The Free Software Foundation shared an update on its "series of actions to strengthen and modernize the foundation's governance structure and processes." After a series of interviews with various firms, the board has retained a professional consultant to help the FSF devise and execute the changes needed to optimize the impact of the board and the organization. During an initial six-month engagement, the firm will work with board members and FSF stakeholders to devise a range of systems and infrastructure that lead to: - A transparent community-supported process for identifying new board members and evaluating current board members; - A board member agreement that clearly outlines the responsibilities of all board members; - A code of ethics that articulates the values of the FSF and conveys a set of principles to guide its decision making and activities, as well as the behavior of its board members, officers, employees, and volunteers; and, - More focused and streamlined board processes that encourage consistent attention on FSF's most pressing needs .In addition, FSF executive director John Sullivan has begun recruiting candidates to succeed him as the organization's chief employed officer... The board is also evaluating the first proposed changes to its bylaws since 2002. The goals of these revisions are to ensure that user freedom cannot be compromised by changes in the board, members, or hostile courts, with particular focus on the future of the various GNU General Public Licenses (GPL); to codify the implementation of the staff seat created on March 25, 2021; and, to align the bylaws with the outcomes of the ongoing effort to modernize the foundation's governance structure and processes. As FSF continues to pursue its mission, the board believes these collective efforts will strengthen the organization's governance, ensuring that it is transparent, accountable, and professional for current and future board members, associate members, staff, and the broader free software movement. These efforts also underscore the board's recognition of the need to attract a new generation of activists for software freedom and to grow the movement.

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The New York Times reports: When Kroger customers in Cincinnati shop online these days, their groceries may be picked out not by a worker in their local supermarket but by a robot in a nearby warehouse... And in the drive-through lane at Checkers near Atlanta, requests for Big Buford burgers and Mother Cruncher chicken sandwiches may be fielded not by a cashier in a headset, but by a voice-recognition algorithm. An increase in automation, especially in service industries, may prove to be an economic legacy of the pandemic. Businesses from factories to fast-food outlets to hotels turned to technology last year to keep operations running amid social distancing requirements and contagion fears. Now the outbreak is ebbing in the United States, but the difficulty in hiring workers — at least at the wages that employers are used to paying — is providing new momentum for automation... [S]ome economists say the latest wave of automation could eliminate jobs and erode bargaining power, particularly for the lowest-paid workers, in a lasting way. "Once a job is automated, it's pretty hard to turn back," said Casey Warman, an economist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia who has studied automation in the pandemic... A working paper published by the International Monetary Fund this year predicted that pandemic-induced automation would increase inequality in coming years, not just in the United States but around the world. "Six months ago, all these workers were essential," said Marc Perrone, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers, a union representing grocery workers. "Everyone was calling them heroes. Now, they're trying to figure out how to get rid of them...." The push toward automation goes far beyond the restaurant sector. Hotels, retailers, manufacturers and other businesses have all accelerated technological investments. In a survey of nearly 300 global companies by the World Economic Forum last year, 43 percent of businesses said they expected to reduce their work forces through new uses of technology... Daron Acemoglu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said that many of the technological investments had just replaced human labor without adding much to overall productivity. In a recent working paper, Professor Acemoglu and a colleague concluded that "a significant portion of the rise in U.S. wage inequality over the last four decades has been driven by automation" — and he said that trend had almost certainly accelerated in the pandemic. "If we automated less, we would not actually have generated that much less output but we would have had a very different trajectory for inequality," Professor Acemoglu said. "We'll look back and say why didn't we do this sooner," fast-food franchisee Shana Gonzales told the Times after implementing an automated voice-recognition system that takes customers' orders. Gonzales added that she'd gladly hire human workers instead, but she just can't find them, and says she's even tried raising their starting pay rate — from $9 an hour to $10. "Ms. Gonzales acknowledged she could fully staff her restaurants if she offered $14 to $15 an hour to attract workers. But doing so, she said, would force her to raise prices so much that she would lose sales — and automation allows her to take another course."

