"As of the 1st of May, the Alexa web traffic ranking engine is going to stop its services," the TIOBE Index reminds us. So for the first time, TIOBE has switched to Similarweb this month to choose which search engines' results to use for its ranking of the popularity of programming languages. Fortunately, there are no big changes in the index due to this swap. The only striking difference is that the top 3 languages, Python, C, and Java, all gained more than 1 percent in the rankings.

We are still fine-tuning the integration with Similarweb, which is combined with a shift to HtmlUnit in the back-end. Some websites are not onboarded yet, but will follow soon. Now that HtmlUnit is applied for web crawling, it will become possible to add more sites to the index, such as Stackoverflow and Github. This will hopefully happen in the next few months.
TechRepublic reports: Python continues to sit atop the index, with C and Java directly behind it. In Feb. 2021, those three also occupied the top spot, but with Python in the number three position, C at top, and Java in second place.

Beyond the top three, there hasn't been much movement in the index, with positions four through eight unchanged from the same time last year. Those slots are occupied, respectively, by C++, C#, Visual Basic, JavaScript and PHP. Positions nine and 10 swapped from Feb. 21 to now, with Assembly Language and SQL now occupying each other's positions.

The one big move of note between Feb. 2021 and Feb. 2022 was with the Groovy programming language, an object-oriented language for Java. Over the course of the year, Groovy fell from 12th position all the way to 20th, putting it perilously close to the "other programming languages" list.
Thanks to Amigan (Slashdot reader #25,469) for sharing the story.

Microsoft last month received a US patent covering modifications to a data-encoding technique called rANS, one of several variants in the Asymmetric Numeral System (ANS) family that support data compression schemes used by leading technology companies and open source projects. The Register reports: The creator of ANS, Jaroslaw Duda, assistant professor at Institute of Computer Science at Jagiellonian University in Poland, has been trying for years to keep ANS patent-free and available for public use. Back in 2018, Duda's lobbying helped convince Google to abandon its ANS-related patent claim in the US and Europe. And he raised the alarm last year when he learned Microsoft had applied for an rANS (range asymmetric number system) patent.

Now that Microsoft's patent application has been granted, he fears the utility of ANS will be diminished, as software developers try to steer clear of a potential infringement claim. "I don't know what to do with it -- [Microsoft's patent] looks like just the description of the standard algorithm," he told The Register in an email. The algorithm is used in JPEG XL and CRAM, as well as open source projects run by Facebook (Meta), Nvidia, and others. "This rANS variant is [for example] used in JPEG XL, which is practically finished (frozen bitstream) and [is] gaining support," Duda told The Register last year. "It provides ~3x better compression than JPEG at similar computational cost, compatibility with JPEG, progressive decoding, missing features like HDR, alpha, lossless, animations. "There is a large team, mostly from Google, behind it. After nearly 30 years, it should finally replace the 1992 JPEG for photos and images, starting with Chrome, Android."

"The OS/2 community is getting close to obtaining a modern browser on their platform," writes Slashdot reader martiniturbide. In an announcement article on Monday, president of the OS/2 Voice community, Roderick Klein, revealed that a public beta of the new Chromium-based Otter Browser will arrive "in the last week of February or the first week of March." XDA Developers reports: OS/2 was the operating system developed jointly by IBM and Microsoft in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with the intended goal of replacing all DOS and Windows-based systems. However, Microsoft decided to focus on Windows after the immense popularity of Windows 3.0 and 3.1, leaving IBM to continue development on its own. IBM eventually stopped working on OS/2 in 2001, but two other companies licensed the operating system to continue where IBM left off -- first eComStation, and more recently, ArcaOS.

