Ars Technica reports: In three-and-a-half years of service, one of SpaceX's reusable Falcon 9 boosters stands apart from the rest of the company's rocket inventory. This booster, designated with the serial number B1058, has now flown 18 times.

For its maiden launch on May 30, 2020, the rocket propelled NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken into the history books on SpaceX's first mission to send people into orbit. This ended a nine-year gap in America's capability to launch astronauts into low-Earth orbit and was the first time a commercial spacecraft achieved this feat... Over the course of its flights to space and back, that white paint has darkened to a charcoal color. Soot from the rocket's exhaust has accumulated, bit by bit, on the 15-story-tall cylinder-shaped booster. The red NASA worm logo is now barely visible.

On Friday night, this rocket launched for the 18th time, breaking a tie at 17 flights with another Falcon 9 booster in SpaceX's fleet... It fired three engines for a braking burn to slow for reentry, then ignited a single engine and extended four carbon-fiber landing legs to settle onto a floating platform holding position near the Bahamas. The drone ship will return the rocket to Cape Canaveral, where SpaceX will refurbish the vehicle for a 19th flight.
Other interesting statistics from the article:

• This single booster rocket has launched 846 satellites into space. (Astrophysicist/spaceflight tracker Jonathan McDowell calculates there are now over 5,000 Starlink satellites in orbit.)

• A SpaceX official told Ars Technica the company might extend the limit on Falcon 9 booster flights beyond 20 for Starlink satellites.

• Friday's launch became the 79th launch so far in 2023 of a Falcon rocket, with SpaceX aiming for a total of 100 by the end of December, and 144 in 2023 (an average of one flight every two-and-a-half days).

• Since 2016, SpaceX has now had 249 consecutive successful launches of its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets

"More developers are looking for or are open to a new job now compared to the last two years," writes Stack Overflow's senior analyst for market research and insights — citing the results of their latest survey of developers in 107 different countries.

"More than 1,000 developers responded to this year's survey about jobs and 79% are at least considering new opportunities if not actively looking." New insights from these survey results show that new tech talent and late-career developers are both more likely to be looking. New developers have increasingly switched jobs compared to early- and mid-career developers in the last three years... Interest in looking for a new job drops as developers get older for new to mid-career (44 and younger) respondents (86% to 74%), but picks back up for those 55 to 64 (88%). Late-career developers acknowledge curiosity about other companies as their second top reason to look for a new job this year behind "better salary," which all age groups rank as their top reason. Curiosity grew in importance for late-career developers since last year more than all other age groups (32% vs. 22%) and is more important to this group than reasons other groups ranked higher such as working with new technology and growth opportunities...

In our 2023 Developer Survey, we started asking about AI and the sentiment around it in our developer community; results were very similar when we checked in again through this pulse survey (70% are using AI or planning to). Developers may also feel less enthusiastic about learning opportunities now that AI tools are rapidly developing to help many be more productive in their jobs (30% cite this as the top benefit).
Other interesting findings from the survey:

• Compared to the 2023 Developer Survey, 8% of developers have exited the technology industry and are increasingly filling roles in manufacturing and supply chain companies (11% vs. 7%)

• Technology is the industry most developers currently work in (46%), followed by manufacturing/supply chain (14%) and financial services (13%)

• New tech talent is onboarding at as many jobs by 24 as those up to 10 years their senior and this rapid experience cycle could rival the knowledge and experience of those they report to.

Redis, the go-to in-memory database used as a cache and system broker, is looking to include disk as part of a tiered storage architecture to reduce costs and broaden the system's appeal. From a report: Speaking to The Register, CEO Rowan Trollope said he hoped the move would help customers lower costs and simplify their architecture. Redis counts Twitter X, Snapchat, and Craigslist among its customers, and it's popular among developers of modern internet-scale applications owing to its ability to create a cache to prevent the main database from overloading. Trollope said the sub-millisecond distributed system gives devs the performance they need, but admitted other systems built for internet scale, such as MongoDB, might offer price advantages. To address this, the company has already created a tiered approach to memory by offering flash support behind its in-memory system.