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Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares news from UPI: The creators of a new instant water disinfectant, made using only hydrogen and the surrounding air, claim their invention is "millions of times more effective" at ridding water of viruses and bacteria than commercial purification methods. In addition to revolutionizing municipal water cleaning, the inventors of the novel technique suggest their disinfectant can help safely and cheaply deliver potable water to communities in need. Around the world, an estimated 780 million people are without reliable access to clean water, and millions more experience water scarcity at least once a month. The technique — described Thursday in the journal Nature Catalyst — uses a catalyst of gold and palladium to instantly turn hydrogen and oxygen into hydrogen peroxide, a common disinfectant... The new disinfectant, which can be made and used on site, eliminates the safety issues associated with commercial hydrogen peroxide and chlorine purification methods. In lab tests, researchers found their catalyst yielded not only hydrogen peroxide, but a variety of highly reactive compounds called reactive oxygen species, or ROS. It turned out that these novel compounds were responsible for the majority of the new disinfectant's impressive antibacterial and antiviral abilities... When compared to commercially produced hydrogen peroxide, scientists found their instant disinfectant was 10 million times more potent against viruses and bacteria.

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For three weeks the "payload computer" has been down on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, and "Without it, the instruments on board meant to snap pictures and collect data are not currently working," NPR recently reported. But as this weekend approached, NASA made an announcement... NASA confirmed that there is a procedure for turning on the telescope's backup hardware, and that in the coming week it will first test those crucial procedures. (In the past week NASA has "completed preparations" for those tests.) After more than 30 years in space, "the telescope itself and science instruments remain healthy and in a safe configuration," NASA confirmed this week. But while they've now suspended new scientific observations, images already collected by the telescope are still being analyzed, reports Space.com — including one image with all the colors of the American flag released just before the holiday celebrating the country's founding as an independent nation: The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a dazzling view of a distant star cluster, one filled with stars that sparkle in red, white and blue, unveiled just in time for the Fourth of July U.S. holiday. The photo, which NASA and the European Space Agency released July 2, shows the open star cluster NGC 330, a group of stars located about 180,000 light-years away in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf satellite galaxy to our own Milky Way, in the constellation Tucana, the Toucan... Astronomers used archived observations from Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 in 2018 to create this image to support two different studies aimed at understanding how star clusters evolve and how large stars can grow before they explode as supernovas. "The most stunning object in this image is actually the very small star cluster in the lower left corner of the image, surrounded by a nebula of ionised hydrogen (red) and dust (blue)," ESA officials said in a separate image description. " Named Galfor 1, the cluster was discovered in 2018 in Hubble's archival data, which was used to create this latest image from Hubble." And today NASA also tweeted out an image of "the Fireworks Galaxy," the spiral galaxy Caldwell 12 with an unprecedented 10 supernovae observed since 1917.

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Canada's highest temperature ever recorded happened Tuesday, in the small British Columbia town of Lytton, reports CNN. But it's just part of "an unprecedented heat wave that has over a week killed hundreds of people and triggered more than 240 wildfires" across the Canadian province — "most of which are still burning." Lytton hit 49.6 degrees Celsius (121.3 degrees Fahrenheit), astounding for the town of just 250 people nestled in the mountains, where June maximum temperatures are usually around 25 degrees Celsius (77 degrees Fahrenheit). This past week, however, its nights have been hotter than its days usually are, in a region where air conditioning is rare and homes are designed to retain heat. Now fires have turned much of Lytton to ash and forced its people, as well as hundreds around them, to flee. Scientists have warned for decades that climate change will make heat waves more frequent and more intense. That is a reality now playing out in Canada, but also in many other parts of the northern hemisphere that are increasingly becoming uninhabitable. Roads melted this week in America's northwest, and residents in New York City were told not to use high-energy appliances, like washers and dryers — and painfully, even their air conditioners — for the sake of the power grid. In Russia, Moscow reported its highest-ever June temperature of 34.8 degrees Celsius (94 degrees Fahrenheit) on June 23, and Siberian farmers are scrambling to save their crops from dying in an ongoing heat wave. Even in the Arctic Circle, temperatures soared into the 30s [above 86 degrees Fahrenheit]. The World Meteorological Organization is seeking to verify the highest-ever temperature north of the Arctic Circle since records there began, after a weather station in Siberia's Verkhoyansk recorded a 38-degree day on June 20 [over 100 degrees Fahrenheit]. In India, tens of millions of people in the northwest were affected by heat waves... And in Iraq, authorities announced a public holiday across several provinces for Thursday, including the capital Baghdad, because it was simply too hot to work or study, after temperatures surpassed 50 degrees and its electricity system collapsed.

