An anonymous reader quotes Phoronix: Back on the AMD EPYC 7002 "Rome" launch day I wrote about how AMD is working to return to open-source BIOS/Coreboot support and now there's further confirmation of their work in that direction. We were tipped off Friday that AMD's Head of Platform Firmware, Edward Benyukhis, publicly posted on LinkedIn that he is "looking to hire someone with solid Coreboot and UEFI background." If you have Coreboot experience or know someone who is, see LinkedIn for contacting Benyukhis.

That's exciting itself and certainly noteworthy, but also notable is AMD is now sponsoring next week's Open-Source Firmware Conference. AMD has joined the likes of Amazon AWS, Arm, System76, TrustedFirmware.org, and other companies in sponsoring this conference about Coreboot, LinuxBoot, and related open-source firmware projects.

Mike Bouma (Slashdot reader #85,252) writes: The IBrowse Team announced the commercial release of IBrowse 2.5 for AmigaOS 3.x (68k) and an improved PPC native AmigaOS 4.x version.

IBrowse was the most popular Amiga web browser of the 1990s when it pioneered advanced features such as tabbed web browsing.
"After many years in the making, development has been on a roller coaster since IBrowse 2.4, with challenging personal, technical and commercial issues complicating the release schedule," reads the announcement on the iBrowse site.

"However, we are extremely happy to finally make this new version available to all the valued users who have been waiting so patiently."

Long-time Slashdot reader Qbertino writes: On PHPday in Verona (Italy) Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP, gave an enlightening talk on PHP and its history. 25 years of PHP (video of the talk) is ripe with details on PHP, the design choices behind the web's favorite server-side templating language and with explanations on why what you may think of as an inconsistent mess actually makes perfect sense just the way it is. Very insightful, fun, interesting and a must-watch for PHP lovers and haters alike.
Introducing one slide, Lerdorf remembers that in the 1990s, "the web looked like this -- CGI bins written in C."

But he also shows his first computers from the 1980s at the beginning of the talk, before moving on to screenshots of Gopher, and then of the Mosaic browser. "This changed everything. And not just for me, for everybody...

"Everybody around at the time, playing with this stuff, and having had UUCP addresses and playing with Usenet and bulletin boards -- it was very easy to see that this was going to change the world."

A municipal broadband service in Fort Collins, Colorado went live for new customers today, less than two years after the city's voters approved the network despite a cable industry-led campaign against it. Ars Technica reports: Fort Collins Connexion, the new fiber-to-the-home municipal option, costs $59.95 a month for 1Gbps download and 1Gbps upload speeds, with no data caps, contracts, or installation fees. There's a $15 monthly add-on fee to cover Wi-Fi, but customers can avoid that fee by purchasing their own router. Fort Collins Connexion also offers home phone service, and it plans to add TV service later on. Connexion is only available in a small portion of the city right now.

"The initial number of homes we're targeting this week is 20-30. We will notify new homes weekly, slowly ramping up in volume," Connexion spokesperson Erin Shanley told Ars. While Connexion's fiber lines currently pass just a small percentage of the city's homes and businesses, Shanley said the city's plan is to build out to the city limits within two or three years. "Ideally we will capture more than 50% of the market share, similar to Longmont," another Colorado city that built its own network, Shanley said. Beta testers at seven homes are already using the Fort Collins service, and the plan is to start notifying potential customers about service availability today. The city reportedly issued $143 million in bonds to finance the city-wide network. Fort Collins has a population of 165,000. The two residential internet packages that Connexion is offering are the $59.95 gigabit plan and 10Gbps plan for $299.95 a month. Shanley told Ars that "there are no taxes and fees on internet service," aside from the optional $15 charge to use city-provided Wi-Fi hardware instead of a customer-purchase router.

The broadband service also offers a gigabit Internet and phone service bundle for $74.90 a month. "Phone service on its own starts at $19.95 a month," adds Ars. "When TV service is available, there will be an Internet and TV bundle for $119.90 a month, and a bundle of all three services starts at $144.85."

