Stanford University announced strict new rules for undergraduates after a student tested positive for COVID-19: "The university already went to online classes last week," notes the Los Angeles Times. Now, noting county-wide restrictions on gatherings of more than 100 people, the university has also changed its dining hall procedures, and students "will be given pre-filled to-go containers and bottled or canned drinks. Students will then need to leave the dining hall and eat outdoors, in their dorm room or elsewhere."

In addition, all other students have been asked to leave campus, reports SFGate, though "International students who cannot go home, students who have known health or safety risks, and students who are homeless can still remain on campus if a request is submitted."

And the provost is also asking instructors to make winter quarter final exams optional for undergraduate students.
In other news, Slashdot reader RobinH notes that the FIRST Robotics Competition has suspended its entire season and canceled its championships.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bleeping Computer: SETI@home has announced that they will no longer be distributing new work to clients starting on March 31st as they have enough data and want to focus on completing their back-end analysis of the data. SETI@home is a distributed computing project where volunteers contribute their CPU resources to analyze radio data from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).

Run by the Berkeley SETI Research Center since 1999, SETI@home has been a popular project where people from all over the world have been donating their CPU resources to process small chunks of data, or "jobs," for interesting radio transmissions or anomalies. This data is then sent back to the researchers for analysis. In an announcement posted yesterday, the project stated that they will no longer send data to SETI@home clients starting on March 31st, 2020 as they have reached a "point of diminishing returns" and have analyzed all the data that they need for now. Instead, they want to focus on analyzing the back-end results in order to publish a scientific paper. SETI@Home has a list of BOINC projects on their website for those interested in donating their CPU resources.

Personal information from more than 10.6 million people was published online this week, reports ZDNet -- all from people who'd stayed at MGM Resorts hotels (which include the Bellagio, Mandalay Bay, and ARIA): Besides details for regular tourists and travelers, included in the leaked files are also personal and contact details for celebrities, tech CEOs, reporters, government officials, and employees at some of the world's largest tech companies. ZDNet verified the authenticity of the data today, together with a security researcher from Under the Breach, a soon-to-be-launched data breach monitoring service. A spokesperson for MGM Resorts confirmed the incident via email.

According to our analysis, the MGM data dump that was shared today contains personal details for 10,683,188 former hotel guests. Included in the leaked files are personal details such as full names, home addresses, phone numbers, emails, and dates of birth... These users now face a higher risk of receiving spear-phishing emails, and being SIM swapped, Under the Breach told ZDNet.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, pop star Justin Bieber, and DHS and TSA officials are some of the big names Under the Breach spotted in the leaked files.
While the data appears to be several years old, Irina Nesterovsky, Head of Research at threat intel firm KELA, tells ZDNet that the data has been shared in "hacking forums" since last July. MGM blames the breach on "unauthorized access to a cloud server" last summer -- pointing out that at least no credit card information was stolen, and that they notified all affected customers.

But NBC News "spoke to a man with a Secret Service email address who was surprised to learn that he had been hacked. He said MGM never notified him about to breach."

MGM told ZDNet that "we take our responsibility to protect guest data very seriously, and we have strengthened and enhanced the security of our network to prevent this from happening again."

Long-time Slashdot reader lkcl writes: Michael Larabel, of Phoronix, writes that the OpenPower Foundation has released a license agreement for Hardware Vendors to implement the Power ISA RISC instruction set in their processors. Hugh Blemings, the Director of OpenPower, was responsible for ensuring that the EULA is favourable and friendly towards Libre and Open Hardware projects and businesses.

Of particular interest is that IBM's massive patent portfolio is automatically granted, royalty-free as long as two conditions apply: firstly, the hardware must be fully and properly Power ISA compliant, and secondly, the implementor must not "try it on" as a patent troll.

