Sunday, December 1st, 2024

Time	Event
2:14a	OpenWRT One Released: First Router Designed Specifically For OpenWrt Friday the Software Freedom Conservancy announced the production release of the new OpenWrt One network router — designed specifically for running the Linux-based router OS OpenWrt (a member project of the SFC). "This is the first wireless Internet router designed and built with your software freedom and right to repair in mind. "The OpenWrt One will never be locked down and is forever unbrickable." This device services your needs as its owner and user. Everyone deserves control of their computing. The OpenWrt One takes a great first step toward bringing software rights to your home: you can control your own network with the software of your choice, and ensure your right to change, modify, and repair it as you like. The OpenWrt One demonstrates what's possible when hardware designers and manufacturers prioritize your software right to repair; OpenWrt One exuberantly follows these requirements of the copyleft licenses of Linux and other GPL'd programs. This device provides the fully copyleft-compliant source code release from the start. Device owners have all the rights as intended on Day 1; device owners are encouraged to take full advantage of these rights to improve and repair the software on their OpenWrt One. Priced at US$89 for a complete OpenWrt One with case (or US$68.42 for a caseless One's logic board), it's ready for a wide variety of use cases... This new product has completed full FCC compliance tests; it's confirmed that OpenWrt met all of the FCC compliance requirements. Industry "conventional wisdom" often argues that FCC requirements somehow conflict with the software right to repair. SFC has long argued that's pure FUD. We at SFC and OpenWrt have now proved copyleft compliance, the software right to repair, and FCC requirements are all attainable in one product! You can order an OpenWrt One now! Since today is the traditional day in the USA when folks buy gifts for love ones, we urge you to invest in a wireless router that can last! We do expect that for orders placed today, sellers will deliver by December 22 in most countries... Regardless of where you buy from, for every purchase of a new OpenWrt One, a US$10 donation will go to the OpenWrt earmarked fund at Software Freedom Conservancy. Your purchase not only improves your software right to repair, but also helps OpenWrt and SFC continue to improve the important software and software freedom on which we all rely! LWN.net points out that OpenWrt has also "served as the base on which a lot of network-oriented development (including the bufferbloat-reduction work) has been done." The OpenWrt One was designed to be a functional network router that would serve as a useful tool for the development of OpenWrt itself. To that end, the hope was to create a device that was entirely supported by upstream free software, and which was as unbrickable as it could be... The OpenWrt One comes with a two-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor, 1GB of RAM, and 256MB of NAND flash memory. There is also a separate, read-only 16MB NOR flash array in the device. Normally, the OpenWrt One will boot and run from the NAND flash, but there is a small switch in the back that will cause it to boot from the NOR instead. This is a bricking-resistance feature; should a software load break the device, it can be recovered by booting from NOR and flashing a new image into the NAND array. .. After booting into the new image, the One behaved like any other OpenWrt router... What could be more interesting is seeing this router get into the hands of developers and enthusiasts who will use it to make OpenWrt (and other small-system distributions) better. Long-time Slashdot reader dumfrac writes: The intent to build the device was announced on the OpenWRT forums earlier this year. It is based on MediaTek MT7981B (Filogic 820) SoC and MediaTek MT7976C dual-band WiFi 6 chipset and the board is made by Banana Pi. A poll to select the logo was run in April on the OpenWRT forums, and now the hardware is available for purchase. . Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
4:34a	Despite Clean Energy Use, Global Warming is Still Projected to Continue The world's use of clean energy "is rapidly growing", reports the Washington Post, "but not fast enough to keep temperatures in check..." Many experts say it will be the economics of clean energy that defines the future of the planet — and how developing countries choose to meet their growing electricity demands. "What happens in emerging and developing economies in the next decade in some sense is the whole ballgame," said Jason Bordoff, founding director of the Center for Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. Global greenhouse gas emissions could peak as soon as next year, according to the International Energy Agency, but are not on course to drop sharply enough to contain warming. The world would have to cut its emissions roughly in half by 2035 to meet the 1.5 C target, scientists warn, in part because carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for centuries. Instead, the U.N. projects that nations' current policies will lead to 3.1 C of warming by 2100, or as little as 2.6 C if the strongest pledges are kept. This would represent substantial progress from when the Paris agreement was adopted, when scientists expected a 4 C (7.2 F) rise in temperatures by century's end... Still, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts "dangerous and widespread disruption" on the current path. The Greenland ice sheet might tip into irreversible collapse, according to the IPCC, threatening cities from New York to Shanghai, while extreme heat and humidity could make large swaths of the world effectively uninhabitable. Scientists also expect a growing toll of disease, crop failures and weather disasters. It would likely take thousands of years for Greenland's ice to completely vanish, but other impacts — like the death of coral reefs worldwide and month-long heat waves — could come in a matter of decades. If countries wish to avoid these consequences, they will have to spend vast sums on adaptation. From now through 2030, poor nations will need up to $387 billion per year to adapt to mounting climate disasters, according to a recent U.N. report... [Much of the progress on curbing emissions] has come from the United States' switch from coal to natural gas and renewables, and the European Union's rapid embrace of wind and solar power... But the demand for power is also rising, complicating these efforts. According to a recent report from the International Energy Agency, countries are expected to add electricity demand equivalent to the entire nation of Japan every year — thanks to the growth of EVs, the rapid build-out of AI data centers, and a surge in a need for air conditioning in developing countries. That growth in demand means that even as clean energy is added to the grid, fossil fuel use hasn't decreased. And unless countries close coal and gas plants and shut down oil drilling, emissions won't start to come down. "Two things can both be true: Clean energy is breaking almost every record you can imagine," Bordoff said. "And oil use is going up, and gas use is going up, and coal use is going up." Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
8:34a	What 'The Oregon Trail' Co-Creator Thinks of Apple's Plans for a Movie It's one of the most successful — and oldest — computer games of all-time. This week CBS News Minnesota interviewed Bill Heinemann, who in 1971 co-created "The Oregon Trail" as an educational video game simulating pioneers travelling west. "It's surprising and gratifying and humbling, in a way, that a little thing that I spent two weeks on has become a worldwide phenomenon," Heinemann said... The game's become known for the many ways players can die, including by dysentery, but Heinemann's favorite was death by snake bite. "It only happened once every several hundred times, and so people could've played it for months and all of a sudden, 'What? I got bit by a snake and died? This has never happened to me before!'" he said. The game has been the subject of numerous satirical articles by McSweeney's. And long-time Slashdot reader whois_drek points out that a sketch comedy group also based a movie on the videogame in 2023. So how does the game's co-creator feel about Apple's plans to film a new big-budget movie based on the game? "Surprising to me how popular it's become and how long the interest in it has been around," Heinemann said. "And this is just the next step I guess." He won't be making any money off the movie. In fact, Heinemann's never seen a dime from the iconic game. He and his two co-creators, Rawitsch and Paul Dillenberger, turned it over to the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium shortly after they invented it. Heinemann says it doesn't bother him. "I didn't do it for money," he said. "I did it for just the love of the game and the love of teaching." Thanks to Slashdot reader quonset for sharing the news. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
12:34p	Utilities Are Trying Enormous 'Flow' Batteries Big Enough to Oust Coal Power Plants To help replace power plants, Japan's northernmost island, Hokkaido, "is turning to a new generation of batteries designed to stockpile massive amounts of energy," reports the Washington Post. "The Hokkaido Electric Power Network (HEPCO Network) is deploying flow batteries, an emerging kind of battery that stores energy in hulking tanks of metallic liquid." [F]low batteries are making their debut in big real-world projects. Sumitomo Electric, the company that built the Hokkaido plant, has also built flow batteries in Taiwan, Belgium, Australia, Morocco and California. Hokkaido's flow battery farm was the biggest in the world when it opened in April 2022 — a record that lasted just a month before China built one that is eight times bigger and can deliver as much energy as an average U.S. natural gas plant. "It looks like flow batteries are finally about to take off with interest from China," said Michael Taylor, an energy analyst at the International Renewable Energy Agency, an international group that studies and promotes green energy. "When China starts to get comfortable with a technology and sees it working, then they will very quickly scale their manufacturing base if they think they can drive down the costs, which they usually can...." Lithium-ion batteries are perfect for smartphones because they're lightweight and fit in small spaces, even if they don't last long and have to be replaced frequently. Utilities have a different set of priorities: They need to store millions of times more energy, and they have much more room to work with. "If you think about utility-scale stationary applications, maybe you don't need lithium-ion batteries. You can use another one that is cheaper and can provide the services that you want like, for example, vanadium flow batteries," said Francisco