Slashdot Mirror

angel'o'sphere shares a report: The annual Stack Overflow survey is one of the most comprehensive snapshots of how programmers work, with this year's poll being taken by almost 90,000 developers across the globe. This year's survey details which languages developers enjoy using, which are associated with the best paid jobs, which are most commonly used, as well as developers' preferred frameworks, databases, and integrated development environments.

Python's versatility continues to fuel its rise through Stack Overflow's rankings for the "most popular" languages, which lists the languages most widely used by developers. This year's survey finds Python to be the fastest-growing major programming language, with Python edging out Android and enterprise workhorse Java to become the fourth most commonly used language. [...] More importantly for developers, this popularity overlaps with demand for the language, with Julia Silge, data scientist at Stack Overflow, saying that jobs data gathered by Stack Overflow also shows Python to be one of the most in-demand languages sought by employers.

[...] Rust may not have as many users as Python or JavaScript but it has earned a lot of affection from those who use it. For the fourth year running, the language tops Stack Overflow's list of "most-loved" languages, which means the proportion of Rust developers who want to continue working with it is larger than that of any other language.[...] Go stands out as a language that is well paid, while also being sought after and where developers report high levels of job satisfaction. Full report here.

New submitter intensivevocoder shares a report from TechRepublic: Extended support for Windows Embedded POSReady 2009 -- the last supported version of Windows based on Windows XP -- ended on April 9, 2019, marking the final end of the Windows NT 5.1 product line after 17 years, 7 months, and 16 days. Counting this edition, Windows XP is the longest-lived version of Windows ever -- a record which is unlikely to be beaten.

Despite the nominal end of support for Windows XP five years ago, the existence of POSReady 2009 allowed users to receive security updates on Windows XP Home and Professional SP3 through the use of a registry hack. Microsoft dissuaded users from doing this, stating that they "do not fully protect Windows XP customers," though no attempt was apparently made to prevent users from using this hack. With POSReady reaching the end of support, the flow of these security updates will likewise come to an end.

C++ has knocked machine-learning favorite Python out of the top 3 in the TIOBE Index of popular programming languages. From a report: It marks a reversal of fortune for C++, which, after years of occupying third place in the index, was pushed down to fourth place by Python in September last year. First and second place in the list remain unchanged, with Java in pole position and C at number two. The TIOBE Index attempts to estimate the popularity of languages worldwide based on results from major search engines. The index is sometimes criticized for being a rather blunt measure, likely to be influenced by a range of factors beyond a language's popularity, but its rankings are broadly in line with others, with a similar mix of languages albeit arranged in a different order.

In an analysis alongside the latest figures, TIOBE attributes the comeback of C++ to a surge in its popularity, rather than a fall in the use of Python. "This is certainly not because Python is in decline: Python is scoring all time highs almost every month. It is just that C++ is also getting more and more popular," it writes. The report credits this growing interest in C++ to C++11, the version of the language released in 2011 that TIOBE said made C++ "much simpler, safer and more expressive."

A new report from the open source security company WhiteSource asks the question, "Is one programming language more secure than the rest?"

An anonymous reader quotes TechRepublic: To answer this question, the report compiled information from WhiteSource's database, which aggregates information on open source vulnerabilities from sources including the National Vulnerability Database, security advisories, GitHub issue trackers, and popular open source projects issue trackers. Researchers focused in on open source security vulnerabilities in the seven most widely-used languages of the past 10 years to learn which are most secure, and which vulnerability types are most common in each...

The most common vulnerabilities across most of these languages are Cross-SiteScripting (XSS); Input Validation; Permissions, Privileges, and Access Control; and Information Leak / Disclosure, according to the report.
Across the seven most widely-used programming languages, here's how the vulnerabilities were distributed:

• C (47%)
• PHP (17%)
• Java (11%)
• JavaScript (10%)
• Python (5%)
• C++ (5%)
• Ruby (4%)

But the results are full of disclaimers -- for example, that C tops the list because it's the oldest language with "the highest volume of written code" and "is also one of the languages behind major infrastructure like Open SSL and the Linux kernel."

The report also notes a "substantial rise" across all languages for known open source security vulnerabilities over the last two years, attributing this to more awareness about vulnerable components -- thanks to more research, automated security tools, and "the growing investment in bug bounty programs" -- as well as the increasing popularity of open source software. And it also reports a drop in the percentage of critical vulnerabilities for most languages -- except JavaScript and PHP.

The report then concludes that "the Winner Of Most Secure Programming Language is...no one and everyone...! It is not about the language itself that makes it any more or less secure, but how you use it. If you are mitigating your vulnerabilities throughout the software development lifecycle with the proper management approach, then you are far more likely to stay secure."

Coincidentally, WhiteSource sells software which monitors open source components throughout the software development lifecycle to provide alerts about security (and licensing) issues.

A group of programmers and device hackers are working to bring proper support for Ubuntu to Arm-powered Windows laptops, starting with first-generation Snapdragon 835 systems, like the HP Envy x2 and Asus NovaGo. From a report: The aarch64-laptops project provides prebuilt images for the aforementioned notebook PCs, as well as the Lenovo Miix 630. Although Ubuntu and other Linux distributions support aarch64 (ARMv8) by default, various obstacles including the design and configuration of Qualcomm Snapdragon processors make these default images not practically usable. The aarch64-laptops project developers are aiming to address these difficulties, though work is still ongoing. Presently, the TouchPad does not work properly on the Asus, with all three lacking proper support for on-board storage and Wi-Fi, which rely on UFS support. According to their documentation, this is being worked on upstream.

Writing at Linux Journal, Glyn Moody reports that dozens of government IT systems are switching to open source software.

"The fact that this approach is not already the norm is something of a failure on the part of the Free Software community..." One factor driving this uptake by innovative government departments is the potential to cut costs by avoiding constant upgrade fees. But it's important not to overstate the "free as in beer" element here. All major software projects have associated costs of implementation and support. Departments choosing free software simply because they believe it will save lots of money in obvious ways are likely to be disappointed, and that will be bad for open source's reputation and future projects.

Arguably as important as any cost savings is the use of open standards. This ensures that there is no lock-in to a proprietary solution, and it makes the long-term access and preservation of files much easier. For governments with a broader responsibility to society than simply saving money, that should be a key consideration, even if it hasn't been in the past.... Another is transparency. Recently it emerged that Microsoft has been gathering personal information from 300,000 government users of Microsoft Office ProPlus in the Netherlands, without permission and without documentation.
He includes an inspiring quote from the Free Software Foundation Europe about code produced by the government: "If it is public money, it should be public code as well. But when it comes to the larger issue about the general usage of proprietary vs. non-proprietary software -- what do Slashdot's readers think?

