"FreeBSD, the other Linux, reached version 13," writes long-time Slashdot reader undoman. "The operating system is known for its stable code, native ZFS support, and use of the more liberal BSD licenses." Phoronix highlights some of the major new improvements: FreeBSD 13.0 delivers on performance improvements (particularly for Intel CPUs we've seen in benchmarks thanks to hardware P-States), upgrading to LLVM Clang 11 as the default compiler toolchain, POWER 64-bit support improvements, a wide variety of networking improvements, 64-bit ARM (AArch64) now being a tier-one architecture alongside x86_64, EFI boot improvements, AES-NI is now included by default for generic kernel builds, the default CPU support for i386 is bumped to i686 from i486, and a variety of other hardware support improvements. Various obsolete GNU tools have been removed like an old version of GNU Debugger used for crashinfo, obsolete GCC 4.2.1 and Binutils 2.17 were dropped from the main tree, and also switching to a BSD version of grep. The release announcement can be found here.

Inside.com's developer newsletter reports: The PHP team no longer believes the git.php.net server was compromised in a recent attack, which prompted PHP to move servers to GitHub and caused the team to temporarily put releases on hold until mid-April...

In an update offering further insight into the root cause of the late March attack, the team says because it's possible the master.php.net user database was exposed, master.php.net has been moved to main.php.net. The team also reset php.net passwords, and you can visit https://main.php.net/forgot.php to set a new password. In addition, git.php.net and svn.php.net are both read-only now.

Two malicious commits were pushed to the php-src repo from PHP founder Rasmus Lerdorf and PHP core developer Nikita Popov, Popov announced March 28. After an investigation, the PHP team reassured users these malicious commits never reached end-users. However, the team decided to move to GitHub after determining maintaining its own git infrastructure is "an unnecessary security risk."
"In 2019, the PHP team temporarily shut down its Git server after discovering that an attacker had maliciously replaced the official PHP Extension and Application Repository with a malicious one," reports CPO magazine. But this newer supply chain attack "targeted any server that uses PHP ZLib compression when sending data. Most servers use this functionality on almost all content except images and archives that are already size optimized." The supply chain attack would have turned PHP into a remote web shell through which the attackers could execute any command without authentication. This is because the malicious attackers would have the same privileges as the web server running PHP. The backdoor is triggered at the start of a request by checking if the request contains the word "zerodium." If this condition was met, PHP executes the code in the "User-Agentt" request header. The header closely resembles the PHP "User-Agent" request for checking for browser properties.

The rest of the request would thus be treated as a command that could be executed on a PHP server using the server's privileges. This would allow the hackers to run any arbitrary command without the need for further privileges...

PHP powers 80% of all websites. Thus, a successful supply chain attack exploiting the language could prove catastrophic.

Long-time Slashdot reader xiando quotes LinuxReviews: The community distribution Arch Linux has up to now required you to manually install it by entering a whole lot of scary commands in a terminal. Arch version 2021.04.01 features a new guided installer [reached by] typing python -m archinstall guided into the console you get when you boot the Arch Linux installation ISO.

It is not very novice-friendly, or user-friendly, but it gets the job done and it will work fine for those with some basic GNU/Linux knowledge.
Tech Radar writes that previously Arch Linux had "a rather convoluted installation process, which has given rise to a stream of Arch-based distros that are easier to install," adding that the new installer "was reportedly promoted as an official installation mechanism back in January, and was actively worked upon leading to its inclusion in the installation medium." Users have been calling on Arch Linux for simplifying the installation process for a long time, to bring it in line with other Linux distros. However, the Arch philosophy has always been to put the users in charge of every aspect of their installation, which is the antithesis of automated installers.
Phoronix calls the new installer "very quick and easy," although "granted not as user-friendly / polished as say the Debian Installer, Red Hat's Anaconda installer, even Ubuntu's Subiquity, and other TUI/GUI Linux installers out there." They also note that Archinstall "does allow automatically partitioning the drive with your choice of file-system options, automatically installing a desktop environment if desired, configuring the network interfaces, and all the other basics." The method is quick enough that I'll likely use archinstall for future Arch Linux benchmarks on Phoronix as it also then applies a sane set of defaults for users... Five minutes or less and off to the races, ready for Arch Linux."
But Slashdot reader I75BJC still favors "scary commands in a terminal," leaving this comment on the original submission: If you can't type with the big adults, stay on your PlayStation.