BitWise Works GmbH and the Dutch OS/2 Voice foundation started work on Otter Browser in 2017, as it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep an updated version of Firefox available on OS/2 and ArcaOS. Firefox 49 ESR from 2016 is the latest version available, because that's around the time Mozilla started rewriting significant parts of Firefox with Rust code, and there's no Rust compiler for OS/2. Since then, the main focus has been porting Qt 5.0 to OS/2, which includes the QtWebEngine (based on Chromium). This effort also has the side effect of making more cross-platform ports possible in the future.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The San Francisco Police Department's crime lab has been checking DNA collected from sexual assault victims to determine whether any of the victims committed a crime, according to District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who called for an immediate end to the alleged practice. "The crime lab attempts to identify crime suspects by searching a database of DNA evidence that contains DNA collected from rape and sexual assault victims," Boudin's office said in a press release yesterday. Boudin's release denounced the alleged "practice of using rape and sexual assault victims' DNA to attempt to subsequently incriminate them."

"Boudin said his office was made aware of the purported practice last week, after a woman's DNA collected years ago as part of a rape exam was used to link her to a recent property crime," the San Francisco Chronicle reported yesterday. The woman "was recently arrested on suspicion of a felony property crime, with police identifying her based on the rape-kit evidence she gave as a victim, Boudin said." That was the only example provided, and Boudin gave few details about the case to protect the woman's privacy. But the database may include "thousands of victims' DNA profiles, with entries over 'many, many years,' Boudin said," according to the Chronicle. "We should encourage survivors to come forward -- not collect evidence to use against them in the future. This practice treats victims like evidence, not human beings. This is legally and ethically wrong," Boudin said.

San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott said the department will investigate and that he is "committed to ending the practice" if Boudin's allegation is accurate. But Scott also said the suspect cited by Boudin may have been identified from a different DNA database. "We will immediately begin reviewing our DNA collection practices and policies... Although I am informed of the possibility that the suspect in this case may have been identified through a DNA hit in a non-victim DNA database, I think the questions raised by our district attorney today are sufficiently concerning that I have asked my assistant chief for operations to work with our Investigations Bureau to thoroughly review the matter and report back to me and to our DA's office partners," Scott said in a statement published by KRON 4. Scott also said, "I am informed that our existing DNA collection policies have been legally vetted and conform with state and national forensic standards," but he noted that "there are many important principles for which the San Francisco Police Department stands that go beyond state and national standards." "We must never create disincentives for crime victims to cooperate with police, and if it's true that DNA collected from a rape or sexual assault victim has been used by SFPD to identify and apprehend that person as a suspect in another crime, I'm committed to ending the practice," Scott said. Even though the alleged practice may already be illegal under California's Victims' Bill of Rights, State Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) and District 9 Supervisor Hillary Ronen are planning legislation to stop the alleged misuse of DNA.

Wiener said that "if survivors believe their DNA may end up being used against them in the future, they'll have one more reason not to participate in the rape kit process. That's why I'm working with the DA's office to address this problem through state legislation, if needed."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The newest entrant in the fight for EV market share is going back to the future with an all-electric DeLorean. The infamous gull-winged car is being resurrected in Texas by a group of executives who most recently spent time at China-backed EV startup Karma Automotive. They're working with Stephen Wynne, who acquired the DeLorean branding rights in the 1990s and supplies parts for the 6,000 or so remaining vehicles. [...] The new company is called DeLorean Motors Reimagined LLC and its chief executive officer is Joost de Vries, Texas business records and LinkedIn postings show. The firm will set up a headquarters and an engineering outfit in San Antonio, with potential to bring 450 jobs, the city's development arm said in a statement.

It's not the first time the idea of a DeLorean redux has surfaced -- web searches turn up stories every few years about how Wynne has tried to revive the brand or produce low-volume models -- but using an electric powertrain is a new twist on the idea. The original car gained notoriety in the early 1980s both for its quality problems and for the legal woes of its creator, the late John DeLorean, before the "Back to the Future" film franchise turned it into a pop-culture icon.

The Linux 5.18 kernel is adding support this spring for the Intel Hardware Feedback Interface to make better decisions about where to place given work among available CPU cores/threads, reports Phoronix.

This is significant because Intel's Alder Lake CPUs "are the first x86-64 processors to embrace a hybrid paradigm with two separate CPU architectures on the same die," explains Hot Hardware: These two separate CPU architectures have different strengths and capabilities. The Golden Cove "performance cores" (or P-cores) feature Intel's latest high-performance desktop CPU architecture, and they are blisteringly fast. Meanwhile, the Gracemont "efficiency cores" (or E-cores) are so small that four of them, along with 2MB of shared L2 cache, can nearly fit in the same space as a single Golden Cove core. They're slower than the Golden Cove cores, but also much more efficient, at least in theory.

