The humble and familiar barcode -- a staple on consumer packaging for nearly 50 years -- will soon be replaced with a more robust and muscular successor that offers far more information about the product inside. Axios reports: In a worldwide push called "Sunrise 2027," the retail industry is transitioning from the standard 12-digit barcode -- that square of vertical lines that's printed on a package and makes it go "beep" at the checkout scanner -- to a two-dimensional web-enabled version. The effort is being orchestrated by GS1 US, the nonprofit standards organization that oversees the barcode world. In the United States, Universal Product Code (UPC) barcodes will be supplanted by a new 2D type, with information encoded on both the horizontal and vertical axes. By 2027, only the 2D barcodes will be accepted at registers globally.

The new "2D" barcodes will unlock reams of online extras (for consumers) and revolutionize inventory management (for retailers). Scanning them may tell us the field where something was grown, the factory where a garment was sewn, the sustainability practices of the company that made it -- or the washing instructions. [...] Stores will be able to respond immediately to product recalls, identifying faulty items and removing them from shelves. They'll be able to flag foods that are approaching their sell-by date -- and offer discounts before they expire. Consumers will gain online access to a trove of useful data -- everything from ingredients, recipes and potential allergens to promotional offers and information about how to recycle the product.

GS1 US just released a "barcode capabilities test kit" to help retailers evaluate their readiness for the 2D transition. We can expect to start seeing more products printed with 2D barcodes (or both types, as the transition moves forward) fairly soon.

DuckDuckGo announced a new tool called DuckAssist that "automatically pulls and summarizes information from Wikipedia in response to certain questions," reports The Verge. From the report: DuckAssist's beta is live on the search engine right now -- but only through DuckDuckGo's mobile apps and browser extensions. Gabriel Weinberg, the founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo, says the company will add it to the web-based search engine if the trial "goes well." When you enter a question that DuckAssist can help with, you'll see a box that says "I can check to see if Wikipedia has relevant info on this topic, just ask" at the very top of your search results. Hit the blue "Ask" button, and you'll get an AI-generated answer using summarized information from Wikipedia. If DuckAssist has already answered a question once before, that response will automatically appear, which means you won't have to "ask" it the same thing multiple times.

While the tool's built upon language models from OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT, and the Google-backed Anthropic, Weinberg says it'll retain the same focus on privacy as DuckDuckGo. According to the announcement, DuckAssist won't share any personally identifiable information with OpenAI and Anthropic, and neither company will use your anonymous questions to train their models. DuckDuckGo says the feature uses the "most recent full Wikipedia download available," which is around a few weeks old, so it might not be able to help if you're searching for something later than that. However, the company plans to update this in the future, as well as add more sources for DuckAssist to draw from.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the U.S. Department of Justice: Two criminal complaints filed by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York were unsealed today in federal court in Brooklyn charging 44 defendants with various crimes related to efforts by the national police of the People's Republic of China (PRC) -- the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) -- to harass Chinese nationals residing in the New York metropolitan area and elsewhere in the United States. The defendants, including 40 MPS officers and two officials in the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), allegedly perpetrated transnational repression schemes targeting U.S. residents whose political views and actions are disfavored by the PRC government, such as advocating for democracy in the PRC. In the two schemes, the defendants created and used fake social media accounts to harass and intimidate PRC dissidents residing abroad and sought to suppress the dissidents' free speech on the platform of a U.S. telecommunications company (Company-1). The defendants charged in these schemes are believed to reside in the PRC or elsewhere in Asia and remain at large.

The two-count complaint charges 34 MPS officers with conspiracy to transmit interstate threats and conspiracy to commit interstate harassment. All the defendants are believed to reside in the PRC, and they remain at large. As alleged, the officers worked with Beijing's MPS bureau and are or were assigned to an elite task force called the "912 Special Project Working Group" (the Group). The purpose of the Group is to target Chinese dissidents located throughout the world, including in the United States. [...] The complaint alleges how members of the Group created thousands of fake online personas on social media sites, including Twitter, to target Chinese dissidents through online harassment and threats. These online personas also disseminated official PRC government propaganda and narratives to counter the pro-democracy speech of the Chinese dissidents. As alleged, for example, Group members created and maintained the fake social media accounts through temporary email addresses, posted official PRC government content, and interacted with other online users to avoid the appearance that the Group accounts were "flooding" a given social media platform. The Group tracks the performances of members in fulfilling their online responsibilities and rewards Group members who successfully operate multiple online personas without detection by the social media companies who host the platforms or by other users of the platforms.