Even Apple, with its very good GUI has a command line. The command line commands are more flexible, more specific, more subtle than the pointy-clicky GUI.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A year ago, Uber let its California drivers see ride destinations before picking up passengers and let them set pricing in an effort to prove that the drivers were truly independent contractors. It was part of the company's strategy to block drivers from being reclassified as employees under AB5, California's gig-work law. Now, Uber is acknowledging that the move has hurt business and is considering axing its visible destinations and price-naming policies, The Chronicle has learned. The see-saw may disappoint drivers who appreciated that extra control over their work.

Too many drivers cherry-pick lucrative rides and decline other requests, making the service unreliable, the San Francisco company said on Monday. Uber no longer has to worry about proving that drivers are independent contractors, because Prop 22 -- the November ballot measure that Uber and fellow gig companies spent $220 million to pass -- enshrines their non-employee status.

For more than six months, federal prosecutors say, a New York man used inside information to make illegal profits in the stock market -- and a core element of his alleged scheme was his interaction with Bloomberg News, which published several stories shortly after the trader arranged to make significant purchases of the companies' shares. From a report: Last month, a federal grand jury indicted Jason Peltz on multiple counts of securities fraud, money laundering, tax evasion and lying to the FBI. Peltz, 38, is accused of working with over a half-dozen unnamed and unindicted co-conspirators to learn about impending takeovers and other market-moving news, and to move money between accounts as a way to hide his role and profits. The indictment notes that Peltz's moves were timed closely to stories that ran at "a financial news organization."

While the newsroom isn't named, federal officials cite five stories and their timestamps -- all of which match precisely to pieces that ran on Bloomberg News' website. Each of those stories had shared bylines, but only one reporter is identified as an author for all of the articles: Ed Hammond, who worked at the Financial Times before coming to Bloomberg more than six years ago to cover mergers and acquisitions. In 2017, Hammond was named Bloomberg's senior deals reporter in New York -- a highly prestigious post in that newsroom. The feds allege that Peltz used disposable "burner" phones and encrypted apps to communicate with a journalist, and that the reporter provided "material nonpublic information about forthcoming articles" which Peltz used to trade in the market "just prior to publication of an article about each company written by the reporter." The indictment describes "numerous contacts" between Peltz and a reporter, including at least one in-person meeting. Neither Hammond nor Bloomberg is named in the indictment; the filing says a financial-news reporter's identity was made known to the grand jury that heard the case. No one at Bloomberg is accused by prosecutors of wrongdoing or of being aware that these stories might be linked to an insider-trading scheme. Prosecutors make no allegation that the stories contained any inaccurate information, nor do any of the stories display corrections.

Long-time Slashdot reader xiando quotes the backstory from LinuxReviews.org: CentOS used to be the go-to alternative for those who wanted to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) without having to pay RedHat to use it. It was a almost 1:1 clone until RedHat took control of it and turned it into what is now a RHEL beta-version, not a stable RHEL release without the branding. Almalinux is one of several projects that have made their own RHEL forks in response. The first Almalinux version is now released.
ZDNet notes that CentOS co-founder Gregory Kurtzer has announced his own RHEL clone and CentOS replacement named Rocky Linux. But they offer this report on AlmaLinux: CloudLinux — which was founded in 2009 to provide a customized, high-performance, lightweight RHEL/CentOS server clone for multitenancy web and server hosting companies — came ready to deliver. The new free AlmaLinux is now stable and ready for production workloads. The company also announced the formation of a non-profit organization: AlmaLinux Open Source Foundation. This group will take over managing the AlmaLinux project going forward. CloudLinux has committed a $1 million annual endowment to support the project.

Jack Aboutboul, former Red Hat and Fedora engineer and architect, will be AlmaLinux's community manager. Altogether, Aboutboul brings over 20 years of experience in open-source communities as a participant, manager, and evangelist... "In an effort to fill the void soon to be left by the demise of CentOS as a stable release, AlmaLinux has been developed in close collaboration with the Linux community," said Aboutaboul in a statement. "These efforts resulted in a production-ready alternative to CentOS that is supported by community members...."

