An official version of the popular 7-zip archiving program has been released for Linux for the first time. Bleeping Computer reports: Linux already had support for the 7-zip archive file format through a POSIX port called p7zip but it was maintained by a different developer. As the p7zip developer has not maintained their project for 4-5 years, 7-Zip developer Igor Pavlov decided to create a new official Linux version based on the latest 7-Zip source code. Pavlov has released 7-Zip for Linux in AMD64, ARM64, x86, and armhf versions, which users can download [via their respective links]. "These new 7-Zip binaries for Linux were linked (compiled) by GCC without -static switch. And compiled 32-bit executables (x86 and armhf) didn't work on some arm64 and amd64 systems, probably because of missing of some required .so files." "Please write here, if you have some advices how to compile and link binaries that will work in most Linux systems," Pavlov stated on his release page.

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I've discovered I really enjoy writing verb docs. how weird, i used to hate it. i hired someone to do it for Frontier. But now it's like playing a game. I keep wanting to do another verb.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is calling on its sister agency to implement stricter regulation related to automated vehicle technology. In a letter it sent to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) at the start of February, the NTSB says the regulator "must act" to "develop a strong safety foundation." What's notable about the document is that NTSB chair Robert Sumwalt frequently cites Tesla in a negative light to support his department's suggestions. The automaker is referenced 16 times across the letter's 15 pages. For instance, in one section, Sumwalt writes of NHTSA's "continued failure" to implement regulations that would prevent driver-assist systems like Autopilot from operating beyond their intended use. "Because NHTSA has put in place no requirements, manufacturers can operate and test vehicles virtually anywhere, even if the location exceeds the AV control system's limitations," Sumwalt writes. "For example, Tesla recently released a beta version of its Level 2 Autopilot system, described as having full self-driving capability. By releasing the system, Tesla is testing on public roads a highly automated AV technology but with limited oversight or reporting requirements."

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Microsoft is investigating whether a world-wide cyberattack on tens of thousands of its corporate customers may be linked to a leak of information by the company or its partners, WSJ reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. From a report: The investigation centers in part on the question of how a stealthy attack that began in early January picked up steam in the week before the company was able to send a software fix to customers. In that time, a handful of China-linked hacking groups obtained the tools that allowed them to launch wide-ranging cyberattacks that have now infected computers all over the world running Microsoft's Exchange email software. Some of the tools used in the second wave of the attack, which is believed to have begun Feb. 28, bear similarities to âoeproof-of-conceptâ attack code that Microsoft distributed to antivirus companies and other security partners Feb. 23, investigators at security companies say. Microsoft had planned to release its security fixes two weeks later, on March 9, but after the second wave began it pushed out the patches a week early, on March 2, according to researchers.

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A small change with a big impact: no more "subscribe: as podcasting moves to "follow." From a report: Apple Podcasts will no longer use the word "subscribe" in a few weeks. Listeners will be invited to "follow" their favourite podcasts instead. The new wording will be in iOS 14.5, which should be released later this month (and is available in beta). We expect Apple to communicate further with creators, and listeners, when this version of iOS is released. This seemingly small change could dramatically affect the industry. Tom Webster from Edison Research says 47% of people who don't currently listen to podcasts think that 'subscribing' to a podcast will cost money, describing it as a stone in the shoe of podcasting's growth run. He tells Podnews: "Today, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube are the three most widely used services to play podcasts, and now the word Subscribe means 'automatically download for free' in exactly none of them. Podcasters will have no choice but to adapt their language accordingly or risk confusing listeners."

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Myanmar's first satellite is being held on board the International Space Station following the Myanmar coup, while Japan's space agency and a Japanese university decide what to do with it, two Japanese university officials said. Reuters: The $15 million satellite was built by Japan's Hokkaido University in a joint project with Myanmar's government-funded Myanmar Aerospace Engineering University (MAEU). It is the first of a set of two 50 kg microsatellites equipped with cameras designed to monitor agriculture and fisheries. Human rights activists and some officials in Japan worry that those cameras could be used for military purposes by the junta that seized power in Myanmar on Feb. 1. That has put the deployment on hold, as Hokkaido University holds discussions with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the two Hokkaido University officials said.

