Bruce Perens (Slashdot reader #3872) co-founded the Open Source Initiative with Eric Raymond in 1998. But on Thursday Perens posted "it seems to me that the organization is rather enthusiastically headed toward accepting a license that isn't freedom respecting. Fine, do it without me, please. "I asked Patrick to cancel my membership, and I would have unsubscribed from OSI lists, including this one, if your server was working..." The issue is a new software license drafted by lawyer Van Lindberg called the Cryptographic Autonomy License (or CAL). Another open-source-community leader familiar with the debate -- who spoke with The Register on condition of anonymity -- claimed Lindberg lobbied OSI directors privately to green-light the license, contrary to an approval process that's supposed to be carried out in public. "I don't think that's an appropriate characterization," said Lindberg, of law firm Dykema, in a phone interview with The Register. "I think there are number of people who from the beginning made up their minds about the Cryptographic Autonomy License. You'll see a lot of people jumping onto any pretext they can find in order to oppose it. With regard to this idea of lobbying, there have been procedural-type communications that I think are entirely reasonable," he added. "But all the substantive debate has been on the license review and license discussion forums...." Perens said he resigned because the OSI appears to have already decided to accept the license. He said he's headed in a different direction, which he called "coherent open source." "We've gone the wrong way with licensing," he said, citing the proliferation of software licenses. He believes just three are necessary, AGPLv3, the LGPLv3, and Apache v2. Meanwhile, the Cryptographic Autonomy License is envisioned for use with the distributed development platform Holo, notes the Register: According to Holo co-founder Arthur Brock, distributed peer-to-peer software needs a license that addresses cryptographic key rights, which is why the Cryptographic Autonomy License has been proposed. "We are trying to say: the only valid way to use our code is if that developer's end-users are the sole authors and controllers of their own private crypto keys," he wrote in a post last year. Lindberg said the Cryptographic Autonomy License is applicable to current web applications but it more meaningful in the context of distributed workloads and distributed computation, which he contends will become more important as people seek alternatives to the centralization of today's cloud-based systems. "A lot of people are very concerned about this concept of owning your data, owning your computer, having the ability to really control your computing experience and have it not be controlled by your cloud provider," said Lindberg. Perens said, "It's a good goal but it means you now need to have a lawyer to understand the license and to respond to your users." Slashdot asked Bruce Perens for details on "Coherent Open Source." Here's what he wrote back...

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"The gigabytes of data we're using -- although invisible -- come at a significant cost to the environment," argues the CBC's senior technology reporter. "Some experts say it rivals that of the airline industry." And as more smart devices rely on data to operate (think internet-connected refrigerators or self-driving cars), their electricity demands are set to skyrocket. "We are using an immense amount of energy to drive this data revolution," said Jane Kearns, an environment and technology expert at MaRS Discovery District, an innovation hub in Toronto. "It has real implications for our climate." [Kearns is also the co-founder of the CanadaCleantech Alliance....] It's not the gadgets themselves that are drawing so much power, it's the far-flung servers that act as their electronic brains... The data centres, often bigger than a football field, house endless stacks of servers handling many terabytes (thousands of gigabytes) of digital traffic. Just as laptops tend to warm during heavy usage, servers must be cooled to avoid overheating. And cooling so many machines requires plenty of power. Anders Andrae, a researcher at Huawei Technologies Sweden whose estimates are often cited, told CBC News in an email he expects the world's data centres alone will devour up to 651 terawatt-hours of electricity in the next year. That's nearly as much electricity as Canada's entire energy sector produces. And it's just the beginning. Andrae's calculations, published in the International Journal of Green Technology, suggest data centres could more than double their power demands over the next decade. He projects computing will gobble up 11 per cent of global energy by 2030 and cloud-based services will represent a sizeable proportion of that. "This will become completely unsustainable by 2040," Andrae wrote... The information and communications technology sector as a whole is thought to be responsible for two to three per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions -- roughly on par with the often-criticized airline sector. The article also notes that by 2018 Amazon had already switched to renewable energy for at least 50% of its cloud computing servers. And it also adds that tech companies "in Canada and abroad...are coming up with innovative solutions to curb the growing problem." Solutions being investigated include recovering the low-level heat generated by servers and increasing the speed and capacity of data transfers (including one approach involving a quantum dot multi-wavelength laser).