The investigation also uncovered official MPS taskings to Group members to compose articles and videos based on certain themes targeting, for example, the activities of Chinese dissidents located abroad or the policies of the U.S. government. As alleged, the defendants also attempted to recruit U.S. persons to act as unwitting agents of the PRC government by disseminating propaganda or narratives of the PRC government. On several occasions, the defendants used online personas to contact individuals assessed to be sympathetic and supportive of the PRC government's narratives and asked these individuals to disseminate Group content. In addition, Group members took repeated affirmative actions to have Chinese dissidents and their meetings removed from the platform of Company-1. For example, Group members disrupted a dissident's efforts to commemorate the Tiananmen Square Massacre through a videoconference by posting threats against the participants through the platform's chat function. In another Company-1 videoconference on the topic of countering communism organized by a PRC dissident, Group members flooded the videoconference and drowned out the meeting with loud music and vulgar screams and threats directed at the pro-democracy participants. "These cases demonstrate the lengths the PRC government will go to silence and harass U.S. persons who exercise their fundamental rights to speak out against PRC oppression, including by unlawfully exploiting a U.S.-based technology company," said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department's National Security Division. "These actions violate our laws and are an affront to our democratic values and basic human rights."

Bank of England Deputy Governor Jon Cunliffe said regulators may need to impose a limit on using so-called stablecoins for payments as policy makers try to balance the need for innovation with its accompanying concerns. From a report: Cunliffe raised the prospect that rapid innovation in payment systems could bring new risks for customers and financial markets as a whole. "While, from a public policy perspective, we want competition and innovation in payments we need to guard against rapid, disruptive change that does not allow the financial system time to adjust and could therefore threaten financial stability," Cunliffe said Monday in a text of remarks at an event hosted by fintech industry body Innovate Finance. Regulators would need to decide "whether there should be limits, initially at any rate, on stablecoins used for payments." Stablecoins, which are currently issued by non-bank businesses, are pegged to the value of an asset. They are designed to maintain a stable value, unlike cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, while using ledger technology to record and transfer ownership. Cunliffe noted that "so far their use has been confined to facilitating trading and other transactions in the world of crypto assets," but that there were proposals to use them for other, broader payment purposes. "Stablecoins offer the possibility of greater efficiency and functionality in payments," Cunliffe said. But they currently do not fit into any regulatory framework, unlike the existing payments systems and money issued by commercial banks.

Google is sprinting to protect its core business with a flurry of projects, including updates to its search engine and plans for an all-new one. From a report: Google's employees were shocked when they learned in March that the South Korean consumer electronics giant Samsung was considering replacing Google with Microsoft's Bing as the default search engine on its devices. For years, Bing had been a search engine also-ran. But it became a lot more interesting to industry insiders when it recently added new artificial intelligence technology. Google's reaction to the Samsung threat was "panic," according to internal messages reviewed by The New York Times. An estimated $3 billion in annual revenue was at stake with the Samsung contract. An additional $20 billion is tied to a similar Apple contract that will be up for renewal this year.

A.I. competitors like the new Bing are quickly becoming the most serious threat to Google's search business in 25 years, and in response, Google is racing to build an all-new search engine powered by the technology. It is also upgrading the existing one with A.I. features, according to internal documents reviewed by The Times. The new features, under the project name Magi, are being created by designers, engineers and executives working in so-called sprint rooms to tweak and test the latest versions. The new search engine would offer users a far more personalized experience than the company's current service, attempting to anticipate users' needs.

The Asia Internet Coalition, an influential industry organization representing technology giants such as Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon, has voiced concerns over a recent amendment to India's IT rules, saying the changes grant the local government expansive content removal authority without implementing adequate procedural safeguards. From a report: India recently updated its IT rules, barring social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter from disseminating false or misleading information about the government's business affairs. Under the new regulations, these firms must rely on New Delhi's own fact-checking unit to verify claims. The amendments lack the "sufficient procedural safeguards" to protect people's fundamental rights to access information, said Jeff Paine, Managing Director of AIC in a statement Monday.