Tablizer shares a report from SFGate: Visitors to Disney's new Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge attraction, can choose from more than 1,000 unique items to take home as souvenirs. But if they plan on flying home, they'll have to leave at least one behind -- a specially designed "thermal detonator" Coca-Cola bottle the company made especially for the new attraction. TSA has told fans that the bottle, which retails for $5, looks too much like a replica explosive and therefore won't be allowed in carry-on or checked baggage. Fans, not surprisingly are not pleased with the decision. I hope they don't take away my lightsaber.

Slashdot reader sfcrazy writes: The Linux Foundation hosted the executive director of the FreeBSD Foundation, Deb Goodkin, at the Open Source Summit in San Diego. In this episode of Let's Talk, we sat down with Goodkin to talk about the FreeBSD project and the foundation.
"How did they let you in?" jokes their interviewer.

"They didn't realize that FreeBSD was not a Linux distribution," the executive director replies. "No, but seriously, they've been very welcoming to the FreeBSD community and wanting to include our voice in conversations about open source." FreeBSD is about five and a half million lines of code, versus 35 million for Linux, so "If you want to learn, it's a great way to learn... Someone said they believed that they were a great Linux sys-admin because of knowing FreeBSD."

Founded in 2000 in Boulder, Colorado, the FreeBSD project is a 501(c)(3) -- a public charity -- where the Linux Foundation is a 501(c)(6) -- a trade association. They have 400 committers, and "We're known for excellent documentation," the executive director says in the interview, describing how the community works to welcome new-comers and mentor new contributors. "We actually descended from the original Berkeley Unix. Some of those original people who worked on Berkeley Unix are still involved in the FreeBSD project. They're very approachable. So these young people go to conferences, and here you have Kirk McKusick, who developed UFS and still works on file systems, and he's there, and he's telling stories about back in the day, when he was at Berkeley working with Bill Joy, and he is really interested in helping these new people contribute."

Companies using FreeBSD include Netflix and Apple -- and according to Phoronix, the number of FreeBSD ports has increased to nearly 37,000 packages.

The world's oldest continuously working webcam is being switched off after 25 years. The BBC reports: The Fogcam was set up in 1994 to watch how the weather changed on the San Francisco State University campus. has broadcast almost continuously since then barring regular maintenance and the occasional need for it to be re-sited to maintain its view. Its creators said it was being shut down because there were now no good places to put the webcam. Jeff Schwartz, who with Dan Wong set up the webcam, said it would go offline on 30 August. "We felt it was time to let it go," Mr Schwartz told the SFGate newspaper, adding that it was getting harder to find secure locations to put the camera so it had a good view of Holloway Avenue.

Mr Schwartz said he was inspired to set up the camera by what is believed to be the first-ever live webcam which was set up at Cambridge University in 1993 to watch a communal coffee pot.

"Elon Musk tweeted on Thursday evening 'Nuke Mars.' A few hours later he followed it up with 'T-shirt soon'," writes Business Insider.

BGR reports: Musk's tweet is a reference to the theory that by dropping one or more large bombs on Mars' poles, the CO2 locked away in the ice there would be released, giving the Martian atmosphere a much-needed boost... Making the planet's atmosphere denser could help it retain heat and bring it a small step closer to being habitable by human settlers. However, past research has suggested that bombing the planet's poles wouldn't release nearly enough CO2 to be worth the trouble. Elon Musk has publicly disagreed.

It's unclear why the SpaceX boss decided to bring this all up again, but he does have a habit of saying whatever he thinks will get a big reaction on Twitter. Oh, and apparently he's hoping to sell some shirts as well.

In any case, no space agency is ready to even begin preliminary planning for a crewed Mars mission, much less any long-term efforts to change the climate of the Red Planet. If that ever does happen, bombs may or may not play a role.
The article adds that scientists "aren't fully on board" with Musk's line of thinking, but the t-shirts really are available in the online SpaceX store. Late Friday Musk began promoting them with an optimistic tweet.