Boshell, a researcher at the International Renewable Energy Agency... Flow batteries are designed to tap giant tanks that can store a lot of energy for a long time. To boost their storage capacity, all you have to do is build a bigger tank and add more vanadium. That's a big advantage: By contrast, there's no easy way to adjust the storage capacity of a lithium-ion battery — if you want more storage, you have to build a whole new battery... One major barrier to building more of these battery farms is finding enough vanadium. Three-quarters of the world's supply comes as a by-product from 10 steel mills in China and Russia, according to Kara Rodby [a battery analyst at the investment firm Volta Energy Technologies] who got her PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studying the design and market for flow batteries. Australia, South Africa and the United States also produce vanadium, but in much smaller quantities. Mines that have been proposed could boost supply. And some flow battery start-ups are trying to sidestep the vanadium problem entirely by using different materials that are easier to buy. The other hurdle is their up-front cost. Vanadium flow batteries are at least twice as expensive to build as lithium-ion batteries, Rodby said, and banks are hesitant to lend money to fund an unfamiliar technology. But experts say flow batteries can be cheaper in the long run because they're easier to maintain and last longer. A lithium-ion battery might have to be replaced after 10 years, but Rodby says flow batteries can last much longer. "There really is no finite lifetime for a flow battery in the way there is for lithium-ion," Rodby said. Here's an interesting statistic from the article. "Over the next six years, utilities will have to build 35 times as many batteries as there are today to soak up all extra renewable energy that will come online, according to the International Energy Agency." Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
3:34p	Spacecraft Face 'Sophisticated and Dangerous' Cybersecurity Threats "Spacecraft, satellites, and space-based systems all face cybersecurity threats that are becoming increasingly sophisticated and dangerous," reports CNBC. "With interconnected technologies controlling everything from navigation to anti-ballistic missiles, a security breach could have catastrophic consequences." Critical space infrastructure is susceptible to threats across three key segments: in space, on the ground segment and within the communication links between the two. A break in one can be a cascading failure for all, said Wayne Lonstein, co-founder and CEO at VFT Solutions, and co-author of Cyber-Human Systems, Space Technologies, and Threats. "In many ways, the threats to critical infrastructure on Earth can cause vulnerabilities in space," Lonstein said. "Internet, power, spoofing and so many other vectors that can cause havoc in space," he added. The integration of artificial intelligence into space projects has heightened the risk of sophisticated cyber attacks orchestrated by state actors and individual hackers. AI integration into space exploration allows more decision-making with less human oversight. For example, NASA is using AI to target scientific specimens for planetary rovers. However, reduced human oversight could make these missions more prone to unexplained and potentially calamitous cyberattacks, said Sylvester Kaczmarek, chief technology officer at OrbiSky Systems, which specializes in the integration of AI, robotics, cybersecurity, and edge computing in aerospace applications. Data poisoning, where attackers feed corrupted data to AI models, is one example of what could go wrong, Kaczmarek said. Another threat, he said, is model inversion, where adversaries reverse-engineer AI models to extract sensitive information, potentially compromising mission integrity. If compromised, AI systems could be used to interfere with or take control of strategically important national space missions... The U.S. government is tightening up the integrity and security of AI systems in space. The 2023 Cyberspace Solarium Commission report stressed the importance of designating outer space as a critical infrastructure sector, urging enhanced cybersecurity protocols for satellite operators... The rivalry between the U.S. and China includes the new battleground of space. As both nations ramp up their space ambitions and militarized capabilities beyond Earth's atmosphere, the threat of cyberattacks targeting critical orbital assets has become an increasingly pressing concern... Space-based systems increasingly support critical infrastructure back on Earth, and any cyberattacks on these systems could undermine national security and economic interests. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
4:34p	'Hour of Code' Cartoon Includes a Shout-Out to AI Nonprofit Code.org has posted this year's cartoon for "Hour of Code," their annual learn-to-code event for schoolchildren. Long-time Slashdot reader theodp notes its animated pigeon gives a shout-out to the AI that could ultimately replace programmers: In an Instagram post introducing the video, Code.org explains: "Bartlett the Pigeon just learned how to code and now thinks he's smarter than us. Honestly...he might be. Meet the face (and feathers) of this year's #HourOfCode." In the video, Bartlett wows a social media influencer with his coding skills. "Is this pigeon typing code?" she asks in disbelief. "I'm going to film this for my socials!" Bartlett goes on to explain that the song he remixes with coding blocks — Aloe Blacc's "I Need a Dollar" — could have instead been generated by simply using AI, which he says is "like having a personal DJ assistant who never misses a beat!" Interestingly, Blacc noted in a 2011 interview that he wrote "I Need a Dollar" after being made redundant in his career as a business consultant by Ernst & Young. That multinational company is now advising global business leaders on how they can harness the power of GenAI "to achieve more with fewer resources" by disrupting professions — like programming — that "involve a high degree of repetitive and data-driven tasks that AI can automate." Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