There's a new problem with driverless test vehicles. Wired obtain records from San Francisco's public transit agency for about six months showing that driverless cars testing on city streets "resulted in at least 83 minutes of direct delays" for the city's "Muni" buses. And "that data likely doesn't reflect the true scale of the problem," Wired argues, since "a single delay can slow other lines, worsening the blow."

Some examples from the article: - On January 22, a Cruise at a green light wouldn't budge, preventing a San Francisco light-rail train from moving for nearly 16 minutes. As the train driver headed out to investigate, a passenger said, "Nobody in there, huh?" Over a span of 10 minutes, the driver chatted with passengers, checked with managers over the radio, and walked around the motionless Cruise vehicle. Someone wearing a reflective vest and holding a tablet eventually got into the Cruise and drove it away...

- On September 30, 2022, a Muni light-rail train, or streetcar, that was full of celebrating baseball fans began driving from a station into an intersection. An empty Cruise robotaxi at a stop sign to the train's left then also drove forward... It was seven minutes before the driverless car cleared the track and the train started again, drawing cheers from riders...

- On January 21, a Muni bus with a couple of riders aboard had lost six minutes because a Cruise was lingering across an intersection crowded by police and fire vehicles, video shows. While other cars maneuvered past, the Cruise did not. "I have one of those autonomous cars in front of me, so I'm stuck," the driver radioed. "I could make this turn on Sixth Avenue if this car wasn't in front of me...."

- In November, one light-rail passenger called it quits after waiting nearly six minutes for a Cruise driverless car in front to move. "There's nobody in the car," the driver told the person as they stepped off the train.

- [After a white Waymo SUV stopped in the middle of the road, Waymo spokesperson Sandy Karp] says one of the company's roadside assistance crews arrived within 11 minutes of being dispatched to drive the SUV, clearing the blockage about 15 minutes after it began. Karp declined to elaborate on why the remote responder's guidance failed but said engineers have since introduced an unspecified change that allows addressing "these rare situations faster and with more flexibility...."

"The Russian government has become far more successful at manipulating social media and search engine rankings than previously known," reports the Washington Post, "boosting lies about Ukraine's military and the side effects of vaccines with hundreds of thousands of fake online accounts, according to documents recently leaked on the chat app Discord.

"The Russian operators of those accounts boast that they are detected by social networks only about 1 percent of the time, one document says." That claim, described here for the first time, drew alarm from former government officials and experts inside and outside social media companies contacted for this article. "Google and Meta and others are trying to stop this, and Russia is trying to get better. The figure that you are citing suggests that Russia is winning," said Thomas Rid, a disinformation scholar and professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. He added that the 1 percent claim was likely exaggerated or misleading.

The undated analysis of Russia's effectiveness at boosting propaganda on Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Telegram and other social media platforms cites activity in late 2022 and was apparently presented to U.S. military leaders in recent months. It is part of a trove of documents circulated in a Discord chatroom and obtained by The Washington Post. Air National Guard technician Jack Teixeira was charged Friday with taking and transmitting the classified papers, charges for which he faces 15 years in prison...

Many of the 10 current and former intelligence and tech safety specialists interviewed for this article cautioned that the Russian agency whose claims helped form the basis for the leaked document may have exaggerated its success rate.
The leaked document was apparently prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, U.S. Cyber Command and Europe Command, which directs American military activities in Europe. "It refers to signals intelligence, which includes eavesdropping, but does not cite sources for its conclusions," the Post reports, describing the document as offering "a rare candid assessment by U.S. intelligence of Russian disinformation operations."

The assessment concludes that foreign bots "view, 'like,' subscribe and repost content and manipulate view counts to move content up in search results and recommendation lists." And the document says a Russian center's disinformation network — working directly for Russia's presidential administration — was still working on improvements as recently as late 2022 and expected to improve its ability to "promote pro-Russian narratives abroad." After Russia's 2016 efforts to interfere in the U.S. presidential election, social media companies stepped up their attempts to verify users, including through phone numbers. Russia responded, in at least one case, by buying SIM cards in bulk, which worked until companies spotted the pattern, employees said. The Russians have now turned to front companies that can acquire less detectable phone numbers, the document says.

