The MPA, MPA-Canada, and Amazon have filed a request with Github requesting that a Kodi add-on developer's account be deleted from the platform. Citing a copyright case and a permanent injunction handed down by Canada's Federal Court, the content companies claim that the account is still being used to infringe their rights. Github has left the account intact, however. TorrentFreak reports: In February 2018, a developer known online as 'Blamo' (aka 'Mr. Blamo') revealed that he, in common with several of his counterparts, had been threatened by content companies. From there the trail went cold but according to a complaint filed against Github this week, legal action in Canada followed. On September 7, 2018, a dozen companies including the studios of the MPA/MPA-Canada plus Amazon and Netflix launched a copyright infringement lawsuit at Canada's Federal Court against an individual "doing business" as Mr. Blamo.

"In the context of that action, our clients alleged that [Blamo] notably developed, hosted, promoted and distributed infringing add-ons for the Kodi media center, which provided unauthorized access to motion pictures and television content for which the copyright is owned by our clients," the MPA writes. According to Federal Court records, Blamo did not mount any kind of defense so as a result, the matter was decided in his absence. On January 15, 2019, the Federal Court handed down a final judgment, including a declaration of infringement and a permanent injunction. "The permanent injunction enjoins and restrains [Blamo] from, inter alia, hosting, distributing or promoting infringing Kodi add-ons and their repositories, including notably the 'Blamo' repository and the "Chocolate Salty Balls' infringing add-ons," the MPA adds.

The problem here is that, according to the MPA and associated companies, Blamo has a Github account where it is claimed he continues to "host and distribute infringing Kodi add-ons and their repository, including notably the Chocolate Salty Balls infringing add-on and the Blamo repository." This, the MPA says, amounts to contempt of court. What's particularly interesting here, however, is that the MPA isn't asking for the specified URLs to be deleted. Instead, it asks for Blamo's entire Github account to be deactivated instead.

A hacker claims to have stolen over 500GB of data from Microsoft's private GitHub repositories, BleepingComputer reports. From the report: This evening, a hacker going by the name Shiny Hunters contacted BleepingComputer to tell us they had hacked into the Microsoft GitHub account, gaining full access to the software giant's 'Private' repositories. The individual told us that they then downloaded 500GB of private projects and initially planned on selling it, but has now decided to leak it for free. Based on the file stamps in the leaked files, the breach may have occurred on March 28th, 2020.

Slashdot reader thereitis shares a report from Ars Technica that "delves into the reversing community's efforts to produce usable C source code from N64 game binaries." Here's an excerpt: Early this week, with little warning, the Internet was graced with a Windows executable containing a fully playable PC port of Super Mario 64. Far from being just a usual emulated ROM, this self-contained program enables features like automatic scaling to any screen resolution, and players are already experimenting with adding simple graphics-card-level reshaders, including ray-tracing, as well. The PC port -- which was released with little buildup and almost no promotion -- wasn't built from scratch in a modern game engine, in the manner of some other now-defunct Super Mario 64 porting projects. And its release has nothing to do with a recent leak of internal Nintendo files dating back to the Gamecube days. Instead, the port seems to be a direct result of a years-long effort to decompile the Super Mario 64 ROM into parsable C code. This kind of reverse-engineering from raw binary to easy-to-read code isn't a simple process, but it's an effort that a growing community of hobbyist decompilers is undertaking to unlock the secrets behind some of their favorite games.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: The details of 44 million Pakistani mobile subscribers have leaked online this week, ZDNet has learned. The leak comes after a hacker tried to sell a package containing 115 million Pakistani mobile user records last month for a price of $2.1 million in bitcoin. Data contains names, phone numbers, national IDs, and home addresses among others, and is believed to have originated from Jazz, a local mobile provider. According to our analysis of the leaked files, the data contained both personally-identifiable and telephony-related information. This includes the likes of: Customer full names; Home addresses (city, region, street name); National identification (CNIC) numbers; Mobile phone numbers; Landline numbers; and Dates of subscription.

