On Monday long-time Slashdot reader TorinEdge wrote that Microsoft "appears to have botched an internal Office365 cloud services rollout today, with outages confirmed up and down the West Coast of North America. Confirmed roll backs were good early omens, but in the end did not appear to be successful... Symptoms may include: All 365-related services flaking out, borking, alternately approving logins and confirming they definitely do not exist." CRN reported service was impacted for five hours. But on Thursday some users were now intermittently unable to access Microsoft Exchange from 12:52 a.m. until 10:50 p.m., "according to a Microsoft email update to Office 365 administrators..." "Some partners believe the tech giant is grappling with a DevOps crisis." "It looks like they are pushing out software updates that are causing the outages," said a channel source impacted by one of the outages. "They have so much going on right now, rolling Teams out at a breakneck pace. I think they are running into an issue where code tested out fine but there is a configuration problem when they deploy it." DevOps is a set of practices that, according to the Wikipedia definition, shortens the systems development life cycle and provides continuous delivery of code with high software quality... A senior executive for one of Microsoft's top partners, who did not want to be identified, said he sees both recent outages as clearly DevOps-related... "Microsoft is a development first company, well known in general for DevOps, so the question is: why is this happening?" said the executive. "I love Microsoft but why is a company that paid $7.5 billion for Github, the leading source code repository company in the world, getting taken down by code that is not being well tested or has a single point of failure. That is ridiculous. If we caused this kind of production outage for a customer we would be fired and possibly blacklisted from the ecosystem. We have to bat 1,000 as a partner." The lesson from the outages may well be that a company's DevOps is only as "good as the humans who configure it and execute upon it," said the executive. The executive said the outages will definitely have a ripple effect in the channel. "I bet the Google G Suite sales reps threw a party when they saw this," he said. "No cloud vendor is immune to downtime," Microsoft says in a statement quoted by CRN. "Our number one priority is to get to resolution as quickly as possible and ensure our customers stay updated along the way, as was the case here. "We continuously invest in the resilience of our platform and focus on learning from these incidents to ultimately reduce the impact of inevitable outages..."

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"Trials of a hydrogen-powered train are underway in the U.K.," reports CNBC: The HydroFLEX train — which has been developed by a team from the University of Birmingham and Porterbrook, a rolling stock firm — uses a fuel-cell which combines hydrogen and oxygen to generate electricity, heat and water... It's hoped that the technology will be available to retrofit trains already in use by the year 2023... Wednesday's news comes at the end of a month that's seen several interesting developments in the arena of hydrogen-powered transport. Last week, in airspace over England, a hydrogen fuel-cell plane capable of carrying passengers completed its maiden flight. A few days earlier, Airbus released details of three hydrogen-fueled concept planes, saying they could enter service by the year 2035. Earlier in the month ÖBB, the Austrian Federal Railways, said a hydrogen-powered train would commence a passenger service trial in southern areas of Lower Austria... According to the company, it can reach speeds of up to 140 kilometers per hour, is low-noise and "emits only steam and water."

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The Guardian reports: "Green hydrogen" made with wind and solar electricity could become the cheapest form of what the Australian government has described as a "transformative fuel" much faster than expected, analysts believe. Chinese manufacturers have reported making systems to create hydrogen with renewable energy for up to 80% less than official Australian estimates from just two years ago. Energy analysts said it suggested green hydrogen was likely to leapfrog hydrogen made with gas and coal as the most cost-effective form of the energy before the end of the decade, and by the time an industry could be developed at scale... Germany has dedicated more than A$15bn of Covid-19 stimulus spending to developing a domestic hydrogen industry, and has agreed with Australia to undertake a joint feasibility study into its potential as an energy source. The European Commission recently launched a strategy that positions green hydrogen as central to the continent's goal to reach "climate neutrality" — net zero emissions — by 2050... The hope is that hydrogen will prove an emissions-free alternative to coal and gas in industries that operate at incredibly high temperatures.