In talking with CentOS business users, who deployed CentOS on web and host servers, I found many of them to be very hopeful about AlmaLinux. One from a mid-Atlantic-based Linux hosting company said, "What we want is a stable Linux that our customers can rely on from year to year. Since CentOS Stream can't deliver that, we think — hope — that AlmaLinux can do it for us and our users instead...."

This first release of AlmaLinux is a one-to-one binary compatible fork of RHEL 8.3. Looking ahead, AlmaLinux will seek to keep step-in-step with future RHEL releases... The GitHub page has already been published and the completed source code has been published in the main download repository. The CloudLinux engineering team has also published FAQ on AlmaLinux Wiki.
"The sudden shift in direction for CentOS that was announced in December created a big void for millions of CentOS users," said Simon Phipps, open source advocate and a former president of the Open Source Initiative who is on the governing board of the AlmaLinux project. In a statement, Phipps said that "As a drop-in open-source replacement, AlmaLinux provides those users with continuity and new opportunity to be part of a vibrant community built around creating and supporting this new Linux distribution under non-profit governance.

"I give a lot of credit to CloudLinux for stepping in to offer CentOS users a lifeline to continue with AlmaLinux."

dotancohen writes: Late Sunday night, on March 28, 2021, Nikita Popov, a core PHP committer, released a statement indicating that two malicious commits had been pushed to the php-src Git repository. These commits were pushed to create a backdoor that would have effectively allowed attackers to achieve remote code execution through PHP and an HTTP header. "The incident is alarming considering PHP remains the server-side programming language to power over 79% of the websites on the Internet," adds BleepingComputer.

"In the malicious commits [1, 2] the attackers published a mysterious change upstream, 'fix typo' under the pretense this was a minor typographical correction. However, taking a look at the added line 370 where zend_eval_string function is called, the code actually plants a backdoor for obtaining easy Remote Code Execution (RCE) on a website running this hijacked version of PHP."

According to Popov, the first commit was detected a couple hours after it was made, and the changes were reverted right away. "Although a complete investigation of the incident is ongoing, according to PHP maintainers, this malicious activity stemmed from the compromised git.php.net server, rather than compromise of an individual's Git account," reports BleepingComputer. "As a precaution following this incident, PHP maintainers have decided to migrate the official PHP source code repository to GitHub."

In his "Technically Incorrect" column, Chris Matyszczyk shares one employee's gripe about their new lockdown-incuded online workplace: Writing to New York magazine's The Cut — specifically workplace advice columnist Alison Green — the employee expressed frustration about their boss's so-called Zoom Happy Hours. "These aren't really happy hours," the employee says. "They're more 'work meetings with alcohol on Zoom,' and while they're framed as not 'technically' obligatory, they definitely are, and I get pointed comments if I choose to not attend."

Worse, they're not in actual working hours. Their boss, though, believes everyone's in lockdown, so what's the difference...? This particular boss has decreed the (not really) optional Happy Hour is between 5 p.m. and 7:30 p.m...

I was struck by new research from the University of Sydney. The academic title is: "Collecting experimental network data from interventions on critical links in workplace networks." But drift to the press release and you find: "Benefits of team-building exercises jeopardized if not truly voluntary." Lead researcher Dr. Petr Matous described the situation quite baldly: "Many workers told us that they despise team building activities and see them as a waste of time."
The researchers recommend employers try to encourage a good relationship between two employees — but to let them ultimately work it out for themselves. And Matyszczyk believes this approach makes even more sense on Zoom. "If you're on a Zoom Happy Hour with, say, 50 people, there's still only one actual conversation. Even if you want to participate, it's hard to get a word in and have it instantly understood, never mind appreciated."

That is, unless your boss decides to distribute all the online Happy Hour participants into smaller "breakout rooms"...

This week Swedish developer Daniel Stenberg posted a remarkable reflection on the 23rd anniversary of his command-line data tool, cURL: curl was adopted in Red Hat Linux in late 1998, became a Debian package in May 1999, shipped in Mac OS X 10.1 in August 2001. Today, it is also shipped by default in Windows 10 and in iOS and Android devices. Not to mention the game consoles, Nintendo Switch, Xbox and Sony PS5.

Amusingly, libcurl is used by the two major mobile OSes but not provided as an API by them, so lots of apps, including many extremely large volume apps bundle their own libcurl build: YouTube, Skype, Instagram, Spotify, Google Photos, Netflix etc. Meaning that most smartphone users today have many separate curl installations in their phones.

