The GNOME 40 desktop update has been released with a bunch of new improvements. Phoronix summarizes the major changes: GNOME 40 is out with the GTK4 toolkit in tow, many improvements and alterations to the GNOME Shell including major changes to the dash and workspaces, Mutter has continued refining its Wayland support, Mutter also added a native headless back-end for testing, atomic mode-setting is now supported, input handling is now done in a separate thread, and a wide variety of other improvements. And, yes, there is also the big shift in GNOME's versioning practices moving forward while still sticking to the same six month release regiment. The release announcement and release notes can be found at their respective links.

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Trying to convey the sheer scale of the nearly quarter-mile-long container ship that has been stuck in the Suez Canal since Tuesday evening, some news outlets compared it to the length of four soccer fields. Others simply called it gigantic. From a report: But the main thing to know was this: After powerful winds forced the ship aground on one of the canal's banks, it was big enough to block nearly the entire width of the canal, producing a large traffic jam in one of the world's most important maritime arteries. By Wednesday morning, more than 100 ships were stuck at each end of the 120-mile canal, which connects the Red Sea to the Mediterranean and carries roughly 10 percent of worldwide shipping traffic. Only the Panama Canal looms as large in the global passage of goods. "The Suez Canal is the choke point," said Capt. John Konrad, founder of the shipping news website gCaptain.com, noting that 90 percent of the world's goods are transported on ships. It "could not happen in a worse place," he said, "and the timing's pretty bad, too." The potential fallout is vast. The vessels caught in the bottleneck or expected to arrive there in the coming days include oil tankers carrying about one-tenth of a day's total global oil consumption, according to Kpler, a market research firm, to say nothing of the rest of the cargo now waiting to traverse the canal. And if the ship is not freed within a few days, it would add one more burden to a global shipping industry already reeling from the coronavirus pandemic, creating delays, shortages of goods and higher prices for consumers. The ship, the Ever Given, was heading from China to the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. It ran aground amid poor visibility and high winds from a sandstorm that struck much of northern Egypt this week, according to George Safwat, a spokesman for the Suez Canal Authority. The storm caused an "inability to direct the ship," he said in a statement.

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Swinging above the African savannah, an upside-down rhino suspended from a helicopter looks comically surreal. But for the black rhino, flying to new territory is no laughing matter -- it's about survival. From a report: Most rhino translocations are carried out with trucks, but some remote locations can't be reached by road. So ten years ago, conservationists began using helicopters, on an occasional basis, to move rhinos to and from inaccessible terrain. The rhino is either placed on its side on a stretcher, or hung upside down by its legs. Conservationists like the upside-down airlift because it's faster, easier and less expensive than the stretcher option, but until now it hasn't been clear how being flipped affects the rhinos. Seeking to find out, the Namibian government asked a research team at Cornell's College of Veterinary Medicine to look into the practice. The results, published in January, were surprising. "We were anticipating that the rhinos would fare worse hanging upside down," says Robin Radcliffe, a senior lecturer in wildlife and conservation medicine. Instead, Radcliffe and his team found that although it looks like an uncomfortable experience, upside-down flying is the better option for rhino health. [...] Radcliffe says the upside-down position allows the spine to stretch which helps to open the airways. Additionally, the team found that when lying on their side, rhinos have a larger "dead space" -- the amount of air in each breath that does not contribute oxygen to the body. The difference between the two postures was small, but because the strong anaesthetic used on the rhino causes hypoxemia -- low oxygen levels in the blood -- even a minor improvement makes a difference to the rhino's welfare.

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Utah Gov. Spencer Cox signed a bill on Tuesday requiring all cellphones and tablets sold in the state to automatically block pornography. In order for it to take effect though, at least five other states have to pass the measure. The Hill reports: The bill, H.B. 72, is aimed at establishing filter requirements and enforcement for tablets and smartphones activated in the state on or after Jan. 1 of the year the measure takes effect, according to its text. Manufacturers that don't abide by the law could face fines of $10 for each violation with a cap of $500. The bill's sponsor, Rep. Susan Pulishper (R), said she was "grateful" that Cox signed the bill, which she said was aimed at keeping porn away from children, the AP notes. She also noted that parents could take the filters off. Jason Groth, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Utah, told the news service that the measure was "another example of the Legislature dodging the constitutional impacts of the legislation they pass." He further said the bill's constitutionality will likely be argued in court.