Should all government IT systems be using open source software?

An anonymous reader shares a report: New interface styles and feature improvements are available in version 6.2 of LibreOffice -- the most popular open-source office suite -- released Thursday by The Document Foundation. As with any software update, bug fixes and feature enhancements are present, making this release a significant upgrade, particularly for users coming from Microsoft Office, or working with files created with those programs. LibreOffice now supports SVG-based icons for toolbars in the Breeze, Colibre, and Elementary icon sets as an experimental feature, to better support HiDPI displays increasingly found in notebook PCs. The Elementary icon set was also improved significantly, adding a 32px PNG version, and fixing inconsistencies between the 16, 24, and 32px versions, as well as adding more icons across the set to prevent reverting to defaults. In LibreOffice 6.2, the "Tabbed" interface is now available for Writer, Calc, Impress, and Draw, and is considered sufficiently stable to be a default option. This interface mimics the oft-maligned "Ribbon interface" in Office 2007. The "traditional" Office-style toolbar is default, though the Tabbed interface can be enabled through the "View > User Interface" menus.

Web hosting service GoDaddy is injecting JavaScript into customer websites that could impact the overall performance of the website or even render it inoperable, according to Australian programmer Igor Kromin. From a report: GoDaddy's analytics system is based on W3C Navigation Timing, but the company's practice of unilaterally opting in paying customers to an analytics service -- tracking the visitors to websites hosted on GoDaddy services -- without forewarning is deserving of criticism. GoDaddy claims the technology, which it calls "Real User Metrics" (RUM), "[allows] us to identify internal bottlenecks and optimization opportunities by inserting a small snippet of javascript code into customer websites," that will "measure and track the performance of your website, and collects information such as connection time and page load time," adding that the script does not collect user information. The script name "Real User Metrics" is somewhat at odds with that claim; likewise, GoDaddy provides no definition of "user information."

GoDaddy claims "most customers won't experience issues when opted-in to RUM, but the JavaScript used may cause issues including slower site performance, or a broken/inoperable website," particularly for users of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), and websites with pages containing multiple ending tags.

Tech Republic re-visits the story of the earliest attempts to build the Raspberry Pi, and the dramatic launch of a quest "to rekindle the curiosity about computing in a generation immersed in technology but indifferent to how it worked." [T]he dominant computers -- games consoles and later tablets and smartphones -- no longer offered an invitation to create, but rather to consume. Eben Upton recalls a bonfire party in 2007 where an 11-year-old boy told him he wanted to be an electrical engineer, and his disappointment at realizing the boy didn't have access to a computer he could program on. "I said, 'Oh, what computer have you got?'. He said, 'I've got a Nintendo Wii'. And there was just that awful feeling about there being a kid who was excited, a kid who was showing concrete interest in our profession, and who didn't have access to a programmable computer, a computer of any sort. He just had a games console."

At this time Upton was working as a system-on-a-chip architect at chip designer Broadcom, and realized he had the skills to try to halt this drift away from computers that encouraged users to code.
Upton describes the Raspberry Pi as "a very conscious attempt" to bring back the easily programmable home computers that he remembered as a child in the 1980s -- and he was gratified at its success. "Even early on you started to see those pictures of kids lying on the living room floor, looking up at the TV with Raspberry Pi plugged into it, the same way we used to."

It was named "Pi" because it booted into a version of Python, and Raspberry because "There's a lot of fruit-named computer companies, and the 'blowing a raspberry' thing was also deliberate."

It's gone on to become the world's third best-selling general-purpose computer.

Organizations desperate for software engineering talent tend to follow similar plays when it comes to attracting student developers about the enter the workforce, including offering perks like free food, beer, and ping pong. However, student developers have a much stronger appetite for other workplace elements when making employment decisions, according to a Tuesday report from HackerRank. From a news writeup: The three most important criteria students look for in job opportunities are professional growth and learning (58%), work/life balance (52%), and having interesting problems to solve (46%), according to a survey of 10,350 student developers worldwide. These far outpaced compensation (18%) and perks (11%), which they view as "nice to haves" rather than deal breakers, the survey found.

For many student developers, a computer science degree is not enough to teach them the skills they will need in the workforce, the report found. Nearly two-thirds (65%) said they rely partially on self-teaching to learn to code, and 27% say they are totally self-taught. Only 32% said they were entirely taught at school, the survey found.

An anonymous reader quotes TechRepublic: PHP 7.3, the newest update to the widespread server-side web development language, was released on Thursday, bringing with it a handful of new features, modernizations, and modest speed improvements.... The largest improvements in 7.3 include support for Foreign Function Interface (FFI), allowing programmers to write inline C code inside PHP scripts. Though this feature does not presently provide the same level of performance as native PHP code, it can under certain circumstances be used to reduce the memory footprint of a given task.

PHP 7.3 also includes flexible heredoc and nowdoc syntax, now no longer requiring closing markers to be followed by a semicolon or new line. The feature proposal for this notes that the previous rigid requirements "caused them to be, in-part, eschewed by developers because their usage in code can look ugly and harm readability...." PHP 7.3 does bring some backward incompatible changes and deprecated functions. The use of case-insensitive constraints is now deprecated, as is the use of case-insensitive constants with a case that differs from the declaration.
Phoronix reports that PHP 7.3 is nearly 10% faster than version 7.2, while it's 31% faster than PHP 7.0 and nearly three times faster than PHP 5.6.

"The Linux Foundation and RISC-V Foundation announced yesterday a joint collaboration project to promote open source development and commercial adoption of the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA)," reports TechRepublic: Though some devices that integrate RISC-V will use real-time operating systems rather than Linux, the use of Linux in development will be instrumental as existing tools are being extended to support the RISC-V ISA when developing software on traditional computers. "This joint collaboration with the Linux Foundation will enable the RISC-V Foundation to offer more robust support and educational tools for the active RISC-V community, and enable operating systems, hardware implementations and development tools to scale faster," said Rick O'Connor, executive director of the RISC-V Foundation, in a press release.