Further, libcurl is used by some of the most played computer games of all times: GTA V, Fortnite, PUBG mobile, Red Dead Redemption 2 etc.

libcurl powers media players and set-top boxes such as Roku, Apple TV by maybe half a billion TVs.

curl and libcurl ships in virtually every Internet server and is the default transfer engine in PHP, which is found in almost 80% of the world's almost two billion websites.

Cars are Internet-connected now. libcurl is used in virtually every modern car these days to transfer data to and from the vehicles.

Then add media players, kitchen and medical devices, printers, smart watches and lots of "smart"; IoT things. Practically speaking, just about every Internet-connected device in existence runs curl.

I'm convinced I'm not exaggerating when I claim that curl exists in over ten billion installations world-wide...

Those 300 lines of code in late 1996 have grown to 172,000 lines in March 2021.
Stenberg attributes cURL's success to persistence. "We hold out. We endure and keep polishing. We're here for the long run. It took me two years (counting from the precursors) to reach 300 downloads. It took another ten or so until it was really widely available and used." But he adds that 22 different CPU architectures and 86 different operating systems are now known to have run curl.

In a later blog post titled "GitHub Steel," Stenberg also reveals that GitHub gave him a 3D-printed steel version of his 2020 GitHub contribution matrix — accompanied by a friendly note. "Please accept this small gift as a token of appreciation on behalf of all of us here at GitHub, and everyone who benefits from your work."

Nieman Lab: In a paper summarizing 30 years of sports coverage on televised news and highlights shows, researchers began by quoting a short segment dedicated to a WNBA game between the L.A. Sparks and the Atlanta Dream. The broadcast was unusual, authors Cheryl Cooky, LaToya D. Council, Maria A. Mears, and Michael A. Messner pointed out, in that women's sports were mentioned at all. They found that 80% of the televised sports news and highlights shows included zero stories on women's sports. The overall portion of sports coverage featuring women had been low for decades and, in 2019, an overwhelming 95% of the sports coverage included in their study focused on men's sports. But, they wrote, the WNBA segment was typical in other ways. The 23-second-long clip was the only mention of women's sports in the six-minute long sports segment -- and it was also the shortest. Other coverage included Major League Baseball games and the men's Wimbledon final, but also segments on a celebrity golf tournament and a competitive hot-dog eating contest. "In short, the WNBA story -- the shortest in duration of the six in the broadcast -- was eclipsed by five longer reports on men's sports, stories ranging from in-season sports (MLB, pro tennis), an out-of-season sport (NBA), to human interest and comedic entertainment only tangentially connected to what most people think of as sports news," the report found.

The study analyzed sports coverage on local network television (the Los Angeles affiliates KCBS, KNBC, and KABC) as well as highlight shows like ESPN's SportsCenter over the 30 years. In 2019 -- after sport media producers and others suggested televised news and highlights shows were not as relevant as they once were -- the researchers started to include online and social media sources, like Twitter accounts for the networks. The proportion of coverage dedicated to women's sports in email newsletters and Twitter was higher than TV news and SportsCenter, but only if the researchers included espnW and its online newsletter. ESPN stopped producing espnW's weekly newsletter, however, and, when researchers removed the data from their sample, the proportions dedicated to women's sports mirrored that found on TV news and highlights shows.

The GNOME 40 desktop update has been released with a bunch of new improvements. Phoronix summarizes the major changes: GNOME 40 is out with the GTK4 toolkit in tow, many improvements and alterations to the GNOME Shell including major changes to the dash and workspaces, Mutter has continued refining its Wayland support, Mutter also added a native headless back-end for testing, atomic mode-setting is now supported, input handling is now done in a separate thread, and a wide variety of other improvements. And, yes, there is also the big shift in GNOME's versioning practices moving forward while still sticking to the same six month release regiment. The release announcement and release notes can be found at their respective links.