"Nuking Mars one T-shirt at a time."

America's Defense Department "is looking to build tools that can quickly detect deepfakes and other manipulated media amid the growing threat of 'large-scale, automated disinformation attacks,'" reports Nextgov: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency on Tuesday announced it would host a proposers day for an upcoming initiative focused on curbing the spread of malicious deepfakes, shockingly realistic but forged images, audio and videos generated by artificial intelligence. Under the Semantic Forensics program, or SemaFor, researchers aim to help computers use common sense and logical reasoning to detect manipulated media.

As global adversaries enhance their technological capabilities, deepfakes and other advanced disinformation tactics are becoming a top concern for the national security community... Industry has started developing tech that use statistical methods to determine if a video or image has been manipulated, but existing tools "are quickly becoming insufficient" as manipulation techniques continue to advance, according to DARPA. "Detection techniques that rely on statistical fingerprints can often be fooled with limited additional resources," officials said in a post on FedBizOpps...

Beyond simply detecting errors, officials also want the tools to attribute the media to different groups and determine whether the content was manipulated for nefarious purposes. Using that information, the tech would flag posts for human review. "A comprehensive suite of semantic inconsistency detectors would dramatically increase the burden on media falsifiers, requiring the creators of falsified media to get every semantic detail correct, while defenders only need to find one, or a very few, inconsistencies," DARPA officials said.

But that's easier said than done. Today, even the most advanced machine intelligence platforms have a tough time understanding the world beyond their training data.

A victim of billionaire Jeffrey Epstein testified that she was forced to have sex with MIT professor Marvin Minsky, as revealed in a newly unsealed deposition. The Verge reports: Minsky, who died in 2016, was known as an associate of Epstein, but this is the first direct accusation implicating the AI pioneer in Epstein's broader sex trafficking network. The deposition also names Prince Andrew of Britain and former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, among others. The accusation against Minsky was made by Virginia Giuffre, who was deposed in May 2016 as part of a broader defamation suit between her and an Epstein associate named Ghislaine Maxwell. In the deposition, Giuffre says she was directed to have sex with Minsky when he visited Epstein's compound in the U.S. Virgin Islands. As part of the defamation suit, Maxwell's counsel denied the allegations, calling them "salacious and improper." Representatives for Giuffre and Maxwell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A pivotal member of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab, Marvin Minsky pioneered the first generation of self-training algorithms, establishing the concept of artificial neural networks in his 1969 book Perceptrons. He also developed the first head-mounted display, a precursor to modern VR and augmented reality systems. Minsky was one of a number of prominent scientists with ties to Jeffrey Epstein, who often called himself a "science philanthropist" and donated to research projects and academic institutions. Minsky's affiliation with Epstein went particularly deep, including organizing a two-day symposium on artificial intelligence at Epstein's private island in 2002, as reported by Slate. In 2012, the Jeffrey Epstein Foundation issued a press release touting another conference organized by Minsky on the island in December 2011.
UPDATE (8/10/2019): Jeffrey Epstein "died by suicide early Saturday in his Lower Manhattan prison cell, three law enforcement officials told ABC News."

Red Hat has joined the RISC-V Foundation to help foster this open-source processor ISA. Phoronix reports: While we're still likely years away from seeing any serious RISC-V powered servers at least that can deliver meaningful performance, Red Hat has been active in promoting RISC-V as an open-source processor instruction set architecture and one of the most promising libre architectures we have seen over the years. Red Hat developers have already helped in working on Fedora's RISC-V support and now the IBM-owned company is helping out more and showing their commitment by joining the RISC-V Foundation. Red Hat joins the likes of Google, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, SiFive, Western Digital, IBM, and Samsung as among the many RISC-V members.