In many ways, RISC-V is a hardware equivalent to the open source principles that guide the Linux project, as the ISA is open source, is not subject to patent encumbrances, and is available under the BSD license. [L]icensing fees for Arm or MIPS ISAs -- both of which are fundamentally RISC in principle -- can be avoided by using RISC-V.... As alternatives like Alpha, SuperH, MIPS, and even Intel's own Itanium processors have fallen by the wayside, organizations using those ISAs in their products have had difficult adjustment periods transitioning away, while patent encumbrances largely prevent third parties from continuing development or providing drop-in replacements for those technologies. RISC-V's open nature prevents these issues, as it is possible for any organization to extend or customize their own implementation, and any organization can produce their own RISC-V processors.
Manufacturers like how RISC-V CPUs aren't restricted to a single manufacturer, according to the article, which points out that NVIDIA and Western Digital have both announced plans to use RISC-V in some upcoming products.

RISC-V is also "gaining popularity in Internet of Things, low-power, and embedded applications," and Western Digital even plans to ultimately transition its annual consumption of processors -- one billion cores per yer -- to RISC-V.

Google and Mozilla are heading a group that is devising a way for users to save changes they make using web apps. From a report: The idea is to allow users to save changes they've made using web apps, without the hassle of having to download new files after each edit, as is necessary today. "Today, if a user wants to edit a local file in a web app, the web app needs to ask the user to open the file," said Google developer advocate Pete LePage. "Then, after editing the file, the only way to save changes is by downloading the file to the Downloads folder, or having to replace the original file by navigating the directory structure to find the original folder and file. This user experience leaves a lot to be desired, and makes it hard to build web apps that access user files."

To this end, the W3C Web Incubator Community Group (WICG), which is chaired by representatives from Chrome developer Google and Firefox developer Mozilla, is working on developing the new Writable Files API, which would allow web apps running in the browser to open a file, edit it, and save the changes back to the same file. However, the group says the biggest challenge will be guarding against malicious sites seeking to abuse persistent access to files on a user's system. "By far the hardest part for this API is of course going to be the security model to use," warns the WICG's explainer page for the API. "The API provides a lot of scary power to websites that could be abused in many terrible ways."

puddingebola shares a report: WLinux is a $20 open-source, Debian-based distribution, designed to run on Windows 10's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). The WSL allows Windows 10 to run various GNU/Linux distros inside Windows as Microsoft Store apps, providing access to Ubuntu, openSUSE, Debian, Fedora, Kali Linux, and others. The WSL has disadvantages over a running a dedicated GNU/Linux system. For example, there's no official support for desktop environments or graphical applications, and I/O performance bottlenecks, but it is being improved over time. The developers of WLinux describe it as a "fast Linux terminal environment for developers", saying it is the first distribution to be "pre-configured and optimized to run specifically on Windows Subsystem for Linux". Announcing WLinux's availability, Microsoft program manager Tara Raj, called out the wlinux-setup tool, "which allows users to easily set up common developer toolchains, and removes unsupported features like systemd."

ekimd writes: Fedora 29 is released today. Among the new features are the ability to allow parallel installation of packages such as Node.js. Fedora 29 also supports ZRAM (formerly called compcache) for ARMv7 and v8. In addition to the more efficient use of RAM, it also increases the lifespan of microSD cards on the Raspberry Pi as well as other SBCs.

"Additionally, UEFI for ARMv7 is now supported in Fedora 29, which also benefits Raspberry Pi users," reports TechRepublic. "Fedora already supported UEFI on 64-bit ARM devices."

An anonymous reader quotes Digital Trends: With the launch of Chrome 69, Google stunned users last week with a surprising decision to no longer display the "www" and "m" part of the URL in the Chrome search bar, but user backlash forced Google to soften its stance. Google's course reversal, although welcomed by users, is only short term, and the search giant said it will change course once again with the release of the Chrome 70 browser....

Critics have argued that by not displaying the special-case subdomains, it was harder for users to identify sites as legitimate, and the move could lead to more scams on the internet. Others go as far as questioning Google's motives for not displaying the "www" and "m" portion of a web address, and these users speculated that the move may be to disguise Google's AMP -- or Accelerated Mobile Pages -- subdomain to make it indistinguishable for the actual domain....

With the launch of Chrome 70, Google plans on hiding the 'www' portion of a web address inside the search bar, but it will continue to display the 'm' subdomain. "We are not going to elide 'm' in M70 because we found large sites that have a user-controlled 'm' subdomain," Google Chromium product manager Emily Schecter said. "There is more community consensus that sites should not allow the 'www' subdomain to be user controlled."
ZDNet notes that while Chrome's billion-plus users were surprised, "Apple's Safari likewise hides the www and m but it hasn't caused as much concern, likely because of Google's outsized influence over the web and Chrome's dominance of the browser market."

TechRepublic quotes a community feedback post that had argued that "Lying about the hostname to novices and power users alike in the name of simplifying the UI seems imprudent from a security perspective."

Julia, the MIT-created programming language for developers "who want it all", hit its milestone 1.0 release this month -- with MIT highlighting its rapid adoption in the six short years since its launch. From a report: Released in 2012, Julia is designed to combine the speed of C with the usability of Python, the dynamism of Ruby, the mathematical prowess of MatLab, and the statistical chops of R. "The release of Julia 1.0 signals that Julia is now ready to change the technical world by combining the high-level productivity and ease of use of Python and R with the lightning-fast speed of C++," says MIT professor Alan Edelman. The breadth of Julia's capabilities and ability to spread workloads across hundreds of thousands of processing cores have led to its use for everything from machine learning to large-scale supercomputer simulation. MIT says Julia is the only high-level dynamic programming language in the "petaflop club," having been used to simulate 188 million stars, galaxies, and other astronomical objects on Cori, the world's 10th-most powerful supercomputer. The simulation ran in just 14.6 minutes, using 650,000 Intel Knights Landing Xeon Phi cores to handle 1.5 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point operations per second).

Jack Wallen, writing for TechRepublic: For a company to support Linux, they have to consider supporting: Multiple file systems, multiple distributions, multiple desktops, multiple init systems, multiple kernels. If you're an open source developer, focusing on a single distribution, that's not a problem. If you're a company that produces a product (and you stake your living on that product), those multiple points of entry do become a problem. Let's consider Adobe (and Photoshop). If Adobe wanted to port their industry-leading product to Linux, how do they do that? Do they spend the time developing support for ext4, btrfs, Ubuntu, Fedora, GNOME, Mate, KDE, systemd? You see how that might look from the eyes of any given company?