The idea is that background tasks and light workloads can be run on the E-cores, saving power, while latency-sensitive and compute-intensive tasks can be run on the faster P-cores. The benefits of this may not have been exactly as clear as Intel would have liked on Windows, but they were even less visible on Linux. That's because Linux isn't aware of the unusual configuration of Alder Lake CPUs.

Well, that's changing in Linux 5.18, slated for release this spring. Linux 5.18 is bringing support for the Intel Enhanced Hardware Feedback Interface, or EHFI...

This is essentially the crux of Intel's "Thread Director," which is an intelligent, low-latency hardware-assisted scheduler.

At least some nuclear power plants in the US contain counterfeit parts that could pose significant risks, an investigation by the inspector general's office of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has found. Those parts "present nuclear safety and security concerns that could have serious consequences," says the resulting report (PDF) published on February 9th. The Verge reports: The investigation was conducted after unnamed individuals alleged that "most, if not all," nuclear plants in the US have fake or faulty parts. The inspector general's office uncovered problems with counterfeit parts at a few different plants as part of its investigation. The report also says that the DOE had separately flagged 100 "incidents" involving counterfeit parts just last year. It's a problem that the US will have to crack down on if it moves forward with plans to include nuclear power in its transition to clean energy. Without greater oversight at the NRC, the report warns, the risk of counterfeit parts going unnoticed in the nation's nuclear power plants could rise.

As part of its inquiry, the inspector general's office looked for parts that are illegally altered to look like legitimate products, parts that are "intentionally misrepresented to deceive," and parts that don't meet product specifications. It sampled four power plants across the US and found evidence of counterfeit parts at one of those plants in the midwest. It also points to nuclear power plants in the Northeast, separate from those it sampled, where a "well-placed NRC principal" found that counterfeit parts were involved in two separate component failures.

The NRC might be underestimating the prevalence of counterfeit parts, the report warns, because the regulatory agency doesn't have a robust system in place for tracking problematic parts. It only requires plants to report counterfeits in extraordinary circumstances, like if they lead to an emergency shutdown of a reactor. The report also notes that the NRC hasn't thoroughly investigated all counterfeit allegations. There were 55 nuclear power plants operating in the US as of September 2021, and the inspector general's office sampled just four for its report. NRC Public Affairs Officer Scott Burnell told The Verge in an email that "nothing in the report suggests an immediate safety concern. The NRC's office of the Executive Director for Operations is thoroughly reviewing the report and will direct the agency's program offices to take appropriate action."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Dan Goodin: About 500 e-commerce websites were recently found to be compromised by hackers who installed a credit card skimmer that surreptitiously stole sensitive data when visitors attempted to make a purchase. A report published on Tuesday is only the latest one involving Magecart, an umbrella term given to competing crime groups that infect e-commerce sites with skimmers. Over the past few years, thousands of sites have been hit by exploits that cause them to run malicious code. When visitors enter payment card details during purchase, the code sends that information to attacker-controlled servers.

Sansec, the security firm that discovered the latest batch of infections, said the compromised sites were all loading malicious scripts hosted at the domain naturalfreshmall[.]com. "The Natural Fresh skimmer shows a fake payment popup, defeating the security of a (PCI compliant) hosted payment form," firm researchers wrote on Twitter. "Payments are sent to https://naturalfreshmall.com/p...." The hackers then modified existing files or planted new files that provided no fewer than 19 backdoors that the hackers could use to retain control over the sites in the event the malicious script was detected and removed and the vulnerable software was updated. The only way to fully disinfect the site is to identify and remove the backdoors before updating the vulnerable CMS that allowed the site to be hacked in the first place.