It's been a gripe for many running Linux on low RAM systems especially is that when the Linux desktop is under memory pressure the performance can be quite brutal with the system barely being responsive. The discussion over that behavior has been reignited this week. From a report: Developer Artem S Tashkinov took to the kernel mailing list over the weekend to express his frustration with the kernel's inability to handle low memory pressure in a graceful manner. If booting a system with just 4GB of RAM available, disabling SWAP to accelerate the impact/behavior, and launching a web browser and opening new web pages / tabs can in a matter of minutes bring the system down to its knees.

Artem elaborated on the kernel mailing list, "Once you hit a situation when opening a new tab requires more RAM than is currently available, the system will stall hard. You will barely be able to move the mouse pointer. Your disk LED will be flashing incessantly (I'm not entirely sure why). You will not be able to run new applications or close currently running ones. This little crisis may continue for minutes or even longer. I think that's not how the system should behave in this situation. I believe something must be done about that to avoid this stall."

The Atlantic talked to Lora Hooper, chair of the immunology department at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, one of the researchers investigating gut microbes, inflammation, and what may be a very important connection.

They note that the rise of antibiotic usage among humans "coincides with the obesity epidemic." This could be a spurious correlation, of course -- lots of things have been on the rise since the '50s. But dismissing it entirely would require ignoring a growing body of evidence that our metabolic health is inseparable from the health of our gut microbes... While other researchers focused on the gut microbiome itself, [Hooper] took an interest in the immune system. Specifically, she wanted to know how an inflammatory response could influence these microscopic populations, and thus be related to weight gain.

Over the past decade or so, multiple studies have shown that obese adults mount less effective immune responses to vaccinations, and that both overweight and underweight people have elevated rates of infection. But these were long assumed to be effects of obesity, not causes.

"When I started my lab there wasn't much known about how the immune system perceives the gut microbes," Hooper says. "A lot of people thought the gut immune system might be sort of blind to them." To her, it was obvious that this couldn't be the case. The human gut is host to about 100 trillion bacteria. They serve vital metabolic functions, but can quickly kill a person if they get into the bloodstream. "So clearly the immune system has got to be involved in maintaining them," she says. It made sense to her that even subtle changes in the functioning of the immune system could influence microbial populations -- and, hence, weight gain and metabolism. This theory was borne out late last month in a paper in Science... [T]his experiment is a demonstration of principle: The immune system helps control the composition of the gut microbiome.
Slashdot reader Beeftopia submitted the story, noting that even the North American Meat Institute, the largest trade group representing meat processors, acknowledges that the use of some antibiotics "can destroy certain bacteria in the gut and help livestock and poultry convert feed to muscle more quickly causing more rapid growth." [PDF, page 4].

"Inflammation plays a critical role in determining how we digest food," writes the Atlantic, "and it's only now starting to reveal itself."

Matt Lamkin reports via Scientific American: In March, the Food and Drug Administration approved esketamine, a drug that produces psychedelic effects, to treat depression -- the first psychedelic ever to clear that bar. Meanwhile the FDA has granted "breakthrough therapy" status -- a designation that enables fast-tracked research -- to study MDMA (also called "ecstasy") as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder and psilocybin as a treatment for major depression. While these and other psychedelic drugs show promise as treatments for specific illnesses, FDA approval means doctors could also prescribe them for other, "off-label" purposes -- including enhancing the quality of life of people who do not suffer from any disorder. Hence if MDMA gains approval as a treatment for PTSD, psychiatrists could prescribe the drug for very different purposes.

Yet while the FDA generally does not regulate physicians' prescribing practices, a federal law called the Controlled Substances Act bars them from writing prescriptions without a "legitimate medical purpose." Although this prohibition aims to prevent doctors from acting as drug traffickers, the law does not explain which purposes qualify as "legitimate," nor how to distinguish valid prescriptions from those that merely enable patients' illicit drug abuse. Would prescribing a psychedelic drug simply to promote empathy or increase "life satisfaction" fall within the scope of legitimate medicine -- or would these practices render the physician a drug dealer? To many the answer may seem obvious: to qualify as a "medical" use, a drug must be prescribed to treat an illness. But in fact, medical practice has always included interventions aimed at promoting the well-being of healthy individuals. "At a time when 'lifestyle drugs' are marketed as consumer products, it is increasingly difficult to draw a bright line that distinguishes legitimate medical practices from their illicit cousins," adds Lamkin. "If prescribing mind-altering drugs to help healthy people achieve desirable mental states falls within the bounds of legitimate medicine, what is left of the concept of recreational use?"