A separate top-secret document from the same Discord trove summarized six specific influence campaigns that were operational or planned for later this year by a new Russian organization, the Center for Special Operations in Cyberspace. The new group is mainly targeting Ukraine's regional allies, that document said. Those campaigns included one designed to spread the idea that U.S. officials were hiding vaccine side effects, intended to stoke divisions in the West.

"The fact remains that Google Chrome is the arbiter of web standards," argues FSF campaigns manager Greg Farough (while adding that Firefox, "through ethical distributions like GNU IceCat and Abrowser, can weaken that stranglehold.")

"Google's deprecation of the JPEG-XL image format in February in favor of its own patented AVIF format might not end the web in the grand scheme of things, but it does highlight, once again, the disturbing amount of control it has over the platform generally." Part of Google's official rationale for the deprecation is the following line: "There is not enough interest from the entire ecosystem to continue experimenting with JPEG-XL." Putting aside the problematic aspects of the term "ecosystem," let us remark that it's easy to gauge the response of the "entire ecosystem" when you yourself are by far the largest and most dangerous predator in said "ecosystem." In relation to Google's overwhelming power, the average web user might as well be a microbe. In supposedly gauging what the "ecosystem" wants, all Google is really doing is asking itself what Google wants...

While we can't link to Google's issue tracker directly because of another freedom issue — its use of nonfree JavaScript — we're told that the issue regarding JPEG-XL's removal is the second-most "starred" issue in the history of the Chromium project, the nominally free basis for the Google Chrome browser. Chromium users came out of the woodwork to plead with Google not to make this decision. It made it anyway, not bothering to respond to users' concerns. We're not sure what metric it's using to gauge the interest of the "entire ecosystem," but it seems users have given JPEG-XL a strong show of support. In turn, what users will be given is yet another facet of the web that Google itself controls: the AVIF format.

As the response to JPEG-XL's deprecation has shown, our rallying together and telling Google we want something isn't liable to get it to change its mind. It will keep on wanting what it wants: control; we'll keep on wanting what we want: freedom.

Only, the situation isn't hopeless. At the present moment, not even Google can stop us from creating the web communities that we want to see: pages that don't run huge chunks of malicious, nonfree code on our computers. We have the power to choose what we run or do not run in our browsers. Browsers like GNU IceCat (and extensions like LibreJS and JShelter> ) help with that. Google also can't prevent us from exploring networks beyond the web like Gemini. What our community can do is rally support behind those free browsers that choose to support JPEG-XL and similar formats, letting the big G know that even if we're smaller than it, we won't be bossed around.

The Washington Post found a new tranche of "top-secret intelligence documents" on Discord, and based on them reported Friday that U.S. intelligence agencies were aware of at least two additional Chinese spy balloons.

Based on the classified documents, the Post also reports that "questions lingered about the true capabilities of the one that flew over the continental United States in January and February." The Chinese spy balloon that flew over the United States this year, called Killeen-23 by U.S. intelligence agencies, carried a raft of sensors and antennas the U.S. government still had not identified more than a week after shooting it down, according to a document allegedly leaked to a Discord chatroom by Jack Teixeira, a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard.

Another balloon flew over a U.S. carrier strike group in a previously unreported incident, and a third crashed in the South China Sea, a second top-secret document stated, though it did not provide specific information for launch dates.... [Chinese spy balloon] Bulger-21 carried sophisticated surveillance equipment and circumnavigated the globe from December 2021 until May 2022, the NGA document states. Accardo-21 carried similar equipment as well as a "foil-lined gimbaled" sensor, it says....

Annotating what appear to be detailed photos of the balloon that flew over the United States, presumably taken from a U-2 spy plane, intelligence analysts assessed that it could generate enough power to operate "any" surveillance and reconnaissance technology, including a type of radar that can see at night and through clouds and thin materials [including tarps].... China's military has operated a vast surveillance balloon project for several years, partly out of Hainan province off China's south coast, U.S. officials have previously told The Post.

But the NGA document is notable as much for what it doesn't say, reflecting the government's possible lack of insight, at least in mid-February, into the balloons' capabilities... The lack of detailed conclusions about the balloon's surveillance capabilities raises questions about the decision to let it fly over the United States before shooting it down, an action the Defense Department justified at the time as an opportunity to collect additional intelligence.
The Post also reports that another leaked document (relying on intercepted communications) assessed that within the Chinese military the balloon surveillance program lacked "strong leadership" oversight.