Based on the dates of subscription, the oldest entries in the leaked files are from late 2013, suggesting that hackers either got their hands on an older backup file, or the breach took place in 2013, and only now surfaced online. The vast majority of entries in the leaked files contained mobile phone numbers belonging to Jazz (formerly Mobilink), a Pakistani mobile operator. However, ZDNet also identified phone numbers that appeared to belong to other mobile operators. [...] The incident is already under investigation in Pakistan, where the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) and the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) are looking into the matter since last month when the hacker first tried to sell the entire 115 million batch on a hacker forum.

GitHub has launched Codespaces -- a feature that lets you code directly on the web. Think of this as a virtual Integrated Development Environment (IDE) on the cloud. From a report: Earlier, to contribute to a project you would need to make a pull request, and set up the environment on your local machine according to the requirements of a project. With Codespaces, you don't need to do that anymore. As soon as you click on the code button, the website sets up the environment in seconds.

MicroProse, an American video game publisher and developer founded by Bill Stealey and Sid Meier in 1982, is being resurrected after an absence of almost 20 years. The publisher's last game was Grand Prix 4 released in 2002, but is most famous for the XCOM and Civilization franchises. MojoKid shares a report from HotHardware: The company is now being led by CEO David Lagettiu, while Bill Stealey, who originally founded MicroProse with Sid Meier, will be onboard as a consultant this time around. For those that would like to see some of their MicroProse classics "refreshed" for modern systems, you're in luck. It will be remastering a number of games, although those specific titles haven't been revealed at this time. What the reinvigorated company has announced, however, is that it has three new games on deck. The first is Task Force Admiral, which will have you in command of a U.S. Navy WWII (Pacifica Theater) carrier task force. This will be a full 3D simulation game with 90 ship classes and 40 different types of aircraft with realistic ballistics and full damage modeling. The game is being developed by Drydock Dreams.

Next up is Second front, which is another WWII-themed game developed by Hexdraw. "Second Front is an accessible WWII turn-based tactical game with more than 40 infantry units and 200 tanks, vehicles and guns," writes MicroProse. It has all the depth of a paper wargame and the ease of a computer simulation. Campaign, scenarios and a complete editor make it an infinite tactical sandbox experience." Finally, there's Sea Power, which was developed by Triassic Games. Sea Power shifts to "modern naval conflict campaigns." All three of the games will be launching soon via Steam, which you can check out using the follow links: Task Force Admiral, Second Front, Sea Power.

CAM4, a popular adult platform that advertises "free live sex cams," misconfigured an ElasticSearch production database so that it was easy to find and view heaps of personally identifiable information, as well as corporate details like fraud and spam detection logs. According to Wired, the database exposed 7 terabytes of names, sexual orientations, payment logs, and email and chat transcripts -- 10.88 billions records in all. From the report: First of all, very important distinction here: There's no evidence that CAM4 was hacked, or that the database was accessed by malicious actors. That doesn't mean it wasn't, but this is not an Ashley Madison-style meltdown. It's the difference between leaving the bank vault door wide open (bad) and robbers actually stealing the money (much worse). [...] The list of data that CAM4 leaked is alarmingly comprehensive. The production logs Safety Detectives found date back to March 16 of this year; in addition to the categories of information mentioned above, they also included country of origin, sign-up dates, device information, language preferences, user names, hashed passwords, and email correspondence between users and the company.

Out of the 10.88 billion records the researchers found, 11 million contained email addresses, while another 26,392,701 had password hashes for both CAM4 users and website systems. A few hundred of the entries included full names, credit card types, and payment amounts. Who's Affected? It's hard to say exactly, but the Safety Detectives analysis suggests that roughly 6.6 million US users of CAM4 were part of the leak, along with 5.4 million in Brazil, 4.9 million in Italy, and 4.2 million in France. It's unclear to what extent the leak impacted both performers and customers. The report says CAM4's parent company, Granity Entertainment, took the server offline within a half hour of being contacted by the researchers.

Apple's virtual WWDC event will start on June 22, Apple said today. It will be hosted in the Apple Developer app and the Apple Developer website and it will be free for all developers. Apple does plan to hold a keynote event, presumably on June 22 when WWDC begins.

This week long-time open source advocate Matt Asay warned employers that the best way to keep their developers happy was to let them contribute to open source projects: SlashData recently surveyed over 16,000 developers to see what makes them tick... what they care about. The data is collected in SlashData's State of the Developer Nation, though let me give you the tl;dr: 59% of developers contribute to open source software today. Why do they contribute? The top two reasons are: To improve coding skills and because they believe in open source.