Cisco has agreed to pay $8.6 million to settle a claim that it sold video surveillance software it knew was vulnerable to hackers to hospitals, airports, schools, state governments and federal agencies. SFGate reports: The tech giant continued to sell the software and didn't fix the massive security weakness for about four years after a whistleblower alerted the company about it in 2008, according to a settlement unsealed Wednesday with the Justice Department and 15 states as well as the District of Columbia.

Hackers could use the flaw not just to spy on video footage but to turn surveillance cameras on and off, delete footage and even potentially compromise other connected physical security systems such as alarms or locks - all without being detected, according to Hamsa Mahendranathan, an attorney at Constantine Cannon, which represented whistleblower James Glenn. The settlement marks the first time a company has been forced to pay out under a federal whistleblower law for not having adequate cybersecurity protections.

An anonymous reader quotes The Verge's AI and Robotics reporter: By scanning huge datasets of text, machine learning software can produce convincing samples of everything from short stories to song lyrics. Now, those same techniques are being applied to the world of coding with a new program called Deep TabNine, a "coding autocompleter." Programmers can install it as an add-on in their editor of choice, and when they start writing, it'll suggest how to continue each line, offering small chunks at a time. Think of it as Gmail's Smart Compose feature but for code.

Jacob Jackson, the computer science undergrad at the University of Waterloo who created Deep TabNine, says this sort of software isn't new, but machine learning has hugely improved what it can offer... Earlier this month, he released an updated version that uses a deep learning text-generation algorithm called GPT-2, which was designed by the research lab OpenAI, to improve its abilities. The update has seriously impressed coders, who have called it "amazing," "insane," and "absolutely mind-blowing" on Twitter...

Deep TabNine is trained on 2 million files from coding repository GitHub. It finds patterns in this data and uses them to suggest what's likely to appear next in any given line of code, whether that's a variable name or a function... Most importantly, thanks to the analytical abilities of deep learning, the suggestions Deep TabNine makes are of a high overall quality. And because the software doesn't look at users' own code to make suggestions, it can start helping with projects right from the word go, rather than waiting to get some cues from the code the user writes.
It's not free software. Currently a personal license costs $49 (with a business-use license costing $99), the Verge reports -- but the tool supports the following 22 languages...

Python, JavaScript, Java, C++, C, PHP, Go, C#, Ruby, Objective-C, Rust, Swift, TypeScript, Haskell, OCaml, Scala, Kotlin, Perl, SQL, HTML, CSS, and Bash.

There's already nearly 5,000 satellites orbiting earth, "and many of them are non-functioning space debris now, clogging up orbital paths for newer satellites," reports Universe Today. Yet over the next five years we expect to launch up to 2600 more -- which is prompting a search for solutions to "the growing problem of space debris in Low-Earth Orbit." Some exotic-sounding solutions involve harpoons, nets, magnets, even lasers. Now NASA has given Purdue University-related startup Vestigo Aerospace money for a six month study that looks at using drag sails to de-orbit space junk, including satellites, spent rocket boosters, and other debris, safely...Drag sails are a bit different than other methods. While the harpoons, lasers, and nets proposed by various agencies are meant to deal with the space junk that's already accumulated, drag sails are designed to be built into a satellite and deployed at the end of their useful life... Once deployed, they would reduce an object's velocity and then help it deorbit safely.

