"In a message to the Linux Kernel Mailing List Wednesday, founding developer Linus Torvalds warned the world not to use the 5.12-rc1 kernel in his public git tree..." writes Ars Technica: As it turns out, when Linus Torvalds flags some code dontuse, he really means it — the problem with this 5.12 release candidate broke swapfile handling in a very unpleasant way. Specifically, the updated code would lose the proper offset pointing to the beginning of the swapfile. Again, in Torvalds' own words, "swapping still happened, but it happened to the wrong part of the filesystem, with the obvious catastrophic end results." If your imagination is insufficient, this means that when the kernel paged contents of memory out to disk, the data would land on random parts of the same disk and partition the swapfile lived on... not as files, mind you, but as garbage spewed directly to raw sectors on the disk. This means overwriting not only data in existing files, but also rather large chunks of metadata whose corruption would likely render the entire filesystem unmountable and unusable. Torvalds goes on to point out that if you aren't using swap at all, this problem wouldn't bite you. And if you're using swap partitions, rather than swap files, you'd be similarly unaffected... Torvalds also advised anyone who'd already pulled his git tree to do a git tag -d v5.12-rc1 "to actually get rid of the original tag name..." — or at least, to not use it for anything. "I want everybody to be aware..." Torvalds writes, "because _if_ it bites you, it bites you hard, and you can end up with a filesystem that is essentially overwritten by random swap data. This is what we in the industry call 'double ungood'."

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schwit1 shares an article from Entrepreneur: If anyone has the ability to surprise the world with his ambitious projects, it is Elon Musk . The billionaire announced that he is building a new city in Texas to be called Starbase, around the rocket launch site of his company SpaceX... Later, he alluded to his project to colonize the red planet, hinting that Starbase would be just the beginning to go further. "From there to Mars. And hence the Stars," detailed the CEO of Tesla. The tycoon, who is currently the second richest person in the world , said that his city will occupy an area "much larger" than Boca Chica , a place that houses a launch site for SpaceX and where the company is building its Starship rocket... Eddie Treviño, judge for Cameron County, Texas, confirmed that SpaceX informed the authorities of Elon Musk's intention: to incorporate Boca Chica into the city of Starbase . The official noted that the mogul and his company must comply with all state statutes of incorporation and clarified that the county will process any petition in accordance with the law. Musk also tweeted that the leader of his new city "shall be The Doge," linking to a Wikipedia definition for the Venetian word doge (meaning either "military commander" or "spiritual leader".) Musk made his remark in response to a Twitter user named Wootiez, who had asked him whether his new city would be dog friendly.

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"For a week we lost control of the Perl.com domain," a long-running site offering news and articles about the programming language, writes the site's senior editor, brian d foy. "Now that the incident has died down, we can explain some of what happened and how we handled it." This incident only affected the domain ownership of Perl.com and there was no other compromise of community resources. This website was still there, but DNS was handing out different IP numbers... Recovering the domain wasn't the end of the response though. While the domain was compromised, various security products had blacklisted Perl.com and some DNS servers had sinkholed it. We figured that would naturally work itself out, so we didn't immediately celebrate the return of Perl.com. We wanted it to be back for everyone. And, I think we're fully back. However, if you have problems with the domain, please raise an issue so we at least know it's not working for part of the internet. What we think happened This part veers into some speculation, and Perl.com wasn't the only victim. We think that there was a social engineering attack on Network Solutions, including phony documents and so on. There's no reason for Network Solutions to reveal anything to me (again, I'm not the injured party), but I did talk to other domain owners involved and this is the basic scheme they reported. John Berryhill provided some forensic work in Twitter that showed the compromise actually happened in September. The domain was transferred to the BizCN registrar in December, but the nameservers were not changed. The domain was transferred again in January to another registrar, Key Systems, GmbH. This latency period avoids immediate detection, and bouncing the domain through a couple registrars makes the recovery much harder... Once transferred to Key Systems in late January, the new, fraudulent registrant listed the domain (along with others), on Afternic (a domain marketplace). If you had $190,000, you could have bought Perl.com. This was quickly de-listed after the The Register made inquiries. "I think we were very fortunate here and that many people with a soft spot in their hearts for Perl did a lot of good work for us," the article notes. "All sides understood that Perl.com belonged to Tom and it was a simple matter of work to resolve it. A relatively unknown domain name might not fare as well in proving they own it..." But again, the incident ended happily, foy writes, and "The Perl.com domain is back in the hands of Tom Christiansen and we're working on the various security updates so this doesn't happen again. The website is back to how it was and slightly shinier for the help we received."