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"They're trolling us... we think. But how the hell did this get published?" asks Popular Mechanics. Slashdot reader worldofsimulacra shares their report: Scientists have uncovered a bizarre, indefensible paper that squeaked through peer review at what appears at first pass to be a legitimate medical journal... 13 listed authors from wildly different fields throw together a series of escalating falsehoods. "Recently, some scientists from NASA have claimed that there may be a black hole like structure at the centre of the earth," the abstract begins. It only gets crazier from there: "The earth's core is the biggest system of telecommunication which exchanges waves with all DNAs and molecules of water. Imaging of DNAs on the interior of the metal of the core produces a DNA black brane with around 109 times longer than the core of the earth which is compacted and creates a structure similar to a black hole or black brane. We have shown that this DNA black brane is the main cause of high temperature of core and magnetic of earth...." One of the theories to explain the paper is that it was generated using "peer-review-tricking" artificial intelligence, which shuffles key terms and phrases and glues them together into something almost coherent. Apparently you can't trust everything you read in the Open Access Macedonian Journal of Medical Sciences. The paper's title? "A Black Hole at the Center of Earth Plays the Role of the Biggest System of Telecommunication for Connecting DNAs, Dark DNAs and Molecules of Water on 4+N- Dimensional Manifold." At the top of the paper, the journal has since appended a retraction, leading to a page warning "An internal investigation" has "raised sufficient evidence" that the paper is "not directly connected with the special issue Global Dermatology and contain inconsistent results... "We apologize to our audience about this unfortunate situation."

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ZDNet reports: At the Microsoft Build 2020 virtual developers' conference, CEO Satya Nadella announced that Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) 2.0 would soon support Linux GUIs and applications. That day is closer now than ever before. At the recent X.Org Developers Conference, Microsoft partner developer lead Steve Pronovost revealed that Microsoft has made it possible to run graphical Linux applications within WSL. It's always been possible to run Linux graphical programs such as the GIMP graphics editor, Evolution e-mail client, and LibreOffice on WSL. But it wasn't easy. You had to install a third-party X Window display server, such as the VcXsrv Windows X Server in Windows 10, and then do some tuning with both Windows and Linux to get them to work together smoothly. The X Window System underlies almost all Linux graphical user interfaces. Now, Microsoft has ported a Wayland display server to WSL. Wayland is the most popular X Window compatible server. In WSL2, it connects the graphical Linux applications via a Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) connection to the main Windows display. This means you can run Linux and Windows GUI applications simultaneously on the same desktop screen.... Craig Loewen, Microsoft WSL Program Manager, added in a Twitter thread that the key differences between using a third-party X server and the built-in Wayland server is that: "You don't need to start up or start the server, we'll handle that for you." In addition, it comes with "Lovely integration with Windows," such as drop shadows and Linux icon support. Loewen also said you can run a Linux web browser in it. "We haven't tested it extensively with a full desktop environment yet, as we want to focus on running often asked for apps first, and primarily IDEs [integrated development environment] so you can run those in a full Linux environment," he said. Don't get too excited about it just yet, though. Loewen continued, "We don't yet have an ETA for the beta channel, however, this work will be available in general for Insiders to try within the next couple of months."