"We have a half-step between disk and memory. For some specific use cases, in gaming for example, a company might use us for leaderboards and other in-game stats, which they need in real time," he said. However, after an initial flush of the game launch, a large chunk of users would finish the game and their accounts would go dormant until the release of a new episode or some new content, when they might return. Trollope said using flash allowed users to dynamically tier memory. "We can take the lesser-used data that hasn't been touched in a while and shuttle it off to flash where it can sit for a while. When the user comes back eventually, it's very easy for us to seamlessly move it from flash back into memory. And that allows the company to save costs," he said.

One of the world's largest private BitTorrent trackers, Filelist, has announced it will shut down soon. The site has been in operation for sixteen years and enjoys millions of monthly visits, mostly from Romania. Site admin EboLLa has chosen to devote time to other parts of life and without a trusted successor, it's best to close the doors. TorrentFreak reports: Many private trackers have come and gone over the years. The Romanian-based tracker FileList.io is one of the bigger ones to survive, although it came close to shutting down a few years ago when Romanian authorities seized its domain name. The enforcement action was a wake-up call for both staff and users of the members-only tracker, but it didn't mark the end of the road. FileList simply switched from the seized .ro domain to an .io version and with the database unscathed, it kept on going. According to recent traffic stats from SimilarWeb, the tracker hasn't lost its appeal. With an estimated average of roughly six million monthly visits, the site continues to draw a massive audience. That, however, is about to change.

A few hours ago, FileList sysop "EboLLa" informed the site's members that the doors will permanently close in a few weeks. This isn't the result of legal pressure; it's a conscious and well-evaluated life choice. "Unfortunately, I no longer have the time to run the site. A site like this requires quite a lot of commitment and my priorities in everyday life have changed in recent years. Time is the most precious resource for all of us and I have invested enough time here," the operator writes. The decision was a difficult one. FileList's operator long considered handing the reigns to a successor, but that is easier said than done, especially after the dream candidate was no longer an option.

"I don't have anyone to leave it to. ToXiC, the one who was going to take my place is no longer with us," EboLLa writes. [...] "It is quite difficult to find a person who is integrated here and shares the same values and has the same dedication that you have enjoyed for the last 16 years. I decided that the best thing to do is to close the site rather than risk something like this." "During this time you can still enjoy the site, download what you need from here and post your goodbye message in the thread. After ~3 months, sometime around January 2024, the site will be closed permanently," EboLLa concludes.

Even Zoom is now telling its 8,400 employees to stop working remotely at least two days a week and return to the office. The policy applies to employees within 50 miles of a Zoom office ith a Zoom spokesperson calling this hybrid approach the "most effective".

Business Insider quips that Zoom making the move means "The remote work revolution is officially dead."

And earlier this week The Los Angeles Times argues that "After watching and waiting, some chaotic back-and-forth and a few false starts, the white-collar American workforce appears to be settling — for now — in a hybrid mode." Even as more corporations are moving to call workers back to the office, arguing it's better for preserving company culture and decision-making, few employers have required employees to work on-site five days a week. Most are like Meta and Los Angeles-based Farmers Group, which recently announced that most employees who had been working remotely will have to come in three days a week starting in September.

Some firms have backtracked in favor of a more flexible system, or put return-to-office plans on ice, because of worker resistance and other changes wrought by the pandemic... [M]any other companies have stayed silent on the issue of remote work, maintaining vague or largely unenforced policies as they wait to see where the struggle ends. More unions, including the guild at the Los Angeles Times, are wrestling with management over remote work, which has become a top labor issue. For all these reasons, the overall amount of work done from home has held remarkably steady this year at about 28%, according to monthly surveys of thousands of workers by WFH Research, a group including Stanford and the University of Chicago. That's way up from roughly 5% of work done at home before COVID-19.

And there are some signs that employers are giving workers greater flexibility in their work schedules and when they can work from home. In a nationwide survey conducted last month for The Times by polling firm Leger, 27% of full-time workers said their employers had become more lenient over the last year about working remotely. Only 15% said their employers got stricter. Most of the rest said there was no change. Leger's survey showed that 11% of full-time employees work 100% from home, and 31% work a hybrid schedule, with most saying they choose which days to come into the office. The remainder said that they work fully on company premises or that their jobs aren't compatible with at-home work. These results line up almost exactly with WFH data...

