Bryan Lunduke as the creator of the humorous "Linux Sucks" presentations at the annual Southern California Linux Exposition. He's now also a member of the OpenSUSE project board and an all-around open source guy. (In September, he released every one of his books, videos and comics under a Creative Commons license, while his Patreon page offers a tip jar and premiums for monthly patrons). But now he's also got a new "daily computing/nerd show" on YouTube, and last week -- using nothing but free software -- he interviewed the 64-year-old founder of the Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman. "We talk about everything from the W3C's stance on DRM to opinions on the movie Galaxy Quest," Lunduke explains in the show's notes.

Click through to read some of the highlights.
"Instead of the DMCA, which makes it a crime to show people how to break DRM, it should be a crime to make, import or lease or sell devices with DRM," Stallman says. "Both the players and the media. It should be a crime. The executives of the companies that are now pulling the strings of the W3C, they should go to jail for doing DRM. "

Asked about Sir Tim Berners-Lee's endorsement of DRM in HTML5, Stallman quipped that "The fact that he's a knight means he was of service to the empire. And now he's being of service to another empire...What's happening here is that Berners-Lee and Jeff Jaffee have convinced themselves that by making this a standard, they will make the injustice of DRM smoother and less annoying in minor ways. And they've convinced themselves that that's the purpose of their lives... "

"He should handle it by saying no. But he can't really. And the reason is he set up an organization which is controlled by the businesses that want to put in the most money... By structuring it so it's controlled by the businesses, they've structured it so it wouldn't defend us from those businesses."

Stallman calls Skype "a non-free program with a network effect" whose users are "victim co-perpetrators," and also says that "Nobody uses Facebook, Facebook uses them. Facebook doesn't have users. It has useds. If you have a Facebook account, Facebook is using you to get information about you and about other people you know..."

Stallman pans mobile devices "that are full of peripherals that require non-free software at the system level. So there's no way to free them and have them work, except lots of painstaking reverse engineering, which is proceeding slowly."

And Stallman reserves a special bile for "the internet of Stings", saying "I personally wouldn't tolerate anything in my home that was talking to the internet except for my computer. They're designed to mistreat you. And part of the way they're designed to mistreat you is that they contain non-free software. And as happens often in the non-free software world, they have malicious functionality... It's the act of folly to use such a device."

Citing evils including surveillance, DRM, and back doors, as well as censorship and tethering to a remote server, Stallman says "If any proprietary program nowadays has no malicious functionality, that's basically luck."

"With free software you can remove any malicious functionality [or] a few other users can get together and release their modified version, and you just have to use it. With free software the community of users can defend itself from malicious functionalities. With proprietary software, the users are defenseless. This is why the mere fact of being proprietary software is an injustice." At one point he even says that proprietary software is like a dangerous drug, and "we've got to teach people to get off of it."

His advice to others? "Reject products with DRM. Never use any product designed to restrict you unless you have, immediately to hand, what it takes to break the handcuffs."

Stallman says he's running Trisquel's GNU/Linux distro on a ThinkPad x60, "one of the models of computer that can run a free BIOS with no binary blobs in the BIOS or in Linux, no proprietary software at any level of the GNU system. This is basically what we were aiming for 34 years ago."

Lunduke asks Stallman how a staunch proponent of free software -- and a man who doesn't agree to EULAs -- gets his entertainment media? Stallman replies, "No movie or show or song is worth giving up my freedom for. So I don't. So the only ways I will get copies of publications is when there's an ethical way to do it, one that doesn't mistreat me, doesn't do injustice to those who are using it..." "I buy music on CDs from physical stores... The problem is in the U.S. it's hard to find such stores any more!"

As a recovering teenaged TV addict, he no longer owns a television -- he went cold turkey when he went to college -- but he loved The Prisoner, and quotes it. " 'I'm going to escape and come back and wipe this place off off the face of the earth' is an inspiration to me. You might say that spirit is the base of the Free Software Movement. I'm going to escape from proprietary software, and come back, and wipe proprietary software off the face of the earth."

Finally, Stallman says we need more free software champions to help with this great work, and when Lunduke conveys the thank-yous of many free software fans, Stallman replies, "The best way to thank me and the thousands of other people who've worked on GNU is by helping us advance. So look at GNU.org/help, and you'll see see dozens of different kinds of work you can do or contributions you can make. And it's not all programming..."

Many Slashdot readers know Bryan Lunduke as the creator of the humorous "Linux Sucks" presentations at the annual Southern California Linux Exposition. He's now also a member of the OpenSUSE project board and an all-around open source guy. (In September, he released every one of his books, videos and comics under a Creative Commons license, while his Patreon page offers a tip jar and premiums for monthly patrons). But now he's also got a new "daily computing/nerd show" on YouTube, and last week -- using nothing but free software -- he interviewed the 64-year-old founder of the Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman. "We talk about everything from the W3C's stance on DRM to opinions on the movie Galaxy Quest," Lunduke explains in the show's notes.

Click through to read some of the highlights.
"Instead of the DMCA, which makes it a crime to show people how to break DRM, it should be a crime to make, import or lease or sell devices with DRM," Stallman says. "Both the players and the media. It should be a crime. The executives of the companies that are now pulling the strings of the W3C, they should go to jail for doing DRM. "

Asked about Sir Tim Berners-Lee's endorsement of DRM in HTML5, Stallman quipped that "The fact that he's a knight means he was of service to the empire. And now he's being of service to another empire...What's happening here is that Berners-Lee and Jeff Jaffee have convinced themselves that by making this a standard, they will make the injustice of DRM smoother and less annoying in minor ways. And they've convinced themselves that that's the purpose of their lives... "

"He should handle it by saying no. But he can't really. And the reason is he set up an organization which is controlled by the businesses that want to put in the most money... By structuring it so it's controlled by the businesses, they've structured it so it wouldn't defend us from those businesses."

Stallman calls Skype "a non-free program with a network effect" whose users are "victim co-perpetrators," and also says that "Nobody uses Facebook, Facebook uses them. Facebook doesn't have users. It has useds. If you have a Facebook account, Facebook is using you to get information about you and about other people you know..."

Stallman pans mobile devices "that are full of peripherals that require non-free software at the system level. So there's no way to free them and have them work, except lots of painstaking reverse engineering, which is proceeding slowly."