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T-Mobile this week pledged that 200 million people in the U.S. will have access to a fast version of 5G wireless service by the end of the year, a far larger number than can be expected from AT&T or Verizon. From a report: Long the upstart challenger, T-Mobile has a strong network story when it comes to 5G, thanks to its possession of a key swath of mid-band spectrum -- which offers a good balance of faster speed and decent coverage compared to other chunks of airwaves. Each of the major carriers is making fresh 5G commitments this week, increasing the number of people they hope to reach with different flavors of the high-speed wireless technology. Verizon detailed its 5G plans on Wednesday, including how it plans to use the $53 billion in spectrum it bought in a recent government auction as the airwaves become available. It plans to offer midband service in 46 markets this year, per CNET. AT&T holds its investor event Friday. It has been faster than Verizon at rolling out broad 5G coverage, but not as fast as T-Mobile. Also, like Verizon, it is relying on just-acquired midband spectrum to build out its network.

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Swiss authorities raided the apartment Friday of a hacker who claimed credit for breaching the Silicon Valley security camera company Verkada and gaining access to its customers' surveillance feeds, according to the hacker and a search warrant seen by Bloomberg News. From the report: Tillie Kottmann said their apartment in Lucerne, Switzerland, was raided and that police seized the hacker's electronic devices. The warrant was based on an alleged hack that took place last year and not on the recent breach of Verkada. After being notified of the breach by Bloomberg News, Verkada referred the matter to the FBI. The breach exposed live camera feeds of companies like Tesla, as well as hospitals, jails, and schools. According to a copy of the search warrant provided to Bloomberg News, the search was conducted as part of a U.S criminal case against Kottmann in the Western District of Washington. The warrant requested documents related to hacking as well as information on cryptocurrency holdings. Kottmann has been accused of unauthorized access to protected computers, identify theft, and fraud.

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The pandemic is very much not over. Italy is locking down over Easter. We all know what's happening. And again, the US is largely going exactly the wrong way. We're mistaking feelings for reality. It feels like spring is here, and it's time to emerge from hibernation. It's the wrong impulse. If you use your mind, you can see the feelings are wrong. Adults do the right thing anyway. Look at Italy. Smart.

The 2,000-year-old mechanism has baffled experts since it was discovered on a shipwreck in 1901.

Google and Microsoft engineers might collaborate on the Chromium browser code, but that hasn't stopped corporate politics between the pair. From a report: Google has launched a scathing attack on Microsoft today, accusing it of trying "to break the way the open web works in an effort to undercut a rival." Google is upset about what it believes is an attack by Microsoft to undermine the company's efforts to support journalism and publishers. In January, Google threatened to remove its search engine from Australia, in response to a law that would force Google to pay news publishers for their content. Australia passed the law in February, just days after Google caved and cut a deal with News Corp. and other publishers that ensured its services continue to be available in Australia. In the middle of all of this, Microsoft was very public about its support of Australia's new law, and it even teamed up with European publishers to call for online platforms to reach deals to pay news outlets for content. Google isn't happy about Microsoft getting involved and this is the first big public spat we've seen since the Scroogled era. "They are now making self-serving claims and are even willing to break the way the open web works in an effort to undercut a rival," says Kent Walker, Google's head of global affairs, in a blog post. "This latest attack marks a return to Microsoft's longtime practices. Walker links to the Wikipedia entry for Fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD), and accuses Microsoft of muddying the waters to distract from recent security issues." "It's no coincidence that Microsoft's newfound interest in attacking us comes on the heels of the SolarWinds attack and at a moment when they've allowed tens of thousands of their customers ... to be actively hacked via major Microsoft vulnerabilities," says Walker. "Microsoft was warned about the vulnerabilities in their system, knew they were being exploited, and are now doing damage control while their customers scramble to pick up the pieces from what has been dubbed the Great Email Robbery. So maybe it's not surprising to see them dusting off the old diversionary Scroogled playbook."

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Google Chrome version 89 began rolling out to users in the stable channel on March 2 and should be on most people's machines by now. From a report: The new build offers significant memory savings on 64-bit Windows platforms thanks to increased use of Google's PartitionAlloc memory allocator. On macOS, Chrome 89 plays catch-up and gets closer to the performance of the flagship Windows builds. Google says use of RAM in 64-bit Windows is down up to 22 percent in the browser process, 8 percent in the renderer, and 3 percent in the GPU. The company also claims a 9 percent decrease in latency, meaning a more responsive browser. The improvements are largely due to intercepting malloc() calls with PartitionAlloc. Chrome 89 has also gotten significantly more aggressive about discarding unused RAM. When you scroll resources such as large images off-screen in the foreground tab, Chrome discards the memory those resources used. The change impacts background tabs as well, resulting in a savings of as much as 100MiB per tab.