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The San Francisco Chronicle reports on a startup named Wildtype that hopes to open a unique sushi bar this fall serving salmon grown in a lab: Like other alternative meat companies, Wildtype hopes it can eventually produce enough fish to be sold at grocery stores and to be served in dishes at Bay Area restaurants... Companies like Wildtype fall into the category of what's known as cell-based agriculture, where instead of plant-based alternatives, animal cells are used to create cuts of meat in a lab. In the case of Wildtype, the company is still working with the same salmon cells it acquired a few years ago to create fish in its lab. These salmon cells are then fed nutrients in the tank before they are harvested and affixed to plant-based structures that enable the cells to grow into a particular cut of the fish. From the cell stage to harvesting, it can take between three weeks to three months, said Elfenbein. Conventional fish farming can often take upwards of a year before the fish can be harvested... The company is still working to get approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to open its sushi bar to the public, though Kolbeck is hopeful that might happen by the end of this year. Unlike plant-based meat substitutes like Impossible Foods and Beyond Beef, which have skyrocketed in popularity in recent years, cell-based, lab-grown meat products have yet to be approved for mass consumption by the FDA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Bay Area companies like Eat Just, Wildtype and Berkeley's Upside Foods are among a growing number of companies nationwide looking to make lab-grown meat go mainstream in an effort to counter the environmental impacts of traditional meat production. In December last year, the Singapore government approved the sale of Eat Just's lab-grown chicken, making it the first country in the world to approve such meat consumption on a commercial scale... Wildtype hasn't been able to mass-produce quite yet. The Dogpatch production facility is hoping to produce 50,000 pounds per year in the near future, with plans to expand to 200,000 pounds per year in a larger space down the road, Kolbeck said.

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League of Legends developer Riot Games released a 37-track album of ambient tunes (now on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Music) "that will let gamers stream their sessions accompanied by music that doesn't infringe copyright protections," reports Bloomberg. And that's just one response to aggressive copyright enforcement: For example, a new Guardians of the Galaxy game to be released later this year will be loaded with a soundtrack with songs by Iron Maiden, KISS, Wham!, Blondie and more. To stay on the good side of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the studio behind the game, Eidos Montreal, has created a toggle switch that will allow gamers to turn off the soundtrack when live streaming, Venturebeat has reported. Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt SA also created an option for players to turn off certain songs that could cause trouble and replace them with an alternative. After largely ignoring streaming platforms for years, last spring the music industry suddenly bore down on Twitch, owned by Amazon.com Inc. and started sending users thousands of DMCA takedowns for copyright violations. Twitch responded by telling users they could no longer use copyrighted material and also had to remove old posts that violated the rules. Some games are still struggling to adapt. Earlier this month, a number of music publishers, including those that represent Ed Sheeran and Ariana Grande, sued Roblox Corp. for copyright infringement, saying the company hasn't licensed the music many of its creators have used in their games. The lawsuit is seeking at least $200 million in damages, the Wall Street Journal reported... The collection is just the beginning and Riot said it's committed to creating more projects like Sessions in the future.

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I was taught as a youngster that the US was the greatest country ever, both at home and in school. I imagine this is the same education kids in every terrible country ever got. And my parents were biased, they were immigrants who would have died for sure in Europe during WW II if the US hadn't taken them in.

Over time they came to see the reality that the US is a seriously flawed country. But nothing would have prepared them for what we've seen in the last five years. My mom died in February 2018, so she did live to see Trump elected, but did not see the January 6 insurrection, and all the looney tunes that followed. She also missed out on the 1619 Project which was, for me a real head-turner.

I knew slavery was part of our legacy, but I didn't know that it was pretty much our whole legacy. We fought and won a Civil War to purge ourselves of slavery, but that wasn't enough, Jim Crow undid a lot of the good that was done in post-Civil War America. The Voting Rights Act, passed in 1965 and re-authorized in 2006, has now been gutted by the Supreme Court. And the Republican-run states are rapidly moving to deprive citizens of color their voting rights.

The fact is the US is an awful fucked up country. It doesn't live up to the promise of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution for a huge portion of the population, and that means it doesn't mean shit for the rest of us.

I am an American, nothing is going to change that, but if you asked me do I feel this is the greatest country ever, I'd say that's an idea we have to purge from our minds, the US is the opposite, it's a fat, lazy, spoiled, ridiculous excuse for a country. If we want to amount to anything we need to take a 180 degree turn now.

