Trisha Thadani, reporting for SFChronicle: The Trump administration has officially delayed a rule that would allow some foreign entrepreneurs to stay in the U.S. and build their companies. During this delay, the administration will propose a plan to rescind the rule all together, according to a Federal Register notice that will be published Tuesday. This official notice, which will be published in the Federal Register Tuesday, comes exactly one week before the rule was slated to go into effect. It will be delayed until March 14. The International Entrepreneur Rule, is the closest the United States has come to the "startup visa" Silicon Valley has long sought, was approved by the Department of Homeland Security in January during President Barack Obama's waning hours in office.

With bike-sharing companies like Mobike becoming incredibly successful in Chinese cities, a few startups have decided to mimic the concept with shareable umbrellas. The only problem: most of the umbrellas have gone missing, reports local media. From a report: Only a few weeks after starting up operations in 11 cities across China, Sharing E Umbrella announced that it had lost almost all of its 300,000 umbrellas. The Shenzhen-based company was launched with a 10 million yuan ($1.5 million) investment. The concept was similar to those that bike-sharing startups have used to (mostly) great success. Customers use an app on their smartphone to pay a 19 yuan deposit fee for an umbrella, which costs just 50 jiao for every half hour of use.

After collating 30,171 responses, Phoronixhas released some results from their first Linux Laptop Survey. An anonymous reader quotes their report: To little surprise, Ubuntu was the most popular Linux distribution running on the respondents' laptops. 38.9% of the respondents were said to be using Ubuntu while interesting in second place was Arch Linux at 27.1% followed by Debian at 15.3%. Rounding out the top ten were then Fedora at 14.8%, Linux Mint in 5th at 10.8%, openSUSE/SUSE in sixth at 4.2%, Gentoo in seventh at 3.9%, CentOS/RHEL in eighth at 3.1%, Solus in ninth at 2%, and Manjaro in tenth at 1.6%. The other Linux distributions had each commanded less than 1% of the overall response.
Only 10.3% of respondents said their most recent laptop purchase came pre-loaded with Linux. But 29.3% are now dual-booting their Linux laptop with Windows, while another 4.4% were dual-booting with yet another Linux distribution.

"The seminal operating system Multics has been reborn," writes Slashdot reader doon386: The last native Multics system was shut down in 2000. After more than a dozen years in hibernation a simulator for the Honeywell DPS-8/M CPU was finally realized and, consequently, Multics found new life... Along with the simulator an accompanying new release of Multics -- MR12.6 -- has been created and made available. MR12.6 contains many bug and Y2K fixes and allows Multics to run in a post-Y2K, internet-enabled world.
Besides supporting dates in the 21st century, it offers mail and send_message functionality, and can even simulate tape and disk I/O. (And yes, someone has already installed Multics on a Raspberry Pi.) Version 1.0 of the simulator was released Saturday, and Multicians.org is offering a complete QuickStart installation package with software, compilers, install scripts, and several initial projects (including SysDaemon, SysAdmin, and Daemon). Plus there's also useful Wiki documents about how to get started, noting that Multics emulation runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, and Raspian systems.

The original submission points out that "This revival of Multics allows hobbyists, researchers and students the chance to experience first hand the system that inspired UNIX."

An anonymous reader writes: "In a few years, families could be living at Facebook," quips CNET. The Bay Area Newsgroup reports that Facebook is proposing a new campus with facilities open to the public "to address long-neglected community needs and to accommodate its burgeoning workforce." But the San Francisco Chronicle sees more than just new buildings. "Implicit in the tech company's announcement is Facebook's belief that it can solve some of the area's most pressing issues, including traffic congestion, demand for affordable housing and a lack of transit options. By opening the campus and some of its facilities to the public, Facebook is also heading off a common criticism lobbed at wealthy tech firms: that they move into cities, drive up the cost of living, displace area residents and then do little to give back."

Facebook will offer 15% of the housing -- about 225 units -- at "below market rates." They're also promising to invest tens of millions of dollars in improvements to nearby Highway 101 and to "catalyze regional transit investment," according to Facebook's vice president of global facilities and real estate. The Chronicle notes that the campus's open-to-the-public pharmacy and grocery store "would also solve the issue of a lack of food retailers in that part of the city, where the nearest large store is a Safeway 4 miles away -- a trip that can take up to 40 minutes during rush hour, according to Google Maps."

