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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 54 declined, 15 accepted (69 total, 21.74% accepted)

Submission + - Malicious code submitted and accepted to PHP core. (php.net)

dotancohen writes: Late Sunday night, on March 28, 2021, Nikita Popov, a core PHP committer, released a statement indicating that two malicious commits had been pushed to the php-src git repository. These commits were pushed to create a backdoor that would have effectively allowed attackers to achieve remote code execution through PHP and an HTTP header.

Submission + - Treefinder revokes software license for users in immigrant-friendly nations (sciencemag.org)

dotancohen writes: The author of bioinformatics software Treefinder is revoking the license to his software for researchers working in eight European countries because those countries allow too many immigrants to cross their borders, effective 1 October. The author states "Immigration to my country harms me, it harms my family, it harms my people. Whoever invites or welcomes immigrants to Europe and Germany is my enemy”.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: How to handle unfixed Linux accessibility bugs?

dotancohen writes: It is commonly said that open source software is preferable because if you need something changed, you can change it yourself. Well, I am not an Xorg developer and I cannot maintain a separate Xorg fork. Xorg version 1.13.1 introduced a bug which breaks the "Sticky Keys" accessibility option. Thus, handicapped users who rely on the feature cannot use Xorg-based systems with the affected versions and are stuck on older software versions. Though all pre-bug Linux distros are soon scheduled for retirement, there seems to be no fix in sight. Should disabled users stick with outdated, vulnerable, and unsupported Linux distros or should we move to OS-X / Windows? The prospect of changing my OS, applications, and practices due to such an ostensibly small issue is frightening.

Note that we are not discussing "I don't like change" but rather "this unintentional change is incompatible with my physical disability". Thus this is not a case of every change breaks someone's workflow.
Hardware

Submission + - Linux-friendly major motherboard manufacturers? 2

dotancohen writes: "I am tasked with building a few Linux machines for a small office. However, all the currently available motherboards seem to be Linux-hostile. For instance, in addition to the whole UEFI issue, my last install was a three-day affair due to the motherboard reporting a Linux-supported ethernet device (the common RTL8168) whilst it was actually using a GbE Ethernet device that does not work with the legacy drivers and didn't even work with a test Windows 7 install until the driver disk was installed. There are no current HCL for Debian or Ubuntu and I've written to Asus and Gigabyte but from both have received the expected reply: No official Linux support, install Windows for best experience.

Note that I did even turn to the two large local computer vendors asking if they could provide Linux-compatible machines ready to go, but neither of them would be of any help. What globally-available motherboards or motherboard manufacturers can one recommend today?"

Submission + - Greenpeace penetrates French nuclear plant (aljazeera.com)

dotancohen writes: "Greenpeace activists secretly entered a French nuclear site before dawn and draped a banner reading "Hey" and "Easy" on its reactor containment building, to expose the vulnerability of atomic sites in the country. Greenpeace said the break-in aimed to show that an ongoing review of safety measures, ordered by French authorities after a tsunami ravaged Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant earlier this year, was focused too narrowly on possible natural disasters, and not human factors."

Submission + - AskSlashdot: Calculators with 1-2-3 numpads? 2

dotancohen writes: "Although the telephone has the 1-2-3 key on the top row, most calculators and keyboards have 7-8-9 on the top row. Switching between the two destroys muscle- and spatial- memory. Do any slashdotters use a scientific calculator with 1-2-3 on the top row? I've already scraped and resoldered my Casio fx-82 calculator to have 1-2-3 on the top, and remapped the numpad in Kubuntu, but if there exist any calculators like this already on the market I'd buy two."
Mars

Submission + - Mars rover Spirit is no more (discovermagazine.com)

dotancohen writes: "fter nearly a year of trying to reestablish communications with the Spirit Mars rover, NASA has decided to suspend efforts. Communications channels used to contact the vehicle (redesignated from "rover" to "spot" when it got stuck in a sand trap) will be used to develop a communications base wit hthe next Mars rover: the ambitious Mars Science Laboratory."

Submission + - Fedora 16 will number user UIDs from 1000 (fedoraproject.org)

dotancohen writes: "Sharing users between Fedora and Debian-based distros just got a little easier. Beginning with Fedora 16, the Red-Hat based distro will number it's human user UIDs starting from 1000, as opposed to the old 500. Though this change is intended to facilitate interoperability with other distros, it risks breaking backward compatibility with older Fedora releases including the newly released Fedora 15."
Programming

Submission + - Ergonomic mechanical-switch keyboard?

dotancohen writes: As my hands wear I find that I need an ergonomic (split) keyboard. It seems that 98% of the available ergonomics are either crippled with dome-switches or have unusual designs which place many critical keys under the thumbs (I cannot use my right thumb). The one normal-appearing contender, the Northgate Ergonomic Evolution, seems to be noisier than even the Model M, in fact it echoes! Programmers and hobbyists geeky enough to be here today, what do you type on?
Programming

Submission + - FOSS Licences Wars: trying to write an app

dotancohen writes: "Here's an exercise: Write a GPLed server for solving Freecell that the graphical game would communicate with using TCP/IP or a different IPC mechanism. Easy, right? Except for that pesky licensing bit. Our own Shlomi Fish gives an overview of the various options in picking up a licence for one's FOSS project, and tries to give some guidelines choosing one."
Earth

Submission + - Reaction Engines plan Mach 5 airliner (vnunet.com) 2

What is? writes: "A British company has designed an eco-friendly airliner that could make a trip from London to Sydney in under five hours. Reaction Engines has received funding from the European Space Agency to design the plane as part of the Long-Term Advanced Propulsion Concepts and Technologies project. The A2 airliner would be capable of carrying 300 passengers at speeds of up to Mach 5."
Networking

Submission + - How do slashdotters manage email on their laptops?

dotancohen writes: "I'll soon be getting a new Dell laptop that'll be running Fedora Core 5 or 6. I need to access the email stored on my home box from the laptop, and also to read new email sent to me while I'm not home (and the home box is shut down). If I run an IMAP server at home, then I can't read the mail when the home box is down. But if I pull from the POP3 server (and leave the mail on the server) then I won't be able to sort and file the mail while on the go. Is there anyway to sync the mail accounts between two linux boxen, assuming that I'm using the same mail client? I currently use Kmail, but I might switch to Eudora in April/March when it becomes available for Linux.

Thanks in advance."

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