Innovation in the RISC space just got a little more interesting.
"Amidst the fully free and open RISC-V ISA making headway into the computing market, and ARM feeling pressured to loosen up its licensing, it seems they figured that it's best to join the party early," argues Hackaday.

cusco shares a report: For the 30th anniversary of one of the most iconic views from the Voyager mission, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, is publishing a new version of the image known as the "Pale Blue Dot." The updated image uses modern image-processing software and techniques while respecting the intent of those who planned the image. Like the original, the new color view shows Planet Earth as a single, bright blue pixel in the vastness of space. Rays of sunlight scattered within the camera optics stretch across the scene, one of which happens to have intersected dramatically with Earth.

The view was obtained on Feb. 14, 1990, just minutes before Voyager 1's cameras were intentionally powered off to conserve power and because the probe -- along with its sibling, Voyager 2 -- would not make close flybys of any other objects during their lifetimes. Shutting down instruments and other systems on the two Voyager spacecraft has been a gradual and ongoing process that has helped enable their longevity. This celebrated Voyager 1 view was part of a series of 60 images designed to produce what the mission called the "Family Portrait of the Solar System." This sequence of camera-pointing commands returned images of six of the solar system's planets, as well as the Sun. The Pale Blue Dot view was created using the color images Voyager took of Earth. Planetary scientist Carolyn Porco shared the story behind the idea of Pale Blue Dot picture on Neil deGrasse Tyson's video podcast "Star Talk" last year. It's fascinating -- watch from 51:05 seconds and hang around for 13 minutes. Also the famous video where Carl Sagan describes the Pale Blue Dot. An interview he did on the subject later.

Meghan Bartels writes via Space.com: One of Earth's premier instruments for studying nearby asteroids is back to work after being rattled by earthquakes, and its first new observations show that a newly discovered space rock is actually two separate asteroids. The instrument is the planetary radar system at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. The observatory was closed for most of January, after a series of earthquakes hit the island beginning on Dec. 28, 2019. The observatory reopened on Jan. 29. Meanwhile, on Jan. 27, scientists using a telescope on Mauna Loa in Hawaii spotted an asteroid that astronomers hadn't seen before. The team dubbed the newfound space rock 2020 BX12 based on a formula recognizing its discovery date.

Because of the size of 2020 BX12 and the way its orbit approaches that of Earth, it is designated a potentially hazardous asteroid. However, the space rock has already come as close to Earth as it will during this pass (2.7 million miles or 4.3 million kilometers); astronomers have calculated the asteroid's close approaches with Earth for the next century, and all will be at a greater distance than this one was. [...] Based on the observations, the scientists discovered that 2020 BX12 is a binary asteroid, with a smaller rock orbiting the larger rock. About 15% of larger asteroids turn out, on closer inspection, to be binary, according to NASA. The larger rock is likely at least 540 feet (165 meters) across, and the smaller one is about 230 feet (70 m) wide, according to the observations gathered by Arecibo. When the instrument observed the two space rocks on Feb. 5, they appeared to be separated by about 1,200 feet (360 m).

jrepin writes: The KDE community today announced the release of Plasma 5.18. This version of the popular desktop environment is the latest long-term supported release and brings an emoji selector, user feedback capabilities, a global edit mode, and improvements to System Settings, the Discover software manager, widgets, GTK integration and much more. The full Plasma 5.18.0 changelog is available here.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Among the techniques featured in a 2012 City Pages story on The 10 Most Corrupt Tax Loopholes was pretending to be Irish. Chris Parker wrote, "Most people associate such exhaustive money-laundering with drug cartels. But it's now standard practice at firms like Eli Lilly, Google, Microsoft, Pfizer, and Facebook. The only difference is that when drug dealers do it, the government shows up with Kevlar and automatic weapons instead of a refund check."

The WSJ reports that Facebook and the Internal Revenue Service will square off in a U.S. Tax Court case next week (alt source) that could cost the social-media giant more than $9 billion and shape the government's ability to crack down on companies' efforts to shift profits to low-tax countries, capping off a nine-year dispute over how Facebook structured its international operations. The IRS argues that more of the company's profits should have been taxed at higher rates in the U.S., rather than in the company's Irish subsidiary. Facebook contends that it deserves a refund.