5:34p	Leaked Documents Show What Phones Secretive Tech 'Graykey' Can Unlock Primarily used by law enforcement, Graykey unlocks mobile devices to extract data from both Android and iOS systems, according to the blog AppleInsider, "though its effectiveness varies depending on the specific hardware and software involved." But while its capabilities are rarely disclosed, "a leak of some Grayshift's internal documents was recently reported on by 404 Media." According to the data, Graykey can only perform "partial" data retrieval from iPhones running iOS 18 and iOS 18.0.1. These versions were released in September and early October, respectively. A partial extraction likely includes unencrypted files and metadata, such as folder structures and file sizes, according to past reports. Notably, Graykey struggles with beta versions of iOS 18.1. Under the latest update, the tool fails to extract any data, as per the documents. Meanwhile, Graykey's performance with Android phones varies, largely due to the diversity of devices and manufacturers. On Google's Pixel lineup, Graykey can only partially access data from the latest Pixel 9 when in an "After First Unlock" (AFU) state — where the phone has been unlocked at least once since being powered on. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the article. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
6:34p	CJIT - C, Just In Time! Long-time Slashdot reader jaromil writes: As a fun project, we hacked together a C interpreter (based on Tiny C Compiler) that compiles C code in-memory and runs it live. CJIT today is a 2MB executable that can do a lot, including call functions from any installed library on Linux, Windows, and MacOSX. Slashdot reader oliwer points out "they are also including a REPL, which could be interesting." And the CJIT web page promises there's "no EULA to sign, no IDE to install... 100% Free and open source!" It also says the project was inspired by Terry Davis (TempleOS) and Fabrice Bellard (Tiny C Compiler). Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
7:34p	Greg Kroah-Hartman Sees 'Tipping Point' for Rust Drivers in Linux Kernel Greg Kroah-Hartman noted some coming changes in Linux 6.13 will make it possible to create "way more" Rust-based kernel drivers. "The veteran kernel developer believes we're at a tipping point of seeing more upstream Rust drivers ahead," reports Phoronix: These Rust char/misc changes are on top of the main Rust pull for Linux 6.13 that brought 3k lines of code for providing more Rust infrastructure. Linux 6.13 separately is also bringing Rust file abstractions. "Sorry for doing this at the end of the merge window," Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote in the pull request, explaining that "conference and holiday travel got in the way on my side (hence the 5am pull request emails...)" Loads of things in here... — Rust misc driver bindings and other rust changes to make misc drivers actually possible. I think this is the tipping point, expect to see way more rust drivers going forward now that these bindings are present. Next merge window hopefully we will have pci and platform drivers working, which will fully enable almost all driver subsystems to start accepting (or at least getting) rust drivers. This is the end result of a lot of work from a lot of people, congrats to all of them for getting this far, you've proved many of us wrong in the best way possible, working code :) Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
8:58p	Bluesky Passes Threads for Active Website Users, But Confronts 'Scammers and Impersonators' Bluesky now has more active website users than Threads in the U.S., according to a graph from the Financial Times. And though Threads still leads in app usage, "Prior to November 5 Threads had five times more daily active users in the U.S. than Bluesky... Now, Threads is only 1.5 times larger than its rival, Similarweb said." But "the influx of new users has opened up new opportunities for scammers and impersonators," Engadget reported this week: A recent analysis by Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security Trust and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech found that 44 percent of the top 100 most-followed accounts on Bluesky had at least one "doppelganger," with most looking like "cheap knock-offs of the bigger account, down to the same bio and profile picture," Mantzarlis wrote in his newsletter Faked Up. The article highlighted issues with Bluesky's loose account verification policies. And then, Bluesky announced a new change-of-policy Friday. Engadget reports: The Bluesky Safety account said that the social media service is removing accounts that are impersonating other people and those squatting on handles... Bluesky now requires parody, satire or fan accounts to label themselves