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The team that in 2019 brought you the first image of a black hole is now offering a new twist on that iconic view. From a report: The thin lines spiraling toward the central black hole shadow in the image above show emissions with different polarizations -- the direction in which light waves vibrate. Light is polarized if it passes through a magnetic field, so the spiraling lines point to the twisting magnetic field lines near the black hole's event horizon. As the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team describes today in a pair of papers in Astrophysical Journal, the new picture uses the same data as in the original image, produced from a series of observations in 2017 of the supermassive black hole at the core of nearby galaxy M87, using the combined collecting power of eight radio observatories across the world. To extract the polarization information, the data have gone through many months of additional analysis. Seeing the magnetic field will help astrophysicists solve an enduring mystery: how matter, sucked in from a swirling disk around the black hole's equator, can sometimes feed a powerful jet of matter and energy spewing from its poles. M87's black hole has a jet that extends 5000 light-years away from the galaxy. The EHT team says the orientation of the magnetic field lines suggests they help push matter outward, against the pull of the black hole's gravity, a process that may funnel some of it toward the jet.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Intel made several big announcements about its 7nm tech at this week's Intel Unleashed: Engineering the Future event and divulged that it expects that the majority of its products in 2023 to still be produced in-house using its own manufacturing technology. But there's a caveat: Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said the company will also release "leadership CPU products" in 2023 with CPU cores that are fabricated with an unspecified process node from third-party foundry TSMC, and those CPUs will come to both the client and data center markets. This development comes on the heels of Intel's announcement last year that its 7nm process was delayed, possibly forcing it to do the unthinkable -- turn to external foundries to produce its core logic, like CPUs and GPUs, for the first time in the company's history. The newest announcements mean that, in addition to the 7nm Meteor Lake desktop chips and Granite Rapids data center processors that Intel will produce with its own process technology in 2023, the company will also release other lines of CPUs in 2023 that will use CPU cores with an as-yet-unspecified process node from TSMC. Intel noted that the chips that utilize TSMC's third-party process tech will power Intel's "CPU leadership" products for both the client and data center markets, suggesting a split product stack. Intel says that the majority of its products in 2023 will come manufactured with its own process technology. Still, it's important to note that Intel hasn't specified that the majority of the newly-released 2023 products will come with its own 7nm process. Naturally, Intel will still have plenty of chip production volume centered on its 14nm and 10nm process tech in that timeframe, and even older nodes that still ship in large volumes. Further reading: Intel To Spend $20 Billion To Build Two New Chip Fabs In Arizona.

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Sidestepping a crackdown on internet use since the military seized power almost two months ago, hundreds of thousands of protesters and citizens in Myanmar are finding different ways to communicate online, downloading tools to bypass censorship restrictions and turning to alternative media sources and underground networks, according to new research. From a report: They have moved to a mirror site of Facebook on the dark web, used apps that rely on Bluetooth technology to continue messaging each other and turned to lesser known social media platforms to stay connected, according to Recorded Future, a closely held cybersecurity firm based near Boston. Myanmar citizens are following the lead of protesters in Hong Kong, Belarus and elsewhere who have found creative ways around government internet restrictions. Protesters from some of those countries are now providing guidance and support to Myanmar, and online forums are offering tips on how its citizens can stay connected. "In the history of Myanmar and all the coups they've experienced and all this political upheaval, it looks to be the first time the people really had this type of access to alternative platforms, and have used it to reach out to international organizations and other countries for help," said Charity Wright, cyber threat intelligence analyst at Recorded Future, who has been studying the impact of the crackdown on the internet for the past month and a half.