"Facebook Ireland and Facebook's other foreign affiliates — not Facebook U.S. — led the high-risk, and ultimately successful, international effort to sell Facebook ads," the company wrote in its pretrial memo. "Facebook Ireland is entitled to profits from the foreign business it built." Countering that argument, the government quoted Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg as saying that Facebook had to call Ireland its international headquarters for "tax purposes." While this tidbit didn't find its way into the why-Ireland statement Sandberg offered in Facebook's official Dublin HQ press release, it does square with a statement made by former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who in a 2005 moment of candor explained, "Corporate tax is part of the overall advantage of doing business in Ireland. It would be disingenuous to say otherwise."

An anonymous reader quotes TechRadar: Intel's Clear Linux distribution looks like it could be the best operating system to run on cheap AMD hardware, with benchmarks showing it outperforms Windows 10 and Ubuntu on a $199 laptop with a budget AMD Ryzen 3200U processor. The Phoronix website ran a series of benchmarks on a super-cheap AMD laptop from Walmart, and found that Intel Clear Linux beat popular Linux distros Fedora and Ubuntu for 78% of the tests.

Not only is it remarkable that a relatively unknown Linux distro is so easily outperforming established operating systems, the fact that Intel is the company behind the distro is particularly ironic. As you can imagine, Clear Linux is optimized for Intel processors, but it seems like it works brilliantly on AMD hardware as well.

Phoronix's Michael Larabel is doing some performance testing on Walmart's $199 Motile-branded M141 laptop (which has an AMD Ryzen 3 3200U processor, Vega 3 graphics, 4GB of RAM, and a 14-inch 1080p display).

But first he compared the performance of its pre-installed Windows 10 OS against the forthcoming Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Linux distribution.

Some highlights: - Java text rendering performance did come out much faster on Ubuntu 20.04 with this Ryzen 3 3200U laptop...

- The GraphicsMagick imaging program tended to run much better on Linux, which we've seen on other systems in the past as well.

- Intel's Embree path-tracer was running faster on Ubuntu...

- Various video benchmarks were generally favoring Ubuntu for better performance though I wouldn't recommend much in the way of video encoding from such a low-end device...

- The GIMP image editing software was running much faster on Ubuntu 20.04 in its development state than GIMP 2.10 on Windows 10...

- Python 3 performance is still much faster on Linux than Windows.

- If planning to do any web/LAMP development from the budget laptop and testing PHP scripts locally, Ubuntu's PHP7 performance continues running much stronger than Windows 10. - Git also continues running much faster on Linux.
Their conclusion? "Out of 63 tests ran on both operating systems, Ubuntu 20.04 was the fastest... coming in front 60% of the time." (This sounds like 38 wins for Ubuntu versus 25 wins for Windows 10.)

"If taking the geometric mean of all 63 tests, the Motile $199 laptop with Ryzen 3 3200U was 15% faster on Ubuntu Linux over Windows 10."

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is moving away from Facebook Workplace to instead make use of more open-source software packages. Phoronix reports: Facebook Workplace is Facebook's corporate-focused product for internal real-time communication and related communication needs within organizations. CERN had been making use of Facebook Workplace and in addition to data privacy concerns, they were recently confronted with either paying Facebook or losing administrative rights, no more single sign-on access, and Facebook having access to their internal data. But now they have assembled their own set of software packages to fill the void by abandoning Facebook Workplace.

CERN is now using the Mattermost open-source software for online chat and Discourse for further information exchange. CERN's IT department is working on filling the gaps further left by getting rid of Facebook Workplace. [CERN has published a post with more details about the move.] ZDNet points out that this latest announcement "ends a nearly four-year trial with Facebook Workplace and means CERN will remove its presence from the platform on January 31, 2020."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Pim Techamuanvivit was managing her Michelin-starred Thai restaurant in San Francisco, Kin Khao, around 8:30 p.m. on Saturday when she got an unexpected call. A customer was wondering when food from his order on the online food delivery company Seamless was coming, as he had been waiting 45 minutes. "I think you must be confused, because I don't do delivery," Techamuanvivit told him. Techamuanvivit said the man then asked, "So what are you doing on Seamless?" The restaurateur soon discovered that her restaurant had a page on both Seamless and Grubhub. Both brands are owned by Grubhub, a Chicago online food delivery company that merged with New York's Seamless in 2013. The delivery sites listed her restaurant and its address with a menu that she does not serve, including pad Thai and, of all things in a restaurant that specializes in lesser-known Thai regional cuisine, Vietnamese pho.