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A biodiversity expert suggests almost half a billion animals might have been affected in Australia.

The Associated Press looks at three new fatalities involving Teslas this week, saying the crashes have "increased scrutiny of the company's Autopilot driving system just months before CEO Elon Musk has planned to put fully self-driving cars on the streets." Last Sunday, a Tesla Model S sedan left a freeway in Gardena, California, at a high speed, ran a red light and struck a Honda Civic, killing two people inside, police said.... Raj Rajkumar, an electrical and computer engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University, said it's likely that the Tesla in Sunday's California crash was operating on Autopilot, which has become confused in the past by lane lines. He speculated that the lane line was more visible for the exit ramp, so the car took the ramp because it looked like a freeway lane. He also suggested that the driver might not have been paying close attention. "No normal human being would not slow down in an exit lane," he said... On the same day, a Tesla Model 3 hit a parked firetruck on an Indiana freeway, killing a passenger in the Tesla... In both cases, authorities have yet to determine whether Tesla's Autopilot system was being used... Many experts say they're not aware of fatal crashes involving similar driver-assist systems from General Motors, Mercedes and other automakers. GM monitors drivers with cameras and will shut down the driving system if they don't watch the road. "Tesla is nowhere close to that standard," Rajkumar said. He predicted more deaths involving Teslas if the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration fails to take action... And on Dec. 7, yet another Model 3 struck a police cruiser on a Connecticut highway, though no one was hurt... [T]he driver told police that the car was operating on Autopilot, a Tesla system designed to keep a car in its lane and a safe distance from other vehicles.

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This is so typical. Journalist says the “good internet” ended when Google shut down Reader. Millions of users figured out how to use RSS without Google. I wonder what else this guy misses because he’s not willing to do a bit of research.

"Companies are finally getting really good at selling directly to consumers, forcing them to question Amazon's value to them," writes a columnist at the Motley Fool: Rather than one single powerhouse, the threat to Amazon comes in the form of hundreds of smaller e-commerce venues that can each take a tiny, collective stab at online shopping's 800-pound gorilla. Within the past year, according to brand PR firm Diffusion, 2 out of every 5 Americans made a purchase directly from the brand or manufacturer, bypassing middlemen like Walmart or Amazon in the process... The frequency of direct-to-consumer (DTC) purchases expected in the foreseeable future also fell from the year-ago version of the survey. Still, this mode of discretionary spending is on the rise in conjunction with the raw number of DTC options. Yes, any discussion about the threat the DTC option poses to Amazon must point out how athletic apparel brand Nike has already severed a fairly short-lived relationship with the world's largest e-commerce platform so it can focus on its own retail sales effort. The decision will (if it hasn't already) embolden other brands to make a similar decision to handle their own e-commerce affairs. It's not just other major brands that might soon mull making their own way that could prove disruptive, though. It's the hundreds of DTC brands never affiliated with Amazon in the first place that are still finding their way... It's not an existential threat to Amazon, to be clear. Diffusion's survey indicates that direct-to-consumer shopping will grow 20% over the course of the next five years...not exactly a show stopper given that less than 10% of the nation's retail industry is now driven by DTC shopping... The tepid growth estimate for DTC, however, may be rooted in a history that ignores how much direct-to-consumer brands have figured out in just the past few months and perhaps during 2019's busy shopping season in particular. As it turns out, they've finally learned consumers really are responsive to brands they trust and connect with. As Loren Padelford, general manager of Shopify Plus, put it: "Consumers are coming back to [retailers] and saying, 'We want to shop directly from the makers....'" The exact scope or speed of the threat to Amazon still isn't clear, and to the extent it can be measured, it's also still in flux. One thing is certain, though: Neither consumers nor brands need Amazon as much as they used to. They've only just begun to figure it out. The crux of this paradigm shift is ahead.

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Last night's emails didn't go out because I exceeded the rate limit with the service provider we use. It's good that more people subscribed to the emails. I've sent the service provider a request to increase the rate limit. Apologies.

I've also added code to my nightly mail-sending app to limit the rate at which we send emails. Previously we sent them out the pipe as fast as we can. Since computers these days are very fast, that's a lot of emails in a very short time. The new code sends mail a max of ten messages per second. It's possible that's the rate limit we exceeded. A lot of times this software stuff is like boxing with an invisible opponent. A very unreasonable opponent.