Sansec worked with the admins of hacked sites to determine the common entry point used by the attackers. The researchers eventually determined that the attackers combined a SQL injection exploit with a PHP object injection attack in a Magento plugin known as Quickview. [...] It's not hard to find sites that remain infected more than a week after Sansec first reported the campaign on Twitter. At the time this post was going live, Bedexpress[.]com continued to contain this HTML attribute, which pulls JavaScript from the rogue naturalfreshmall[.]com domain. The hacked sites were running Magento 1, a version of the e-commerce platform that was retired in June 2020. The safer bet for any site still using this deprecated package is to upgrade to the latest version of Adobe Commerce. Another option is to install open source patches available for Magento 1 using either DIY software from the OpenMage project or with commercial support from Mage-One.

Intel's mysterious Software Defined Silicon (SDSi) mechanism for adding features to Xeon CPUs will be officially supported in Linux 5.18, the next major release of the operating system. Tom's Hardware reports: SDSi allows users to add features to their CPU after they've already purchased it. Formal SDSi support means that the technology is coming to Intel's Xeon processors that will be released rather shortly, implying Sapphire Rapids will be the first CPUs with SDSi. Intel started to roll out Linux patches to enable its SDSi functionality in the OS last September. By now, several sets of patches have been released and it looks like they will be added to Linux 5.18, which is due this Spring. Hans de Goede, a long-time Linux developer who works at Red Hat on a wide array of hardware enablement related projects, claims that SDSi will land in Linux 5.18 if no problems emerge, reports Phoronix. "Assuming no major issues are found, the plan definitely is to get this in before the 5.18 merge window," said de Goede.

Intel Software Defined Silicon (SDSi) is a mechanism for activating additional silicon features in already produced and deployed server CPUs using the software. While formal support for the functionality is coming to Linux 5.18 and is set to be available this spring, Intel hasn't disclosed what exactly it plans to enable using its pay-as-you-go CPU upgrade model. We don't know how it works and what it enables, but we can make some educated guesses. [...]

slack_justyb writes: "Quietly making its v1.0 debut yesterday was system76-scheduler as a Rust-written daemon aiming to improve Linux desktop responsiveness and catering to their Pop!_OS distribution," reports Phoronix.

The daemon will work with the kernel's CFS scheduler to give priority to components that System76 deems important for its distro. Out of the box, the scheduler will assign priority to the X.Org Server and desktop window managers/compositors, while pushing compilers and other background tasks lower. However, the scheduler will be configurable via Rusty Object Notation (RON) files found in /etc/system76-scheduler/assignments/ and /usr/share/system76-scheduler/assignments/.

Over on the GitHub page for the project, the team indicates that they are indeed making a trade-off from the default CFS to benefit Desktop configurations over the typical load a server might see.

Slashdot reader sombragris writes: Slackware, the oldest actively maintained Linux distribution, released version 15.0 yesterday after a long release cycle that goes all the way back to 2016 where the last version (14.2) was released. According to the release notes, the whole spirit of this release is: "Keep it familiar, but make it modern."

Among the news, this release offers kernel 5.15.19, PAM, PipeWire and PulseAudio, Wayland and X11 graphical systems, and Rust and Python 3. As graphical environments, both Xfce 4.16 and the latest Plasma 5 (Plasma 5.23.5, Frameworks 5.90, KDE apps 21.12 running under Qt 5.15.3) are available, with Cinnamon and Mate also available from third parties. The main compilers are gcc-11.2 and llvm 13.0. The default browser is Firefox 91.5esr, with Chromium available as a third-party repository. And... no systemd at all.

Slackware can be downloaded from a variety of mirrors. BitTorrent downloads are going to be available too. I've used Slackware for 20 years and it's always impressed me with its stability and speed. I encourage everyone interested to try it. Slashdot readers arfonrg and saxa also shared the news.

Cruise, the driverless spin-off from General Motors, said on Tuesday that it's about to offer public robot-taxi rides in its San Francisco hometown soon -- "within weeks, not months." In a first for San Francisco, Cruise's public rides will be fully driverless, with no back-up driver behind the wheel. The San Francisco Chronicle reports: It has been giving rides to its own employees sans backup driver since November, and has been test-driving truly driverless cars here since December 2020. Waymo, the self-driving unit of Google parent Alphabet, has been providing rides to some San Franciscans since August. [...] Cruise is now accepting applications from members of the public who want to hop into Poppy, Tostada or another of its self-driving Chevy Bolts. The company said it will pick names from the wait list in "weeks not months." Meanwhile it is already giving rides to some locals who were nominated by Cruise employees.