It becomes even more complicated when companies consider how accustomed to the idea of "free" (as in beer) Linux users are. Although I am very willing to pay for software on Linux, it's a rare occasion that I do (mostly because I haven't found a piece of must-have software that has an associated cost). Few companies will support the Linux desktop when the act of supporting means putting that much time and effort into a product that a large cross-section of users might wind up unwilling to pay the price of admission. That's not to say every Linux user is unwilling to shell out the cost for a piece of software. But many won't.

Gmail's new confidential mode lets its users create "expiration dates" for emails, or require recipients to provide an SMS passcode. (And Google also claims they've removed the option to forward, copy, download or print messages.)

But Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein warns that Google is also opening up a new vector for phishing emails: The problem arises since non-Gmail users cannot directly receive Gmail confidential mode messages. Instead...when a Gmail user wants to send a non-Gmail user such a message, the non-Gmail user is instead sent a link, that when clicked takes them to Google's servers where they can read the confidential mode message in their browser.

The potential risks for any service that operates in this way are obvious. Those of us working on Internet security and privacy have literally spent many years attempting to train users to avoid clicking on "to read the message, click here" links in emails that they receive. Criminals have simply become too adept at creating fraudulent emails that lead to phishing and malware sites.

New submitter stikves writes: The Raspberry foundation has launched an incremental update to the Raspberry Pi 3 model B: Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ . In addition to slight increase (200MHz) in CPU speed, and upgraded networking (802.11ac and Gigabit, albeit over USB2), one big advantage is the better thermal management which allows sustained performance over longer load periods. Further reading: TechRepublic, and Linux Journal.

A new study by IBM Security surveying 4,000 adults from a few different regions of the world found that consumers are now ranking security over convenience. For the first time ever, business users and consumers are now preferring security over convenience. From a report: TechRepublic spoke with executive security advisor at IBM Security Limor Kessem to discuss this new trend. "We always talk about the ease of use, and not impacting user experience, etc, but it turns out that when it comes to their financial accounts...people actually would go the extra mile and will use extra security," Kessem said. Whether it's using two factor authentication, an SMS message on top of their password, or any other additional step for extra protection, people still want to use it. Some 74% of respondents said that they would use extra security when it comes to those accounts, she said.

The German city of Munich, once seen as a open-source pioneer, has decided to return to Windows. Windows 10 will be rolled out to about 29,000 PCs at the city council, a major shift for an authority that has been running Linux for more than a decade. From a report: Back in 2003 the council decided to to switch to a Linux-based desktop, which came to be known as LiMux, and other open-source software, despite heavy lobbying by Microsoft. But now Munich will begin rolling out a Windows 10 client from 2020, at a cost of about Euro 50m ($59.6m), with a view to Windows replacing LiMux across the council by early 2023. Politicians who supported the move at a meeting of the full council today say using Windows 10 will make it easier to source compatible applications and hardware drivers than it has been using a Linux-based OS, and will also reduce costs associated with running Windows and LiMux PCs side-by-side.

An anonymous reader quotes TechRepublic: The city of Munich has suggested it will cost too much to carry on using Linux alongside Windows, despite having spent millions of euros switching PCs to open-source software... "Today, with a Linux client-centric environment, we are often confronted with major difficulties and additional costs when it comes to acquiring and operating professional application software," the city council told the German Federation of Taxpayers. Running Linux will ultimately prove unsustainable, suggests the council, due to the need to also keep a minority of Windows machines to run line-of-business software incompatible with Linux. "In the long term, this situation means that the operation of the non-uniform client landscape can no longer be made cost-efficient"... Since completing the multi-year move to LiMux, a custom-version of the Linux-based OS Ubuntu, the city always kept a smaller number of Windows machines to run incompatible software. As of last year it had about 4,163 Windows-based PCs, compared to about 20,000 Linux-based PCs.

The assessment is at odds with a wide-ranging review of the city's IT systems by Accenture last year, which found that most of the problems stem not from the use of open-source software, but from inefficiencies in how Munich co-ordinates the efforts of IT teams scattered throughout different departments. Dr. Florian Roth, leader of the Green Party at Munich City Council, said the review had also not recommended a wholesale shift to Windows. "The Accenture report suggested to run both systems because the complete 'rollback' to Windows and MS Office would mean a waste of experience, technology, work and money," he said... The city's administration is investigating how long it would take and how much it would cost to build a Windows 10 client for use by the city's employees. Once this work is complete, the council will vote again in November on whether this Windows client should replace LiMux across the authority from 2021.
A taxpayer's federation post urged "Penguin, adieu!" -- while also admitting that returning to Windows "will devour further tax money in the millions," according to TechRepublic.

"The federation's post also makes no mention of the licensing and other savings achieved by switching to LiMux, estimated to stand at about €10m."

TechRepublic got different answers about Microsoft's new enthusiasm for Linux from Canonical's founder and CEO Mark Shuttleworth, and from Richard Stallman. Stallman "believes that Microsoft's decision to build a Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) amounts to an attempt to extinguish software that users are free to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve." "It certainly looks that way. But it won't be so easy to extinguish us, because our reasons for using and advancing free software are not limited to practical convenience," he said. "We want freedom. As a way to use computers in freedom, Windows is a non-starter..." Stallman remains adamant that the WSL can only help entrench the dominance of proprietary software like Windows, and undermine the use of free software. "That doesn't advance the cause of free software, not one bit," he says... "The aim of the free software movement is to free users from freedom-denying proprietary programs and systems, such as Windows. Making a non-free system, such as Windows or MacOS or iOS or ChromeOS or Android, more convenient is a step backward in the campaign for freedom..."

For Shuttleworth, Windows' embrace of GNU/Linux is a net positive for open-source software as a whole. "It's not like Microsoft is stealing our toys, it's more that we're sharing them with Microsoft in order to give everyone the best possible experience," he says. "WSL provides users who are well versed in the Windows environment with greater choice and flexibility, while also opening up a whole new potential user base for the open source platform..." Today Shuttleworth takes Microsoft's newfound enthusiasm for GNU/Linux at face value, and says the company has a different ethos to that of the 1990s, a fresh perspective that benefits Microsoft as much as it does open-source software. "Microsoft is a different company now, with a much more balanced view of open and competitive platforms on multiple fronts," he says. "They do a tremendous amount of engineering specifically to accommodate open platforms like Ubuntu on Azure and Hyper-V, and this work is being done in that spirit."
The article also points out that Microsoft "does seem to be laying the groundwork for WSL to extend what's possible using a single GNU/Linux distro today, for instance, letting the user chain together commands from different GNU/Linux distros with those from Windows."