Rob Sadow, chief executive at Scoop Technologies, a firm specializing in flexible-work software and research, says the percentages of employers that are fully remote and fully in-office have both declined since the start of the year. What's grown in their place is a "structured" hybrid model in which employees and employers have essentially split the difference. "This two to three days a week is starting to feel like a pretty decent, happy medium," Sadow said. "Executives and employees are finding somewhat of a truce in terms of how much time is spent in the office and at home."
The article also points out that "Some employees have quit and moved to more remote-work friendly firms."

For over a decade, Backblaze's quarterly reports on the annualized failure rates (AFRs) of its substantial hard disk drives inventory have offered a peek into long-term storage utilization. The company, known for its backup and cloud storage services, has now disclosed data for the second quarter of 2023, revealing a fascinating rise in AFRs. ArsTechnica: Today's blog post details data for 240,940 HDDs that Backblaze uses for data storage around the world. There are 31 different models, and Backblaze's Andy Klein, who authored the blog, estimated in an email to Ars Technica that 15 percent of the HDDs in the dataset, including some of the 4, 6, and 8TB drives, are consumer-grade. The dataset doesn't include boot drives, drives in commission for testing purposes, or drive models for which Backblaze didn't have at least 60 units. One of the biggest revelations from examining the drives from April 1, 2023, through June 30, 2023, was an increase in AFR from Q1 2023 (1.54 percent) to Q2 2023 (2.28 percent). Backblaze's Q1 dataset examined 237,278 HDDs across 30 models. Of course, that AFR increase alone isn't enough to warrant any panic.

Since quarterly AFR numbers are "volatile," Klein told Ars Technica, Backblaze further evaluates both quarter-to-quarter and lifetime trends "to see if what happened was an anomaly or something more." So, Klein started digging further by grouping the drives by capacity. This is because, as Klein explained to Ars: "A Backblaze storage vault consists of 1,200 drives of the same size, with 60 drives in 20 storage servers. If we grouped the drives strictly by age and wanted to replace just the oldest drives in a given Backblaze vault, we would only replace those drives in the vault that met the old age criteria, not all the drives. Then, a year from now, we'd do it again, and the year after that, etc. By using the average age by drive size, we can, as appropriate, replace/upgrade all of the drives in a vault at once."

The Steam Survey results for July 2023 were just published and it points to a large and unexpected jump in the Linux gaming marketshare. Phoronix reports; According to these new numbers from Valve, the Linux customer base is up to 1.96%, or a 0.52% jump over June! That's a huge jump with normally just moving 0.1% or so in either direction most months... It's also near an all-time high on a percentage basis going back to the early days of Steam on Linux when it had around a 2% marketshare but at that time the Steam customer size in absolute numbers was much smaller a decade ago than it is now. So if the percentage numbers are accurate, this is likely the largest in absolute terms that the Linux gaming marketshare has ever been.

When looking at the Steam Linux breakdown, the SteamOS Holo that powers the Steam Deck is now accounting for around 42% of all Linux gamers on Steam. Meanwhile, AMD CPU marketshare among Linux gamers has reached 69%. The Steam Survey results for July show Windows 10 64-bit losing 1.56% marketshare and Linux gaining the healthy 0.52% of that. This is also the first time the Linux gaming marketshare outpasses Apple macOS on Steam!

Michael Larabel, reporting at Phoronix: Alpine Linux remains one of the most popular lightweight Linux distributions built atop musl libc and Busybox. Alpine Linux has found significant use within containers and the embedded space while now sadly the most prolific maintainer of packages for the Linux distribution has decided to step down from her roles. Alice "psykose" who is easily responsible for the highest number of commits per author over the past year has decided to step down from maintaining her packages.

These Alpine aports stats put her at 13,894 commits over the past year. In comparison, the second most prolific packager saw just 2,053 commits... Or put another way, psykose has 6.7x the number of commits as the next packager. The 13.8k commits is also about half of the 26.8k commits seen in total over the past year. Over the weekend I was alerted to the fact that psykose/nekopsykose has begun dropping maintainership of packages she maintained. All of her recent alpinelinux/aports commits two days ago were removing packages she oversaw.

According to Statcounter, the Linux share on the desktop has passed 3% for the first time. GamingOnLinux reports: While it has been close a couple of times, the trend according to their stats is pretty clear that Linux use has been slowly rising over the last few years. This does not include ChromeOS, even though it's based on Linux, as they track that separately so this is just plain desktop Linux.