Cruise's rides for the public will run from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. and will be in the city's northwest quadrant -- including Nob Hill, the Fillmore, the Panhandle, the Sunset and the Richmond. For now, the rides from both services are free. Neither Cruise nor any other robot car company has permission from the California Public Utilities Commission to charge for rides, although Cruise applied for it in November.

"Qt, the framework that powers the KDE desktop, is announcing support for ads in client-side applications," reports Neowin: This means that application developers will now be able to serve ads in traditional desktop applications.... Windows users have been dealing with this in Metro UI apps since Windows 8 and it's something that's never gone over well on the desktop.

While it's doubtful you'll see ads in KDE's core applications, it would be possible for distributions that wish to further monetize their work to fork these applications, placing ads in them.... According to the documentation, the advertising plugin supports a variety of platforms. They are as follows:

- Windows 10
- Ubuntu 20.04
- Raspbian Buster
- macOS
- Android 7.0
— iOS

"Our offering aims to disrupt the IoT industry," explains Qt's press release, "enabling new business models and business cases that before were not possible."

Reactions have been mixed. Comments on Phoronix ranged from calling it "a great way for boost development on KDE" to "Not sure if I like this."

Thanks to Slashdot reader segaboy81 for sharing the story

In 2015 the San Francisco Arts Commission surveyed nearly 600 local artists. "More than 70% of them had either already left San Francisco or were about to be displaced from their work, home or both," reports SFGate.com, adding "The pandemic has only intensified these problems. A report by Americans for the Arts found that 53% of artists have no savings whatsoever as a result of the pandemic."

Would it help to give over 100 artists their own Universal Basic Income? In an effort to mitigate what appears to be an existential threat to the arts, in March 2021, the city of San Francisco partnered with the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts [YBCA] to launch a guaranteed income pilot, called the SF Guaranteed Income Pilot for Artists, or SF-GIPA, that gives 130 local low-income artists who have been severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic $1,000 a month, no strings attached, for 18 months.... At the time, YBCA was planning to launch its own guaranteed income project for artists, and this allowed it to combine forces and take both projects further. The first six months of funding for the SF-GIPA project came from the Arts Impact Endowment, which is funded by San Francisco's hotel tax and designated for underserved communities. YBCA extended the project by an additional 12 months with private funding from the Start Small Foundation, a philanthropic initiative by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey....

Though the additional income from SF-GIPA is a welcome relief, as the project moves past its halfway point, the question remains: Will 18 months be enough time to truly make a difference in these artists' lives? YBCA is currently scrambling to find a way to continue supporting guaranteed income recipients after the project's scheduled end in October 2023.... "It's just so sad; people come to San Francisco because of the art and culture, but the art and culture makers can't afford to live here," says Stephanie Imah, who is leading YBCA's pilot. "This is very much a rental problem. It's really hard for artists living in San Francisco unless they work in tech. It's clear we need long-term solutions." For YBCA, that means advocating for big policy changes down the line.

"Our eyes are on the federal government," YBCA CEO Deborah Cullinan explains in an interview with Berkeley's Aurora Theatre. "We'd like to see guaranteed income programs across the country for all people." For now, the organization is focused on collecting "university standard research" in order to make an irrefutable case for universal basic income as a viable long-term solution to poverty.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: The Royal Society is the UK's national academy of sciences. On Wednesday, it published a report on what it calls the "online information environment," challenging some key assumptions behind the movement to de-platform conspiracy theorists spreading hoax info on topics like climate change, 5G, and the coronavirus. Based on literature reviews, workshops and roundtables with academic experts and fact-checking groups, and two surveys in the UK, the Royal Society reached several conclusions. The first is that while online misinformation is rampant, its influence may be exaggerated, at least as far as the UK goes: "the vast majority of respondents believe the COVID-19 vaccines are safe, that human activity is responsible for climate change, and that 5G technology is not harmful." The second is that the impact of so-called echo chambers may be similarly exaggerated and there's little evidence to support the "filter bubble" hypothesis (basically, algorithm-fueled extremist rabbit holes). The researchers also highlighted that many debates about what constitutes misinformation are rooted in disputes within the scientific community and that the anti-vax movement is far broader than any one set of beliefs or motivations.