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Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from The Drive: In a surprising turn of events, the United States government is calling upon its country's industry to reverse engineer components for the Air Force's B-2 Spirit stealth bomber. An official call for this highly unusual kind of assistance was put out today on the U.S. government's contracting website beta.SAM.gov. Mark Thompson, a national-security analyst at the Project On Government Oversight, brought our attention to the notice, which seeks an engineering effort that will reverse engineer key parts for the B-2's Load Heat Exchangers. While it is not exactly clear what part of the aircraft's many complex and exotic subsystems these heat exchangers relate to, the bomber has no shortage of avionics systems, for example, which could require cooling... While it's hard to say exactly why this approach is being taken now, it indicates that the original plans for these components are unavailable or the manufacturing processes and tooling used to produce them no longer exists... Indeed, as the average age of the Air Force fleet continues to increase, there are only likely to be more such requirements for parts that are long out of production. Before he stood down, the former Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, Will Roper, told Air Force Magazine of his desire for a "digital representation of every part in the Air Force inventory...." All in all, the search for reverse-engineered components for the B-2 fleet is keeping with the Air Force's current trend of moving toward the latest digital engineering and manufacturing techniques to help ensure its aircraft can be sustained not just easier and more cheaply, but in some cases, possibly at all.

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Hackaday writes: In the early years of personal computing there were a slew of serious contenders. A PC, a Mac, an Atari ST, an Amiga, and several more that all demanded serious consideration on the general purpose desktop computer market. Of all these platforms, the Amiga somehow stubbornly refuses to die. The Amiga 1200+ from [Jeroen Vandezande] is the latest in a long procession of post-Commodore Amigas, and as its name suggests it provides an upgrade for the popular early-1990s all-in-one Amiga model. It takes the form of a well-executed open-source printed circuit board that's a drop-in replacement for the original A1200 motherboard... The catch: it does require all the custom Amiga chips from a donor board... It's fair to say that this is the Amiga upgrade we'd all have loved to see in about 1996 rather than waiting until 2019. Mike Bouma (Slashdot reader #85,252) shares a recent video showing the latest update of AmigaOS 4 by Hyperion Entertainment, and reminds us of two "also active" Amiga OS clones — AROS and MorphOS. Further reading: Little Things That Made Amiga Great.

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NFT's are kind of like that million-pixel-page project from the 90s, only you can have an infinite number of them.

Slashdot reader wooloohoo shares a new article from Cornell's Alliance for Science, a group who gives its mission as correcting misinformation and countering conspiracy theories slowing progress on issues including synthetic biology and agricultural innovations: There are two types of chickens: the broilers that we eat and the layers that produce the eggs. The layers don't have enough meat to make them useful for human consumption and since only hens can lay eggs, that leaves the male layers useless. As a result, billions of newly hatched male layer chicks are killed each year. Now the Israeli ag-tech startup eggXYt has found a way to humanely address this dilemma through the use of CRISPR — the gene editing technique that allows scientists to make targeted, specific genetic tweaks... By using CRISPR, eggXYt's scientists can edit the genes of chickens to make them lay sex-detectable eggs... The global egg industry saves the costs and the ethical conundrum of killing half of its product and billions of additional eggs are added to the global market to help meet growing demand.

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"Algorithms are meaningless without good data. The public can exploit that to demand change," argues a new article in MIT's Technology Review (shared by long-time Slashdot reader mspohr): Data is fed into machine-learning algorithms to target you with ads and recommendations. Google cashes your data in for over $120 billion a year of ad revenue. Increasingly, we can no longer opt out of this arrangement... Now researchers at Northwestern University are suggesting new ways to redress this power imbalance by treating our collective data as a bargaining chip... In a new paper being presented at the Association for Computing Machinery's Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency conference next week, researchers including PhD students Nicholas Vincent and Hanlin Li propose three ways the public can exploit this to their advantage: Data strikes, inspired by the idea of labor strikes, which involve withholding or deleting your data so a tech firm cannot use it — leaving a platform or installing privacy tools, for instance. Data poisoning, which involves contributing meaningless or harmful data. AdNauseam, for example, is a browser extension that clicks on every single ad served to you, thus confusing Google's ad-targeting algorithms. Conscious data contribution, which involves giving meaningful data to the competitor of a platform you want to protest, such as by uploading your Facebook photos to Tumblr instead. Will we someday see "white-hat data poisoners" trying to convince tech companies that the best place to advertise is the classified sections of small local newspapers? While the researchers believe sporadic individual actions have little impact, the article takes this to its ultimate conclusion. "What if millions of people were to coordinate to poison a tech giant's data well...? That might just give them some leverage to assert their demands."