Across this year their stats show for Linux:

January - 2.91%
February - 2.94%
March - 2.85%
April - 2.83%
May - 2.7%
June - 3.07%

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Wargraphs, a one-man-band startup behind a popular companion app for League of Legends called Porofessor, which helps players track and improve their playing stats, is getting acquired for up to [$54 million], half up front and half based on meeting certain earnings and growth targets. MOBA Networks, a company founded out of Sweden that buys, grows and runs online gaming communities (MOBA is short for "multiplayer online battle arena"), is buying the startup and its existing products. The plan is to expand them to more markets, in particular across Asia, and to build analytics for more titles.

I write "startup", but that might be with the loosest interpretation of the term. There is only a single employee, the mild-mannered Jean-Nicholas, and he has also entirely bootstrapped the business on his own. But that hasn't held him back. Wargraphs currently also builds analytics for Legends of Runeterra and Teamfight Tactics, but the League of Legends business has been its biggest it by far. Porofessor has had 10 million downloads of its app on Overwolf -- which is where Porofessor was built -- and more than 1.25 million daily active users if you combine traffic both from that platform and its own direct website. The company, such as it is, has been around for some 10 years, has pretty much always been profitable with revenues of 12.3 million euros in its last fiscal year. Jean-Nicholas told TechCrunch's Ingrid Lunden that he wants to build "a game" next. "Specifically, a card game that will compete against Hearthstone, coincidentally published by Activision Blizzard," writes Lunden. "He has no plans to raise outside funding for this, but he might hire an employee or two."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When should you be concerned about a NAS hard drive failing? Multiple factors are at play, so many might turn to various SMART (self-monitoring, analysis, and reporting technology) data. When it comes to how long the drive has been active, there are backup companies like Backblaze using hard drives that are nearly 8 years old. That may be why some customers have been panicked, confused, and/or angered to see their Western Digital NAS hard drive automatically given a warning label in Synology's DiskStation Manager (DSM) after they were powered on for three years. With no other factors considered for these automatic flags, Western Digital is accused of age-shaming drives to push people to buy new HDDs prematurely. The practice's revelation is the last straw for some users. Western Digital already had a steep climb to win back NAS customers' trust after shipping NAS drives with SMR (shingled magnetic recording) instead of CMR (conventional magnetic recording). Now, some are saying they won't use or recommend the company's hard drives anymore.

As users have reported online, including on Synology-focused and Synology's own forums, as well as on Reddit and YouTube, Western Digital drives using Western Device Digital Analytics (WDDA) are getting a "warning" stamp in Synology DSM once their power-on hours count hits the three-year mark. WDDA is similar to SMART monitoring and rival offerings, like Seagate's IronWolf, and is supposed to provide analytics and actionable items. The recommended action says: "The drive has accumulated a large number of power on hours [throughout] the entire life of the drive. Please consider to replace the drive soon." There seem to be no discernible problems with the hard drives otherwise.

Synology confirmed this to Ars Technica and noted that the labels come from Western Digital, not Synology. A spokesperson said the "WDDA monitoring and testing subsystem is developed by Western Digital, including the warning after they reach a certain number of power-on-hours." The practice has caused some, like YouTuber SpaceRex, to stop recommending Western Digital drives for the foreseeable future. In May, the YouTuber and tech consultant described his outrage, saying three years is "absolutely nothing" for a NAS drive and lamenting the flags having nothing to do with anything besides whether or not a drive has been in use for three years. A user on SynoForum discussed their "panic" upon seeing the label. And SpaceRex said one of its clients also panicked and quickly replaced the "warning" drives out of fear of losing business-critical data. "It is clearly predatory tactics by Western Digital trying to sell more hard drives," SpaceRex said in a June 10 video. "Users are also concerned that this could prevent people from noticing serious problems with their drive," adds Ars. "Further, you can't repair a pool with a drive marked with a warning label."

Some of the affected products with WDDA include the WD Red Pro, WD Red Plus, and WD Purple. A discussion post about how to disable WDDA via SSH can be found here.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: AWS offered A Look Inside the Making of an NFL Football Schedule in conjunction with Thursday's release of the 2023 NFL Schedule Powered by AWS. AWS notes that producing the schedule required the use of 4,000+ AWS EC2 Spot Instances. An AWS promotional video claims they "saved the NFL an estimated $2 million each season" by leveraging AWS Spot Instances for a discount of up to 90% off compared to AWS On-Demand pricing..