Samsung witnessed a reduction in the number of employees last year in its first manpower cut in seven years due mainly to its restructuring in China, South Korean newspaper Herald reports citing figured published by the company. From the report: The number of employees of the world's largest smartphone and memory chip manufacturer fell 5.2 percent to 308,745 last year from 325,677 the previous year, the data said. By region, domestic employees dropped 3.8 percent to 93,204, and those abroad declined 5.8 percent to 215,541. As of the end of last year, the percentage of the employees at Samsung's companies abroad dropped 0.4 percent to 69.8 percent. The number of Samsung employees in China fell 17.5 percent to 37,070 last year from 44,948 the previous year, while those in North and South America surged 8.5 percent to 25,988.

This week the Free Software Foundation awarded its coveted 'Respects Your Freedom' certification to 15 products -- more than doubling the number of certified products (from 12 to 27) since the program began in 2012. An anonymous reader writes: The non-profit FSF certified six different laptops, two docking stations, three WiFi USB adapters and two internal WiFi devices, a mainboard, and their first-ever certified Bluetooth device, the TET-BT4 USB adapter. The products are all from Technoethical (formerly Tehnoetic), a Romania-based company who previously had just one mini wireless USB adapter on their list of FSF-certified products. "In 2014 we started selling hardware compatible with fully free systems in order to fund the free software activism work that we've been doing with our foundation," said Technoethical founder, Tiberiu C. Turbureanu. "Since then, we worked hard to build a hardware catalog that allows free software users to choose what best fits their computing needs, while also helping with the funding of different free software projects."
"We are excited that Technoethical has brought out such an impressive collection of hardware whose associated software respects user freedom," said the FSF's executive director, John Sullivan. "RYF certification continues to gain speed and momentum, thanks to companies like them."

"On 14 days during March, Arizona utilities got a gift from California: free solar power," reported the Los Angeles Times. Mic reports: California is generating so much solar energy that it is resorting to paying other states to take the excess electricity in order to prevent overloading power lines. According to the Los Angeles Times, Arizona residents have already saved millions in 2017 thanks to California's contribution. The state, which produced little to no solar energy just 15 years ago, has made strides -- it single-handedly has nearly half of the country's solar electricity generating capacity...

When there's too much solar energy, there is a risk of the electricity grid overloading. This can result in blackouts. In times like this, California offers other states a financial incentive to take their power. But it's not as environmentally friendly as one would think. Take Arizona, for example. The state opts to put a pin in its own solar energy sources instead of fossil fuel power, which means greenhouse gas emissions aren't getting any better due to California's overproduction.
The Los Angeles Times suggests over-construction of natural gas plants created part of the problem -- Californians now pay roughly 50% more than the rest of the country for power -- but they report that power supplies could become more predictable when battery storage technologies improve.

An anonymous reader writes: Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has absorbed blistering criticism for the way he handled allegations of sexual misconduct at the San Francisco riding-hailing service. But he can at least count on the support of one big name in Silicon Valley: former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. Speaking at the annual Stanford Directors' College Tuesday, Mayer defended Kalanick, suggesting that he was unaware of the toxic culture brewing at Uber because of the company's rapid growth. Mayer's name has come up in reports as a possible replacement for Kalanick at Uber, though there's no indication the company has had talks with her. "Scale is incredibly tricky," Mayer said. "I count Travis as one of my friends. I think he's a phenomenal leader; Uber is ridiculously interesting. I just don't think he knew," she said. "When your company scales that quickly, it's hard." Mayer then compared Uber's situation to the early days of Google when it first brought in Eric Schmidt as CEO to help co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page manage the company.

Phoronix is hosting a 2017 Linux Laptop Survey. From their site: While Linux laptop compatibility is much better than where it was years ago, it's still not too uncommon to run into display/hybrid issues, shorter battery life under Linux than Windows or macOS, touchpad problems, and other occasional compatibility/performance shortcomings. So we've established this Linux Laptop Survey in conjunction with Linux stakeholders to hopefully gather more feedback that will be useful to many different parties...
The survey will be online until July 6th, after which the results will be publicly available, and will determine the most popular brands, distros, screen sizes, and GPUs, as well as common pain points and popular price points. And one particularly interestng question asks respondents what they'd like to see in a "dream Linux laptop."

