The last RHEL release, RHEL 7.7, is now available for current Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscribers via the Red Hat Customer Portal. ZDNet reports on what's new: RHEL 7.7's most important updates are support for the latest generation of enterprise hardware and remediation for the recently disclosed ZombieLoad vulnerabilities. The latest RHEL 7 also includes network stack performance enhancements. With this release, you can offload virtual switching operations to network interface card (NIC) hardware. What that means for you is, if you're using virtual switching and network function virtualization (NFV), you'll see better network performance on cloud and container platforms such as Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat OpenShift. RHEL 7.7 users can also use Red Hat's new predictive problem shooter: Red Hat Insights. This uses a software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based predictive analytics approach to spot, assess, and mitigate potential problems to their systems before they can cause trouble. For developers, RHEL 7.7 comes with Python 3.6 interpreter, and the pip and setup tools utilities. Previously, Python 3 versions were available only as a part of Red Hat Software Collections. Moving on to the cloud, RHEL 7.7 Red Hat Image Builder is now supported. This feature, which is also in RHEL 8, enables you to easily create custom RHEL system images for cloud and virtualization platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), VMware vSphere, and OpenStack. To help cloud-native developers, RHEL 7.7 includes full support for Red Hat's distributed-container toolkit -- buildah, podman, and skopeo -- on RHEL workstations. After building on the desktop, programmers can use Red Hat Universal Base Image to build, run, and manage containerized applications across the hybrid cloud.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Optical links will pull pictures and data from other spacecraft and then speed them to the ground.

At the Flash Memory Summit today, Toshiba introduced a new form factor for NVMe SSDs that is small enough to be a removable alternative to soldered-down BGA SSDs. "The new XFMEXPRESS form factor allows for two or four PCIe lanes while taking up much less space than even the smallest M.2 22x30mm card size," reports AnandTech. "The XFMEXPRESS card size is 18x14x1.4mm, slightly larger and thicker than a microSD card. It mounts into a latching socket that increases the footprint up to 22.2x17.75x2.2mm." From the report: XFMEXPRESS is intended to bring the benefits of replaceable storage to devices that would normally be stuck with soldered BGA SSDs or eMMC and UFS modules. For consumer devices this opens the way for aftermarket capacity upgrades, and for embedded devices that need to be serviceable this can permit smaller overall dimensions. Device manufacturers also get a bit of supply chain flexibility since storage capacity can be adjusted later in the assembly process. XFMEXPRESS is not intended to be used as an externally-accessible slot like SD cards; swapping out an XFMEXPRESS SSD will require opening up the case of the device it's installed in, though unlike M.2 SSDs the XFMEXPRESS socket and retention mechanism itself is tool-less. XFMEXPRESS will allow for similar performance to BGA SSDs. The PCIe x4 host interface will generally not be the bottleneck, especially in the near future when BGA SSDs start adopting PCIe gen4, which the XFMEXPRESS connector can support. Instead, SSDs in these small form factors are often thermally limited, and the XFMEXPRESS connector was designed to allow for easy heat dissipation with a metal lid that can serve as a heatspreader.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Press Trust of India says Swaraj died of a heart attack at a New Delhi hospital.

Indian government's move came hours after it imposed a major security clampdown in the disputed region.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: The Fed announced Monday that it will develop a real-time payment service called "FedNow" to help move money around the economy more quickly. It's the kind of government service that companies and consumers have been requesting for years -- one that already exists in other countries. The service could also compete with solutions already developed in the private sector by big banks and tech companies. The Fed itself is not setting up a consumer bank, but it has always played a behind-the-scenes role facilitating the movement of money between banks and helping to verify transactions. This new system would help cut down on the amount of time between when money is deposited into an account and when it is available for use. FedNow would operate all hours and days of the week, with an aim to launch in 2023 or 2024. Currently, the process of sending and receiving money can take up to 72 hours, leaving businesses and consumers, and especially low-income people, in limbo. "For example, the current system can create problems for people paid by check at the end of a month, because they must deposit the check into their bank accounts and wait for it to be cleared before they can use that money to pay a utility bill at the start of the next month," reports CNN.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Kenyans are being forced to make a choice between legal erasure and being commodified as data by their own government.