And Stallman reserves a special bile for "the internet of Stings", saying "I personally wouldn't tolerate anything in my home that was talking to the internet except for my computer. They're designed to mistreat you. And part of the way they're designed to mistreat you is that they contain non-free software. And as happens often in the non-free software world, they have malicious functionality... It's the act of folly to use such a device."

Citing evils including surveillance, DRM, and back doors, as well as censorship and tethering to a remote server, Stallman says "If any proprietary program nowadays has no malicious functionality, that's basically luck."

"With free software you can remove any malicious functionality [or] a few other users can get together and release their modified version, and you just have to use it. With free software the community of users can defend itself from malicious functionalities. With proprietary software, the users are defenseless. This is why the mere fact of being proprietary software is an injustice." At one point he even says that proprietary software is like a dangerous drug, and "we've got to teach people to get off of it."

His advice to others? "Reject products with DRM. Never use any product designed to restrict you unless you have, immediately to hand, what it takes to break the handcuffs."

Stallman says he's running Trisquel's GNU/Linux distro on a ThinkPad x60, "one of the models of computer that can run a free BIOS with no binary blobs in the BIOS or in Linux, no proprietary software at any level of the GNU system. This is basically what we were aiming for 34 years ago."

Lunduke asks Stallman how a staunch proponent of free software -- and a man who doesn't agree to EULAs -- gets his entertainment media? Stallman replies, "No movie or show or song is worth giving up my freedom for. So I don't. So the only ways I will get copies of publications is when there's an ethical way to do it, one that doesn't mistreat me, doesn't do injustice to those who are using it..." "I buy music on CDs from physical stores... The problem is in the U.S. it's hard to find such stores any more!"

As a recovering teenaged TV addict, he no longer owns a television -- he went cold turkey when he went to college -- but he loved The Prisoner, and quotes it. " 'I'm going to escape and come back and wipe this place off off the face of the earth' is an inspiration to me. You might say that spirit is the base of the Free Software Movement. I'm going to escape from proprietary software, and come back, and wipe proprietary software off the face of the earth."

Finally, Stallman says we need more free software champions to help with this great work, and when Lunduke conveys the thank-yous of many free software fans, Stallman replies, "The best way to thank me and the thousands of other people who've worked on GNU is by helping us advance. So look at GNU.org/help, and you'll see see dozens of different kinds of work you can do or contributions you can make. And it's not all programming..."

Many Slashdot readers know Bryan Lunduke as the creator of the humorous "Linux Sucks" presentations at the annual Southern California Linux Exposition. He's now also a member of the OpenSUSE project board and an all-around open source guy. (In September, he released every one of his books, videos and comics under a Creative Commons license, while his Patreon page offers a tip jar and premiums for monthly patrons). But now he's also got a new "daily computing/nerd show" on YouTube, and last week -- using nothing but free software -- he interviewed the 64-year-old founder of the Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman. "We talk about everything from the W3C's stance on DRM to opinions on the movie Galaxy Quest," Lunduke explains in the show's notes.

Click through to read some of the highlights.
"Instead of the DMCA, which makes it a crime to show people how to break DRM, it should be a crime to make, import or lease or sell devices with DRM," Stallman says. "Both the players and the media. It should be a crime. The executives of the companies that are now pulling the strings of the W3C, they should go to jail for doing DRM. "

Asked about Sir Tim Berners-Lee's endorsement of DRM in HTML5, Stallman quipped that "The fact that he's a knight means he was of service to the empire. And now he's being of service to another empire...What's happening here is that Berners-Lee and Jeff Jaffee have convinced themselves that by making this a standard, they will make the injustice of DRM smoother and less annoying in minor ways. And they've convinced themselves that that's the purpose of their lives... "

"He should handle it by saying no. But he can't really. And the reason is he set up an organization which is controlled by the businesses that want to put in the most money... By structuring it so it's controlled by the businesses, they've structured it so it wouldn't defend us from those businesses."

Stallman calls Skype "a non-free program with a network effect" whose users are "victim co-perpetrators," and also says that "Nobody uses Facebook, Facebook uses them. Facebook doesn't have users. It has useds. If you have a Facebook account, Facebook is using you to get information about you and about other people you know..."

Stallman pans mobile devices "that are full of peripherals that require non-free software at the system level. So there's no way to free them and have them work, except lots of painstaking reverse engineering, which is proceeding slowly."

And Stallman reserves a special bile for "the internet of Stings", saying "I personally wouldn't tolerate anything in my home that was talking to the internet except for my computer. They're designed to mistreat you. And part of the way they're designed to mistreat you is that they contain non-free software. And as happens often in the non-free software world, they have malicious functionality... It's the act of folly to use such a device."

Citing evils including surveillance, DRM, and back doors, as well as censorship and tethering to a remote server, Stallman says "If any proprietary program nowadays has no malicious functionality, that's basically luck."

"With free software you can remove any malicious functionality [or] a few other users can get together and release their modified version, and you just have to use it. With free software the community of users can defend itself from malicious functionalities. With proprietary software, the users are defenseless. This is why the mere fact of being proprietary software is an injustice." At one point he even says that proprietary software is like a dangerous drug, and "we've got to teach people to get off of it."

His advice to others? "Reject products with DRM. Never use any product designed to restrict you unless you have, immediately to hand, what it takes to break the handcuffs."

Stallman says he's running Trisquel's GNU/Linux distro on a ThinkPad x60, "one of the models of computer that can run a free BIOS with no binary blobs in the BIOS or in Linux, no proprietary software at any level of the GNU system. This is basically what we were aiming for 34 years ago."

Lunduke asks Stallman how a staunch proponent of free software -- and a man who doesn't agree to EULAs -- gets his entertainment media? Stallman replies, "No movie or show or song is worth giving up my freedom for. So I don't. So the only ways I will get copies of publications is when there's an ethical way to do it, one that doesn't mistreat me, doesn't do injustice to those who are using it..." "I buy music on CDs from physical stores... The problem is in the U.S. it's hard to find such stores any more!"

As a recovering teenaged TV addict, he no longer owns a television -- he went cold turkey when he went to college -- but he loved The Prisoner, and quotes it. " 'I'm going to escape and come back and wipe this place off off the face of the earth' is an inspiration to me. You might say that spirit is the base of the Free Software Movement. I'm going to escape from proprietary software, and come back, and wipe proprietary software off the face of the earth."