A married pair of San Francisco entrepreneurs were indicted Thursday on multiple federal charges, the latest twist in the saga of a once trendy, now bankrupt fecal matter-testing startup. From a report: Zachary Schulz Apte and Jessica Sunshine Richman, co-founders of defunct microbiome testing company uBiome, are accused of bilking their investors and health insurance providers, federal prosecutors said. They were indicted Thursday on multiple federal charges, including conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit health care fraud and money laundering. Their court appearances have not been scheduled, and it was not immediately clear if they had attorneys who could speak on their behalf. Apte, 36, and Richman, 46, founded uBiome in 2012 as a direct-to-consumer service called "Gut Explorer." Customers would submit a fecal sample that the company analyzed in a laboratory, comparing the consumer's microbiome to others' microbiomes, prosecutors said. The service cost less than $100 initially.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin is the ninth-richest person in the world — and he loves airships. Now new details have emerged about Brin's secretive airship company, LTA Research and Exploration (which stands for "Lighter Than Air"). SFGate reports: Although back in 2017 the word on the street was that Brin intended the aircraft to serve at least in part as a luxurious "air yacht" for his family and friends, the LTA website states only humanitarian goals: "LTA airships will have the ability to complement — and even speed up — humanitarian disaster response and relief efforts, especially in remote areas that cannot be easily accessed by plane and boat due to limited or destroyed infrastructure." Unlike jet planes, airships have the ability to land or deliver goods almost anywhere.

In addition, the LTA site says that their airships are intended to serve as a zero emissions alternative to airplanes, used for both shipping goods and moving people. Climate change has made airships sound more appealing to scientists in recent years — while slower than airplanes, airships are faster than cargo ships and have fewer emissions than both boats and planes. In fact, airships produce 80% to 90% fewer emissions than conventional aircraft.

They're going to be huge — and they're not going to be cheap. "It's going to be massive on a grand scale," a source told the Guardian in 2017, estimating that Brin's airship would be about 650 feet long... A recent job description posted on the LTA website revealed the company's plans to build a 1.5-megawatt hydrogen fuel cell propulsion system.
TechCrunch reports that one airship — named Pathfinder 1 — has already been built, and could be ready to launch from Silicon Valley as soon as this year.

From a report: On Saturday, Zack Snyder himself will head to Twitch to unveil the first look at Justice League: Justice Is Gray... the grayscale version that will soon arrive on HBO Max. The "pre-show" for the event kicks off at 2:30 p.m. Pacific Time on the MANvsGAME channel, with the Snyder and and Justice League star Joe Manganiello joining the broadcast for the big reveal at 4:00 p.m. Pacific. StreamElements designed audience tools to use during the stream, including an engaging donation functionality that will benefit the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.
The Chicago Tribune argues all you needed to know about Joss Whedon's original 2017 version is encapsulated in the 68-second YouTube video "Sad Affleck." (An SFGate columnist calls the new version "vastly better.") But the Tribune calls Snyder's four-hour director's cut "a 14-year-old's idea of gravitas. Epic, violent, full of naughty words, told with the lyricism of a pharmaceutical ad about bloating. And more importantly, for now, it's complete."

Yahoo Entertainment's Insider has compiled "The 45 biggest differences between 'Zack Snyder's Justice League' and the 2017 theatrical version." But Variety just specifically asked Zack Snyder, "Why is Justice League so violent?" [T]he violence in "Justice League" is bloodier and more violent than audiences are typically accustomed to with superhero movies, which are almost always rated PG-13 — and therefore largely bloodless. Snyder wanted to push the envelope. "It's a pure exercise in creative freedom," the director told Variety this week... Snyder says knowing his film would be streaming on HBO Max freed him from having to make his "Justice League" work for a PG-13 rating.

"Let's just do it the exact way we would if there was no ratings board," he said of his team's thinking. "Let's not use any second guessing. Let's just do it the way we think is the coolest. That was the philosophical approach." Part of the reason that "Justice League" is so violent is to realistically demonstrate what it would be like to actually face off against god-like superheroes.
ComicBook.com reports that Snyder is now also planning "a multi-day SnyderVerse movie marathon later in 2021, where showings of Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice will culminate in a theatrical IMAX screening of Zack Snyder's Justice League. The filmmaker is a "huge admirer" of the Justice Is Gray Edition in IMAX, calling it the "ultimate version" of Justice League that is "sort of the penultimate ridiculous movie that shouldn't exist at its highest most fetishistic level."
Snyder tells Esquire his four-hour re-edit was "a labor of love and I would do it again in a second. I wouldn't hesitate. And look, we were doing it for free. I really didn't care. I just wanted to get it, fix it."