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Long-time Slashdot reader lee1 shares a new article from Linux magazine: The danger and irritations of the modern web have unleashed a movement dedicated to creating a safer and simpler alternative. The old Gopher network and the new Gemini protocol have emerged as building blocks for this new "small Internet." Anyone who has used the World Wide Web (WWW) lately knows that something bad is happening to it. It does not resemble the WWW of the early years, with enthusiastic amateurs freely sharing ideas and information. These things still exist, and the web is still an indispensable medium connecting the world. But the web experience is now encumbered with advertising, invasions of privacy in the form of pervasive tracking, enormous file sizes, CPU straining JavaScript, the danger of exploits, and door slams asking you to subscribe to a newsletter before viewing a site. This unpleasant environment has led to a backlash. There are now some communities of developers and computer users who still desire a connected information system, but who seek a refuge from the noise, danger, and increasingly resource-hungry WWW. They feel that web technology does too much, and that since it makes various forms of abuse too easy, no lasting reform is possible. The solution is to use or create a separate protocol that is simply not capable of supporting the technologies that enable advertising networks, user fingerprinting, or the myriad of other things that exploit users rather than helping them. This small movement has approached the problem from two directions that in practice are often merged: the revival of the Gopher protocol and the creation of a new protocol called Gemini. Gemini would support its own lightweight hypertext format, and would co-exist with Gopher and HTTP as an alternative client-server protocol with built-in privacy-assuring features like mandatory Transport Layer Security and a "Trust On First Use" public-key security model. ("Connections are closed at the end of a single transaction and cannot be reused," notes the Project Gemini home page.) "You may think of Gemini as 'the web, stripped right back to its essence,'" explains its FAQ, "or as 'Gopher, souped up and modernised just a little', depending upon your perspective..." "Gemini is also intended to be very privacy conscious, to be difficult to extend in the future (so that it will *stay* simple and privacy conscious), and to be compatible with a 'do it yourself' computing ethos."

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I don't like the Holier Than Thou BS of the Democratic Party. If the Never Trumpers form a new party, I might join up. I'd like a party that endorses only two things, 1. the Constitution and 2. a return to majority rule. All other issues, up to the individual to decide.

I want to know more about who the listeners are for the Radio Open Source podcast. Chris likes to say at the outset that it's 15 years since it started, "the first podcast," he says (with some justification) but my recurring thought is -- great -- 15 years wow. What innovations have you done lately? Sorry. As one of the co-parents of this venture, I apologize for the lack of innovation. I bet the people who listen to that podcast are amazing. I'd start by asking listeners to send in a photo of where they listen to the podcast. We'd publish them (after reviewing to be sure they're safe for work).

Key fact: Every time someone gets infected, the virus has another chance to mutate and thereby get around our vaccines. So it's in all our interests to reduce the number of infections, to slow mutations. Does this make sense? Somewhere in my education, I don't remember where, they taught me to think like this. Two or more processes that interact happening at the same time. It's reality. We're in a contest with the virus. It won for many months, and it's still winning, but now we have a strategy for slowing its growth. We will not eliminate it. These are basic facts most people haven't begun to absorb.

I like Chris Lydon who does the Radio Open Source podcast. In this week's episode, interviewing an expert on pandemics, he exclaimed "ay oy oy, almost wearily. Now Chris is nice, as I said, but he’s a total goy, so it was LOL funny to hear him say that phrase. Oy!

One of the reasons I love writing for the blog is that I've made the best software for me for editing it. I didn't make it for anyone else. I know of one person who has adapted it for his own use, that's it. The software still is far from as good as it could be. But I think it needs the one feature my old outliner in Frontier had, scriptability. I need to get outside the limits of the JavaScript environment in the browser and on the server, while relying on the software I've built so far, to define a new virtuality that is perfectly scriptable. To exist at a higher level, both as a writer and a developer. I've been to the top of this mountain before, but this time I'm taking a different path to the top. And maybe it isn't even the same mountain. That's what makes these writing/software explorations so interesing, and risky.

Poll: Do you like the idea of using email to write for your blog?