"It's outrageous. They can't get away with this. They can't totally fake a restaurant that doesn't do delivery and go pick up food from, I don't know, some rat-infested warehouse somewhere and deliver to my guests," said Techamuanvivit, who added that she intends to sue Seamless. Grubhub said that the company partners with more than 140,000 restaurants in over 2,700 U.S. cities, and that most orders are from restaurants with which it has an explicit partnership. The company recently started adding other restaurants to its sites without such a partnership, when it finds restaurants that are in high demand, it said. In those cases, someone from the company orders the food ahead or at the restaurant, and a driver is sent to pick it up, it added.

357 Amazon employees have now "violated the e-commerce giant's communications policy Sunday in an unprecedented public display of support for colleagues who were warned that they could be fired for speaking out to criticize the company's climate practices," reports the Washington Post: Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, a group of workers concerned about the company's business with the oil and gas industry as well as its carbon footprint, published quotes from the workers in a post on Medium. The comments, all of which are attributed to Amazon workers by name, are a mass defiance of company rules that bar workers from commenting publicly on its business without corporate justification and approval from executives... "Solidarity to the workers facing retaliation for standing up!" wrote Charlie LaBarge, a software engineer...

Amazon encourages workers to advocate for causes they believe in but wants them to pursue those convictions when related to the company's business internally, spokesman Drew Herdener said in a statement. Workers can submit questions to executives during all-hands meetings, and they can join internal interest groups, such as ones that focus on sustainability. Employees can also attend lunch sessions with Amazon leaders to discuss the issues, as long as they are willing to keep matters raised in those sessions confidential. "While all employees are welcome to engage constructively with any of the many teams inside Amazon that work on sustainability and other topics, we do enforce our external communications policy and will not allow employees to publicly disparage or misrepresent the company or the hard work of their colleagues who are developing solutions to these hard problems," Herdener said.
Ironically, the Washington Post...is owned by Amazon.

mbadolato (Slashdot reader #105,588) shares this post from Belgium-based programmer Brent Roose: It's no secret among web developers and programmers in general: PHP doesn't have the best reputation. Despite still being one of the most used languages to build web applications; over the years PHP has managed to get itself a reputation of messy codebases, inexperienced developers, insecure code, an inconsistent core library, and what not. While many of the arguments against PHP still stand today, there's also a bright side: you can write clean and maintainable, fast and reliable applications in PHP.

In this post, I want to look at this bright side of PHP development. I want to show you that, despite its many shortcomings, PHP is a worthwhile language to learn. I want you to know that the PHP 5 era is coming to an end. That, if you want to, you can write modern and clean PHP code, and leave behind much of the mess it was 10 years ago.
The article notes PHP's opt-in type system and performance-enhancing rewrites (including the ability to store compiled chunks of PHP code in memory). And it argues that PHP "is still evolving today," with a package repository averaging over 25 million downloads a day. There's also PHP web application frameworks (as well as asynchronous frameworks), so "PHP isn't just WordPress anymore."

And in keeping with the core team's yearly release cycle, PHP 8 is expected at the end of 2020, which will include a JIT compiler, "allowing PHP to enter new areas besides web development..."

Bruce Perens (Slashdot reader #3872) co-founded the Open Source Initiative with Eric Raymond in 1998. (And then left it this January 2nd.)