China has told India not to block its Huawei from doing business in the country, warning there could be consequences for Indian firms operating in China, Reuters reported on Tuesday, citing sources with knowledge of the matter said. From a report: India is due to hold trials for installing a next-generation 5G cellular network in the next few months, but has not yet taken a call on whether it would invite the Chinese telecoms equipment maker to take part, telecoms minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has said. Huawei, the world's biggest maker of such gear, is at the centre of a geopolitical tug-of-war between China and the United States. U.S. President Donald Trump's administration put the company on a blacklist in May, citing national security concerns. It has asked its allies not to use Huawei equipment, which it says China could exploit for spying.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's been a gripe for many running Linux on low RAM systems especially is that when the Linux desktop is under memory pressure the performance can be quite brutal with the system barely being responsive. The discussion over that behavior has been reignited this week. From a report: Developer Artem S Tashkinov took to the kernel mailing list over the weekend to express his frustration with the kernel's inability to handle low memory pressure in a graceful manner. If booting a system with just 4GB of RAM available, disabling SWAP to accelerate the impact/behavior, and launching a web browser and opening new web pages / tabs can in a matter of minutes bring the system down to its knees. Artem elaborated on the kernel mailing list, "Once you hit a situation when opening a new tab requires more RAM than is currently available, the system will stall hard. You will barely be able to move the mouse pointer. Your disk LED will be flashing incessantly (I'm not entirely sure why). You will not be able to run new applications or close currently running ones. This little crisis may continue for minutes or even longer. I think that's not how the system should behave in this situation. I believe something must be done about that to avoid this stall."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Shootings that killed dozens have been linked to radical hate manifestos posted online.

MPs voice anger at India’s decision to revoke autonomy and privileges for the contested Muslim-majority region.

'Britain is desperate and has no leverage,' says former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.

As Japan marks 74th anniversary of world's first nuclear bomb attack, we examine the events that shaped history.

Jonathan O'Callaghan, writing for Scientific American: Most of the more than 4,000 exoplanets astronomers have found across the past few decades come from NASA's pioneering Kepler mission, which launched in 2009 and ended in late October 2018. But among Kepler's cavalcade of data, more planets are still waiting to be found -- and a new method just turned up the biggest haul yet from the mission's second, concluding phase, called K2. The K2 run from 2014 to 2018 was notable for its unique use of the functionality, or lack thereof, of the Kepler space telescope. Essentially a large tube with a single camera, Kepler relied on four reaction wheels (spinning wheels to orient the spacecraft) to point at specific patches of the sky for days or even weeks on end. Such long stares were beneficial for its primary planet-finding technique, known as the transit method, which detects worlds by watching for dips in a star's light caused by an orbiting planet's passage in front of it. But when two of Kepler's reaction wheels failed, one in 2012 and another in 2013, mission planners came up with an ingenious method of using the pressure of the solar wind to act as a makeshift third wheel, allowing observations to continue, albeit with some limitations. "We had this issue because the K2 mission was working off of two reaction wheels; it rolled a little bit every six hours," says Susan Mullally of the Space Telescope Science Institute. "And as a result, the light curves have these little arcs that run through them that you have to first remove." Various efforts were subsequently made to extract planets from the K2 data. But none have been more successful than one reported in a new paper by Ethan Kruse of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and his colleagues, which was posted on the preprint server arXiv.org last week and accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series. Kruse employed an algorithm known as as QATS (for Quasiperiodic Automated Transit Search) and a light-curve-analysis program called EVEREST (for EPIC Variability Extraction and Removal for Exoplanet Science Targets) to better account for the spacecraft's rolling and other sources of instrumental and astrophysical "noise" in the K2 data. The result was a whopping total of 818 planet candidates -- 374 of which had never been spotted before -- from the first nine of K2's 20 observation campaigns.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

US asset freeze is an attack on private property, could bring additional hardship to Venezuelans, vice president says.