"In just three months," AWS explains, "National Football League (NFL) schedule makers methodically build an exciting 18 week 272-game schedule spanning 576 possible game windows." Up until 10 years ago, AWS notes in an accompanying infographic, the NFL used a white-boarding process to manually craft its schedule.

Not to diminish the NFL's and AWS's 2023 scheduling achievement, but the 2013 documentary The Schedule Makers told the remarkable tale of the husband-and-wife duo of Henry and Holly Stephenson, who for almost a quarter of a century in the pre-Cloud era managed the scheduling for 30 Major League Baseball (MLB) teams who each played 162 regular season games a year. According to the May 1985 Atari Compendium (pg. 38), the Stephensons were using a self-written program running on a 64K IMS-8000 to help schedule games for the MLB (2,106 games over a 6-month season), NBA, and NASL/MISL (defunct soccer leagues). So perhaps the NFL's claim that "There's no way the NFL could deliver the quality of schedule that we put out every year for our fans and television partners without the contributions of our friends at AWS" should be taken with a grain of salt.

An anonymous reader shares a report: We recently covered a study by Secure Data Recovery, an HDD, SSD, and RAID data recovery company, of 2,007 defective hard disk drives it received. It found the average time before failure among those drives to be 2 years and 10 months. That seemed like a short life span, but considering the limited sample size and analysis in Secure Data Recovery's report, there was room for skepticism. Today, Backblaze, a backup and cloud storage company with a reputation for detailed HDD and SSD failure analysis, followed up Secure Data Recovery's report with its own research using a much larger data set. Among the 17,155 failed HDDs Backblaze examined, the average age at which the drives failed was 2 years and 6 months.

Backblaze arrived at this age by examining all of its failed drives and their respective power-on hours. The company recorded each drive's failure date, model, serial number, capacity, failure, and SMART raw value. The 17,155 drives examined include 72 different models and does not include failed boot drives, drives that had no SMART raw attribute data, or drives with out-of-bounds data. If Backblaze only looked at drives that it didn't use in its data centers anymore, there would be 3,379 drives across 35 models, and the average age of failure would be a bit longer at 2 years and 7 months. Backblaze said its results thus far "are consistent" with Secure Data Recovery's March findings. This is despite Backblaze currently using HDDs that are older than 2 years and 7 months.

Thelasko writes: Renowned data journalist, Nate Silver, announced he will be leaving the company as soon as his contract expires. Although Disney owns the FiveThirtyEight brand, it is believed that Silver retains ownership of the site's algorithms. "ABC News remains dedicated to data journalism with a core focus on politics, the economy and enterprise reporting -- this streamlined structure will allow us to be more closely aligned with our priorities for the 2024 election and beyond," an ABC News spokesperson said in a statement. "We are grateful for the invaluable contributions of the team members who will be departing the organization and know they will continue to make an important impact on the future of journalism."

YouTube TV just won its first Technical Emmy award for its "Views" suite of features, which lets users access sports highlights, key plays, player stats and game scores. TechCrunch reports: At the 74th annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards last night, YouTube TV was declared the winner for the category "AI-ML Curation of Sports Highlights." The tech company also announced today that Key Plays reached a notable milestone -- the feature was used in over 10 million watch sessions on the platform. Last year, viewers used key plays the most during the World Cup, regular season NFL games and Premier League matches.

The Key Plays view tracks important plays in a game. Users can tap on the plays to rewatch when it occurs in the game. This is helpful for users that missed a live game and want to catch up on key moments. When YouTube TV launched Views in 2018, it was only available for baseball, basketball, football and hockey. Soccer and golf were added later on. The suite of features was also initially limited to phones and tablets. Today, the feature is available within the YouTube TV app across smart TVs and mobile devices.