Finally, Stallman says we need more free software champions to help with this great work, and when Lunduke conveys the thank-yous of many free software fans, Stallman replies, "The best way to thank me and the thousands of other people who've worked on GNU is by helping us advance. So look at GNU.org/help, and you'll see see dozens of different kinds of work you can do or contributions you can make. And it's not all programming..."

An anonymous reader writes: Functional programming seems to be all the rage these days. Efforts are being made to highlight its use in Java, JavaScript, C# and elsewhere. Lots of claims are being made about it's virtues that seem relatively easy to prove or disprove such as "Its use will reduce your debugging time." Or "It will clarify your code." My co-workers are resorting to arm-wrestling matches over this style choice. Half of my co-workers have drunk the Kool-Aid and are evangelizing its benefits. The other half are unconvinced of its virtues over Object Oriented Design patterns, etc.

What is your take on functional programming and related technologies (i.e. lambdas and streams)? Is it our salvation? Is it merely another useful design pattern? Or is it a technological dead-end?
Python creator Guido van Rossum has said most programmers aren't used to functional languages, and when he answered Slashdot reader questions in 2013 said the only functional language he knew much about was Haskell, and "any language less popular than Haskell surely has very little practical value." He even added "I also don't think that the current crop of functional languages is ready for mainstream."

Leave your own opinions in the comments. Do you like functional programming?

An anonymous reader quotes MIT Technology Review: A group of Australian marine scientists believe that altering clouds might offer one of the best hopes for saving the Great Barrier Reef. For the last six months, researchers at the Sydney Institute of Marine Science and the University of Sydney School of Geosciences have been meeting regularly to explore the possibility of making low-lying clouds off the northeastern coast of Australia more reflective in order to cool the waters surrounding the world's biggest coral reef system...

Last year, as El Nino events cranked up ocean temperatures, at least 20% of the reef died and more than 90% of it was damaged. The Australian researchers took a hard look at a number of potential ways to preserve the reefs. But at this point, making clouds more reflective looks like the most feasible way to protect an ecosystem that stretches across more than 130,000 square miles, says Daniel Harrison, a postdoctoral research associate with the Ocean Technology Group at the University of Sydney. Cloud brightening is the only thing we've identified that's scalable, sensible, and relatively environmentally benign," he says... Next month, he plans to start computer climate modeling to explore whether cloud brightening could make a big enough temperature difference to help.
They're collaborating with Silicon Valley's Marine Cloud Brightening Project, which has spent the last seven years "developing a nozzle that they believe can spray salt particles of just the right size and quantity to alter the clouds. They're attempting to raise several million dollars to build full-scale sprayers." The article describes them as "one of several research groups that have started to explore whether cloud brightening, generally discussed as a potential tool to alter the climate as a whole, could be applied in more targeted ways."

White hat hackers "are in very high demand," says PwC's director of cyber investigation and breach response, in a New York Post article titled "Companies are paying millions to get hacked -- on purpose." An anonymous reader quotes their report: HackerOne, a San Francisco-based "vulnerability coordination and bug bounty platform," reports that it has some 800 corporate customers who paid out more than $15 million in bonuses to white-hat hackers since its founding in 2012. Most of that bounty was paid in the past two years, as companies have become more aware of their cyber vulnerabilities. Clients that have used the platform include General Motors, Uber, Twitter, Starbucks and even the US Department of Defense.
Google paid $3 million last year through its own bounty program, according to HackerOne's CEO Marten Micko, who touts his company's "turn-key" solution -- a platform which now offers the services of 100,000 ethical (and vetted) hackers. "With a diverse group, all types of vulnerabilities can be found," Micko told TechRepublic. "This is a corollary to the 'given enough eyeballs' wisdom... they find them faster than other solutions, the hunting is ongoing and not happening at just one time, and the cost is a tenth of what it would be with other methods." And one of the platform's white hat hackers has already earned over $600,000 in just two years.

Startup Eternime, founded by MIT fellow Marius Ursache, is still working on "immortal avatars" that, after your death, will continue interacting with your loves ones from beyond the grave. An anonymous reader quotes CNET: Give Eternime access to your social media profiles and the startup's algorithms will scrape your posts and interactions to build a profile... The algorithms will study your memories and mannerisms. They'll learn how to be "you"... Eternime was announced in 2014 after Ursache developed the idea during the MIT Entrepreneurship Development Program. He wasn't entirely sure if he should develop the project further and wanted to get a sense of public reaction.

In the first four days, 3,000 people signed up at Eterni.me, the company's website, for a private beta. Then, Urasche received an email from a man dying of terminal cancer. "Eternime, he wrote, was the last chance to leave something behind for friends and family," Urasche told me. "That was the moment I decided that this was something worth dedicating my life to"... Since 2014, the Eternime website has largely been silent, although it continues to take names of people who want to test the service. Ursache says the Eternime team has been refining the product over the last two years, testing features, figuring out what will work and what won't.
"The private beta test is ongoing," according to the article, "and Ursache says the feedback has been positive." But unfortunately, the service still isn't operational yet.

An anonymous reader quotes Caltech's announcement about the results of a study funded by NASA and the Department of Energy: During the early 2000s, environmental scientists studying methane emissions noticed something unexpected: the global concentrations of atmospheric methane -- which had increased for decades, driven by methane emissions from fossil fuels and agriculture -- inexplicably leveled off. The methane levels remained stable for a few years, then started rising again in 2007... New modeling by researchers at Caltech and Harvard University suggests that methane emissions might not have increased dramatically in 2007 after all. Instead, the most likely explanation has less to do with methane emissions and more to do with changes in the availability of the hydroxyl radical, which breaks down methane in the atmosphere... If global levels of hydroxyl decrease, global methane concentrations will increase -- even if methane emissions remain constant, the researchers say...