Want to keep those developers happy and employed with you? Let them contribute...

[Y]our employees want to contribute both code and knowledge — they want to be part of something. Talking to Bert Hubert, founder of PowerDNS, a supplier of open source DNS software, services, and support, he stressed that an open source project must be "a fun place where people feel that they are learning things, that they're contributing things, that they're being valued." Perhaps not surprisingly, these are the same elements developers expect from their employers. By making open source a valued part of workplace expectations, employers tick both boxes.

Is it an absolute requirement that you encourage your developers to contribute to open source projects? No. But many of your best developers will chafe at keeping their talents locked up behind the firewall, and other developers simply won't apply if you have a reputation for being an open source scrooge.
The article was written by Matt Asay, a former COO of Canonical now working at AWS. (Right before becoming Canonical's COO, Matt answered questions from Slashdot readers).

The survey he cites also found that out of 17,000 developers they talked to, just 3% said they were paid to contribute to open source.

The other 97% contributed for free.

Three female employees at Oracle scored a major victory in court, gaining the right to represent thousands of others in a gender-discrimination lawsuit over pay, a legal milestone that has eluded women at other tech titans. From a report: A California state judge certified the class action Thursday, allowing the lawsuit to advance on behalf of more than 4,000 women who claim the database giant pays men more for doing the same job. "Whether the jobs at issue in this case are substantially equal or similar is a question of fact for a jury," California Superior Court Judge V. Raymond Swope in Redwood City said in the 25-page ruling, rejecting Oracle's claim that each is an individual case because people in the same job code don't perform substantially similar work. The ruling gives the women critical leverage in pursuing the case under the state's Equal Pay Act.

About a year ago, Microsoft launched Visual Studio Online, its online code editor based on the popular Visual Studio Code project. It')s basically a full code editor and hosted environment that lives in your browser. Today, the company announced that it is changing the name of this service to Visual Studio Codespaces. It's also dropping the price of the service by more than 50% and giving developers the option to run it on relatively low-performance virtual machines that will start at $0.08 per hour. In today's announcement, Microsoft's Scott Hanselman points out that the company learned that most developers who used Visual Studio Online thought of it as being much more than simply an editor in the browser.

The British Museum has revamped its online collections database, making over 1.9 million photos of its collection available for free online under a Creative Commons license. ianVisits reports: Under the new agreement the majority of the 1.9 million images are being made available for anyone to use for free under a Creative Commons 4.0 license. Users no longer need to register to use these photographs, and can now download them directly from the British Museum. Under the terms of the Creative Commons license, you are free to share and adapt the images for non-commercial use, but must include a credit to the British Museum. The relaunch also sees 280,000 new object photographs and 85,000 new object records published for the very first time, many of them acquisitions the Museum has made in recent years, including 73 portraits by Damian Hirst, a previously lost watercolour by Rossetti, and a stunning 3,000-year-old Bronze age pendant. You can view the whole online collection here.

Zoom selected Oracle to expand its cloud on Tuesday, bypassing major cloud leaders Amazon Web Services, Alphabet's Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft's Azure Cloud. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. CNBC reports: "We recently experienced the most significant growth our business has ever seen, requiring massive increases in our service capacity. We explored multiple platforms, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure was instrumental in helping us quickly scale our capacity and meet the needs of our new users," Zoom CEO Eric Yuan said in a press release. "We chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure because of its industry-leading security, outstanding performance and unmatched level of support."

Zoom already uses Amazon and Microsoft's cloud services, but went with Oracle for its latest expansion. Oracle founder and chairman Larry Ellison praised Zoom earlier this month, calling it an "essential service" during the coronavirus pandemic. Oracle said in a release that Zoom chose its service for Oracle's "advantages in performance, scalability, reliability and superior cloud security." It's a surprising move from Zoom, as it chose Oracle over its larger competitors. According to research firm Canalys, Amazon had the largest cloud market share at the end of 2019 with 32.4%, followed by Microsoft, with 17.6%, and Google, with 6%.