Virginia Norwood, an aerospace pioneer who invented the scanner that has been used to map and study the earth from space for more than 50 years, has died at her home in Topanga, Calif. She was 96. The New York Times reports: Her death was announced by the United States Geological Survey, whose Landsat satellite program relies on her invention. Her daughter, Naomi Norwood, said her mother was found dead in her bed on the morning of March 27. The Landsat satellites, speeding 438 miles above the surface, orbit the earth every 99 minutes and have captured a complete image of the planet every 16 days since 1972. These images have provided powerful visual evidence of climate change, deforestation and other shifts affecting the planet's well-being.

Ms. Norwood, a physicist, was the person primarily responsible for designing and championing the scanner that made the program possible. NASA has called her "the mother of Landsat." At the dawn of the era of space exploration in the 1950s and '60s, she was working at Hughes Aircraft Company developing instruments. One of a small group of women in a male-dominated industry, she stood out more for her acumen. "She said, 'I was kind of known as the person who could solve impossible problems,'" Naomi Norwood told NASA for a video on its website. "So people would bring things to her, even pieces of other projects." [...]

Over the next 50 years, new Landsat satellites replaced earlier ones. Ms. Norwood oversaw the development of Landsat 2, 3, 4 and 5. Currently, Landsat 8 and 9 are orbiting the earth, and NASA plans to launch Landsat 10 in 2030. Each generation satellite has added more imaging capabilities, but always based on Ms. Norwood's original concept. The Landsat program has mapped changes in the planet brought on by climate change and by human actions. They include the near disappearance of the Aral Sea between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the shrinking of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, the evolving shape of the Mississippi Delta, and the deforestation and increasing agricultural use of land in Turkey and Brazil.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's chief executive, has declared that 2023 will be the "year of efficiency" at his company. So far, efficiency has translated into mass layoffs. He has conducted two rounds of cuts over the past six months, with two more to come; these will eliminate more than 21,000 people. Mr. Zuckerberg is also closing 5,000 open positions, which amounts to 30 percent of his company's work force. At the same time, some of Meta's top executives have moved away and are managing large parts of the Silicon Valley company from their new homes in places like London and Tel Aviv. The layoffs and absentee leadership, along with concerns that Mr. Zuckerberg is making a bad bet on the future, have devastated employee morale at Meta, according to nine current and former employees, as well as messages reviewed by The New York Times.

Employees at Meta, which not long ago was one of the most desirable workplaces in Silicon Valley, face an increasingly precarious future. The company's stock price has dropped 43 percent from its peak 19 months ago. More layoffs, Mr. Zuckerberg has said on his Facebook page, are coming this month. Some of those cuts could be in engineering groups, which would have been unthinkable before the trouble started last year, two employees said. "So many of the employees feel like they're in limbo right now," said Erin Sumner, a global director of human resources at DeleteMe, who was laid off from Facebook in November. "They're saying it's 'Hunger Games' meets 'Lord of the Flies,' where everyone is trying to prove their worth to management."

Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is not the only big tech company that has hit the brakes on spending. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce and others have laid off thousands of workers in recent months, shed office space, dropped perks and pulled back from experimental initiatives. But Meta appears to face the most challenges. Last year, the company reported consecutive quarters of declining revenue -- a first since it became a public company in 2012.

Back in 2021, Samsung brought SmartThings to Android Auto. Google is now opening the door for more smart home/Internet of Things (IoT) apps on Android Auto and Automotive. 9to5Google reports: Android Auto today supports media and mapping/navigation apps. Google is now "enabling developers to bring [IoT] apps to cars." This might include controlling home security and doors from a touchscreen UI rather than having to rely on voice commands (assuming Google Assistant supports your home ecosystem). Google offers driving-optimized templates in the Android for Cars App Library, with testing via the Automotive OS emulator for Android Automotive OS and the DHU for Android Auto. Expect a consistent grid-based layout throughout apps. In fact, "drivers of cars using Android Auto can now download IOT apps developed with the Android for Cars App Library immediately from Google Play."