Tracking decadal trends in both methane and hydroxyl, Christian Frankenberg and his colleagues noted that fluctuations in hydroxyl concentrations correlated strongly with fluctuations in methane... "Think of the atmosphere like a kitchen sink with the faucet running," Frankenberg explains. "When the water level inside the sink rises, that can mean that you've opened up the faucet more. Or it can mean that the drain is blocking up. You have to look at both."
So what's changing the level of hydroxl in the atmosphere? The researchers say they have no idea.

wisebabo quotes Science Daily: Until now, researchers had not had a good way to study how people actually experienced what is called "epiphany learning." In new research, scientists at The Ohio State University used eye-tracking and pupil dilation technology to see what happens as people figured out how to win a strategy game on a computer. "We could see our study participants figuring out the solution through their eye movements as they considered their options," said Ian Krajbich, co-author of the study and assistant professor of psychology and economics at Ohio State. "We could predict they were about to have an epiphany before they even knew it was coming."
The original submission suggests, "This might be useful to determine when you are trying to teach a difficult subject to someone who you're afraid might be inclined to just nod their head. Or maybe this is how the Voight-Kampff test works. (Are you a replicant?)"

Slashdot user #1083, downwa, writes: Canonical engineer Simon Fels has publicly released an Alpha version of Anbox. Similar to the method employed for Android apps on ChromeOS, Anbox runs an entire Android system (7.1.1 at present) in an LXC container. Developed over the last year and a half, the software promises to seamlessly bring performant Android apps to the Linux desktop.

After installing Anbox (based on Android 7.1.1) and starting Anbox Application Manager, ten apps are available: Calculator, Calendar, Clock, Contacts, Email, Files, Gallery, Music, Settings, and WebView. Apps run in separate resizeable windows. Additional apps (ARM-native binaries are excluded) can be installed via adb. Installation currently is only supported on a few Linux distributions able to install snaps. Contributions are welcome on Github.
In a blog post Simon describes it as "a side project" that he's worked on for over a year and a half. "There were quite a few problems to solve on the way to a really working implementation but it is now in a state that it makes sense to share it with a wider audience."

Long-time reader jaromil writes: Devuan 1.0.0-RC is announced, following its beta 2 release last year. The Debian fork that spawned over systemd controversy is reaching stability and plans long-term support. Devuan deploys an innovative continuous integration setup: with fallback on Debian packages, it overlays its own modifications and then uses the merged source repository to ship images for 11 ARM targets, a desktop and minimal live, vagrant and qemu virtual machines and the classic installer isos. The release announcement contains several links to projects that have already adopted this distribution as a base OS.
"Dear Init Freedom Lovers," begins the announcement, "Once again the Veteran Unix Admins salute you!" It points out that Devuan "can be adopted as a flawless upgrade path from both Debian Wheezy and Jessie. This is a main goal for the Devuan Jessie stable release and has proven to be a very stable operation every time it has been performed. "

Long-time reader jaromil writes: Devuan 1.0.0-RC is announced, following its beta 2 release last year. The Debian fork that spawned over systemd controversy is reaching stability and plans long-term support. Devuan deploys an innovative continuous integration setup: with fallback on Debian packages, it overlays its own modifications and then uses the merged source repository to ship images for 11 ARM targets, a desktop and minimal live, vagrant and qemu virtual machines and the classic installer isos. The release announcement contains several links to projects that have already adopted this distribution as a base OS.
"Dear Init Freedom Lovers," begins the announcement, "Once again the Veteran Unix Admins salute you!" It points out that Devuan "can be adopted as a flawless upgrade path from both Debian Wheezy and Jessie. This is a main goal for the Devuan Jessie stable release and has proven to be a very stable operation every time it has been performed. "

RockDoctor writes: A recent proposition to launch probes to other star systems driven by lasers which remain in the Solar system has garnered considerable attention. But recently published work suggests that there are unexpected complexities to the system. One would think that the closest star systems would be the easiest to reach. But unless you are content with a fly-by examination of the star system, with much reduced science returns, you will need to decelerate the probe at the far end, without any infrastructure to assist with the braking. By combining both light-pressure braking and gravitational slingshots, a team of German, French and Chilean astronomers discover that the brightness of the destination star can significantly increase deceleration, and thus travel time (because higher flight velocities can be used). Slingshotting around a companion star to lengthen deceleration times can help shed flight velocity to allow capture into a stable orbit. The 4.37 light year distant binary stars Alpha Centauri A and B could be reached in 75 years from Earth. Covering the 0.24 light year distance to Proxima Centauri depends on arriving at the correct relative orientations of Alpha Centauri A and B in their mutual 80 year orbit for the sling shot to work. Without a companion star, Proxima Centauri can only absorb a final leg velocity of about 1280km/s, so that leg of the trip would take an additional 46 years. Using the same performance characteristics for the light sail, the corresponding duration for an approach to the Sirius system, almost twice as far away (8.58 lightyears), is a mere 68.9 years, making it (and it's white dwarf companion) possibly a more attractive target. Of course, none of this addresses the question of how to get any data from there to here. Or, indeed, how to manage a project that will last longer than a working lifetime. There are also issues of aiming -- the motion of the Alpha Centauri system isn't well-enough known at the moment to achieve the precise maneuvering needed without course corrections (and so, data transmission from there to here) en route.

An anonymous reader writes: In an interview today, the author of BrickerBot, a malware that bricks IoT and networking devices, claimed he destroyed over 2 million devices, but he never intended to do so in the first place. His intentions were to fight the rising number of IoT botnets that were used to launch DDoS attacks last year, such as Gafgyt and Mirai. He says he created BrickerBot with 84 routines that try to secure devices so they can't be taken over by Mirai and other malware. Nevertheless, he realized that some devices are so badly designed that he could never protect them. He says that for these, he created a "Plan B," which meant deleting the device's storage, effectively bricking the device. His identity was revealed after a reporter received an anonymous tip about a HackForum users claiming he was destroying IoT devices since last November, just after BrickerBot appeared. When contacted, BrickerBot's author revealed that the malware is a personal project which he calls "Internet Chemotherapy" and he's "the doctor" who will kill all the cancerous unsecured IoT devices.

Microsoft has announced plans to host an event next month where it is expected to unveil Windows 10 Cloud operating system. Microsoft will be positioning the new OS as a competitor to Chrome OS, according to several reports. Windows Central has obtained an internal document which sheds light on the kind of devices that will be running Windows 10 Cloud. The hardware requirement that Microsoft has set for third-party OEMs is as follows: 1. Quad-core (Celeron or better) processor.
2. 4GB of RAM.
3. 32GB of storage (64GB for 64-bit). 4. A battery larger than 40 WHr.
5. Fast eMMC or solid state drive (SSD) for storage technology.
6. Pen and touch (optional). The report adds that Microsoft wants these laptops to offer over 10-hour of battery life, and the "cold boot" should not take longer than 20 seconds.