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On Friday America's Department of Justice announced: Two leaders of one of the world's most notorious videogame piracy groups, Team Xecuter, have been arrested and are in custody facing charges filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle... The indictment alleges the defendants were leaders of a criminal enterprise that developed and sold illegal devices that hacked popular videogame consoles so they could be used to play unauthorized, or pirated, copies of videogames. The enterprise targeted popular consoles such as the Nintendo Switch, the Nintendo 3DS, the Nintendo Entertainment System Classic Edition, the Sony PlayStation Classic, and the Microsoft Xbox. "These defendants were allegedly leaders of a notorious international criminal group that reaped illegal profits for years by pirating video game technology of U.S. companies," said Acting Assistant Attorney General Brian C. Rabbitt of the Justice Department's Criminal Division. "These arrests show that the department will hold accountable hackers who seek to commandeer and exploit the intellectual property of American companies for financial gain, no matter where they may be located." "These defendants lined their pockets by stealing and selling the work of other video-game developers — even going so far as to make customers pay a licensing fee to play stolen games," said U.S. Attorney Brian Moran for the Western District of Washington. "This conduct doesn't just harm billion dollar companies, it hijacks the hard work of individuals working to advance in the video-game industry." "Theft of intellectual property hurts U.S. industry, game developers and exploits legitimate gaming customers, all of which threaten the legitimacy of the commercial video game industry," said Acting Special Agent in Charge Eben Roberts of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigations, Seattle. "We are committed to working with our international partners to find criminals like these who steal copyrighted material and bring cyber criminals to justice...." According to the indictment, Team Xecuter at times cloaked its illegal activity with a purported desire to support gaming enthusiasts who wanted to design their own videogames for noncommercial use. However, the overwhelming demand and use for the enterprise's devices was to play pirated videogames.

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This is how it's looking. 1. Trump knew on Tues he was infected. 2. Hoped there would be no symptoms. 3. Tried to spread it far and wide, esp Biden. 4. Because that's Trump.

Roger Cochetti directed internet public policy for IBM from 1994 through 2000 and later served as Senior Vice-President & Chief Policy Officer for VeriSign and Group Policy Director for CompTIA. This week he warned about signs "that the once open, global internet is slowly being replaced by 200, nationally-controlled, separate internets." And, while these separate American, Chinese, Russian, Australian, European, British, and other "internets" may decide to have some things in common with each other, the laws of political gravity will slowly pull them further apart as interest groups in each country lobby for their own concerns within their own country. Moreover, we will probably see the emergence of a global alternate internet before long... As background, it's important to recognize that — by almost any measure — the global internet is controlled by businesses and non-profits subject to the jurisdiction of the United States government. Within a roughly 1,000-mile strip of land stretching from San Diego to Seattle lie most major internet businesses and network control or standards bodies (and those that aren't there likely lie elsewhere in the United States). So — as the governments of China, Russia and Iran never tire of explaining — while Americans constitute around 310 million out of the world's 4.3 billion internet users (around 8%), the U.S. government exercises influence or control over more than 70% of the internet's controls and services... China's ability to control the internet experience within its bordersx` between roughly 2005 and 2018 taught many other countries that doing so, even if costly, is possible. This lesson was not lost on Russia, Iran, Australia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the EU and many other countries, which began developing legal (and sometimes technical) means to control internet content within their borders. This legal/technical nationalization over the past decade was significantly boosted by the realization that it was actually not very difficult for a government to substantially shut down the internet within a territory... The first major step in the introduction of a new, China-centric internet may have taken place last year when China introduced to the UN's International Telecommunications Union a proposal for a new type of protocol that would connect networks in a way comparable to, but different from, the way that the internet protocols have done. This was quickly dubbed China's New IP, and it has been the subject of major controversy as the nations and companies decide how to react. Whether a new Chinese-centric internet is based on a new series of protocols or is simply based on a new set of internet domain names and numbers, it seems likely that this alternate internet will give national governments quite a bit more control over what happens within their territories than does the global, open internet. This feature will attract quite a few national governments to join in — not least Russia, Iran and perhaps Turkey and India. The combined market power of those participating countries would make it difficult for any global internet business to avoid such a new medium. The likely result being two, parallel global computer inter-networking systems... which is pretty much what Google CEO Eric Schmidt predicted.

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Imagine you're a kid in a house where they love Trump. It's weird because they're admiring a bully, yet trying to make sure their kid knows bullies are bad. Every family has to deal with this one way or another. I wonder how they do it. Now there's a moral to the story. See, even the bully needs help from other people.

Trump needs science to save his life. Not "as if by magic it'll disappear." If his life is saved it'll be saved by science.

The world, for the moment, is straightening itself out.