TechRepublic got different answers about Microsoft's new enthusiasm for Linux from Canonical's founder and CEO Mark Shuttleworth, and from Richard Stallman. Stallman "believes that Microsoft's decision to build a Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) amounts to an attempt to extinguish software that users are free to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve." "It certainly looks that way. But it won't be so easy to extinguish us, because our reasons for using and advancing free software are not limited to practical convenience," he said. "We want freedom. As a way to use computers in freedom, Windows is a non-starter..." Stallman remains adamant that the WSL can only help entrench the dominance of proprietary software like Windows, and undermine the use of free software. "That doesn't advance the cause of free software, not one bit," he says... "The aim of the free software movement is to free users from freedom-denying proprietary programs and systems, such as Windows. Making a non-free system, such as Windows or MacOS or iOS or ChromeOS or Android, more convenient is a step backward in the campaign for freedom..."

For Shuttleworth, Windows' embrace of GNU/Linux is a net positive for open-source software as a whole. "It's not like Microsoft is stealing our toys, it's more that we're sharing them with Microsoft in order to give everyone the best possible experience," he says. "WSL provides users who are well versed in the Windows environment with greater choice and flexibility, while also opening up a whole new potential user base for the open source platform..." Today Shuttleworth takes Microsoft's newfound enthusiasm for GNU/Linux at face value, and says the company has a different ethos to that of the 1990s, a fresh perspective that benefits Microsoft as much as it does open-source software. "Microsoft is a different company now, with a much more balanced view of open and competitive platforms on multiple fronts," he says. "They do a tremendous amount of engineering specifically to accommodate open platforms like Ubuntu on Azure and Hyper-V, and this work is being done in that spirit."
The article also points out that Microsoft "does seem to be laying the groundwork for WSL to extend what's possible using a single GNU/Linux distro today, for instance, letting the user chain together commands from different GNU/Linux distros with those from Windows."

An anonymous reader quotes TechRepublic: On Wednesday, IBM revealed the Open Liberty project, open sourcing its WebSphere Liberty code on GitHub to support Java microservices and cloud-native apps. The company created Liberty five years ago to help developers more quickly and easily create applications using agile and DevOps principles, according to an IBM developerWorks blog post from Ian Robinson, WebSphere Foundation chief architect at IBM... Developers can also choose to move to the commercial versions of WebSphere Liberty at any time, he noted, which include technical support and more specialized features... "We hope Open Liberty will help more developers turn their ideas into full-fledged, enterprise ready apps," Robinson wrote. "We also hope it will broaden the WebSphere family to include more ideas and innovations to benefit the broader Java community of developers at organizations big and small."
IBM argues that Open Liberty, along with the OpenJ9 VM they open sourced last week, "provides the full Java stack from IBM with a fully open licensing model."

Interestingly, Slashdot ran a story asking "IBM WebSphere SE To Be Opened?" -- back in 2000.

At its Ryzen Pro event in New York City last month, AMD invited a French company called Qarnot to discuss how they're using Ryzen Pro processors to heat homes and offices for free. The company uses the Q.rad -- a heater that embeds three CPUs as a heat source -- to accomplish this feat. "We reuse the heat they generate to heat homes and offices for free," the company says in a blog post. "Q.rad is connected to the internet and receives in real time workloads from our in-house computing platform."

The idea is that anyone in the world can send heavy workloads over the cloud to a Q.rad and have it render the task and heat a person's home in the process. The two industries that are targeted by Qarnot include movies studios for 3D rendering and VFX, and banks for risk analysis. Qarnot is opting in for Ryzen Pro processors over Intel i7 processors due to the performance gain and heat output. According to Qarnot, they "saw a performance gain of 30-45% compared to the Intel i7." They also report that the Ryzen Pro is "producing the same heat as the equivalent Intel CPUs" they were using -- all while providing twice as many cores.

While it's neat to see a company convert what would otherwise be wasted heat into a useful asset that heats a person's home, it does raise some questions about the security and profitability of their business model. By using Ryzen Pro's processors, OS independent memory encryption is enabled to provide additional security layers to Qarnot's heaters. However, Q.rads are naturally still going to be physically unsecured as they can be in anyone's house.

Further reading: The Mac Observer, TechRepublic

"I can't remember the last time I cared about Mozilla," writes Matt Asay at TechRepublic. "I also can't remember a time when we needed it more." An anonymous reader quotes TechRepublic: Mozilla's Firefox is almost a rounding error in desktop market share, and nonexistent in mobile browser market share. It offers a few other services, like Pocket, but largely gets ignored... This is a mistake. Our world is increasingly mediated by the internet, and that internet has just a few gatekeepers, collecting tolls as we browse. As Python guru Matt Harrison put it, "Vendors control the default browser which 99.9% of people use." Those vendors are happy to sell us access to information. Nothing about it is free. You are most definitely the product.

On mobile, where the majority of the world's content is now consumed, Google and Facebook own eight of the top 10 apps, with apps devouring 87% of our time spent on smartphones and tablets, according to new comScore data. For that remaining 13% of time spent on the mobile web, Google and Apple offer the two dominant browsers... the majority of our time online is now mediated by just a few megacorporations, and for the most part their top incentive is to borrow our privacy just long enough to target an ad at us. Then there's Mozilla, an organization whose mantra is "Internet for people, not profit." That feels like a necessary voice to add to today's internet oligopoly, but it's not one we're hearing... We clearly need an organization standing up for web freedom, as expecting Google to do that is like asking the fox to guard the henhouse. Google does many great things, but its clear incentive is to sell ads. We are Google's product, as the saying goes.
The article applauds the Mozilla-sponsored Rust programming language as promising, "but not to save the web from the all-consuming embrace of Facebook and Google, especially as they wall off the experience in apps... "If I sound like I don't know what to propose Mozilla should do, it's because I don't. I simply feel strongly that the role Mozilla played in the early browser wars needs to be resurrected to save the web today."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechRepublic: Today's vending machines are likely to be bolted to the floor or each other and are much more sophisticated -- possibly containing machine intelligence, and belonging to the Internet of Things (IoT). Hacking this kind of vending machine obviously requires a more refined approach. The type security professionals working for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) might conjure up, according to journalists Jason Leopold and David Mack, who first broke the story A Bunch Of CIA Contractors Got Fired For Stealing Snacks From Vending Machines. In their BuzzFeed post, the two writers state, "Several CIA contractors were kicked out of the Agency for stealing more than $3,000 in snacks from vending machines according to official documents... ." This October 2013 declassified Office of Inspector General (OIG) report is one of the documents referred to by Leopold and Mack. The reporters write that getting the records required initiating a Freedom Of Information Act lawsuit two years ago, adding that the redacted files were only recently released. The OIG report states Agency employees use an electronic payment system, developed by FreedomPay, to purchase food, beverages, and goods from the vending machines. The payment system relies on the Agency Internet Network to communicate between vending machines and the FreedomPay controlling server. The OIG report adds the party hacking the electronic payment system discovered that severing communications to the FreedomPay server by disconnecting the vending machine's network cable allows purchases to be made using unfunded FreedomPay cards.