But in 2017 Perens was also sued partly over comments made in a Slashdot discussion. He's just shared a video from the 9th Circuit Appeals Court hearing -- along with this update: Open Source Security Inc. and their CEO, Mr. Bradley Spengler, sued me for 3 Million dollars for defamation, because I wrote this blog post, in which I explained why I thought they were in violation of the GPL. They lost in the lower court, and had to file this $300,000 bond to pay for my defense, which will be awarded to my attorneys if the appeals court upholds the lower court's finding.

Because OSS/Spengler are in Pensylvania and I am in California, this was tried before a Magistrate in Federal court, with the laws of California and the evidentiary rules of the Federal Court. Thus, I am now in the 9th Circuit for appeal.

The first attorney to appear is for OSS/Spengler. The second works for EFF, and the third for O'Melveny. In my opinion EFF and O'Melveny did a great job.

If you are interested in the case, I have a partial archive of the case documents from PACER, and a link to PACER where the rest can be found, here.

71-year-old science fiction author William Gibson coined the word "cyberspace" in his 1984 novel Neuromancer. 36 years later he's back with an even more dystopian future in his new novel Agency.

But in a surprisingly candid interview in the Daily Beast, Gibson says he prefers watching emerging new technologies first because "To use it is to be changed by it; you're not the same person."
"I'm not someone who works from assumptions about where technology might be going. My method of writing is exploratory about that."

That's certainly the case with Agency, Gibson's latest, a densely structured, complexly plotted novel that takes place in two separate time frames, which he refers to as "stubs," and has as one of its central characters an AI named Eunice, who is one part uploaded human consciousness and another part specialized military machine intelligence. In one stub it's 2017, a woman is in the White House, and Brexit never happened. But the threat of nuclear war nonetheless hovers over a conflict in the Middle East. In the other stub, it's 22nd century London after "the jackpot," a grim timeline of disasters that has reduced the Earth's population by 80 percent and left Britain to be ruled by "the klept," which Gibson describes as a "hereditary authoritarian government, [with its] roots in organized crime."

Given these scenarios, it's no surprise to discover that the 71-year-old Gibson's latest work was heavily influenced by the 2016 election and the ascendancy of Donald Trump to the presidency. "The book I had been imagining had been a kind of a romp," says the U.S.-born Gibson down the phone line from his long-time home in Vancouver, B.C. "But then the election happened, and I thought, 'Uh-oh, my whole sense of the present is 24 hours out of date, and that's enough to make the book I've been working on kind of meaningless.' It took me a long time [to re-think and re-write the book], and I thought the weirdness factor of reality, finding some balance -- what can I do with the existing level of weirdness, and that level kept going up. I wanted to write a book that current events wouldn't have left by the time it got out, and I think Agency works...."

"It's an interesting time for science fiction now," says Gibson, "because there are people writing contemporary fiction who are effectively writing science fiction, because the world they live in has become science fiction. Writing a contemporary novel today that doesn't involve concepts that wouldn't have been seen in science fiction 20 years ago is impossible. Unless it's an Amish novel."
The Washington Post calls Gibson's new novel "engaging, thought-provoking and delightful," while the senior editor at Medium's tech site One Zero says it's the first time Gibson "has taken direct aim at Silicon Valley, at the industry and culture that has reorganized the world -- with some of his ideas propelling it."

"The result is a blend of speculation and satire that any self-respecting denizen of the digital world should spend some time with."

And they're also publishing an exclusive excerpt from the novel.

Pine64 will finally start shipping the pre-order units of PinePhone Braveheart Edition on January 17, 2020. Fossbytes reports: A year ago, PinePhone was made available only to developers and hackers. After getting better responses and suggestions, the Pine64 developers planned to bring Pinephone for everyone. In November last year, pre-orders for PinePhone Braveheart Edition commenced for everyone. But due to manufacturing issues coming in the way, the shipment date slipped for weeks, which was scheduled in December last year.

PinePhone Braveheart Edition is an affordable, open source Linux-based operating system smartphone preloaded with factory test image running on Linux OS (postmarketOS) on inbuilt storage. You can check on PinePhone Wiki to find the PinePhone compatible operating system such as Ubuntu Touch, postmarketOS, or Sailfish OS, which you can boot either from internal storage or an SD card.