Alphabet's Google received a mixed ruling on Thursday from a San Francisco federal judge in a patent lawsuit brought by Sonos over wireless audio technology, failing to invalidate all of the patents before a trial but narrowing Sonos' claims. Reuters reports: The case, set for trial May 8, is part of a contentious intellectual property dispute between the former business partners over their smart speakers that includes lawsuits in the United States, Canada, France, Germany and the Netherlands. Sonos won a limited import ban on some Google devices from the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) last year, while Google has sued Sonos for patent infringement at the ITC and in California. [...]

Sonos accused Google in the San Francisco case of infringing four patents related to multi-room wireless speaker technology. U.S. District Judge William Alsup previously invalidated one of the patents and determined Google infringed another. Alsup found Thursday that a second Sonos patent was also invalid, but rejected Google's request to cancel the remaining two patents before trial. The judge also said Google did not infringe one of the surviving patents willfully, reducing Sonos' potential damages. Alsup also said he would hold a separate bench trial after the jury trial to determine whether Google's redesigned speakers infringe Sonos' patents.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Parler, the self-described "uncancelable free speech platform," has been sold and shut down while its new owner conducts a "strategic assessment." The platform will be back eventually, new owner Starboard says. The Parler website is now a simple page containing only today's press release announcing the acquisition, which was completed without financial terms being disclosed. "No reasonable person believes that a Twitter clone just for conservatives is a viable business any more," the acquisition announcement said, promising a revamp.

"While the Parler app as it is currently constituted will be pulled down from operation to undergo a strategic assessment, we at Starboard see tremendous opportunities across multiple sectors to continue to serve marginalized or even outright censored communities -- even extending beyond domestic politics," the press release said. No timing for a return was mentioned. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Starboard founder and CEO Ryan Coyne said that Parler is "going to take a breath of fresh air." Ars notes that Starboard was formerly called Olympic Media and owns conservative news sites American Wire News and BizPac Review.

The previous owner, Parlement Technologies, tried to strike a deal to sell to Ye (formerly Kanye West) in mid-October but canceled the deal after Ye praised Hitler and Nazis. The company laid off a majority of its staff earlier this year.

Nvidia's most-advanced graphics cards are selling for more than $40,000 on eBay, as demand soars for chips needed to train and deploy artificial intelligence software. From a report: The prices for Nvidia's H100 processors were noted by 3D gaming pioneer and former Meta consulting technology chief John Carmack on Twitter. On Friday, at least eight H100s were listed on eBay at prices ranging from $39,995 to just under $46,000. Some retailers have offered it in the past for around $36,000. The H100, announced last year, is Nvidia's latest flagship AI chip, succeeding the A100, a roughly $10,000 chip that's been called the "workhorse" for AI applications. Developers are using the H100 to build so-called large language models (LLMs), which are at the heart of AI applications like OpenAI's ChatGPT. Running those systems is expensive and requires powerful computers to churn through terabytes of data for days or weeks at a time. They also rely on hefty computing power so the AI model can generate text, images or predictions. Training AI models, especially large ones like GPT, requires hundreds of high-end Nvidia GPUs working together.

An anonymous reader shares a report: For Red Hat, which turned 30 on March 27, it was a cause for celebration. From a business that got started in one of its co-founder's wife's sewing room, it became the first billion-dollar pure-play open-source company and then the engine driving IBM. It has been a long strange trip. Sure, today, the tech world is dominated by Linux and open source software, but in 1993, Linux was merely an obscure operating system known only to enthusiasts. Red Hat played a significant role in transforming the "just a hobby" operating system into today's major IT powerhouse. Red Hat co-founder Bob Young, who previously ran a rental typewriter business, was one of those who became intrigued by Linux. In 1993, he established ACC Corporation, a catalog company that distributed Slackware Linux CDs and open-source software.

[...] In 2003, Paul Cormier, then Red Hat's vice president of engineering and now the company's chairman, spearheaded the shift from the inexpensive prosumer Red Hat Linux distribution to the full business-oriented Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). At the time, many Linux users hated the idea. Even inside Red Hat, Cormier said that many engineers were initially opposed to the new business model, causing some to leave the company while others stayed. The change also upset many users who felt Red Hat was abandoning its original customers. However, enterprise clients had a different perspective. Whitehurst, who became Red Hat CEO in 2008, said, "Once RHEL was in the market, we had to fully support it to make it truly consumable for the enterprise." They succeeded, and Red Hat continued to grow. This is the model that turned Red Hat into the first billion-dollar-a-quarter pure open-source company. Impressive for a business built around an operating system once considered suitable only for the "lunatic fringe." Then, in 2018, IBM acquired Red Hat for a cool $34 billion. There was nothing crazy about that move.