Reader sqorbit writes: Munich spent a lot of time (9 years) and a lot of money in shifting some 15,000 staff to a Linux-based OS. The plan now is to move to Windows 10 by 2021. Munich's Green Party is citing the WannaCry virus as a valid reason not to switch to Windows. "As with many of the biggest attacks, the computers that were mainly hit were running the Windows operating system," the Green Party said in a statement.

An anonymous reader writes: The thing is, WannaCry isn't the first of its kind. In fact, ransomware has been exploiting Windows vulnerabilities for a while. The first known ransomware attack was called "AIDS Trojan" that infected Windows machines back in 1989. This particular ransomware attack switched the autoexec.bat file. This new file counted the amount of times a machine had been booted; when the machine reached a count of 90, all of the filenames on the C drive were encrypted. Windows, of course, isn't the only platform to have been hit by ransomware. In fact, back in 2015, the LinuxEncoder ransomware was discovered. That bit of malicious code, however, only affected servers running the Magento ecommerce solution. The important question here is this: Have their been any ransomware attacks on the Linux desktop? The answer is no. With that in mind, it's pretty easy to draw the conclusion that now would be a great time to start deploying Linux on the desktop. I can already hear the tired arguments. The primary issue: software. I will counter that argument by saying this: Most software has migrated to either Software as a Service (SaaS) or the cloud. The majority of work people do is via a web browser. Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari; with few exceptions, SaaS doesn't care. With that in mind, why would you want your employees and staff using a vulnerable system? [...] Imagine, if you will, you have deployed Linux as a desktop OS for your company and those machines work like champs from the day you set them up to the day the hardware finally fails. Doesn't that sound like a win your company could use? If your employees work primarily with SaaS (through web browsers), then there is zero reason keeping you from making the switch to a more reliable, secure platform.

Thursday TechRepublic described the big prediction: In May 2016, a relatively unknown startup called Unanimous A.I. made big headlines when its AI-based platform used collective intelligence to create a prediction for the Kentucky Derby superfecta -- the top four horses, in order of finish. It made exactly the right pick, which returned $541.10 on a $1 bet... Churchill Downs took notice last year and decided to collaborate with Unanimous A.I. to create an official AI swarm made up of handicappers and racing analysts to predict the top finishers for this year's Derby. The track is calling this the "super-expert" Derby pick. On Wednesday, the handicappers logged into Unanimous A.I.'s UNU platform from across the US, and answered a series of questions that gradually narrowed down their picks from the field of 20 horses until they created consensus on the top four picks and the order of finish.
Here's my report on the results...
Below are the picks that resulted from the "AI swarm" guessing which of the 20 thoroughbreds in today's race were most likely to win -- along with each horse's actual finishing position in parentheses (as reported by CBS).

• 1. Classic Empire (finished 4th)
• 2. McCracken (finished 8th)
• 3. Irish War Cry (finished 10th)
• 4. Always Dreaming (finished 1st)
• 5. Hence (finished 11th)
• 6. Gunnevera (finished 7th)
• 7. Practical Joke (finished 5th)
• 8. Battle of Midway (finished 3rd)
• 9. Tapwrit (finished 6th)
• 10. J Echo Boys (finished 15th)
• 11. Sonneteer (finished 16th)

TechRepublic reports that the swarm "also picked the unheralded horses with the best chance of sneaking into the top four."

• 1. Practical Joke (finished 5th)
• 2. Battle of Midway (finished 3rd)
• 3. Tapwrit (finished 6th)
• 4. J Boys Echo (finished 15th)

But even before the race, there were suspicions the AI swarm couldn't successfully predict this year's winners, according to TechRepublic. "While last year's swarm was clear-cut because it was a top-heavy field with a few outstanding horses, this year's swarm reflected the fact that the race is more of a toss-up in 2017."

IBM accidentally shipped USB drives infected with malware to some customers, the company noted in a support advisory post. The drives contained an initialization tool for some of its Storwize systems, the post stated. From a report: IBM customers who received a USB flash drive with the part number 01AC585 should either destroy the drive so that it cannot be reused, the post said, or follow the steps listed in the post to repair the drive. Affected drives were shipped with the following Storwize systems: IBM Storwize V3500 - 2071 models 02A and 10A, IBM Storwize V3700 - 2072 models 12C, 24C, and 2DC, IBM Storwize V5000 - 2077 models 12C and 24C, IBM Storwize V5000 - 2078 models 12C and 24C.

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.

The luminaries speaking at the Google Cloud Next conference had some strong words about the importance of openness, innovation, and a rich developer community. An anonymous reader writes: First Vint Cert said there's a "thread of openness" that runs throughout the internet, adding that "the internet, itself, has open characteristics" and thrives on "permissionless innovation." And Eric Brewer, vice president of infrastructure at Google, touched on the same themes, according to Tech Republic. "Linux, Brewer said, won some of the early internet wars because it was open, but also because it was the most innovative of its time. He also said that companies should work with open source for the value of the ecosystem and community, not just the value of the code." Then Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin told the audience that business models were already changing to include open source, and ultimately made the argument that organizations that "don't harvest the shared innovation" of open source "will fail."