Esquire adds that "Even if you decide not to dive into a four hour super hero movie, at least take away a lesson from the making of the Snyder Cut: in a time when so much of us have experienced wrongs and tragedy, sometimes wrongs can be righted, and sometimes your biggest visions find a way to get out into the world."

The Associated Press reports: A long dormant volcano on the Reykjanes Peninsula in southwestern Iceland flared to life Friday night, spilling lava down two sides in that area's first volcanic eruption in nearly 800 years... The glow from the lava could be seen from the outskirts of Iceland's capital, Reykjavík, which is about 32 kilometers (20 miles) away. The Department of Emergency Management said it was not anticipating evacuations because the volcano is in a remote valley, about 2.5 kilometers (1.5 miles) from the nearest road.
The report adds that initial aerial footage "showed a relatively small eruption so far, with two streams of lava running in opposite directions."

Salesforce canceled its 325,000-square-foot lease at the unbuilt Parcel F tower in San Francisco's Transbay neighborhood, reports SFGate: The company announced in February that more than half of its workforce will continue working remotely or on a flexible schedule after the pandemic is over...

The lease termination is just the latest blow to San Francisco's downtown office footprint as more companies shrink or offload leases because of the persistence of remote work. The lease on Yelp's 161,876-square-foot office space at 140 New Montgomery St. is up in October 2021 and the entire space has been listed for rent. WeWork confirmed it would be scaling back its Bay Area locations and is closing five downtown locations. Just this week, the Mission Bay headquarters once leased by Dropbox is being sold for $1.08 billion. The company adopted a remote work policy in October 2020... In August 2020, Pinterest paid $89.5 million to terminate its lease for 88 Bluxome.

Bleeping Computer reports: The most well-known and popular blogging platform, WordPress, is considering dropping support for Internet Explorer 11 as the browser's usage dips below 1%. Using three metrics to determine the number of people still using IE 11, WordPress has found that its cumulative usage is below 1%...

WordPress is not alone in dropping support for IE 11. In August 2020, Microsoft announced that they would no longer support Internet Explorer on the Microsoft Teams web app, and Microsoft 365 would no longer support it starting on August 17th, 2021.
"Dropping support would result in smaller scripts, lower maintenance burden, and decrease build times," notes a post on the Wordpress blog. "For instance, a recent exploration by @youknowriad demonstrated that not transpiling the scripts to IE11 immediately resulted in a net reduction of nearly 84kB in the Gutenberg JavaScript [Wordpress Editor interface] built files, representing a 7,78% total decrease in size; these scripts have seen a size contraction up to 60%, with an average reduction of 24%...

"Moreover, dropping support would ultimately make WordPress' currently included polyfill script obsolete, decreasing the enqueued scripts size up to 102kB more."

The Washington Post reports: Tesla's Bay Area production plant recorded hundreds of covid-19 cases following CEO Elon Musk's defiant reopening of the plant in May, according to county-level data obtained by a legal transparency website.

The document, obtained by the website PlainSite following a court ruling this year, showed Tesla received around 10 reports of covid-19 in May when the plant reopened, and saw a steady rise in cases all the way up to 125 in December, as the disease caused by the novel coronavirus peaked around the country. The revelation follows The Washington Post's reporting in June that there had been multiple covid-19 cases reported at Tesla's facilities in Fremont, Calif., after Musk decided to reopen despite a countywide stay-at-home order, daring officials to arrest him. The data, covering the months between May and December, showed there were around 450 total reported cases. Roughly 10,000 people work at the plant...

Despite around 10 cases in May, according to the data, the health department told The Post in early June that there were no known cases of workplace infections affecting county residents. Tesla and the Alameda County Public Health Department and representatives did not respond to a request for comment...

Tesla also came under fire for its treatment of workers. It had promised they could remain home if they felt uncomfortable returning to the line. The Post reported in late June and July that workers concerned about covid exposure received termination notices after they did not return to work. The data released by Alameda County shows there were 19 reported cases in June and 58 reported cases at the plant in July.

Tim Wu coined the phrase "net neutrality". He's the author of The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age , and Bloomberg calls him an "outspoken advocate for aggressive antitrust enforcement against U.S. technology giants."

