Mozilla will take the next major step in disabling support for the Adobe Flash plugin later this year when it releases Firefox 69. From a report: Firefox 69 will be Mozilla's third last step to completely dropping support for the historically buggy plugin, which will reach end of life on December 31, 2020. Flash is the last remaining NPAPI plugin that Firefox supports. Mozilla flagged the change, spotted by Ghacks, in a new bug report that notes "we'll disable Flash by default in Nightly 69 and let that roll out". Firefox 69 stable will be released in early September, according to Mozilla's release calendar.

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Kanaka Durga says she was attacked by her mother in law minutes after returning to her home.

Gabonese president has rarely been seen since suffering stroke in October, leaving his country leaderless.

After weeks of protests, Emmanuel Macron sent out a letter to Yellow Vest protesters that he is open to new ideas.

Over 1,000 Hondurans set off for US border, calling on Trump to give them asylum after fleeing 'crisis' at home.

Apple's $29 battery replacement program may have seriously dinged sales of its 2018 iPhone models. From a report: The company replaced 11 million iPhone batteries under the program, John Gruber of tech-focused blog DaringFireball reported Monday, citing Apple CEO Tim Cook at an all-hands meeting. Typically, the company replaces 1 million to 2 million batteries each year, DaringFireball noted. Cook cited the program's negative impact on Apple's revenue in a Jan. 2 sales warning to investors but didn't offer specific numbers.

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For open source projects it makes sense to have a public bug tracker. It would be hard to do the work without it.

But for commercial software? It’s not a good idea at all.

(I bring this up because I saw someone suggest this idea recently, and it stuck in my head.)

Decisions about what to work on — and when, and by whom — are complicated. From the outside it might look like it’s as simple as picking the next feature request with the most votes, but it’s not that simple.

A company might prioritize a crashing bug over that bug.

Or that feature might need x, y, z and done first, all of which require major work — maybe it needs some surprising amount of design or under-the-hood work, or both, that the requestors understandably don’t know about. Or it needs a bunch of localizations. Or lots of extra testing because the implementation is complex or wide-ranging — or it’s in an area where it could cause regressions.

Or the person who best knows that area of the code is temporarily on another team to help with another company priority. Or that person is going on vacation.

Or there are features nobody has asked for specifically, but that the company thinks would be awesome, and those get priority.

Or there are a half-dozen features that are low-hanging fruit, and for various reasons it’s a good idea to do a bunch of easy things for a while.

Or the feature doesn’t even really fit with the app: companies make that call all the time. (I never added Usenet support to NetNewsWire, despite getting requests for it.)

Or the feature is actually impossible. Or impossible without spending two years and a few million dollars on research and development first.

Or there’s a new OS feature that should be supported. Or an incompatibility with a new OS to fix.

And so on — the list goes on.

But if you have a public bug tracker, you’d likely find that you’re having to explain your decisions all the time. You’d be constantly defending your plans to people who remind you that Feature X has all these votes, so why hasn’t it shipped yet?

I’d argue that most companies aren’t open and accessible enough. Many companies don’t listen to their users very well. Many don’t even write honest and respectful release notes.

But opening up the bug tracker to the public is just a way to get bogged down: it’s a way to make worse decisions, and make them more slowly.

The Palestinians presented a request for UN membership in 2011, but that application never came to a vote.

If built, the Future Circular Collider will be 10 times more powerful than the Large Hadron Collider, and could discover new types of particles. From a report: The 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson particle at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is widely considered to be one of the most important scientific breakthroughs in history. It validated a half-century of research about the basic building blocks of matter, and remains the crowning achievement of modern particle physics. Now, CERN wants to follow up on the LHC's smashing success with a super-sized structure called the Future Circular Collider (FCC). This next-generation particle accelerator would boast 10 times the observational power of the LHC and would stretch across 100 kilometers (62 miles), encircling the Swiss city of Geneva and much of the surrounding area. CERN published its first conceptual design report for the FCC on Tuesday. The four-volume roadmap was developed over five years by 1,300 contributors based at 150 universities, according to a statement.

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Al Jazeera recaps the major developments on Britain's path to Brexit since it was first proposed by ex-PM David Cameron.

Microsoft is working on adapting Windows to work on foldable devices, The Verge reported Tuesday, citing sources familiar with the matter. The report further added that the company is making foldable devices and dual-screen hardware a big investment area for both Windows and Surface. From the report: This investment includes adapting Windows itself and its many built-in apps to work across foldable displays and devices with dual screens. While Microsoft has been experimenting with its own hardware with dual-screens, codenamed Andromeda, the company has also been working with Intel and other OEMs to be ready for the next few years of experimentation. PC makers famously developed a range of 2-in-1 devices for Windows 8 more than five years ago, and we're expecting to see a similar effort for dual-screen and foldable devices for Windows in the coming years. Most of this work is related to Microsoft's Composable Shell (C-Shell) and Windows Core OS, a more modular version of the existing Windows Shell that powers many parts of Windows 10 today.

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Barr vows to allow Russia probe to continue despite president's claim that the investigation is a 'witch-hunt'.

Parliament votes 432-202 to deliver a crushing defeat to Prime Minister Theresa May's deal with the European Union.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai refused to brief a Congressional committee Monday about mobile carriers' ability to share their subscribers' location data with third parties. From a report: House Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-N.J.) asked Pai for an "emergency briefing" to explain why the FCC "has yet to end wireless carriers' unauthorized disclosure of consumers' real-time location data," and for an update on "what actions the FCC has taken to address this issue to date." Pai's FCC could take action, despite the 2017 repeal of the commission's broadband privacy rules. Phone carriers are legally required to protect "Customer Proprietary Network Information [CPNI]," and the FCC's definition of CPNI includes location data. [...] Pai did not agree with Pallone, it turns out. "Today, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai refused to brief Energy and Commerce Committee staff on the real-time tracking of cell phone location[s]," Pallone said in a statement yesterday. "In a phone conversation today, his staff asserted that these egregious actions are not a threat to the safety of human life or property that the FCC will address during the Trump shutdown."

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Joshua S. Goldstein, a professor emeritus of international relations at American University, and Staffan A. Qvist, an energy engineer and consultant, writing for The Wall Street Journal: Climate scientists tell us that the world must drastically cut its fossil fuel use in the next 30 years to stave off a potentially catastrophic tipping point for the planet. Confronting this challenge is a moral issue, but it's also a math problem -- and a big part of the solution has to be nuclear power. Today, more than 80% of the world's energy comes from fossil fuels, which are used to generate electricity, to heat buildings and to power car and airplane engines. Worse for the planet, the consumption of fossil fuels is growing quickly as poorer countries climb out of poverty and increase their energy use. Improving energy efficiency can reduce some of the burden, but it's not nearly enough to offset growing demand. Any serious effort to decarbonize the world economy will require, then, a great deal more clean energy, on the order of 100 trillion kilowatt-hours per year, by our calculations -- roughly equivalent to today's entire annual fossil-fuel usage. A key variable is speed. To reach the target within three decades, the world would have to add about 3.3 trillion more kilowatt-hours of clean energy every year. Solar and wind power alone can't scale up fast enough to generate the vast amounts of electricity that will be needed by midcentury, especially as we convert car engines and the like from fossil fuels to carbon-free energy sources. Even Germany's concerted recent effort to add renewables -- the most ambitious national effort so far -- was nowhere near fast enough. A global increase in renewables at a rate matching Germany's peak success would add about 0.7 trillion kilowatt-hours of clean electricity every year. That's just over a fifth of the necessary 3.3 trillion annual target.

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