An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet: Rust has been voted the "most-loved" programming language by developers on Stack Overflow for four years in a row. But the Rust project now admits it has an adoption problem among developers and organizations. Rust's adoption issue surfaced in January's Stack Overflow's 2019 survey, which revealed that despite developers' positive feelings toward Rust, 97% of them hadn't actually used it.

Rust maintainers have now explored the adoption challenges in their latest annual survey of nearly 4,000 developers across the world...

Asked why developers have stopped using Rust, the most common response is that the respondent's company doesn't use it, suggesting an adoption issue. Other common reasons are the learning curve, a lack of necessary libraries, and a lack of integrated development environment (IDE) support. The top issues that respondents say the Rust project could do to improve adoption of the language are better training and documentation, followed by better libraries, IDE integration, and improved compile times... "Most indicated that Rust maturity — such as more libraries and complete learning resources and more mature production capabilities — would make Rust more appealing," the project noted....

"The results show the overriding problem hindering use of Rust is adoption. The learning curve continues to be a challenge — we appear to most need to improve our follow-through for intermediate users — but so are libraries and tooling."
The article also notes that Rust is popular with some developers at Microsoft, "who are experimenting with Rust to reduce memory-related bugs in Windows components written in C and C++."

This week Python's core developer blog announced the very last production release of Python 2.7. Hackaday reports: The intention was for it to coincide with PyCon 2020, but just like so many of the events planned for the first half of the year, the in-person conference had to be canceled in favor of a virtual one due to the COVID-19 epidemic. That might have stymied the celebration somewhat, but the release of Python 2.7.18 will still be looked on as a special moment for everyone involved.
"Thank you @gutworth for being the 2.7 release manager during 11 long years," Guido van Rossum announced on Twitter.

"It's time for the CPython community to say a fond but firm farewell to Python 2," reads the announcement on the core developer's blog. Python 2.7 has been under active development since the release of Python 2.6, more than 11 years ago. Over all those years, CPython's core developers and contributors sedulously applied bug fixes to the 2.7 branch, no small task as the Python 2 and 3 branches diverged.

There were large changes midway through Python 2.7's life such as PEP 466's feature backports to the ssl module and hash randomization. Traditionally, these features would never have been added to a branch in maintenance mode, but exceptions were made to keep Python 2 users secure. Thank you to CPython's community for such dedication.

Python 2.7 was lucky to have the services of two generations of binary builders and operating system experts, Martin von Löwis and Steve Dower for Windows, and Ronald Oussoren and Ned Deily for macOS. The reason we provided binary Python 2.7 releases for macOS 10.9, an operating system obsoleted by Apple 4 years ago, or why the "Microsoft Visual C++ Compiler for Python 2.7" exists is the dedication of these individuals.

Python 3 would be nowhere without the dedication of the wider community. Library maintainers followed CPython by maintaining Python 2 support for many years butalso threw their weight behind the Python 3 statement. Linux distributors chased Python 2 out of their archives. Users migrated hundreds of millions of lines of code, developed porting guides, and kept Python 2 in their brain while Python 3 gained 10 years of improvements.

Finally, thank you to GvR for creating Python 0.9, 1, 2, and 3.

Long live Python 3+!

Liam Tung writing via ZDNet: Google says two million developers have used its Flutter user-interface (UI) framework for building apps targeting mobile, desktop, and the web since declaring it production ready at Google I/O 2018. Flutter is on the rise, according to Google's Tim Sneath, who said Flutter use grew 10% in March compared with February -- despite COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic impediments. He added that the UI framework now has "nearly half a million" developers who use it on a monthly basis. Most of them are also building on Windows, with 60% of Flutter users developing on Windows 10 PCs, 27% on macOS, and 13% on Linux. Google says over a third of Flutter users work at a startup, while 26% are developers working in the enterprise, 19% are self-employed, and 7% work for design agencies. There are also now 50,000 Flutter-built Android apps on the Google Play Store, and 10,000 of those were uploaded in the past month, according to Sneath.