One of the main takeaways: The government and social media companies should not rely on "constant removal" of misleading content [because it is] not a "solution to online scientific misinformation." It also warns that if conspiracy theorists are driven out of places like Facebook, they could retreat into parts of the web where they are unreachable. Importantly, the report makes a distinction between removing scientific misinformation and other content like hate speech or illegal media, where removals may be more effective: "... Whilst this approach may be effective and essential for illegal content (eg hate speech, terrorist content, child sexual abuse material) there is little evidence to support the effectiveness of this approach for scientific misinformation, and approaches to addressing the amplification of misinformation may be more effective. In addition, demonstrating a causal link between online misinformation and offline harm is difficult to achieve, and there is a risk that content removal may cause more harm than good by driving misinformation content (and people who may act upon it) towards harder-to-address corners of the internet."

Instead of removal, the Royal Society researchers advocate developing what they call "collective resilience." Pushing back on scientific disinformation may be more effective via other tactics, such as demonetization, systems to prevent amplification of such content, and fact-checking labels. The report encourages the UK government to continue fighting back against scientific misinformation but to emphasize society-wide harms that may arise from issues like climate change rather than the potential risk to individuals for taking the bait. Other strategies the Royal Society suggests are continuing the development of independent, well-financed fact-checking organizations; fighting misinformation "beyond high-risk, high-reach social media platforms"; and promoting transparency and collaboration between platforms and scientists. Finally, the report mentions that regulating recommendation algorithms may be effective.

Samsung is significantly falling behind in the rush to bring augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) devices to market, partially due to the company's "obsession" with foldable smartphones, The Korea Herald reports. MacRumors reports: Samsung's main competitors, including Apple, Microsoft, Meta, and Sony, are developing or have already launched AR and VR devices amid massive industry-wide investments into the future of the technology, but it is unclear if Samsung is actively developing such devices at all. eBest Investment and Securities analyst Kim Gwang-soo said: "Big tech companies, rather than smartphone manufacturers, are leading XR devices because they have the necessary content and platforms. Google has an operating system Android, Microsoft has Xbox and Sony has PlayStation. It's risky for Samsung to roll out XR devices, so it has no choice but to stick to foldable smartphones."

The growth of Samsung's smartphone business has slowed down to just 0.9 percent year on year, but the company remains committed to the potential of foldable devices to reignite momentum. Samsung shareholders are said to be concerned by its perceived preoccupation with foldable devices, which is distracting the company's attention from the need to compete with future AR and VR devices from its main rivals.

Industry insiders claim that even if Samsung develops its own AR and VR devices, it lacks the content and platform to create a cohesive and compelling ecosystem. In an attempt to catch up in the race to make inroads into the AR and VR market, Samsung made a belated investment in DigiLens, a California startup that makes AR glasses. To stay relevant, market observers are warning that Samsung may need to find a partner that already has content or a platform in exchange for chip expertise, similar to the relationship between Qualcomm and Microsoft.

Firefox 96.0 is officially shipping today as the first update of 2022 for this open-source web browser. From a report: Firefox 96.0 has "significantly" reduced the amount of load placed on the browser's main thread and there is also "significant" improvements in noise suppression and auto-gain-control and improvements in echo cancellation. In addition to that performance work, there are also WebRTC improvements, an improved cookie policy to reduce the likelihood of Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks, video quality degradation fixes, and other fixes. Over on developer.mozilla.org are some of the web developer changes with Firefox 96 including CSS color value function hwb() support for specifying the hue/whiteness/blackness, support for the CSS color-scheme property, the Web Locks API is enabled by default, image encoder support for WebP for exporting HTML5 canvas elements, and other additions.