"The man who runs Munich's central IT says there is no practical reason for the city to write off millions of euros and years of work to ditch its Linux-based OS for Windows," reports TechRepublic. Long-time Slashdot reader Qbertino summarizes a German-language article: Karl-Heinz Schneider, lead of Munich's local system house company IT@M, goes on to claim, "We do not see pressing technical reasons to switch to MS and MS Office... The council [in their recent plans] didn't even follow the analysts' suggestion to stick with using LibreOffice." Furthermore, Schneider stated that "System failures that angered citizens in recent years never were related to the LiMux project, but due to new bureaucratic procedures..." and apparently decisions by unqualified personnel at the administrative level, as Munich's administration itself states.

The worldwide warehouse and logistics robot unit shipments will increase from 40,000 robots in 2016 to 620,000 robots annually by 2021, according to highly reliable numbers from Tractica, which adds that the $1.9 billion market in 2016 is expected to jump a staggering tenfold to an annual $22.4 billion by the end of 2021. From a report on TechRepublic: As a measure of global market value, Tractica also expects the robotic shipments to reach $22.4 billion by the end of 2021, up from an estimated $1.9 billion in 2016. The report, which highlights market drivers and challenges, profiles 75 "emerging industry players," and is divided into sections based on robot type. According to the report, "warehousing and logistics industries are looking for robotics solutions, more than ever before, to remain globally competitive," which will "lead to widespread acceptance and presence of robots in warehouses and logistics operations." To allay fears about lost jobs due to automation, the report authors said they expect that the increase in robots will likely yield new jobs and opportunities for businesses. "The next 5 years will be a period of significant innovation in the space, bringing significant opportunities for established industry players and startups alike," said Manoj Sahi, a research analyst, in the report.

"The prestigious FOSS project replacing the entire city's administration IT with FOSS based systems, is about to be cancelled and decommissioned," writes long-time Slashdot reader Qbertino. TechRepublic reports: Politicians at open-source champion Munich will next week vote on whether to abandon Linux and return to Windows by 2021. The city authority, which made headlines for ditching Windows, will discuss proposals to replace the Linux-based OS used across the council with a Windows 10-based client. If the city leaders back the proposition it would be a notable U-turn by the council, which spent years migrating about 15,000 staff from Windows to LiMux, a custom version of the Ubuntu desktop OS, and only completed the move in 2013...

The use of the open-source Thunderbird email client and LibreOffice suite across the council would also be phased out, in favor of using "market standard products" that offer the "highest possible compatibility" with external and internal software... The full council will vote on whether to back the plan next Wednesday. If all SPD and CSU councillors back the proposal put forward by their party officials, then this new proposal will pass, because the two parties hold the majority.
The leader of the Munich Green Party says the city will lose "many millions of euros" if the change is implemented. The article also reports that Microsoft moved its German headquarters to Munich last year.

Open sourced in 2010, the Apache Kafka distributed streaming platform is now used at more than a third of Fortune 500 companies (as well as seven of the world's top 10 banks). An anonymous reader writes: Co-creator Neha Narkhede says "We saw the need for a distributed architecture with microservices that we could scale quickly and robustly. The legacy systems couldn't help us anymore." In a new interview with TechRepublic, Narkhede explains that while working at LinkedIn, "We had the vision of building the entire company's business logic as stream processors that express transformations on streams of data... [T]hough Kafka started off as a very scalable messaging system, it grew to complete our vision of being a distributed streaming platform."

Narkhede became the CTO and co-founder of Confluent, which supports enterprise installations of Kafka, and now says that being open source "helps you build a pipeline for your product and reduce the cost of sales... [T]he developer is the new decision maker. If the product experience is tailored to ensure that the developers are successful and the technology plays a critical role in your business, you have the foundational pieces of building a growing and profitable business around an open-source technology... Kafka is used as the source-of-truth pipeline carrying critical data that businesses rely on for real-time decision-making."

A new report from Enigma Software Group identifies the American cities with abnormally high infection rates for malware. An anonymous reader quotes TechRepublic: In 2016, Tampa, Orlando, and St. Louis each had malware infection rates per capita more than five times the national average -- the highest in the U.S., the report found. Those same three cities were also at the top of the list of highest infection rates in 2015... ESG compiled malware detection data from its SpyHunter anti-spyware software in the 100 largest cities in the US in all of 2016.
Two Ohio cities also made it into the top ten for malware infection rates -- Cleveland and Cincinnati -- as well as Washington D.C. (with an infection rate 242% higher than the national average). But the infection rates drop noticeably after the top 10, with Miami (at #14) the last city with an infection rate more than double the national average. Interestingly, the top 35 cities include major high-tech centers like Seattle, Austin, Boston, and San Jose.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Stack: Apple is to offer its iPhone 7 as the "device of choice" for the UK military's secure communications. British telecom giant BT is said to be hardening the Apple device in order for it to be able to handle the Ministry of Defense's military communications, including state secrets and highly-sensitive data. While BT has not provided further details on the development, due to security reasons, the telco is reportedly in the process of upgrading the iPhone 7 to support various modes of operation and to add secure apps or "storage containers," as well as military-grade encryption features among other enhancements. The iPhone 7 will now replace Samsung's Galaxy Note 4 smartphone, which was originally selected for the project, as security in the Samsung model was found to be inadequate.

HP is continuing its recall of laptop batteries that could pose a risk to consumers. The company has recalled more than 100,000 lithium-ion batteries used in its notebook computers, according to Consumer Product Safety Commission. The recall expands one from HP in June, when an additional 41,000 batteries were recalled in the US. From a report on TechRepublic: The affected laptops were said to include a lithium-ion battery containing Panasonic cells that malfunctioned, leading to "overheating, melting and charring and causing about $1,000 in property damage," the US Consumer Product Safety (US CPSC) report said. The batteries in question could have been used in HP, Compaq, HP ProBook, HP ENVY, Compaq Presario, and HP Pavilion notebook computers. The recalled batteries were in laptops sold between March 2013 and October 2016, the CPSC report stated. Affected laptops could have been purchased at Best Buy, Walmart, Costco, Sam's Club, or another authorized dealer nationwide or online. The average cost of the laptops was between $300-$1700, and the standalone batteries were sold from $50-$90.

500,000 people signed up for Amazon's Mechanical Turk, one of several online microjobs platforms that "let companies break jobs into smaller tasks and offer them to people across the globe," reports TechRepublic. But though these workers have trouble communicating directly with Amazon, in any given month about 20,000 of them may be active, "part of an invisible, online workforce -- one that is increasingly in demand for their vital role in helping train intelligent machines."

