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Submission + - Schneier on the Musk AI Government (theatlantic.com) 3

Submitted by databasecowgirl
databasecowgirl writes: Schneier and Sanders have an interesting essay in the Atlantic,Itâ(TM)s Time to Worry About DOGEâ(TM)s AI Plans Schneier, who has written extensively about the beneficial uses of AI in government covers some important concerns regarding Musk's plans.

Central to these are the ability to enable Blackbox Policy changes at the click of a button instead of having to create and pass changes legislatively through a potentially opposing Senate and House. Maybe not a concern for those who voted him in, but will it be a good idea to have implemented this system should a subsequent administration, holding opposing views, has access to the centralised power Musk envisions?

Submission + - KDE Plasma 6.3 released (kde.org)

Submitted by jrepin
jrepin writes: Almost after a year since the first release in the sixth generation of the popular Linux and UNIX desktop environment, KDE community announces the release of the latest version of KDE Plasma 6.3 . In this major release the System Settings’ Drawing Tablet page has been overhauled and split into multiple tabs to improve how things are organized, and new configuration options have been added to each section. KWin window manager makes a stronger effort to snap things to the screen’s pixel grid, greatly reducing blurriness and visual gaps everywhere and producing sharper and crisper images. In the color department, screen colors are more accurate when using the Night Light feature both with and without ICC profiles, and KWin offers the option to choose screen color accuracy. Hardware and system monitoring and information tools have also received new features and performance optimizations. KRunner (the built-in search tool that also does conversions, calculations, definitions, graph plotting, and much more) now let you jump between categories using keyboard shortcuts. A security enhancement landing in Discover software management/app store application highlights sandboxed apps whose permissions will change after being updated. If you’re a fan of the forecasts provided by Deutcher Wetterdienst, you’re in luck: Plasma 6.3’s weather widget allows using this source for weather data. You can now configure its built-in touchpad to switch off automatically, so it doesn’t interfere with your typing. When you drag a file out of a window that’s partially below other windows, it no longer jumps to the top, potentially obscuring what you wanted to drag it into. Plasma panels can now be cloned You can also use scripting to change your panels’ opacity levels and what screen they appear on. And there’s much more. To see the full list of changes, check out the complete changelog for KDE Plasma 6.3.

Submission + - Wired Is Covering the Musk Takeover of the US Government

Submitted by kilgoreTrout1968
kilgoreTrout1968 writes: Wired magazine's Vittoria Elliot is doing invaluable journalism covering Musk's invasion of the US Government's IT infrastructure. Wired is not giving glowing coverage. This is Wired magazine, folks, the people who know Musk best and most likely to be his fans

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wired.com%2Fauthor%2Fv...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wired.com%2Fstory%2Fth...

Comment Re:KDE (Score 2) 48

by jrepin (#64850505) Attached to: KDE Plasma 6.2 Released
Well there is a huge grain of truth in this. KDE Plasma is in fact quite a flexible and customizable framework and it can be used to quite easily imitate any existing desktop environment. So yeah even if it was the only DE it would still mean very much different layouts and look and feel for different "distributions" or form-factors of KDE Plasma.

Comment Re:Oh yes, wayland! (Score 2) 48

by jrepin (#64850237) Attached to: KDE Plasma 6.2 Released
Also proper support for scaling, including fractional scaling, and really tear-free rendering. There is a lot of solutions that Wayland brings. Unfortunately there are also some regressions. I especially miss the proper session management and restoration of applications from X11. But even here KDE Plasma did a very nice job, much better than any other desktop environment out there.

Comment Re:Linux desktop lives on (Score 2) 48

by jrepin (#64850093) Attached to: KDE Plasma 6.2 Released
Couldn't agree more. Still forced to use Windows (And macOS, which is evne worse) at work to test our software and yeah it is a good opportunity to remind me how much better GNU/Linux, especially with KDE Plasma desktop is. Not to mention all that sypware and ads and climate destroying "AI" they are recently forcing into Windows. It is even more terrible than it was when I switched to GNU/Linux years ago and by the looks of it just getting worse and worse.

Submission + - KDE Plasma 6.2 Released (kde.org)

Submitted by jrepin
jrepin writes: Plasma is a popular desktop (and mobile) environment for GNU/Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems. Among other things it also powers the desktop mode of Steam Deck gaming handheld. The KDE community today announced the latest release: Plasma 6.2 . This release includes new features for users of drawing tablets. It implements more complete support for the Wayland color management protocol, and enables it by default. There is also improved brightness handling for HDR and ICC profiles, as well as HDR performance. A new tone mapping feature built into Plasma’s KWin compositor will help improve the look of images with a brightness or set of colors greater than what the screen can display, thus reducing the “blown out” look such images can otherwise exhibit. When it comes to power management You can now override misbehaving applications that block the system from going to sleep or locking the screen (and thus prevent saving power), and you can also adjust the brightness of each connected monitor machine separately. Plasma’s built-in app store and software management tool, Discover, now supports PostmarketOS packages for your mobile devices, helps you write better reviews of apps, and presents apps’ license information more accurately. In Plasma 6.2, KDE have overhauled System Settings’ Accessibility page and added colorblindness filters. They've also added support for the full “sticky keys” feature on Wayland. You can read more about these and other features in the Plasma 6.2 anounncement and complete changelog.