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A coalition of 12 state attorneys general on Wednesday sent a letter to Facebook and Twitter, pressing them to do more to ensure online falsehoods aren't undermining efforts to vaccinate the public against covid-19. From a report: Connecticut Attorney General William Tong (D) and 11 other Democratic state attorneys general called Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to "take immediate steps" to fully enforce their policies against vaccine misinformation. The attorneys general say the companies have not cracked down hard enough on prominent anti-vaccine accounts that repeatedly violate the companies' terms of service. They also say that falsehoods about the safety of coronavirus vaccines from a small pool of individuals has reached over 59 million followers on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter, citing data from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which studies online misinformation and disinformation. They sent the letter the day before Zuckerberg, Dorsey, and Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai are expected to testify in front of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The hearing is broadly focused on disinformation, and lawmakers and their staff have been in communication with leaders of Anti-Vax Watch, a collection of people and organizations concerned about vaccine disinformation.

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WhatsApp's planned policy changes aren't sailing smoothly in India, the instant messaging service's biggest market by users. From a report: Indian antitrust body, Competition Commission of India, on Wednesday ordered an investigation into WhatsApp's privacy policy changes, saying that Facebook-owned service breached local antitrust laws in the guise of a policy update. The Indian watchdog has ordered nation's Director General (DG) to investigate WhatsApp's new policy to "ascertain the full extent, scope and impact of data sharing through involuntary consent of users." The Director General has been ordered to complete the investigation and submit the report within 60 days. In its order, the Indian watchdog said WhatsApp's "take-it-or-leave-it" nature of privacy policy and terms of service "merit a detailed investigation in view of the market position and market power enjoyed by WhatsApp."

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I looked around for a decent explanation of JavaScript callbacks, but they take too long to get to the point, or they never explain what they are. Maybe it's too hard to explain? I've been writing a lot of docs lately, so let me try! :-)

Callbacks are used when an operation is going to take a long time and your program wants to do other things while it's waiting. So you create a function to run when the operation is done, and provide that function to the slow operation you're calling with the intent that it will call this function when it's done. Thus it is a callback function.

An example:

• fs.readFile ("notes.txt", function (err, filetext) {
• if (err) {
• console.log (err.message);
• }
• else {
• console.log ("The file contains " + filetext.length + " characters.");
• }
• });
• console.log ("Hi mom!")

If you look in the console, you'll see:

• Hi mom!
• The file contains 28 characters.
•  

An example of a real world callback.

After you upload a video to Facebook, you'll get a dialog when the upload is done saying this is going to take a bit of time to process, so we'll let you know when it's done. In the meantime you can read stuff. When the video is ready, you get a message saying you can watch the video now. That's the basic flow of a callback.

Following up on yesterday's news about Drummer, the key innovation is that you can write JavaScript code that's much simpler, because it does not need to use callbacks.

An example:

• dns.getDomainName (dns.getDottedId (liveblog.co))

This works even though both DNS operations do I/O.

We are using JavaScript's threading, we are not blocking the CPU.

A programmer in any other language will be scratching their head wondering what's the big deal. I know. I've been saying that for years. If Python can do this, I don't see why JavaScript shouldn't.

Note: JavaScript as spec'd can't do this. But we were able to make this work with a very simple pre-processor.

Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, said on Wednesday that the company now accepts Bitcoin as payment for cars in the United States. From a report: Tesla will hold the digital currency, rather than convert payments to dollars, and handle the crypto transactions internally, Mr. Musk said. "Bitcoin paid to Tesla will be retained as Bitcoin, not converted to fiat currency," Mr. Musk explained in a tweet. That means when someone buys a Tesla with Bitcoin, the price of the car could well rise -- or fall -- over time. In other words, Tesla is turning one-time payments into assets with shifting value, or, essentially, investments. Buyers outside the United States will have the option to use Bitcoin "later this year," Mr. Musk said. Mr. Musk said last month that the company bought $1.5 billion in Bitcoin for its treasury. The announcement on Wednesday confirms speculation in the crypto community that Tesla would not simply contract out payments to a third-party processor and treat Bitcoin like dollars. Musk tweeted, "Tesla is using only internal & open source software & operates Bitcoin nodes directly."