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has confirmed plans for his newest company, called Neuralink Corp, revealing he will be the chief executive of a startup that aims to merge computers with brains so humans could one day engage in "consensual telepathy." In an interview with explainer website Wait But Why (36,000-word), Musk said Neuralink aims to implant tiny brain electrodes that first would be used to fight brain conditions but later help humanity avoid subjugation at the hands of intelligent machines. From the report: "There are a bunch of concepts in your head that then your brain has to try to compress into this incredibly low data rate called speech or typing," Musk said. "That's what language is, your brain has executed a compression algorithm on thought, on concept transfer. If you have two brain interfaces, you could actually do an uncompressed direct conceptual communication with another person." Musk says he expects the project to take eight to 10 years before being usable by people with no disability. He anticipates tons of regulatory challenges in his way.

the_newsbeagle writes: Yesterday, Facebook announced that it's working on a "typing by brain" project, promising a non-invasive technology that can decode signals from the brain's speech center and translate them directly to text (see the video beginning at 1:18:00). What's more, Facebook exec Regina Dugan said, the technology will achieve a typing rate of 100 words per minute. Here, a few neuroscientists are asked: Is such a thing remotely feasible? One neuroscientist points out that his team set the current speed record for brain-typing earlier this year: They enabled a paralyzed man to type 8 words per minute, and that was using an invasive brain implant that could get high-fidelity signals from neurons. To date, all non-invasive methods that read brain signals through the scalp and skull have performed much worse. Thomas Naselaris, an assistant professor at the Medical University of South Carolina, says, "Our understanding of the way the words and their phonological and semantic attributes are encoded in brain activity is actually pretty good currently, but much of this understanding has been enabled by fMRI, which is noninvasive but very slow and not at all portable," he said. "So I think that the bottleneck will be the [optical] imaging technology," which is what Facebook's gear will be using.

the_newsbeagle writes: Yesterday, Facebook announced that it's working on a "typing by brain" project, promising a non-invasive technology that can decode signals from the brain's speech center and translate them directly to text (see the video beginning at 1:18:00). What's more, Facebook exec Regina Dugan said, the technology will achieve a typing rate of 100 words per minute. Here, a few neuroscientists are asked: Is such a thing remotely feasible? One neuroscientist points out that his team set the current speed record for brain-typing earlier this year: They enabled a paralyzed man to type 8 words per minute, and that was using an invasive brain implant that could get high-fidelity signals from neurons. To date, all non-invasive methods that read brain signals through the scalp and skull have performed much worse. Thomas Naselaris, an assistant professor at the Medical University of South Carolina, says, "Our understanding of the way the words and their phonological and semantic attributes are encoded in brain activity is actually pretty good currently, but much of this understanding has been enabled by fMRI, which is noninvasive but very slow and not at all portable," he said. "So I think that the bottleneck will be the [optical] imaging technology," which is what Facebook's gear will be using.

Anthony Ha writes via TechCrunch: Jeff Dunn, the former Coca-Cola executive who became CEO of Juicero last year, has responded to a wave of coverage suggesting that the company's juice press isn't all that was promised -- and he's offering dissatisfied customers their money back. A Bloomberg report showed that Juicero's packs could be squeezed by hand, no expensive juicer required. Dunn's response? He doesn't deny that hand-squeezing is a very real possibility, but he does quibble about what you'll find inside, saying it's "nothing but fresh, raw, organic chopped produce" -- see, it's not juice yet because it hasn't been pressed. "What you will get with hand-squeezed hacks is a mediocre (and maybe very messy) experience that you won't want to repeat once, let alone every day," he argued. More importantly, he said, "The value of Juicero is more than a glass of cold-pressed juice. Much more." At the beginning of his post, Dunn said his goal was to "demonstrate the incredible value we know our connected system delivers." And if you're not convinced this is worth $400, well, there's another option for disillusioned Juicero buyers -- Dunn said the company's "Happiness Guarantee" (i.e. its return policy) has been extended to cover anyone who's ever purchased a Juicero Press. So for the next 30 days, anyone who's bought a Press should be able to return it for a full refund.

jenningsthecat writes: As reported here back in February, the CBC, (Canada's national broadcaster), revealed DNA test results which indicated the chicken used in Subway Restaurants' sandwiches only contained about 50% chicken. Now, Subway is suing the public broadcaster for $210 million, because "its reputation and brand have taken a hit as a result of the CBC reports." The suit claims that "false statements [...] were published and republished, maliciously and without just cause or excuse, to a global audience, which has resulted in pecuniary loss to the plaintiffs."

Personally, my working assumption here is that the CBC report is substantially correct. It will be interesting to see how the case plays out -- but should this have happened at all? Regulatory agencies here in Canada seem to be pretty good when it comes to inspecting meat processing facilities. Should they also be testing the prepared foods served by major restaurant chains to ensure that claims regarding food content are true and accurate?

According to a legal documents, the American Hotel and Lodging Association (lobbying group for hotels in the U.S.) kicked off a plan last year to fight back Airbnb and other home-sharing services with a $5.6 million annual budget. Airbnb has responded to the revelation. From a report: The company's head of policy, Christopher Lehane, accused hoteliers of price-gouging customers and called their fight against Airbnb a "campaign to punish the middle-class" in a letter. It's only the latest salvo in a long fight between Airbnb and the American Hotel and Lodging Association (AHLA), which believes the startup is cutting into its business. [...] In a letter to the AHLA, Airbnb accused the group of trying to hurt middle-class property owners. The Airbnb head of policy argued that "we ought to be able to agree that the middle-class family that shares their home while traveling is not a commercial operator running a business." In its minutes, the AHLA alleged that many of the listings on Airbnb are operated by commercial entities. Lehane also accused the AHLA of being inconsistent on homesharing. He said the group's board meeting showed support for "the rights of property owners to occasionally rent out a room or their home."