Currently, satellites deorbit more or less on their own terms, and it's difficult to calculate where they may strike Earth, if they're too large to burn up on re-entry... [D]rag sails offer an affordable, and potentially easy-to-develop method to ensure future satellites don't outlive their usefulness.
The company was started by a Purdue associate professor of engineering who tells the site they're building in scalability, so their sails can handle satellites that weigh one kilogram -- or one ton.

maiden_taiwan writes: Can computers determine your emotional state from your face? A panel of senior scientists with backgrounds in neuroscience, psychology, computer science, electrical engineering, biology, anthropology, psychiatry, pediatrics, and public affairs spent two years reviewing over 1,000 research papers on the topic. Two years later, they have published the most comprehensive analysis to date and concluded: "It is not possible to confidently infer happiness from a smile, anger from a scowl, or sadness from a frown, as much of current technology tries to do when applying what are mistakenly believed to be the scientific facts.... [How] people communicate anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise varies substantially across cultures, situations, and even across people within a single situation."

Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, author of the book How Emotions are Made and behind a popular TED talk on emotion, who was an author on the paper, further elaborates: "People scowl when angry, on average, approximately 25 percent of the time, but they move their faces in other meaningful ways when angry. They might cry, or smile, or widen their eyes and gasp. And they also scowl when not angry, such as when they are concentrating or when they have a stomach ache. Similarly, most smiles don't imply that a person is happy, and most of the time people who are happy do something other than smile."

The American Civil Liberties Union has also commented on the impact of the study. "This paper is significant because an entire industry of automated purported emotion-reading technologies is quickly emerging," writes the ACLU. "As we wrote in our recent paper on 'Robot Surveillance,' the market for emotion recognition software is forecast to reach at least $3.8 billion by 2025. Emotion recognition (aka 'affect recognition' or 'affective computing') is already being incorporated into products for purposes such as marketing, robotics, driver safety, and (as we recently wrote about) audio 'aggression detectors.'"

Berkeley has become the first city in the nation to ban the installation of natural gas lines in new homes. The City Council on Tuesday night unanimously voted to ban gas from new low-rise residential buildings starting Jan. 1. The San Francisco Chronicle reports: The natural gas ordinance, introduced by Councilwoman Kate Harrison, requires all new single-family homes, town homes and small apartment buildings to have electric infrastructure. After its passage, Harrison thanked the community and her colleagues "for making Berkeley the first city in California and the United States to prohibit natural gas infrastructure in new buildings." The city will include commercial buildings and larger residential structures as the state moves to develop regulations for those, officials said. The ordinance allocates $273,341 per year for a two-year staff position in the Building and Safety Division within the city's Department of Planning and Development. The employee will be responsible for implementing the ban.

"Light-to-moderate" alcohol consumption can help reduce your risk of Alzheimer's disease.

An anonymous reader quotes the Washington Post: A study presented Sunday at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference in Los Angeles found that combining five lifestyle habits -- including eating healthier, exercising regularly and refraining from smoking -- can reduce the risk of Alzheimer's by 60 percent. A separate study showed that lifestyle choices can lower risk even for those who are genetically prelifestyle disposed to the disease...

Over the last decade, studies have increasingly pointed to controllable lifestyle factors as critical compenents to reducing the risk of cognitive decline. Researchers say that, as with heart disease, combating dementia will probably require a "cocktail" approach combining drugs and lifestyle changes. And as recent efforts to develop a cure or more effective drug treatments for dementia have proven disappointing, the fact that people can exert some control in preventing the disease through their own choices is encouraging news, they say.

While the new study's authors expected to see that leading a healther life decreases the chance of dementia, they were floored by the "magnitude of the effect," said Klodian Dhana, a Rush University professor and co-author. "This demonstrates the potential of lifestyle behaviors to reduce risk as we age," said Heather Snyder, senior director of medical and scientific operations at the Alzheimer's Association. "The fact that four or five lifestyle habits put together can have that kind of benefit for your brain is incredibly powerful."
The fifth lifestyle habit is "engaging in mentally stimulating activities like reading the newspaper, visiting the library or playing games such as chess and checkers."

Time reports that even following just two or three of the healthy lifestyle factors reduced the risk of developing Alzheimer's dementia in the study by at least 39%.