A sugar additive used in several foods could have helped spread a seriously dangerous superbug around the US, according to a 2018 study. ScienceAlert reports: The finger of blame is pointed squarely at the sugar trehalose, found in foods such as nutrition bars and chewing gum. If the findings are confirmed, it's a stark warning that even apparently harmless additives have the potential to cause health issues when introduced to our food supply. In this case, trehalose is being linked with the rise of two strains of the bacterium Clostridium difficile, capable of causing diarrhea, colitis, organ failure, and even death. The swift rise of the antibiotic-resistant bug has become a huge problem for hospitals in recent years, and the timing matches up with the arrival of trehalose.

"In 2000, trehalose was approved as a food additive in the United States for a number of foods from sushi and vegetables to ice cream," said one of the researchers, Robert Britton from the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, back in January 2018. "About three years later the reports of outbreaks with these lineages started to increase. Other factors may also contribute, but we think that trehalose is a key trigger."

The C. difficile lineages Britton is referring to are RT027 and RT078. When the researchers analysed the genomes of these two strains, they found DNA sequences that enabled them to feed off low doses of trehalose sugar very efficiently. In fact, these particular bacteria need about 1,000 times less trehalose to live off than other varieties of C. difficile, thanks to their genetic make-up. [...] It's still not certain that trehalose has contributed to the rise of C. difficile, but the study results and the timing of its approval as an additive are pretty compelling. More research will now be needed to confirm the link. According to figures from the CDC, "C. difficile was responsible for half a million infections across the year and 29,000 deaths within the first 30 days of diagnosis," adds ScienceAlert.

The findings were published in the journal Nature.

DoorDash, the food delivery app based out of San Francisco, is requiring all its nondelivery employees, including CEO Tony Xu, to do a "dash" once a month -- and some employees are seemingly furious. SFGate reports: MarketWatch first reported that the WeDash program, which was launched when the service was founded, is making its return in January after being paused during the pandemic. A spokesperson for DoorDash confirmed its return to SFGATE. But a 1,500-comment thread on Blind, the anonymous social media platform for techies and other white-collar types, was started last week by one disgruntled DoorDash worker.

An engineer with a reported total compensation, or TC, of $400,000 a year griped about the responsibility of having to do a once-a-month delivery. "What the actual f--k?" the engineer wrote on the platform. "I didn't sign up for this, there was nothing in the offer letter/job description about this." While some people replied to the original post to say it would be a helpful opportunity to develop empathy and learn about the myriad frustrations of delivery workers, others sided with the original poster. "Not acceptable in anyway!" said one.

For employees unable to do deliveries, there are other programs in place to work with service employees and businesses. The program was launched, a spokesperson said, to "learn first-hand how the technology products we build empower local economies, which in turn helps us build a better product." Employees then gain "credits" through these services, which are reportedly built into an annual review. The money employees make during deliveries will be donated to a nonprofit, the spokesperson said.

Phoronix reports: The Linux 5.17 kernel when it kicks off next month is slated to introduce a new driver "x86-android-tablets" just for dealing with all the quirky/buggy x86 tablets out there.

Longtime Linux developer Hans de Goede of Red Hat has been responsible for numerous x86 laptop/tablet improvements in recent years along with other desktop-related improvements at Red Hat. He has now queued up into the x86 platform drivers tree the x86-android-tablets driver he wrote for dealing with the mess of x86 (mostly Android) tablets that don't behave properly out-of-the-box with Linux.

As part of the ACPI DSDT (Differentiated System Description Table), many x86 tablets have simply invalid entries and other problems that cause issue when trying to run mainline Linux on said hardware. Hans explains as part of the commit currently in the platform-drivers-x86 "for-next" branch....

"This driver, which loads only on affected models based on DMI matching, adds DMI based instantiating of kernel devices for devices which are missing from the DSDT, fixing e.g. battery monitoring, touchpads and/or accelerometers not working."

This new x86-android-tablets driver will basically be a catch-all solution for overrides based on device matching. Hans ended the patch message with, "This is the least ugly option to get these devices to fully work and to do so without adding any extra code to the main kernel image (vmlinuz) when built as a module."