Earlier this year, The Guardian reported that editors at Wikipedia had "voted to ban the Daily Mail as a source for the website," calling the publication "generally unreliable." Two months later, not only previous Daily Mail citations on Wikipedia pages are still alive, several new ones have also appeared since. So what's going on? The Outline has the story: There are no rules on Wikipedia, just guidelines. Of Wikipedia's five "pillars," the fifth is that there are no firm rules. There is no formal hierarchy either, though the most dedicated volunteers can apply to become administrators with extra powers after being approved by existing admins. But even they don't say what goes on the site. If there's a dispute or a debate, editors post a "request for comment," asking whoever is interested to have their say. The various points are tallied up by an editor and co-signed by four more after a month, but it's not a vote as in a democracy. Instead, the aim is to reach consensus of opinion, and if that's not possible, to weigh the arguments and pick the side that's most compelling. There was no vote to ban the Daily Mail because Wikipedia editors don't vote. (emphasis ours.) So what happened? The article adds: In this case, an editor submitted a broader request for comment about its [the Daily Mail's] general reliability. Seventy-seven editors participated in the discussion and two thirds supported prohibiting the Daily Mail as a source, with one editor and four co-signing editors (more than usual) chosen among administrators declaring that a consensus, though further discussion continued on a separate noticeboard, alongside complaints that the debate should have been better advertised. Though it's discouraged, the Daily Mail can be (and still is) cited. An editor I met at a recent London "Wikimeet" said he'd used the Daily Mail as a source in the last week, as it was the only source available for the subject he was writing about.

Three Chinese government agencies are planning to tell Apple to "tighten up checks" on live-streaming software offered on its app store, which can be used to violate internet regulation in the country. "Law enforcement officers had already met with Apple representatives over live-streaming services, [state news agency Xinhua reported], but did not provide details of the meetings," reports The Guardian. From the report: The inquiry appears to be focused on third-party apps available for download through Apple's online marketplace. The company did not respond to requests for comment. China operates the world's largest internet censorship regime, blocking a host of foreign websites including Google, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, but the authorities have struggled to control an explosion in popularity of live-streaming video apps. As part of the inquiry into live-streaming, three Chinese websites -- toutiao.com, huoshanzhibo.com and huajiao.com -- were already found to have violated internet regulations, and had broadcast content that violated Chinese law, including providing "pornographic content," the Xinhua report said. Pornography is banned in China. The three sites were told to increase oversight of live-broadcasting services, user registration and "the handling of tips-offs." Two of the websites, huoshanzhibo.com and huajiao.com, were under formal investigation and may have their cases transferred to the police for criminal prosecutions, the Xinhua report said. Casting a wide net, the regulations state that apps cannot "engage in activities prohibited by laws and regulations such as endangering national security, disrupting social order and violating the legitimate rights and interests of others."

Earlier this year, Tesla filed a lawsuit against its former director of Autopilot Programs, Sterling Anderson, for stealing proprietary information about the Autopilot program and recruiting fellow Tesla engineers to work with him at Aurora Innovation, another autonomous driving company. According to Electrek, "the lawsuit was settled today with Tesla withdrawing their allegations without damages and Aurora agreeing to make itself available for an audit by a third-party to make sure they don't have proprietary information from Tesla's Autopilot program." From the report: Aurora also agreed to cover the cost of the audit for up to $100,000. The startup claims that it had already ordered its own audit, which found âoeno material Tesla confidential information." As for the allegations of poaching employees, Aurora has agreed not to reach out to Tesla employees for a year and to release the names of former Tesla employees who have joined the startup already. You can read Auroraâ(TM)s statement about the settlement in full here and Teslaâ(TM)s further down below: âoeSelf-driving vehicles will save lives, preserve resources, and make transportation more accessible and enjoyable for everyone. Aurora was founded on the premise that experience, innovative thinking, hard work, and a commitment to doing the right thing can accelerate this future..."

You asked, he answered!

Lithium-ion battery inventor John B. Goodenough has responded to questions submitted by Slashdot readers. Read on for his answers. Ready for mass production?
by hduff

There are several innovative ideas for better batteries that never make it to market. The problem is that you can make a few by hand in the lab, but production of useful numbers does not scale well at all or it scales, but is horribly expensive. Will your development reasonably scale? If not, what stands in your way.

JBG: At the present time, we do not envision any problems with scale up. Although we have demonstrated with coin cells and a jelly-roll cell how to make novel cathodes, we have not optimized the cathode capacity, voltage, and discharge/charge rates. The anode problem is solved, but battery manufacturers will need to work with Li or Na anodes, which means dry-room assembly.

Critics
by Anonymous Coward

How do you respond to critics of the new battery technology? When can we expect to see them hit the street?

JBG: We respond by demonstrating the concepts in individual coin cells. We do not do the development work. We believe that practical batteries can be marketed in about 3 years.

Electrode material?
by Razed By TV

There seems to be some confusion about whether or not your battery has the same material or differing material on the two electrodes. Can you elaborate on this and, if the electrodes are the same material, how the battery works?

JBG: We have made zero-voltage symmetric cells Li/Li+-glass/Li that are still cycling after more than 2000 cycles at 3 mA/cm2. The key to the concept of a battery voltage that takes metallic lithium from the anode and plates it on the cathode is that a thin lithium (order of a micron thick) current collector is plated on a copper (or other) cathode lithium having a chemical potential over 3.5 V below that of metallic.

Li-ion battery fires
by Anonymous Coward

Could you speculate on the reasons behind the increasing frequency of Li-ion battery fires? Cheaper parts, smaller tolerances, higher energy density, or all of the above?

JBG: The origin of the Li-ion battery fires is the flammable organic-liquid electrolyte and the graphite anode. If the battery is charged too rapidly, metallic lithium is plated on the graphite, and lithium does not wet or is not wet by the electrolyte. As a result, on repeated charging, lithium dendrites (whiskers) form and grow across the liquid electrolyte to the cathode and create a short-circuit, which heats the battery and ignites the electrolyte. If the battery manufacturer does not incorporate a control of the rate of charge, fires follow.

Energy density
by JoshuaZ

Over time battery energy density has improved by approximately 5-10% a year. Do you expect this trend to continue? If not, what do you expect will happen in the long-term? Are there other metrics by which you expect batteries to continue to improve?