According to the Energy Department's Energy Information Administration, wind and solar produced 10 percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. for the first time in March. The Hill reports: The Energy Information Administration's (EIA) monthly power report for March found that wind produced 8 percent of the electricity produced in the U.S. that month, with solar producing 2 percent. The two sources combined to have their best month ever in terms of percentage of overall electricity production, EIA said. The agency expects the two sources topped 10 percent again in April but forecasts that their generation will fall below that mark during the summer months. Due to the way geographic wind patterns affect the generation of electricity, the two sources typically combine for their best months in the spring and fall. Annually, wind and solar made up 7 percent of electric generation in 2016, EIA said.

An anonymous reader quotes BleepingComputer: Verelox, a provider of dedicated KVM and VPS servers based in The Hague, Netherlands, suffered a catastrophic outage after a former administrator deleted all customer data and wiped most of the company's servers. Details of what exactly happened aren't available, but according to posts on various web hosting forums [1, 2, 3], the incident appears to have taken place Thursday, when users couldn't access their servers or the company's website.

Verelox's homepage came back online earlier Friday, but the website was plastered with a grim message informing users of the ex-admin's actions. Following the incident, the hosting provider decided to take the rest of its network offline and focus on recovering customer data. Verelox staff don't believe they can recover all data.
Saturday night the web site was advising customers that the network and hosting services "will be back this week with security updates," adding that "current customers who are still interested in our services will receive compensation."

Carolyn Said, reporting for San Francisco Chronicle: It's a San Francisco truism: Every other car on the streets these days seems to bear a logo for Uber or Lyft -- and many are double-parked as they pick up or drop off passengers. Now the city seeks to compel Uber and Lyft to share details on how many cars are roving the streets, so it can ensure that they comply with local laws; assess their impact on traffic congestion, safety, pollution and parking; and ascertain if they are accessible for disabled and low-income riders. City Attorney Dennis Herrera on Monday subpoenaed Uber and Lyft to disgorge records on four years of driving practices, disability access and service in San Francisco. "No one disputes the convenience of the ride-hailing industry, but that convenience evaporates when you're stuck in traffic behind a double-parked Uber or Lyft, or when you can't get a ride because the vehicle isn't accessible to someone with a disability or because the algorithm disfavors the neighborhood where you live," Herrera said in a statement. The subpoenas seek information on "miles and hours logged by drivers, incentives that encourage drivers to 'commute' from as far away as Fresno or Los Angeles, driver guidance and training, accessible vehicle information, and the services provided to residents of every San Francisco neighborhood," Herrera's office said.

An anonymous reader quotes Phoronix: UBports continues to be the leading community project for trying to let Ubuntu Touch live on and evolve under their direction... Among their recent achievements were acquiring more sponsors, all devices that were sold with Ubuntu Touch can now run with UBports' builds, they are working on their own version of Mozilla's AGPS Location Service to replace Canonical's GPS system, the Halium OS platform continues evolving, the Dekko email client is back under development, installation improvements are being worked on, they are still striving for Wayland support, and more.
The UBports Patreon page has even raised enough to allow UBports founder Marius Gripsgard to work full-time on what they're calling "a beautiful, free and open-source mobile OS." Their recent community update announced that "we are seeing more activity on Ubuntu Touch than for a very long time, and that is really encouraging."

the_newsbeagle writes: Many of today's fanciest artificial intelligence systems are some type of artificial neural network, but they bear only the roughest resemblance to a biological brain's real networks of neurons. That could change thanks to a $100M program from IARPA. The intelligence agency is funding neuroscience teams to map 1 cubic millimeter of rodent brain, looking at activity in the visual cortex while the rodent is engaged in a complex visual recognition task. By discovering how the neural circuits in that brain cube get activated to process information, IARPA hopes to find inspiration for better artificial neural networks. And an AI that performs better on visual recognition tasks could certainly be useful to intelligence agencies.

An anonymous reader quotes DistroWatch: Natanael Copa has announced the release of Alpine Linux 3.6.0. Alpine Linux is an independent, minimal operating system that is well suited to running servers, routers and firewalls. Version 3.6.0 introduces support for 64-bit POWER machines, 64-bit IBM z Systems computers and features many up to date packages, including PHP 7.1, LLVM 4.0 and version 6.3 of the GNU Compiler.
"Noteworthy new packages" include Rust 1.17.0 and Cargo 0.18.0, as well as Julia 0.5.2, as we ll as "significant updates" like Go 1.8, Python 3.6, and Ruby 2.4. And in addition, "MD5 and SHA-1 hashes have been removed from APKBUILDs, being obsoleted by SHA-512."