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David Leonhardt, writing at The New York Times: Bruce Sacerdote, an economics professor at Dartmouth College, noticed something last year about the Covid-19 television coverage that he was watching on CNN and PBS. It almost always seemed negative, regardless of what was he seeing in the data or hearing from scientists he knew. When Covid cases were rising in the U.S., the news coverage emphasized the increase. When cases were falling, the coverage instead focused on those places where cases were rising. And when vaccine research began showing positive results, the coverage downplayed it, as far as Sacerdote could tell. But he was not sure whether his perception was correct. To check, he began working with two other researchers, building a database of Covid coverage from every major network, CNN, Fox News, Politico, The New York Times and hundreds of other sources, in the U.S. and overseas. The researchers then analyzed it with a social-science technique that classifies language as positive, neutral or negative. The results showed that Sacerdote's instinct had been right -- and not just because the pandemic has been mostly a grim story. The coverage by U.S. publications with a national audience has been much more negative than coverage by any other source that the researchers analyzed, including scientific journals, major international publications and regional U.S. media. "The most well-read U.S. media are outliers in terms of their negativity," Molly Cook, a co-author of the study, told me. About 87 percent of Covid coverage in national U.S. media last year was negative. The share was 51 percent in international media, 53 percent in U.S. regional media and 64 percent in scientific journals. Notably, the coverage was negative in both U.S. media outlets with liberal audiences (like MSNBC) and those with conservative audiences (like Fox News).

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will tell lawmakers his plan for "thoughtful reform" of a key tech liability shield rests on requiring best practices for treating illegal content online. From a report: Tech giants are starting to embrace changes to the foundational law that shields platforms from liability from content users post as lawmakers from both parties threaten it. In written testimony ahead of the House hearing Thursday with Google, Twitter and Facebook CEOs, Zuckerberg suggested making Section 230 protections for certain types of unlawful content conditional on platforms' ability to meet best practices to fight the spread of the content. "Instead of being granted immunity, platforms should be required to demonstrate that they have systems in place for identifying unlawful content and removing it," Zuckerberg wrote in the testimony. "Platforms should not be held liable if a particular piece of content evades its detection -- that would be impractical for platforms with billions of posts per day -- but they should be required to have adequate systems in place to address unlawful content." The detection system would be proportionate to platform size, with practices defined by a third party. The best practices would not include "unrelated issues" like encryption or privacy changes, he notes. He also suggested Congress bring more transparency and oversight on how companies make and enforce rules about content that is harmful but still legal.

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Forget email. The final frontier for Slack, as it tries to reimagine the way millions of people communicate at work, is the text message. From a report: Email is a useful tool but a blunt one. It mixes business communication with receipts and confirmation numbers, makes it easy to talk to anyone but also maybe makes it too easy to talk to anyone. But text messages? Not every professional relationship graduates to text-message levels of intimacy, but the ones that do are the ones that matter most. And you might have an assistant read and filter your email, but pretty much everybody checks their own texts. It's the highest, most elusive rung of the business communication ladder, and it's exactly what Slack wants to replace. Starting on Wednesday, any Slack user will be able to direct message any other Slack user. The new system is called Connect DMs, and works a bit like the messaging apps and buddy lists of old: Users send an invite to anyone via their work email address, and once the recipient accepts their new contact is added to their Slack sidebar. The conversations are tied to the users' organizations, but exist in a separate section of the Slack app itself. Connect DMs turns Slack from an app for chatting with co-workers into an app for chatting with anyone. It puts Slack on par with both enterprise tools like Microsoft Teams and free consumer services like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. "When someone opens up their phone," said Ilan Frank, Slack's VP of product, "if they're connecting with their friends, they click on Facebook or WhatsApp. If they're connecting with someone they work with, regardless of where that person works, they should be clicking on Slack." That's a tricky thing to get right, both from a UI perspective and an IT one. But Slack is committed. This has been the plan since before Salesforce bought the company, and it feels even more urgent now. Slack needs this to work, in some ways, as Microsoft Teams and Zoom threaten to leave it behind. By expanding its purview, Slack gives users more reasons to try Slack, gives companies more reasons to adopt it, and makes Slack an even more central part of the modern workday.

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