JBG: Energy density needs to be coupled to the charge/discharge cycle life; with the organic-liquid electrolytes now in use, batteries of high volumetric and/or specific energy density undergo a poor cycle life. The ability to plate a metallic-lithium anode dendrite-free from a solid electrolyte that is not reduced on contact with metallic lithium solves the safety problem, allows a long cycle life, and maximizes the energy density for a given cathode. However, the cathode strategies to optimize the density of stored energy in a full cell are yet to be determined for three different types of cathodes.

Time to market
by MondoGordo

Assuming your new battery tech scales easily and economically for mass production and given the intensifying demand for such tech, when would you expect to see it supplant lithium-ion as the battery technology of choice for manufacturers?

JBG: It will take competent battery manufacturers about two to three years to develop a marketable product. Once the technology is demonstrated by one, others will fall into line very rapidly.

Why?
by Bodhammer

Why is every technology breakthrough I read about "five to ten years away from commercial viability?"

JBG: There is a large difference between a laboratory experiment and a workable battery product. The potential market is huge, but incremental steps will not get us there. But without a demonstration of a novel approach, the estimate of 10 years away is an expression of hope for a true breakthrough. I believe that in two to three years our novel batteries will be marketed.

Will there always be a demand for lithium?
by Michael Woodhams

Will there always be a demand for lithium? Demand for lithium is soaring and supply is scrabbling to keep up. If I was contemplating constructing a lithium mine/extraction facility, I would be worried that my investment might do fine for five years and then suddenly become worthless when some new battery chemistry came along. Is this fear justifiable? Is it reducing current or near-future lithium supply?

JBG: The lithium battery will give 0.3 V higher discharge voltage than sodium, and sodium cathodes are less easy to design than lithium cathodes. However, we have demonstrated good sodium batteries; and people are working on recycling of lithium, which may reduce our vulnerability to finite lithium reserves. Lithium batteries will be marketed for a long time, but sodium batteries can be expected to enter the market within 5 years.

Where to next?
by Anonymous Coward

I am an electrical engineer and developing a battery pack for a light electric aircraft. What do you think is the next big application for batteries after EVs and home energy storage? Into what specific area of batteries should engineers focus their work on when developing battery systems? What is your ultimate vision for battery technology? Could you elaborate?

JBG: Inexpensive batteries that are safe, have a long cycle life, a higher energy density, and a satisfactory charge/discharge rate can be expected to be on the market in about 2 to 3 years. They will have multiple applications, small and large.

Limit of energy density
by Eloking

John, is it (theoretically) possible for a battery to reach the same energy density as fossil fuel? Gasoline has an energy density of 46MJ/kg while a lithium based battery has an energy density of around 1MJ/kg. This would mean that an electric car, boat or airplane would have the same potential range as their oil powered brethren.

JBG: Fossil fuels will always have a higher density of stored energy, but the efficiency of electric-power storage in a battery is greater than the efficiency of a combustion engine. I believe that electric power stored in electrochemical cells can compete relatively soon in convenience and performance with the internal combustion engine without the hidden losses to society by the burning of fossil fuel.

Why aren't 12 V lithium car batteries more popular?
by brad3378

I've noticed that replacement lithium polymer battery packs for hybrid cars often sell for less than $1,000 on eBay, while much smaller lithium based 12 V batteries for conventional cars (with starter motors) often sell for more. As an example, here is a battery suitable for starting a small V8 that sells for $1,600.00. I would assume that it would be much easier to manufacture conventional 12 V starter batteries in volume due to the ability to put them in many more different models of vehicles. The ability to shave off 30+ pounds of weight from race cars would be enormous, so the demand is there, but why not the supply?

JBG: The lead-acid battery is here and is safe. The present Li-ion battery has safety problems and is too expensive. We need a step improvement from the lithium-ion battery to a safe metallic-lithium battery that is cheap to manufacture and to recycle. We believe we have demonstrated this is possible.

What were the problems along the way?
by Anonymous Coward

I'm curious about the development path leading to the recent announcement. What changed to make this battery possible now, versus a decade ago? Was it analytical techniques (better math, faster computers)? Measurement and observation tools (fast/fine X-Ray, femto-second pulsed lasers)? Overall progress in the physical, chemical and electro-chemical sciences? Assembling the right team and lab? Or was it more about waiting for a spark of insight or inspiration? Which factors dominated the development path? And what about the path forward to commercialization?

JBG: What has changed is the ability to plate dendrite-free lithium from a non-flammable solid electrolyte that has a cation conductivity nearly as high as that of the flammable liquid electrolyte of the lithium-ion battery.

Patents
by Gravis Zero

1) Is there any reason these batteries cannot be used for grid-scale energy storage? 2) Who own the patents to the battery technology and will they license it cheaply or hold back the market for 20 years like the overly greedy venture capitalists behind Aquion Energy?

JBG: 1) Our technology can provide competitive grid energy storage and 2) we plan to license the technology to many manufacturers; we want to avoid an exclusive license.

What are the downsides to your sodium batteries
by tempest69

I am very excited about sodium batteries. As sodium is a much more environmentally friendly element to produce at large scale (my conjecture, I didn't look it up). What were the roadblocks of using sodium in previous batteries? I suspect whisker growth, but am not familiar with batteries enough to know other possibilities. With the glass version, what are the big drawbacks to using sodium instead of lithium (if any)? Thank you for your kind reply in advance!

JBG: Sodium is cheaper than lithium and widely available from the ocean. The principal drawbacks include a loss of 0.3 volts relative to lithium, fewer number of cathode materials that can serve as traditional insertion compounds, and a somewhat greater difficulty to handle in a manufacturing process. However, we have demonstrated a new battery strategy that promises to allow sodium batteries to enter the market competitively.

It's the economics
by marcle

Prof. Goodenough, right now, electric cars are only for the well-to-do. In my rural area, not only do people have to drive long miles, but many of them couldn't afford a new car anyway, let alone an electric one. Do you envision battery prices coming down to the point where an electric vehicle can compete with a gas-powered car at the low end of the income scale as well as at the high end?

JBG: Yes, I do envision that within 5 years electric cars that can compete in price and performance with those powered by gasoline will become available.

What do you watch?
by ihaveamo

What other developments in the field of energy storage do you keep a close eye on? Do you foresee breakthroughs coming from other technologies such as gyroscopes or even organic hydrogen production?