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I'm juggling too many balls in my development work. I just lost about 24 hours tracking down a problem. I had some code outside of my davetwitter module that really belonged in there, so after a half-day of working on something else, I decided to quickly move the code from where it was to where I wanted it. However since I was actively developing the davetwitter module, I included it using a require call to include a copy of the file, without going through NPM; and here's the key thing, in one place, and in another I used NPM. I couldn't understand why a properly initialized config object at startup would all of a sudden be completely uninitialized when I used it later. The answer was there were two davetwitters, one initialized the other not. A sloppy mistake I would never have made in a bootstrap. This kind of thing only happens when factoring. I guess the moral of the story is I should only attempt these integrations at the beginning of the day, when no other project is loaded into my brain, and I'd be more likely to spot these kinds of mismatches. In the end it cost me a lot of time to try to do it quickly. That's a lesson I've had to learn many times, and still am learning. I even have a slogan for it -- "Slow down to hurry up."

I have a friend who I have known for a long time, who I love very much, who is one of the smartest people I know, who I would trust with my life, who says she does not want the vaccine. I have told her I'm going to write about it, without naming her, because the goal isn't to shame her, not even slightly, but rather to explore why I was enthusiastic to receive the vaccination, and to be open about it, to share my thoughts and experiences.

First, why I wanted the vaccine. The main reason: I was horrified to think of dying alone, suffocating, feeling awful, surrounded by people who were overworked and exhausted. Your body is theirs. Your life is in their hands.

Hospitals are harsh places. It's never quiet, the lights are always on, people come and go at all times. You're in pain, and groggy from the meds they give you, and you have to grapple with whatever the future holds for you. I've been there myself, with parents who were gravely ill, this is not a place you want to go in good times, and it most definitely is not a place to be during a pandemic, where the odds of survival, if you're sick enough to be in the hospital, are awful. 1 in 100, say. So you're lying there, feeling terrible, with no one help your soul through the most difficult thing a person has to do, knowing you're almost certainly not getting out of there alive. The fear of dying that way overwhelms me. I'd do almost anything to avoid it. Take a vaccine, twice? Sure! No problem.

Okay so what about the other side. Why would you not want to take a vaccine. I listened, and skimmed the brochure my friend sent. And I thought about it. Conceding that the vaccine makers are all big companies with problems in their history, I also know they went through a vetting process with the FDA, and other regulators elsewhere. Yes, it's possible that the government officials could be bribed, but I honestly don't believe they were. Had it only been the Trump government that was supervising it, I would have been more suspicious than I am now. I'd say I'm 95% confident that the FDA can be trusted, and they say the vaccines can be trusted so that's 95% good enough for me. Considering the risk of the awful death I outlined in the first part, this would be enough for me to risk it. But there's more. Suppose the government was in cahoots with the drug manufacturers, what is the probability that that fact would not leak? That's where my real trust lies. I think most professionals in every profession want to do it well. But in this case, every doctor and researcher would have to be in on it. And that's just not possible, imho. The world doesn't work that way.

As much as I love and trust this friend, I also have a friend who is a biomedical researcher who I've known since he was a little person, five or six years old. A real brat who grew up to be a wonderful friend, who I have been talking with since the beginning of the pandemic. He's now in his mid-30s, and because of his field, had early access to the vaccine. He took it. The question of me not taking it never came up in our talks.

I follow lots of doctors' advice. Some of it has been awful and left me with disabilities. Ones that I can live with and are not painful, and ones which are actually hard to live with. So I am very skeptical of the competence of individual doctors. But I also understand that their prescriptions are the result of a huge amount of testing, statistics, cost and risk analysis. With vaccines, they aren't just prescribing a treatment for individuals, I also got the vaccine for everyone else.

This is true of all medicine. The drugs we take to control our diseases aren't designed for each of us individually, they are designed for all humans, we are all assumed to be the same, because there's no other sane way to do it. That's why they print the side-effects warnings on the labels, so we know that while this treatment works for most people, for some it will hurt them, and for some it will kill them. I don't want to die that way either, but I understand statistics and probability and I also understand that I am part of a community, and my health affects yours in a pandemic, and vice versa.

There's more to the story, but this is enough for now.

Pakistan has banned TikTok again in the country after reviewing a complaint that said the popular video app hosted immoral and objectionable content. From a report: A high court in the city of Peshawar on Thursday ordered the nation's telecom authority -- Pakistan Telecom Authority (PTA) -- to ban TikTok. In a statement Thursday evening, Pakistan Telecom Authority said it was complying with the order and had "issued directions to the service providers to immediately block access to the TikTok app."TikTok had about 33 million users in Pakistan last month, according to mobile insight firm App Annie (data of which an industry executive shared with TechCrunch). There are about 100 million internet users in the South Asian nation. The Peshawar High Court's Chief Justice Qaiser Rashid Khan described some videos on TikTok as "unacceptable for Pakistani society," and said these videos were "peddling vulgarity," according to local media reports.

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