According to physicist Jason Steffen, letting slower passengers board airplanes first actually results in a more efficient process and less time before takeoff. An anonymous reader shares a report from Ars Technica: Back in 2011, Jason Steffen, now a physicist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, became intrigued by the problem and applied the same optimization routine used to solve the famous traveling salesman problem to airline boarding strategies. Steffen fully expected that boarding from the back to the front would be the most efficient strategy and was surprised when his results showed that strategy was actually the least efficient. The most efficient, aka the "Steffen method," has the passengers board in a series of waves. "Adjacent passengers in line will be seated two rows apart from each other," Steffen wrote at The Conversation in 2014. "The first wave of passengers would be, in order, 30A, 28A, 26A, 24A, and so on, starting from the back."

Field tests bore out the results, showing that Steffen's method was almost twice as fast as boarding back-to-front or rotating blocks of rows and 20-30 percent faster than random boarding. The key is parallelism, according to Steffen: the ideal scenario is having more than one person sitting down at the same time. "The more parallel you can make the boarding process, the faster it will go," he told Ars. "It's not about structuring things as much as it is about finding the best way to facilitate multiple people sitting down at the same time." Steffen used a standard agent-based model using particles to represent individual agents. This latest study takes a different approach, modeling the boarding process using Lorentzian geometry -- the mathematical foundation of Einstein's general theory of relativity. Co-author Sveinung Erland of Western Norway University and colleagues from Latvia and Israel exploited the well-known connection between microscopic dynamics of interacting particles and macroscopic properties and applied it to the boarding process. In this case, the microscopic interacting particles are the passengers waiting in line to board, and the macroscopic property is how long it takes all the passengers to settle into their assigned seats. The paper has been published in the journal Physical Review E.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: It's official, Akon has his own city in Senegal. Known as "Akon City," the rapper and entrepreneur tweeted Monday that he had finalized the agreement for the new city. Akon, who is of Senegalese descent, originally announced plans for the futuristic "Crypto city" in 2018 saying that the city would be built on a 2,000-acre land gifted to him by the President of Senegal, Macky Sall. The new city would also trade exclusively in his own digital cash currency called AKoin, he said. The official website for the city said at the time it would be a five-minute drive from the West African state's new international airport. According to a video posted to the project's Facebook page, "all transactional activity" in Akon City will be conducted using AKoin.

"What's worrying is that, at this stage, there doesn't appear to be any white paper for Akon's cryptocurrency, so it's hard to gauge exactly what we're in for," reports The Next Web. "The associated website does however hype the release of a white paper and an 'explainer video' sometime before February this year."

An anonymous reader quotes the Washington Post: As it probes why Boeing's Starliner spacecraft suffered a serious setback during a flight test last month that forced the cancellation of its planned docking with the International Space Station, NASA faces a high-stakes dilemma: Should the space agency require the company to repeat the uncrewed test flight, or allow the next flight to proceed, as originally planned, with astronauts on board?

The answer could have significant ramifications for the agency, and put astronauts' lives on the line, at a time when NASA is struggling to restore human spaceflight from the United States since the Space Shuttle fleet was retired in 2011.

Forcing Boeing to redo the test flight without anyone on board would be costly, possibly requiring the embattled company, already struggling from the consequences of two deadly crashes of its 737 Max airplane, to spend tens of millions of dollars to demonstrate that its new spacecraft is capable of meeting the space station in orbit. But if NASA moves ahead with the crewed flight, and something goes wrong that puts the astronauts in danger, the agency would come under withering criticism that could plague it for years to come...

For now, NASA is moving cautiously. It has formed an independent team with Boeing to examine what went wrong with the Starliner during last month's test flight. NASA also is reviewing data to help it determine if the capsule achieved enough objectives during its truncated flight to assure NASA that its astronauts will be safe....

If NASA does force Boeing to perform another test flight, it's not clear who would have to pay the tens of millions of dollars such a mission would cost.