They add that now the Columbia University media law professor "is joining the White House an adviser, signaling that the Biden administration is preparing to square off against the industry's biggest companies." Wu will join the National Economic Council as a special assistant on technology and competition policy, the White House said Friday. Wu's appointment elevates to a senior position in the administration a leading antitrust expert, favored by progressives, who has assailed the power of dominant tech companies like Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Facebook Inc. Both companies were sued by U.S. antitrust enforcers last year for allegedly abusing their monopoly power...

After the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general sued Facebook in December, Wu wrote a column in the New York Times comparing Facebook's strategy of buying competitors to Standard Oil's tactics in the 19th century. "What the federal government and states are doing is reasserting a fundamental rule for all American business: You cannot simply buy your way out of competition," Wu wrote. "Facebook, led by its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has taken that strategy to a smirking and egregious extreme, acquiring multiple companies to stifle the competitive threat they pose."

Wu joins the Biden administration as tech giants are grappling with a reckoning in Washington that could transform the industry. The Facebook lawsuit could lead to the breakup of the company, while the Justice Department's complaint against Google targets the heart of its business — Internet search. Antitrust enforcers have also opened investigations of Apple Inc. and Amazon... Wu argued in his book, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age, that rising concentration across the economy has led to concentrated wealth and power as well as radicalized politics that threatens American democracy.
A White House press briefing Friday included this response to a question about Biden's plans for big tech companies: The President has been clear — on the campaign, and, probably, more recently — that he stands up to the abuse of power, and that includes the abuse of power from big technology companies and their executives. And Tim will help advance the President's agenda, which includes addressing the economic and social challenges posed by the growing power of tech platforms; promoting competition and addressing monopoly and market power issues; expanding access to broadband for low-income and rural communities across the country...

We don't have new policy to announce here... Just that the President believes, as he's talked about before, that it's important to promote competition and address monopoly and market power issues.
Interestingly, last August Wu also wrote an op-ed in the New York Times titled "A TikTok Ban is Overdue," arguing that China's "extensive blocking, censorship and surveillance violate just about every principle of internet openness and decency. China keeps a closed and censorial internet economy at home while its products enjoy full access to open markets abroad..." The asymmetry is unfair and ought no longer be tolerated. The privilege of full internet access — the open internet — should be extended only to companies from countries that respect that openness themselves...

[China] bans not only most foreign competitors to its tech businesses but also foreign sources of news, religious instruction and other information, while using the internet to promote state propaganda and engage in foreign electoral interference... Few foreign companies are allowed to reach Chinese citizens with ideas or services, but the world is fully open to China's online companies...

The idealists who thought the internet would automatically create democracy in China were wrong. Some think that it is a tragic mistake for the United States to violate the principles of internet openness that were pioneered in this country. But there is also such a thing as being a sucker. If China refuses to follow the rules of the open internet, why continue to give it access to internet markets around the world...?

We need to wake up to the game we are playing when it comes to the future of the global internet. The idealists of the 1990s and early '00s believed that building a universal network, a kind of digital cosmopolitanism, would lead to world peace and harmony. No one buys that fantasy any longer. But if we want decency and openness to survive on the internet — surely a more attainable goal — the nations that hold such values need to begin fighting to protect them.

An anonymous reader writes: NASA's Perseverence rover, which is currently exploring Mars, has as it's CPU a BAE Systems RAD 750 running at a 200 Mhz and featuring 256 Megabytes of RAM with 2 Gigabytes of storage. This is a radiation hardened version of the PowerPC G3, with specs roughly equivalent to the Clamshell Ibook that Reese Witherspoon used in Legally Blond back in 2001. This follows a tradition of old tech on space rovers — the Sojourner rover which explored Mars in 1997 used an Intel 80C85 running at 2 Mhz, similar to what could have been found in the classic Radio Shack TRS-80 model 100 portable from 1983.
In a comment on the original submission, long-time Slashdot reader Mal-2 argues "There's not as much distance between the actual capabilities of a CPU now and twenty years ago as there would be if you made the same comparison a decade ago." In the last 12 years or so, the CPUs have gotten more efficient and cooler-running (thus suitable for portable devices) to a much greater degree than they've actually gained new functionality. Retro computing is either going to stay stuck in the 1990s, or it's not going to be very interesting in the future.