In addition to Stats, Key Plays and Scores View, there's also Fantasy Football View, which is a mobile-only feature and lets users link their existing fantasy football account. That way, when a user is watching NFL games on YouTube TV, the feature allows them to see how their team is performing in real time. Plus, there's a "Jump to" function for users to quickly access a segment they want to view, which is especially handy for tennis fans and for users watching the Olympics. "Views came out of a team brainstorm about five years ago and launched about a year after YouTube TV," said Kathryn Cochrane, YouTube TV's group project manager, in a company blog post. "A lot of our viewers are devoted sports fans, and we found that when they watch sports, they aren't just looking at what's on the big screen. They were also actively on their phones, finding more details such as stats for their fantasy football league, updates from other games, and more, all to enhance what they were already watching."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The leader of a small online gaming chat group where a trove of classified U.S. intelligence documents leaked over the last few months is a 21-year-old member of the intelligence wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The New York Times. The National Guardsman, whose name is Jack Teixeira, oversaw a private online group called Thug Shaker Central, where about 20 to 30 people, mostly young men and teenagers, came together over a shared love of guns, racist online memes and video games. On Thursday afternoon, about a half-dozen F.B.I. agents pushed into a residence in North Dighton, Mass. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland later said in a short statement that Airman Teixeira had been arrested "without incident." Federal investigators had been searching for days for the person who leaked the top secret documents online.

Starting months ago, one of the users uploaded hundreds of pages of intelligence briefings into the small chat group, lecturing its members, who had bonded during the isolation of the pandemic, on the importance of staying abreast of world events. [...] The Times spoke with four members of Thug Shaker Central, one of whom said he had known the person who leaked for at least three years, had met him in person and referred to him as the O.G. The friends described him as older than most of the group members, who were in their teens, and the undisputed leader. One of the friends said the O.G. had access to intelligence documents through his job. While the gaming friends would not identify the group's leader by name, a trail of digital evidence compiled by The Times leads to Airman Teixeira. The Times has been able to link Airman Teixeira to other members of Thug Shaker Central through his online gaming profile and other records. Details of the interior of Airman Teixeira's childhood home -- posted on social media in family photographs -- also match details on the margins of some of the photographs of the leaked secret documents.

Members of Thug Shaker Central who spoke to The Times said that the documents they discussed online were meant to be purely informative. While many pertained to the war in Ukraine, the members said they took no side in the conflict. The documents, they said, started to get wider attention only when one of the teenage members of the group took a few dozen of them and posted them to a public online forum. From there they were picked up by Russian-language Telegram channels and then The Times, which first reported on them. The person who leaked, they said, was no whistle-blower, and the secret documents were never meant to leave their small corner of the internet. "This guy was a Christian, antiwar, just wanted to inform some of his friends about what's going on," said one of the person's friends from the community, a 17-year-old recent high school graduate. "We have some people in our group who are in Ukraine. We like fighting games; we like war games."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Over the past month, classified Pentagon documents have circulated on 4chan, Telegram, and various Discord servers. The documents contain daily intelligence briefings, sensitive information about Ukrainian military positions, and a handwritten character sheet for a table-top roleplaying game. No one knows who leaked the Pentagon documents or how. They appeared online as photographs of printed pages, implying someone printed them out and removed them from a secure location, similar to how NSA translator Reality Winner leaked documents. The earliest documents Motherboard has seen are dated February 23, though the New York Times and Bellingcat reported that some are dated as early as January. According to Bellingcat, the earliest known instances of the leaks appearing online can be traced back to a Discord server.

At some point, a Discord user uploaded a zip file of 32 images from the leak onto a Minecraft Discord server. Included in this pack alongside highly sensitive, Top Secret and other classified documents about the Pentagon's strategy and assessment of the war in Ukraine, was a handwritten piece of paper that appeared to be a character sheet for a roleplaying game. It's written on a standard piece of notebook paper, three holes punched out on the side, blue lines crisscrossing the page. The character's name is Doctor "Izmer Trotzky," his character class is "Professor Scientist." They've got a strength of 5, a charisma of 4, and 19 rubles to their name. Doctor Trotzky has 10 points in first aid and occult skills, and 24 in spot hidden. He's carrying a magnifying glass, a fountain pen, a sword cane, and a deringer. [...]

But what game is it from? Motherboard reached out to game designer Jacqueline Bryk to find out. Bryk is an award-winning designer of roleplaying games who has worked on Kult: Divinity Lost, Changeling: the Lost, Fading Suns: Pax Alexius, and Vampire: the Masquerade. "I strongly suspect this is Call Of Cthulhu," Bryk said when first looking at the sheet. Call of Cthulhu (COC) is an RPG based on the work of H.P. Lovecraft where players attempt to stave off madness while investigating eldritch horrors. "This is a pretty classic Professor build. The sword cane really clinches it for me. I notice he's currently carrying a derringer and a dagger but took no points in firearms or fighting. I'm not sure which edition this is but it seems like the most he could do with his weapons is throw them." "After some research, Bryk concluded that the game is a homebrewed combination of COC and the Fallout tabletop game based on the popular video game franchise," adds Motherboard. "My best guest here is Fallout: Cthulhu the Homebrew," Bryk said, giving the home designed game a name.