as such in both their handles and their bio. If they don't, or if they only indicate the nature of their account in one of those elements, then they'll be treated as an impersonator and will be removed from the platform. Bluesky now explicitly prohibits identity churning, as well. Accounts that start as impersonators with the purpose of gaining new users, and who then switch to a different identity in an attempt to circumvent the ban, will still get booted off the app. Finally, it says it's exploring "additional options to enhance account verification," though they're not quite ready for rollout. Bluesky says they've "quadrupled the size of our moderation team, in part to action impersonation reports more quickly. We still have a large backlog of moderation reports due to the influx of new users as we shared previously, though we are making progress." And in addition, "We are working behind the scenes to help many organizations and high-profile individuals set up their verified domain handles." And there's another problem. "The EU's executive arm on Monday said Bluesky didn't provide information it was required to share under the bloc's Digital Services Act," reports Bloomberg. Bluesky responded that it's working to comply, " consulting with its lawyer to follow the EU's information disclosure rules, a Bluesky spokesperson wrote on Tuesday in an email." "All platforms in the EU have to have a dedicated page on their websites where it says how many user numbers they have in the EU and where they are legally established," Thomas Regnier, the commission's spokesperson on digital matters, told reporters. "This is not the case with Bluesky, so this is not followed...." Under the DSA, platforms with more than 45 million users in the bloc qualify as "very large online platforms" and need to follow stricter content moderation rules under the commission's supervision. Breaches can result in fines of up to 6% of their global annual sales... Smaller platforms are still required to comply with the law, but are regulated by the EU country where they have a legal presence. That's so far unclear in the case of Bluesky, which was created expressly to avoid a centralized ownership structure. The commission asked EU member countries' national authorities to investigate "and see if they can find any trace of Bluesky" in their jurisdictions, Regnier said Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
10:29p	UN Plastic Treaty Talks Collapse Without a Deal United Nations members gathered this week in Busan, South Korea to negotiate the first treaty reducing plastic pollution. But Politico reports that "talks collapsed late Sunday after negotiators failed to resolve their differences and agree on a global plastic treaty. At the heart of the disagreement was a refusal by oil-rich nations led by Saudi Arabia to accept a deal that put limits on plastic production... Throughout the two years of talks, oil-rich and plastic-producing states had repeatedly clashed with nations that wanted to reduce plastic production to solve a worsening plastic pollution crisis. Many went to Busan hopeful differences would be put aside in the name of combatting a common global threat. But in the end this proved too optimistic... The EU, alongside more than 100 other countries that included the U.K., on Thursday had backed a new proposal spearheaded by Panama pushing for a global target to reduce plastic production to "sustainable levels", drawing a clear battle line for the talks. But three negotiators from countries in the High Ambition Coalition to End Plastic Pollution — granted anonymity to discuss closed-door talks — told POLITICO Saudi Arabia had coordinated a push from oil-rich and plastic-producing countries to block any proposals for the treaty that threatened to reduce plastic production. The vast majority of plastic is made from oil or natural gas... Along with disagreements over plastic production, countries were also unable to agree on whether and how to target particularly polluting plastic products, and how to finance the treaty. Two of the "high-ambition" negotiators referenced above suggested the talks were doomed to fail from the beginning, arguing that there was never going to be enough time given the scope of the mandate. "I think the pressure on us to deliver that in 18 months ... was kind of stupid then, and it's still stupid now," said one. "Usually these processes take a number of years — beyond what we are doing...." But many observers and some delegates said the summit's collapse demonstrated the failures of consensus-based environmental multilateralism, arguing that requiring all countries to agree by consensus gave reluctant nations too much veto power. NGOs like the Center for International Environmental Law hope this week's failed talks will serve as a lesson for future U.N. talks... The date and time of the next round of talks is yet to be announced. Greenpeace issued a statement saying "over 100 Member States, representing billions of people, rejected a toothless deal that would have accomplished nothing, and stood before the world committing to an ambitious treaty." And they argued that the message is clear. "Ambitious countries must not allow the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries, backed by a small minority of countries, to prevent the will of the vast majority. A strong agreement that protects people and the planet is our only option." Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)

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