[...] Another change that was already present in Red Hat, a shift towards supporting the cloud, has accelerated. Today, while RHEL remains the heart of the business, the Linux-powered cloud has become increasingly important. In particular, Red Hat OpenShift, its Kubernetes-powered hybrid cloud application platform, is more important than ever. Where does Red Hat go from here? When I last talked to Cormier and Red Hat's latest CEO, Matt Hicks, they told me that they'd keep moving forward with the hybrid cloud. After all, as Cormier pointed out, "the cloud wouldn't be here" without Linux and open source. As for Red Hat's relationship with IBM, Cormier said, "The red lines were red, and the blue lines were blue, and that will stay the same."

rmdingler writes: Montana lawmakers have moved one step closer to passing a bill to ban TikTok from operating in the state, a move that's bound to face legal challenges but also serve as a testing ground for the TikTok-free America that many national lawmakers have envisioned. Montana's proposal, which has backing from the state's GOP-controlled legislature, is more sweeping than bans in place in nearly half the states and the U.S. federal government that prohibit TikTok on government devices. The House endorsed the bill 60-39 on Thursday. A final House vote will likely take place Friday before the bill goes to Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte. He has banned TikTok on government devices in Montana. The Senate passed the bill 30-20 in March.

TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese tech company ByteDance, has been under intense scrutiny over concerns it could hand over user data to the Chinese government or push pro-Beijing propaganda and misinformation on the platform. Leaders at the FBI, CIA and numerous lawmakers of both parties have raised those concerns but haven't presented any evidence to prove it has happened. Supporters of a ban point to two Chinese laws that compel companies in the country to cooperate with the government on state intelligence work. They also point out other troubling episodes, such as a disclosure by ByteDance in December that it fired four employees who accessed the IP addresses and other data of two journalists while attempting to uncover the source of a leaked report about the company.

The "right to repair" movement has made considerable inroads over the past five years, partially due to support from the Biden FTC. State-level legislation aimed at dismantling repair monopolies has made progress, despite industry lobbying efforts to weaken the proposals (e.g., Kathy Hochul in New York State). Federal legislation, however, faces challenges in a troubled Congress. In response, a bipartisan group of 28 state attorneys general has penned a letter to key congressional committee leaders, urging them to advance stalled right to repair bills. From the letter: "The Right-to-Repair is a bipartisan issue that impacts every consumer, household, and farm in a time of increasing inflation. It is about ensuring that consumers have choices as to who, where, when and at what cost their vehicles can be repaired. It is about ensuring that farmers can repair their tractors for a reasonable price and quickly enough to harvest their crops."

New submitter jth1234567 reports: In late January, a Steam user posted a negative review for the game Warlander, warning potential buyers about the shady anti-cheat system the game was using, the apparent problems being intrusive data collection and difficult removal after the game itself had been uninstalled (the review text is no longer available). This review stayed on top as the most helpful review for nearly three months, which must have been a big thorn in the side for the developer and the publisher.

Until yesterday, when they managed to get a Steam moderator to remove the negative review. In a perfect, consumer-friendly world it should have been another way around, and the game's sales page removed until the claims were investigated by Valve, but this is not a perfect world. However, things didn't end there.

Apparently the Steam moderator categorized the negative review as "attempting to scam users or other violations of Steam's Rules & Guidelines", which meant that all those 2439 people (plus people who have it 437 awards) got their accounts restricted for 30 days, during this time none of them can up- or downvote any Steam reviews at all.

Support tickets from affected users to Steam Support have received a default response saying Support will not help nor adjust the length of vote bans.

The Steam review system was never perfect, but the impact of this kind of behavior from Valve will render the whole system completely pointless, as negative reviews can be culled by the developers/publishers at any time, and people will just stop marking any negative review as useful to avoid these kinds of repercussions.