InfoWorld reports: Zig, a general purpose programming language that interacts with C/C++ programs and promises to be a modern alternative to C, has made an appearance in the Tiobe index of programming language popularity. Zig entered the top 50 in the April edition of the Tiobe Programming Community Index, ranking 46th, albeit with a rating of just 0.19%. By contrast, the Google-promoted Carbon language, positioned as an experimental successor to C++, ranked just 168th.
Tiobe CEO Paul Jansen argues that high-performance languages "are booming due to the vast amounts of data that needs to be processed nowadays. As a result, C and C++ are doing well in the top 10 and Rust seems to be a keeper in the top 20." Zig has all the nice features of C and C++ (such as explicit memory management enhanced with option types) and has abandoned the not-so-nice features (such as the dreadful preprocessing). Entering the top 50 is no guarantee to become a success, but it is at least a first noteworthy step. Good luck Zig!
Tiobe bases its monthly ranking of programming language popularity on search engine results for courses, third party vendors, and engineers. Here's what they's calculated for the most popular programming languages in April of 2023:

• Python
• C
• Java
• C++
• C#
• Visual Basic
• JavaScript
• SQL
• PHP
• Go

April's top 10 was nearly identical to the rankings a year ago, but assembly language fell from 2022's #8 position to #12 in 2023. SQL and PHP rose one rank (into 2023's #8 and #9 positions) — and as in March, the rankings now shows Go as the 10th most popular programming language.

Anti-piracy group CODA is reporting the shutdown of B9Good, a pirate manga site that targeted Japan but was operated from China. In response to a criminal complaint filed by CODA on behalf of six Japanese companies, which were backed by 21 others during the investigation, Chinese authorities arrested four people and seized one house worth $580,000. TorrentFreak reports: Manga piracy site B9Good initially appeared in 2008 and established itself under B9DM branding. SimilarWeb stats show that the site was enjoying around 15 million visits each month, with CODA noting that in the two-year period leading to February 2023, the site was accessed more than 300 million times Around 95% of the site's visitors came from Japan. B9Good had been featured in an MPA submission to the USTR's notorious markets report in 2019. Traffic was reported as almost 16 million visits per month back then, meaning that site visitor numbers remained stable for the next three years. The MPA said the site was possibly hosted in Canada, but domain records since then show a wider spread, including Hong Kong, China, United States, Bulgaria, and Japan.

Wherever the site ended up, the location of its operator was more important. In 2021, CODA launched its International Enforcement Project (CBEP), which aimed to personally identify the operators of pirate sites, including those behind B9Good who were eventually traced to China. Pursuing copyright cases from outside China is reportedly difficult, but CODA had a plan. In January 2022, CODA's Beijing office was recognized as an NGO with legitimate standing to protect the rights of its member companies. Working on behalf of Aniplex, TV Tokyo, Toei Animation, Toho, Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK), and Bandai Namco Film Works, CODA filed a criminal complaint in China, and starting February 14, 2023, local authorities began rounding up the B9Good team.

williamyf writes: The fine folks at Backblaze have published their first ever report that includes their SSD fleet. To the surprise of no one, SSDs are more more reliable (0.98% AFR) than HDDs (1.64% AFR). The surprising thing thing was how small the difference is (0.66% AFR).

A TL;DR article by well regarded storage reporter Chris Mellor is here. Also worthy of note: S.M.A.R.T. attribute usage among SSD makers is neither standardized, nor very smart:

"Klein notes that the SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) used for drive state reporting is applied inconsistently by manufacturers. "Terms like wear leveling, endurance, lifetime used, life used, LBAs [Logical Block Address] written, LBAs read, and so on are used inconsistently between manufacturers, often using different SMART attributes, and sometimes they are not recorded at all."

That means you can't use such SMART statistics to make valid comparisons between the drives. "Come on, manufacturers. Standardize your SMART numbers."