This song is going through my head like All Along the Watchtower was in Battlestar Galactica. I hadn't heard it in years, but there it was, going round and round. There must be some way out of here.

A new leak of more than 100,000 documents from Cambridge Analytica's work in 68 different countries "will lay bare the global infrastructure of an operation used to manipulate voters on 'an industrial scale,'" writes the Guardian. Long-time Slashdot reader Freshly Exhumed shares their report: The release of documents began on New Year's Day on an anonymous Twitter account, @HindsightFiles, with links to material on elections in Malaysia, Kenya and Brazil. The documents were revealed to have come from Brittany Kaiser, an ex-Cambridge Analytica employee turned whistleblower, and to be the same ones subpoenaed by Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Kaiser, who starred in the Oscar-shortlisted Netflix documentary The Great Hack, decided to go public after last month's election in Britain. "It's so abundantly clear our electoral systems are wide open to abuse," she said. "I'm very fearful about what is going to happen in the US election later this year, and I think one of the few ways of protecting ourselves is to get as much information out there as possible." The documents were retrieved from her email accounts and hard drives, and though she handed over some material to parliament in April 2018, she said there were thousands and thousands more pages which showed a "breadth and depth of the work" that went "way beyond what people think they know about 'the Cambridge Analytica scandal....'" Kaiser said the Facebook data scandal was part of a much bigger global operation that worked with governments, intelligence agencies, commercial companies and political campaigns to manipulate and influence people, and that raised huge national security implications.

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Node devs: The package is davemail, the source is on GitHub.

Trump is like the Knicks, he makes everyone look good. It's like playing checkers with someone who has no idea there is a game or has any idea of what the rules are. Rules? He just does things.

An anonymous reader quotes Forbes: If you've been following the steady march of progress from Dell's Linux-first Project Sputnik team, you're no doubt aware that the "Developer Edition" variant of the XPS 13 is one of the finest Linux-ready ultrabooks you can buy. Just ahead of CES 2020, Dell is pushing out a few more improvements including a feature that's been hotly requested: fingerprint-reader support. It's one of several enhancements Dell is promising to Linux users for its 10th-generation XPS 13, including a new maximum of 32GB RAM and a redesigned "InfinityEdge" display that adds even more screen real estate, resulting in an adjusted 16:10 aspect ratio to match... Details on fingerprint-reader support are still a bit vague, but Dell says it will be released shortly after the system's February 2020 launch as an OTA (over-the-air) update, and then as part of the preloaded Ubuntu Developer Edition image it ships with the system. Dell's lead on Project Sputnik developer systems, Barton George, also blogged about Dell's new 86-inch 4K interactive touch monitor, as well as their upcoming Latitude 9510 notebook and 2-in-1 laptops, promising "a new ultra-premium class of products" offering 5G mobile broadband capabilities, AI-based productivity capabilities, and 30-plus hours of battery life. The blog post ends by noting that "While project Sputnik is the most visible Linux-based offerings from Dell, it is only a small fraction of the over 150 systems that make up Dell's Linux portfolio."

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I'm also adding code to my nightly mail-sending app to limit the rate at which we send emails. Right now we just send them out the pipe as fast as we can. Since computers these days are very fast, that's a lot of emails in a very short time. The new code, which I have yet to test (I will now) sends mail at most ten messages per second. It's possible that's the rate limit we exceeded. A lot of times this software stuff is like boxing with an invisible opponent. A very unreasonable opponent.

Iran has the kind of opportunity the US had after 9/11. We had the whole world behind us. Had we shown restraint, we could have cemented our "sole superpower" status. Instead of spending trillions on unwinnable wars, we could have put that money into infrastructure. Rebuilt our school system. By now those kids would be in the workforce, kicking ass competitively. We would be solving problems. Amazingly Iran is in a similar place now. The US is the bad guy, the terrorist, with an unprovoked attack of apparently similar scale as the terrorist attacks of 9/11. In addition to helping Iran, it would help the people of the United States to get our country off the insane path it's on. By not responding, you deprive Trump of an enemy, and win the support of the world, including in the US. This is how the world wins.

Researchers are unable to establish whether the Native American planted a mulberry tree in Norfolk.