"The first image of a black hole, captured in 2019, has revealed more support for Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity," reports CNN, adding that the new finding suggests his theory is now 500 times harder to beat. [W]hile light can't escape the inside of a black hole, it's possible for light to make a getaway in a region around the event horizon, or point of no return. This in-between space can look like a shadow. Because black holes have such immense gravity, which curves space-time, it can actually act like magnifier that makes the black hole's shadow appear larger than it is. The research team measured this distortion and found that the size of this black hole's shadow aligns with the theory of relativity — or matter warping space-time to create gravity... "This is really just the beginning. We have now shown that it is possible to use an image of a black hole to test the theory of gravity," said Lia Medeiros, study coauthor and postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey, in a statement. "This test will be even more powerful once we image the black hole in the center of our own galaxy and in future EHT observations with additional telescopes that are being added to the array...." "For the first time we have a different gauge by which we can do a test that's 500 times better, and that gauge is the shadow size of a black hole," said Feryal Özel, study coauthor and University of Arizona astrophysics professor. "When we obtain an image of the black hole at the center of our own galaxy, then we can constrain deviations from general relativity even further."

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Something weird is happening. I woke up this morning with nothing to say. For a moment at least the world seems to be straightening itself out. I might take a well-deserved break.

"To teach the next generation of computer scientists the basics of Python programming, Microsoft recently announced a partnership with NASA to create a series of lessons based on space exploration efforts," reports TechRepublic: Overall, the project includes three different NASA-inspired lessons... The Introduction to Python for Space Exploration lesson will provide students with "an introduction to the types of space exploration problems that Python and data science can influence." Made up of eight units in total, this module also details the upcoming Artemis lunar exploration mission. In another learning path, students will learn to design an AI model capable of classifying different types of space rocks depicted in random photos, according to Microsoft. However, the company recommends a "basic understanding of Python for Data Science" as a prerequisite for this particular lesson. The last of the three learning paths serves as an introduction to machine learning and demonstrates ways these technologies can help assist with space exploration operations. Students are presented real-world NASA challenges, particularly rocket launch delays, and learn how the agency can leverage machine learning to resolve the issues... Microsoft also announced partnerships with Wonder Woman 1984 and Smithsonian Learning Labs to curate five additional programming lessons for students.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Nikola has issued copyright-takedown notices targeting critics on YouTube who used clips of the promotional video in which a Nikola prototype truck was seen rolling down a hill. Nikola last month admitted that the promotional video of a supposedly functional Nikola One electric truck moving along a highway actually consisted of the company's vehicle rolling downhill. This week, Nikola "forced the removal of several critical videos from YouTube, saying they infringed its copyright by using footage from the company," including the truck-rolling-downhill video, the Financial Times reported yesterday. Sam Alexander is one of at least two financial commentators who had videos removed by Google subsidiary YouTube at Nikola's request. He says that four of his videos were taken down. "The claim is from when I showed 30 seconds of their Nikola One in Motion footage, which is what they put on Twitter and it's of their Nikola One rolling down the hill," Alexander said in a YouTube video he posted Wednesday. Alexander said he believes his videos should be protected as fair use under YouTube's policies. He used the 30-second clip of the Nikola One in videos that lasted 10 minutes or more, he said. Alexander said he put the words "Source: Nikola" in the corner when he played the truck clip and played his own audio over the clip. Nikola appears to claim that YouTube is the party that initiated the video-removal process. "YouTube regularly identifies copyright violations of Nikola content and shares the lists of videos with us," a Nikola spokesperson told Ars. "Based on YouTube's information, our initial action was to submit takedown requests to remove the content that was used without our permission. We will continue to evaluate flagged videos on a case-by-case basis." YouTube contradicted that claim, saying the company took advantage of the Copyright Match Tool that's available to people in the YouTube Partner Program. "Nikola has access to our copyright match tool, which does not automatically remove any videos," YouTube told the FT. "Users must fill out a copyright removal request form, and when doing so we remind them to consider exceptions to copyright law. Anyone who believes their reuse of a video or segment is protected by fair use can file a counter-notice."

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