theodp writes: Fortune reports that LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman is "leading a $30 million funding round in Change.org, a for-profit petition and fundraising website focused on social and political change." Joining Hoffman in this round, as well as an earlier $25 million round in 2014, is Bill Gates. Change.org, Hoffman explained in a Friday LinkedIn post, "helps enable a world where you don't need to hire a lobbyist to have real impact on the issues and policies that matter to you." He added, "In its decade of existence, Change.org petitions have resulted in more than 21,000 victories, i.e., instances in which a government agency, corporation, or other entity has changed a regulation or a policy in the face of a Change.org petition urging it to do so." Last year, Hoffman joined Gates and some of the biggest names in tech and corporate America who threw their weight behind a Change.org petition that tried to get Congress to fund K-12 Computer Science education. The Change.org petition fell short of its 150,000-signature goal despite claims of support from 90% of the parents of the nation's 58 million K-12 schoolchildren (based on a Google-funded survey of 1,685 parents), widespread press coverage (including a full-page ad in petition signer Jeff Bezos's Washington Post), lobbying efforts by the tech coalition that organized the petition (which counts LinkedIn and Microsoft among its members), and even some free PR from Change.org.

An anonymous reader writes: "Following years of criticism and user requests, the FileZilla FTP client is finally adding support for a master password that will act as a key for storing FTP login credentials in an encrypted format," reports BleepingComputer. "This feature is scheduled to arrive in FileZilla 3.26.0, but you can use it now if you download the 3.26.0 (unstable) release candidate from here." By encrypting its saved FTP logins, FileZilla will finally thwart malware that scrapes the sitemanager.xml file and steals FTP credentials, which were previously stolen in plain text. The move is extremely surprising, at least for the FileZilla user base. Users have been requesting this feature for a decade, since 2007, and they have asked it many and many times since then. All their requests have fallen on deaf ears and met with refusal from FileZilla maintainer, Tim Kosse. In November 2016, a user frustrated with Koose's stance forked the FileZilla FTP client and added support for a master password via a spin-off app called FileZilla Secure.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: One of the problems publishers face today in making their content more readable on mobile devices is that there are multiple, competing formats available for this purpose. Facebook has Instant Articles, Google is spearheading the AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) project, and the Apple News Format optimizes content for iOS devices. Facebook is today taking a crack at a solution to this problem by rolling out support for both AMP and soon Apple News as a part of its open source Instant Articles software development kit. The updated SDK will now include an extension that lets publishers build content that's publishable in all three formats, beginning with support for Google's AMP in addition to Facebook's own Instant Articles. In the weeks ahead it will also include support for publishing to Apple News, though the company didn't provide an exact launch date for when that feature would be added.

Slashdot reader snydeq shares an InfoWorld article identifying "The Working Dead: IT Jobs Bound For Extinction." Here's some of its predictions.

• The president of one job leadership consultancy argues C and C++ coders will soon be as obsolete as Cobol programmers. "The entire world has gone to Java or .Net. You still find C++ coders in financial companies because their systems are built on that, but they're disappearing."
• A data scientist at Stack Overflow "says demand for PHP, WordPress, and LAMP skills are seeing a steady decline, while newer frameworks and languages like React, Angular, and Scala are on the rise."
• The CEO and co-founder of an anonymous virtual private network service says "The rise of Azure and the Linux takeover has put most Windows admins out of work. Many of my old colleagues have had to retrain for Linux or go into something else entirely."
• In addition, "Thanks to the massive migration to the cloud, listings for jobs that involve maintaining IT infrastructure, like network engineer or system administrator, are trending downward, notes Terence Chiu, vice president of careers site Indeed Prime."
• The CTO of the job site Ladders adds that Smalltalk, Flex, and Pascal "quickly went from being popular to being only useful for maintaining older systems. Engineers and programmers need to continually learn new languages, or they'll find themselves maintaining systems instead of creating new products."
• The president of Dice.com says "Right now, Java and Python are really hot. In five years they may not be... jobs are changing all the time, and that's a real pain point for tech professionals."

But the regional dean of Northeastern University-Silicon Valley has the glummest prediction of all. "If I were to look at a crystal ball, I don't think the world's going to need as many coders after 2020. Ninety percent of coding is taking some business specs and translating them into computer logic. That's really ripe for machine learning and low-end AI."