Suggestion: Choose to not be offended, at least once a day.

Today's song: I'm Uncle Sam, how do you do?

California's energy commission has funded dozens of projects "serving as test beds for policies that might lead to commercialization of microgrids," reports the Associated Press: When a wildfire tore through Briceburg nearly two years ago, the tiny community on the edge of Yosemite National Park lost the only power line connecting it to the electrical grid. Rather than rebuilding poles and wires over increasingly dry hillsides, which could raise the risk of equipment igniting catastrophic fires, the nation's largest utility decided to give Briceburg a self-reliant power system. The stand-alone grid made of solar panels, batteries and a backup generator began operating this month. It's the first of potentially hundreds of its kind as Pacific Gas & Electric works to prevent another deadly fire like the one that forced it to file for bankruptcy in 2019. The ramping up of this technology is among a number of strategies to improve energy resilience in California as a cycle of extreme heat, drought and wildfires hammers the U.S. West, triggering massive blackouts and threatening the power supply in the country's most populous state... "I don't think anyone in the world anticipated how quickly the changes brought on by climate change would manifest. We're all scrambling to deal with that," said Peter Lehman, the founding director of the Schatz Energy Research Center, a clean energy institute in Arcata. The response follows widespread blackouts in California in the past two years that exposed the power grid's vulnerability to weather. Fierce windstorms led utilities to deliberately shut off power to large swaths of the state to keep high-voltage transmission lines from sparking fire. Then last summer, an oppressive heat wave triggered the first rolling outages in 20 years. More than 800,000 homes and businesses lost power over two days in August. During both crises, a Native American reservation on California's far northern coast kept the electricity flowing with the help of two microgrids that can disconnect from the larger electrical grid and switch to using solar energy generated and stored in battery banks near its hotel-casino. As most of rural Humboldt County sat in the dark during a planned shutoff in October 2019, the Blue Lake Rancheria became a lifeline for thousands of its neighbors: The gas station and convenience store provided fuel and supplies, the hotel housed patients who needed a place to plug in medical devices, the local newspaper used the conference room to put out the next day's edition, and a hatchery continued pumping water to keep its fish alive... During a few hours of rolling blackouts last August, the reservation's microgrids went into "island mode" to help ease stress on the state's maxed-out grid... State facilities are planning to quadruple the amount of battery storage from 500 megawatts to 2,000 megawatts by this August. But unfortunately, "There are setbacks too: An intensifying drought is weakening the state's hydroelectric facilities..."

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"Why didn't Microsoft die?" And what does that mean for other entrenched tech companies today? That's the question being asked by the New York Times' On Tech newsletter: For a decade or so, Microsoft botched so many significant technology trends that the company became a punchline. But Microsoft more than survived its epic mistakes. Today, it is (again) one of the tech world's superstars... Understanding Microsoft's staying power is relevant when considering an important current question: Are today's Big Tech superstars successful and popular because they're the best at what they do, or because they've become so powerful that they can coast on past successes? Ultimately the angst about Big Tech in 2021 — the antitrust lawsuits, the proposed new laws and the shouting — boils down to a debate about whether the hallmark of our digital lives is a dynamism that drives progress, or whether we actually have dynasties. And what I'm asking is, which one was Microsoft? Let me go back to Microsoft's dark days, which arguably stretched from the mid-2000s to 2014... The company failed to make a popular search engine, tried in vain to compete with Google in digital advertising and had little success selling its own smartphone operating systems or devices. And yet, even in the saddest years at Microsoft, the company made oodles of money. In 2013, the year that Steve Ballmer was semi-pushed to retire as chief executive, the company generated far more profit before taxes and some other costs — more than $27 billion — than Amazon did in 2020... On the healthy side of the ledger, Microsoft did at least one big thing right: cloud computing, which is one of the most important technologies of the past 15 years. That and a culture change were the foundations that morphed Microsoft from winning in spite of its strategy and products to winning because of them. This is the kind of corporate turnaround that we should want. I'll also say that Microsoft is different from its Big Tech peers in a way that might have made it more resilient. Businesses, not individuals, are Microsoft's customers and technology sold to organizations doesn't necessarily need to be good to win. And now the discouraging explanation: What if the lesson from Microsoft is that a fading star can leverage its size, savvy marketing and pull with customers to stay successful even if it makes meh products, loses its grip on new technologies and is plagued by flabby bureaucracy? Was Microsoft so big and powerful that it was invincible, at least long enough to come up with its next act? And are today's Facebook or Google comparable to a 2013 Microsoft — so entrenched that they can thrive even if they're not the best?