Google is also updating the release process for Flutter to improve the stability and predictability of its releases. Google found that Flutter contributors and developers didn't understand when a release would be built and what code it would contain. Another issue is a lack of testing for branches, which means sporadic hotfix releases to address regressions or bugs, which also run the risk of introducing new bugs. Google is now moving to a branching model for Flutter, which commences with the April release and includes a "stabilization period" for the beta and stable releases to address key bugs that have been selected by reviewers. Google will also align the Flutter and Dart release processes and channels. This means Dart now has a beta channel, and it will be aligned with the Flutter beta channel.

macOS and iOS software developers will soon be able to code on an iPad or even iPhone, if an unconfirmed report is correct. iPadOS 14 and the iPhone equivalent will reportedly include support for Xcode, Apple's software development environment. Cult of Mac reports: This report comes from Jon Prosser, founder of YouTube channel Front Page Tech, who recently correctly predicted the launch date of the 2020 iPhone SE. On Monday, Prosser said via Twitter "XCode is present on iOS / iPad OS 14. The implications there are HUGE." Whenever anyone suggests that iPads have become as powerful as MacBooks, someone always asks, "Does it do Xcode?" The implication is that iPads are just toys -- only Macs are real computers. But if Prosser is correct, then devs will be able to use iPad or Mac, whichever they prefer. This is part of Apple steadily upgrading the capabilities of its tablets over years, especially the iPad Pro line. These now have USB-C ports, support for accessing external media, mouse support, etc. And top-tier iPad processors as powerful as Apple laptops.

Long-time Slashdot reader DrYak writes: Over 500 scientists, software developers and clinicians joined forces in the COVID-19 virtual Biohackathon to develop new tools for working with the COVID-19 data. The outcomes of the event improved the accessibility of data, protocols, analysis pipelines and provided dedicated compute resources to execute demanding data analysis tasks.

The COVID-19 Biohackathon was an online event from 5 to 11 April, initiated by Pjotr Prins (USA), Tazro Ohta (Japan) and Leyla Garcia (Germany). It had similar objectives and structure as the face-to-face BioHackathons spearheaded in Japan and recently adopted in Europe by ELIXIR. Participants were working in separate groups and presented their activities in a series of plenary webinar sessions. More than 20 different projects joined the event, many of which were led by members from ELIXIR Nodes.

The results from this biohackathon will get mini publications on the preprints server BioHackrXiv

ELIXIR (the European life-sciences Infrastructure for biological Information) is an initiative that allows life science laboratories across Europe to share and store their research data as part of an organised network.

Disclaimer: our group developed one of the deep sequencing analysis bioinformatics pipelines presented there.

I, for one, welcome our new Linux-running, Beowulf-clustered bioinformatics overlords.

GitHub today announced that all of its core features are now available for free to all users, including those that are currently on free accounts. TechCrunch reports: That means free unlimited private repositories with unlimited collaborators for all, including teams that use the service for commercial projects, as well as up to 2,000 minutes per month of free access to GitHub Actions, the company's automation and CI/CD platform. Teams that want more advanced features like code owners or enterprise features like SAML support will still have to upgrade to a paid plan, but those now start at $4 per month and user for the Teams plans instead of the previous $9, with the Enterprise plan starting at $21 per month and user.

Earlier this week Slashdot reader puddingebola shared a CNN story headlined "Wanted urgently: People who know a half century-old computer language so states can process unemployment claims..."

But now IEEE Spectrum reports that "Cobol programmers in the United States are heeding the call to work on antiquated state unemployment benefits computer systemsâ¦" The new claims brought the three-week total to more than 16 million, the equivalent of a tenth of the U.S. workforce. The spike in new claims has inundated benefits computer systems in states such as Connecticut, Florida, and elsewhere, some of which haven't updated their Cobol-based mainframe systems in years, or decades...

New Jersey isn't alone. Florida's unemployment claims system has been so overwhelmed, the state is reverting to using paper applications. Massachusetts deployed more than 500 new employees to work remotely to meet increased demand that has overloaded its unemployment system... Connecticut's labor department is bringing back retirees and using IT staff from other departments to upgrade its 40-year-old system, which runs on a Cobol mainframe and connected components.
One company that says it reached out to New Jersey was the Texas-based "Cobol Cowboys" placement agency, with nearly 350 contractors, including a man in his mid-80s "who did some work with Grace Hopper." Also helping is U.S. Digital Response, a new group hoping to find skilled volunteers with technical skills for government agencies.

The article notes estimates that Cobol still handles 95% of all ATM swipes and 43% of banking systems.