But are these platforms part of a disturbing new trend? Long-time Slashdot reader Paul Fernhout writes: Hope Reese and Nick Heath at TechRepublic ask: "do they democratize work or exploit the disempowered?" The article says: "Just over half of Turkers earn below the US federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, according to a Pew Research Center study." The article quotes people who believe "it will become increasingly common for computer systems to orchestrate labor." That trend was also was the beginning of Marshall Brain's "Manna" short story.

As an open-source software pioneer, Munich spent years moving away from Windows, but now politicians are debating a report that suggests the city could eventually abandon Linux. A report on TechRepublic adds: If the authority ruling Germany's third largest city backs proposals to make Windows 10 and Microsoft Office available across the council, it would be a significant step away from open-source software for an organization once seen as its champion. Over a nine-year period starting in 2004, the council moved about 15,000 staff from using Windows and Office to LiMux -- a custom version of the Ubuntu desktop OS -- and other open source software. At the time, Munich was one of the largest organizations to reject Windows, and Microsoft took the city's leaving so seriously that then CEO Steve Ballmer flew to Munich to meet the mayor. Now a report commissioned by current mayor Dieter Reiter to help determine the future of IT at the council has outlined a project to make Windows 10 and Microsoft Office available to all departments, and give staff the choice about whether to use Windows or LiMux.

After several delays, the Fedora Project on Tuesday released Fedora 24 (download link), the latest version of its Linux-based operating system. Fedora 24 brings with it a number of interesting features and changes, including the GNOME 3.20 desktop environment. The latest version of GNOME comes with media-player controls in the notification panel, and improved search feature in the Files application. New GNOME will also let you easily upgrade to Fedora 25, by simply using its Software application. There's also improved font-rendering. Among other things Fedora 24 has an upgraded version of glibc, or GNU C Library, which comes with improved performance and bug fixes across the entire operating system. You can learn more about the features at TechRepublic..

An anonymous reader quotes the San Jose Mercury News technology blog: "The $400 million awarded to Apple in a patent-infringement case against Samsung is a moving target... On Friday, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a "friend of the court" brief to the Supreme Court, asking justices to void the $400 million award and send the case back to a lower court to determine if a new trial is needed... Samsung has argued that it should be liable only for profits attributable to a specific design that violated a patent, not an entire phone, and that the law should be interpreted to impose liability related to "components of the phones, rather than the phones themselves, according to the brief. The department came down on Samsung's side on the component argument, and blasted a federal circuit court ruling that had upheld the jury award.
Ironically, earlier this week Steve Wozniak was praising Samsung for its innovation, both in virtual reality headsets and with a Samsung camera that takes a picture whenever you say "smile".

At the annual convention of OS/2 users, Arca Noae announced their new OS/2-OEM distribution will be released in the fourth quarter of 2016, and the project, codenamed "Blue Lion", will officially be called ArcaOS 5.0. "The significance of the version number relates to IBM OS/2 4.52 -- the last maintenance release of the platform released by IBM in 2001," reports TechRepublic. martiniturbide writes: The article discusses the features of ArcaOS like USB bootable installer, USB (1.1 and 2) , ACPI, AHCI, and network card drivers, new OS installer, etc. It will be sold in two editions: ArcaOS Commercial Edition [with 12 months of priority support and updates] and ArcaOS Personal Edition...
Anyone have fond members of OS/2? Are there any Slashdot readers who are still using it?

An anonymous reader writes: Open Source advocate Jack Wallen is a writer for Linux.com and Tech Republic. He predicts that both Windows and OS X will be Open Source within 5 years, writing that "neither Microsoft nor Apple make serious money from operating systems any longer" (with both companies giving away major OS upgrades), but argues that smaller software companies still see close-sourced code as a profit center. So yesterday Wallen wrote a surprising column urging Linux fans to begin considering closed-source software.

"That doesn't mean, in any way, you are giving up on the idea of freedom. What it means is that the best tool for the job is the one you should be using...be that open, closed, or somewhere in between. Should you close your mind to close sourced tools, you could miss out on some seriously amazing applications. On top of that (and this is something I've harped on for decades), the more you use closed source applications on open source environments, the more will be made available."
I'd be curious to hear how many Slashdot readers agree with Mr. Wallen...

New "Swarm Intelligence" platform UNU from Unanimous A.I. made a bet on the Kentucky Derby this weekend and won big. The bet is called the Superfecta and it paid 540 to 1 odds. "Swarm Intelligence" allows groups to amplify their collective IQ beyond the capacity of individuals, something that the human species hasn't been able to do because of evolutionary restraints. Silicon Valley startup Unanimous A.I. set out to answer one question: Can humans swarm, and if so can we amplify our intelligence beyond the ability of individuals? Spoiler: yes we can. According to Yahoo, "Unanimous spent the last two years building a swarm intelligence platform called UNU that enables groups to get together as online swarms -- combing their thoughts, opinions, and intuitions in real-time to answer questions, make predictions, reach decisions, and even play games as a unified collective intelligence." Already, UNU has predicted the Oscars better than experts, and predicted the NCAA college bowl games with 70% accuracy. As for the Kentucky Derby, Hope Reese, reporter for Tech Republic and the Atlantic, challenged Unanimous A.I. to use UNU to predict the winners. The group used UNU to answer questions as a unified Swarm Intelligence, narrowing the field of 20 horses down to four winners. Then it was asked to order the winners into Win, Place, Show, and Fourth. Swarm Intelligence convened again a week later after the Derby announced the post positions of the horses -- one of the four picks was replaced by an alternate.

Austin McChord, Datto's founder writes: In the era of nearly free cloud storage why on earth am I paying $15 a month per user (for Dropbox and Box). This seems absurd. As the founder of a cloud storage company I thought we could fix this. We combined OwnCloud which is an enterprise level open source file sync and share solution with our skills in infrastructure. Today we are launching Datto Drive, a file sync and share service for businesses that costs just $10 a month for unlimited users and 1TB of combined storage. To get started we are giving the first year away free for the first million businesses that sign up. One thing I'm worried about is whether this service will exist for more than a couple of years. We've seen plenty of startups offer us interesting services at great prices over the past few years, but many of them disappear. Tech Republic has more information about the aforementioned service. Update: 05/02 17:09 GMT by M : Reader torrija points us to a service called HubiC which offers 10TB for 5 euro a month. He adds that the feature is limited to one user, though.