Comment Re:Anyone else dislike the UI? (Score 1) 42

by jrepin (#64562401) Attached to: KDE Plasma 6.1 Released
Yeah I do, Oxygen theme by Nuno Pinheiro and the rest of the team was awesome. It had more texture to it more depth. Hard to say just more character in it. In general I don't like this modern trend and fashion of flat web-like boring interfaces. But yeah luckily KDE Plasma is so customizable and flexible you can make it look very different. And not just look different also you can configure the behavior a lot and really make it your very own desktop. Also something I can not find in any other desktop out there.

Comment Re:I have to ask... (Score 1) 42

by jrepin (#64562385) Attached to: KDE Plasma 6.1 Released
For me it is ever since 2004. And slowly ever since then all my close relatives have also been switching to GNU/Linux as well. Just this weekend the last one, one of my aunties, also switched after getting increasingly annoyed with Windows BS and the latest news of them trying to integrate more spyware right into the OS. So yeah for most people it can easily be the year of the GNU/Linux on the desktop, unless you are taken hostage of some very specific software that does not run on it either natively or via Wine emulation. Hack it is even smarter to run Windows in a locked down virtual machine in GNU/Linux then running it on the hardware these days. And as the trends show Windows will be a security and privacy hazard even more so in the future.

Submission + - Satellite 'Megaconstellations' May Jeopardize Recovery of Ozone Hole (phys.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: When old satellites fall into Earth's atmosphere and burn up, they leave behind tiny particles of aluminum oxide, which eat away at Earth's protective ozone layer. A new study finds that these oxides have increased 8-fold between 2016 and 2022 and will continue to accumulate as the number of low-Earth-orbit satellites skyrockets. The 1987 Montreal Protocol successfully regulated ozone-damaging CFCs to protect the ozone layer, shrinking the ozone hole over Antarctica with recovery expected within fifty years. But the unanticipated growth of aluminum oxides may push pause on the ozone success story in decades to come. Of the 8,100 objects in low Earth orbit, 6,000 are Starlink satellites launched in the last few years. Demand for global internet coverage is driving a rapid ramp up of launches of small communication satellite swarms. SpaceX is the frontrunner in this enterprise, with permission to launch another 12,000 Starlink satellites and as many as 42,000 planned. Amazon and other companies around the globe are also planning constellations ranging from 3,000 to 13,000 satellites, the authors of the study said. Internet satellites in low Earth orbit are short-lived, at about five years. Companies must then launch replacement satellites to maintain internet service, continuing a cycle of planned obsolescence and unplanned pollution.

Aluminum oxides spark chemical reactions that destroy stratospheric ozone, which protects Earth from harmful UV radiation. The oxides don't react chemically with ozone molecules, instead triggering destructive reactions between ozone and chlorine that deplete the ozone layer. Because aluminum oxides are not consumed by these chemical reactions, they can continue to destroy molecule after molecule of ozone for decades as they drift down through the stratosphere. Yet little attention has yet been paid to pollutants formed when satellites fall into the upper atmosphere and burn. Earlier studies of satellite pollution largely focused on the consequences of propelling a launch vehicle into space, such as the release of rocket fuel. The new study, by a research team from the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering, is the first realistic estimate of the extent of this long-lived pollution in the upper atmosphere, the authors said. [...]

In 2022, reentering satellites increased aluminum in the atmosphere by 29.5% over natural levels, the researchers found. The modeling showed that a typical 250-kilogram (550-pound) satellite with 30% of its mass being aluminum will generate about 30 kilograms (66 pounds) of aluminum oxide nanoparticles (1-100 nanometers in size) during its reentry plunge. Most of these particles are created in the mesosphere, 50-85 kilometers (30-50 miles) above Earth's surface. The team then calculated that based on particle size, it would take up to 30 years for the aluminum oxides to drift down to stratospheric altitudes, where 90% of Earth's ozone is located. The researchers estimated that by the time the currently planned satellite constellations are complete, every year, 912 metric tons of aluminum (1,005 U.S. tons) will fall to Earth. That will release around 360 metric tons (397 U.S. tons) of aluminum oxides per year to the atmosphere, an increase of 646% over natural levels.

Submission + - KDE Plasma 6.1 released (kde.org)

Submitted by jrepin
jrepin writes: The KDE community announces the latest release of their popular desktop environment: Plasma 6.1 . While Plasma 6.0 was all about getting the migration to the underlying Qt 6 frameworks correct, Plasma 6.1 is where developers start implementing the features that will take you desktop to a new level. In this release, you will find features that go far beyond subtle changes to themes and tweaks to animations (although there is plenty of those too). Among some of the new features in this release you will find improved remote desktop support with a new built-in server, overhauled and streamlined desktop edit mode, restoration of open applications from the previous session on Wayland, synchronization of keyboard LED colors with the desktop accent color, making mouse cursor bigger and easier to find by shaking it, edge barriers (a sticky area for mouse cursor near the edges between screens), explicit sync support eliminates flickering and glitches for NVidia graphics card users on Wayland, and triple buffering support for smoother animations and screen rendering. For detailed information see the KDE Plasma 6.1 release announcement.

Comment Re:That's what happens (Score 1) 46

by jrepin (#64311937) Attached to: EU's Use of Microsoft 365 Found To Breach Data Protection Rules
Exactly. Couldn't agree more. Spyware stuff like this should be outlawed and prohibited and some smart European countries already did this with Microsoft and Google cloud in public institutions and schools. All software in use by governments and public instiutions that are financed by taxes should adhere to principle of Public Money, Public Code and use only libre and opensource software. Not to mention they should insist on using only free and open formats (like OpenDocument Format for office documents), protocols, and standards. Otherwise it is so easy to get trapped into vendor-lockin and then held hostage of these BigTech/GAFAM surveillance corporations that are only getting worse as time goes by.

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