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Linus Torvalds Approves New Kernel ‘Lockdown’ Feature

“After years of countless reviews, discussions, and code rewrites, Linus Torvalds approved on Saturday a new security feature for the Linux kernel, named ‘lockdown’,” reports ZDNet: The new feature will ship as a LSM (Linux Security Module) in the soon-to-be-released Linux kernel 5.4 branch, where it will be turned off by default; usage being optional […]

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Giant Planet Around Tiny Star ‘Should Not Exist’

Thelasko quotes the BBC: Astronomers have discovered a giant planet that, they say, should not exist, according to current theories. The Jupiter-like world is unusually large compared with its host star, contradicting a widely held idea about the way planets form. The star, which lies 284 trillion km away, is an M-type red dwarf – […]

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Tesla’s New ‘Smart Summon’ Feature Reportedly Crashes a Car Into a Garage

Tesla owners who paid for “full self-driving capability” received a software update this week with a Smart Summon feature. In private parking lots, and always within line of sight, the Tesla will magically make its way to an awaiting owner. “Smart Summon can be stopped at any point by the owner removing their finger from […]

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Kickstarter Defends Firings As Not Anti-Union, But Strong Criticism Continues

“Kickstarter’s CEO Aziz Hasan sent an email to staff Friday, explaining why the company fired two staff members and laid off another who played an instrumental role in organizing a union at the company…” reports Motherboard: Hasan insisted that the firings were related specifically to job performance issues, not union organizing. “We understood how these […]

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Google’s DNS-Over-TLS Plans Scrutinized By US Congress

Google’s plans to implement DNS over TLS in Chrome are being investigated by a committee in the U.S. House of Representatives, while the Justice Department has “recently received complaints” about the practice, according to the Wall Street Journal. An anonymous reader quotes Engadget: While Google says it’s pushing for adoption of the technology to prevent […]

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Liberal Arts Majors Eventually Earn More Than STEM Majors

The conventional wisdom that liberal arts majors earn less than compsci majors may be true for the first job, but not necessarily for an entire career, reports the New York Times, in an article shared by jds91md (and republished by Indiana State’s College of Arts and Sciences). “By age 40 the earnings of people who […]

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Libre-RISC-V 3D CPU/GPU Seeks Grants For Ambitious Expansion

The NLNet Foundation is a non-profit supporting privacy, security, and the “open internet”. Now the open source Libre RISC-V hybrid CPU/GPU is applying for eight additional grants from the NLNet Foundation, according to this update from the project’s Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton (Slashdot reader #517,947): Details on each Grant Application are on the newly-opened RISC-V […]

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Both Apple and Amazon Are Quietly Building Networks That Know the Location of Everything

Wired reports on both Sidewalk, Amazon’s new low-bandwidth long-range wireless networking protocol, and Apple’s new position- and distance-measuring U1 chip (mentioned in a recent keynote). Apple’s U1 chip — which allows precise, indoor positional tracking via the latest iPhones and will power, at the very least, directional AirDrop file-sharing — popped up on screen but […]

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‘We Can’t End Climate Change Without Changing Our Eating Habits’

Saturday the Guardian published a call to action by the author of the new book, We are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast: [W]e cannot save the planet unless we significantly reduce our consumption of animal products. This is not my opinion, or anyone’s opinion. It is the inconvenient science. Animal agriculture produces […]

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Richard Stallman Is Still Head of the GNU Project

On Thursday, Richard Stallman reminded the GNU Project mailing list that “On September 16 I resigned as president of the Free Software Foundation, but the GNU Project and the FSF are not the same. I am still the head of the GNU Project (the Chief GNUisance), and I intend to continue as such.” The next […]

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