JBG:I have no crystal ball on other technologies, but I would not bet on the room-temperature fuel cell powered by hydrogen gas.

Viability
by OneHundredAndTen

We keep hearing about breakthroughs in the battery technology world to the tune of several per year. After many years in this forum, the empirical observation is that such breakthroughs are forgotten after a few months, quietly buried, practically never having a measurable impact on our lives. Please explain why your latest claim about a battery breakthrough is not going to end up following that route.

JBG:We have done many tests with laboratory cells. Manufacturing a marketable battery cell will take about 2 years of development by a competent battery company, but we have over 50 companies showing interest to be able to perform tests of our results. I am optimistic that our tests will be verified and that product development will begin soon.

How do you feel about UT patent management?
by MyFirstNameIsPaul

Somewhere around the mid- to late 2000s, I was researching LiFePO4 patents, and came across the University of Texas (UT) patent for which you are listed as an inventor. When I investigated licensing the patent, it was so expensive that it was not profitable to bother with the license at all. The factory partner I worked with was in China, and they were mass-producing the same LiFePO4 for jurisdictions not impacted by the patent. As I understand it, the law firm that UT chose to manage the patent set a price that was incredibly high. Then, invariably, some company would build a market for a LiFePO4 product that violated the patent, and then the law firm would step in after the company had actually done some business and sue them for all they were worth. I have to admit that this last bit was told to me by some battery industry veterans, but it seems plausible based on how the battery industry works. Nonetheless, the decision of UT to exclusively grant permission to the law firm to manage the patent kept the invention out of the market and likely cost UT some incredible amount (billions?) in royalties. How do you feel about your invention, which clearly made mass-production of the chemistry viable, being effectively kept off the market for so long? (BTW, when UT lowered their prices with, like, 5 years or so left on the patent, the factory I worked with immediately purchased the licensed material for selling their batteries in the U.S.)

JBG:UT has now developed an Office of Technology Commercialization that is much more competent. We are building a patent portfolio that I hope will prove successful, and we will not offer an exclusive license. I cannot comment on pirating by the Chinese, but I believe they are learning it is better to play by the international rules. However, where billions of dollars are at stake, the vultures are circling.

Why are they not especially robust?
by serviscope_minor

Rechargeable lithium cells are clearly excellent and power the majority of battery powered things I own. However, by comparison to older, less energy dense techs, they don't seem especially robust, for instance they degrade fast if deep discharged or left at very low charge levels. By comparison, say, NiCd batteries are very robust: while they do lose life, they do it in a pretty slowly and predictable way, you don't get it going off a cliff edge. I've noticed with some (though not all) devices, the battery life drops from hours to minutes in a relatively short timespan. The battery meter also ceases working, which I assume means that the internal resistance spikes way up suddenly and at higher voltages than fresh cells. Can you offer any good insight as to why this happens, and do you think there are going to developments in the pipeline which will introduce the tolerance of the cells? Or are we going to have to rely on better quality active protection circuitry instead?

JBG:The present lithium-ion batteries have many drawbacks because they use a flammable liquid electrolyte that has a small window for a stable voltage range. We have a nonflammable solid electrolyte with a comparable cation conductivity and a large energy window to allow plating a lithium anode dendrite free; a lithium anode is still cycling after more than 2000 charge/discharge cycles and it is not oxidized by the cathode up to a 5 V discharge.

A lithium powered energy economy
by kyubre

Mr. Goodenough, it seems that the world's reserves of lithium are far more centralized than nearly any other energy source. Do you foresee a way to avoid the geopolitical struggles for lithium ore that we experience with oil reserves? Do you see an upper limit on the ability to recycle and reuse existing lithium batteries (those that have avoided a landfill)?

JBG:You raise an important point. We have demonstrated we can make sodium cells with only a loss of 0.3 V compared to lithium cells, and sodium is available from the oceans. However, it is important to develop the means to recycle the lithium batteries to reduce vulnerability to the situation you cite.

Too many ways to skin the cat
by skids

With so many different research approaches to improving batteries, investment in bringing new technology to production scale is often viewed as a hazardous endeavor... there's a pretty good chance the tech you pick will end up getting surpassed by another before financials break even. Obviously the free market helps foster a spirit of competition, but its brutal darwinism also serves as a disincentive. Planned market solutions can spread out risk, but also have to be wary of funding completely unworthy endeavors... if everyone working on batteries, win or lose, got a small but guaranteed "compensation prize," lots of people would jump in and claim without merit to be working on batteries. Subdividing the technology so that different phases of a manufacturing process are developed by different entities seems a promising idea for those parts of the technology that may have wider applications or may apply to multiple competing designs -- but that would require a lot of advocacy which just does not seem to be there. Have you seen any interesting proposals for business/market/public-funding models to address the "too many ways to skin a cat" problem?

JBG:True, the large prize has stimulated a world-wide competition for a solution. We have introduced the first all-solid-state technology that can operate below room temperature, is inexpensive for up to a 3-volt discharge, and can use a conventional cathode to over 4.2 V discharge with a long cycle life. Over 50 battery companies have shown interest in validating our findings and marketing products.

Battery structure and capacity
by gantry

How thick is the initial anode foil of Li or Na? This determines the capacity of the battery. All quantities in the paper are expressed per gram of lithium. The cathode has particles of glass electrolyte, carbon, and sulphur, with a copper collector. When the lithium is plated onto the cathode, upon which of these components is it plated, and how thick is the plating?

JBG:You are correct to imply that plating on the cathode from the anode can only give a voltage for a finite thickness of the plated material on the cathode side. We have not yet obtained a good measure of the thickness of the cathode plating that is viable, but it appears to be micro not nanometers thick. Optimizing the capacity will involve the ability to optimize the surface area of the cathode material. This optimization has yet to be performed, but we can plate sodium as well as lithium.

Cathode problem?
by bayduv1n

In the IEEE article, it was stated that the cathode problem has not yet been solved. Can you elaborate on this? Were the lab experiments conducted without a cathode?

JBG:We have demonstrated two approaches to the cathode of a rechargeable battery: plating of the alkali-metal anode onto a cathode current collector of lower chemical potential to a limited thickness over a large surface area and a conventional high-voltage insertion compound with a plasticizer contacting the cathode. Both work.