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"A human rights group that attracted millions of views on YouTube to testimonies from people who say their families have disappeared in China's Xinjiang region is moving its videos to little-known service Odysee after some were taken down by the Google-owned streaming giant, two sources told Reuters." Long-time Slashdot reader sinij shares their report: Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights' channel has published nearly 11,000 videos on YouTube totaling over 120 million views since 2017, thousands of which feature people speaking to camera about relatives they say have disappeared without a trace in China's Xinjiang region, where UN experts and rights groups estimate over a million people have been detained in recent years. On June 15, the channel was blocked for violating YouTube's guidelines, according to a screenshot seen by Reuters, after twelve of its videos had been reported for breaching its 'cyberbullying and harassment' policy. The channel's administrators had appealed the blocking of all twelve videos between April and June, with some reinstated — but YouTube did not provide an explanation as to why others were kept out of public view, the administrators told Reuters. Following inquiries from Reuters as to why the channel was removed, YouTube restored it on June 18, explaining that it had received multiple so-called 'strikes' for videos which contained people holding up ID cards to prove they were related to the missing, violating a YouTube policy which prohibits personally identifiable information from appearing in its content... YouTube asked Atajurt to blur the IDs. But Atajurt is hesitant to comply, the channel's administrator said, concerned that doing so would jeopardize the trustworthiness of the videos. Fearing further blocking by YouTube, they decided to back up content to Odysee, a website built on a blockchain protocol called LBRY, designed to give creators more control. About 975 videos have been moved so far. Even as administrators were moving content, they received another series of automated messages from YouTube stating that the videos in question had been removed from public view, this time because of concerns that they may promote violent criminal organizations... Atajurt representatives fear pro-China groups who deny that human rights abuses exist in Xinjiang are using YouTube's reporting features to remove their content by reporting it en masse, triggering an automatic block. Representatives shared videos on WhatsApp and Telegram with Reuters which they said described how to report Atajurt's YouTube videos. An activist working with the group told Reuters he's also faced offline challenges — including having his hard disks and cellphones confiscated multiple times in Kazakhstan. This meant that the only place where they'd stored their entire video collection was YouTube.

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"A U.K. high court told Bitcoin.org it can no longer share the 2008 white paper that outlines what bitcoin is on its website," reports Business Insider, "delivering a victory to Craig Wright, a computer scientist who claimed he wrote the original document." Wright won the copyright-infringement case he brought by default, after the website's anonymous founder, known as Cobra, decided not to speak in his defense in the proceedings in London. The ruling on Monday means Bitcoin.org must take the document down from its website. It must also pay Wright £35,000 ($48,600) toward legal costs, as well as put a notice of the court's order on its website for six months, said Ontier, the law firm representing Wright... "This is an important development in Dr Wright's quest to obtain judicial vindication of his copyright in his white paper," said Simon Cohen, a senior associate at London-based Ontier... The Australian computer scientist claimed to be the original author of the white paper that was published in 2008 and describes what bitcoin is and how it works. Ontier said Wright took Cobra to court in order to prevent supporters of assets such as Bitcoin Core from using the white paper to mis-represent those assets as bitcoin... "I didn't turn up because I didn't want to expose my identity," Cobra told Insider in a tweet. Cobra shared more philosophical thoughts on Twitter: All your fiat based assets are ultimately secured by the same legal system that today made it illegal for me to host the Bitcoin whitepaper because a notorious liar swore before a judge that he's Satoshi. A system where 'justice' depends on who's got the bigger wallet. I don't think you could get a better advertisement of *why* Bitcoin is necessary than what happened today. Rules enforced through cryptography are far more superior than rules based on whoever can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in court. In later tweets he added: Sucks when you have billionaires determined to bury you in endless frivolous litigation... Normally it's the person who owes money who runs and hides, but I've repeatedly reached out to CSW to pay him his court ordered costs, and he doesn't seem to want to receive it. Perhaps he is running away from his money so he can make me in "contempt of court"?

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