Media Groups Urge US To Drop Julian Assange Charges

The US government must drop its prosecution of the WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange because it is undermining press freedom, according to the media organizations that first helped him publish leaked diplomatic cables. The Guardian reports: Twelve years ago today, the Guardian, the New York Times, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and El Pais collaborated to release excerpts from 250,000 documents obtained by Assange in the “Cablegate” leak. The material, leaked to WikiLeaks by the then American soldier Chelsea Manning, exposed the inner workings of US diplomacy around the world. The editors and publishers of the media organizations that first published those revelations have come together to publicly oppose plans to charge Assange under a law designed to prosecute first world war spies. “Publishing is not a crime,” they said, saying the prosecution is a direct attack on media freedom.

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UK Ditches Ban On ‘Legal But Harmful’ Online Content In Favor of Free Speech

Britain will not force tech giants to remove content that is “legal but harmful” from their platforms after campaigners and lawmakers raised concerns that the move could curtail free speech, the government said on Monday. Reuters reports: Online safety laws would instead focus on the protection of children and on ensuring companies removed content that was illegal or prohibited in their terms of service, it said, adding that it would not specify what legal content should be censored. Platform owners, such as Facebook-owner Meta and Twitter, would be banned from removing or restricting user-generated content, or suspending or banning users, where there is no breach of their terms of service or the law, it said.

The government had previously said social media companies could be fined up to 10% of turnover or 18 million pounds ($22 million) if they failed to stamp out harmful content such as abuse even if it fell below the criminal threshold, while senior managers could also face criminal action. The proposed legislation, which had already been beset by delays and rows before the latest version, would remove state influence on how private companies managed legal speech, the government said. It would also avoid the risk of platforms taking down legitimate posts to avoid sanctions. […]

The revised Online Safety Bill, which returns to parliament next month, puts the onus on tech companies to take down material in breach of their own terms of service and to enforce their user age limits to stop children circumventing authentication methods, the government said. If users were likely to encounter controversial content such as the glorification of eating disorders, racism, anti-Semitism or misogyny not meeting the criminal threshold, the platform would have to offer tools to help adult users avoid it, it said. Only if platforms failed to uphold their own rules or remove criminal content could a fine of up to 10% of annual turnover apply. Britain said late on Saturday that a new criminal offense of assisting or encouraging self-harm online would be included in the bill.

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Linux Kernel Gets More Infrastructure for Rust, Increasing Interest in the Language

Linux 6.1 (released last month) included what Linus Torvalds described as “initial Rust scaffolding,” remembers this update from SD Times But now, “work has already been done since the 6.1 release to add more infrastructure for Rust in the kernel, though still none of the code interacts with any C code.”

And there’s still no actual Rust code in Linux:

“You need to get all those things that can make sure that Rust can compile, and you can do the debugging and all these things,” explained Joel Marcey, director of advocacy and operations for the Rust Foundation, “and make sure that the memory safety is there and all that sort of stuff. And that has to happen first before you can actually write any real code in Rust for the Linux kernel itself.”

Marcey explained that Linux is going to be doing this inclusion very piecemeal, with lots of little integrations here and there over time so they can see how it is working. “I would imagine that over the next year, you’re going to see more small incremental changes to the kernel with Rust, but as people are seeing that it’s actually kind of working out, you’ll be able to maybe, for example, write Linux drivers or whatever with Rust,” said Marcey….

According to Bec Rumbul, executive director of the Rust Foundation, Rust being added to the kernel is an “enormous vote of confidence in the Rust programming language.” She explained that in the past other languages have been planned to make it into the kernel and ended up not getting put in. “I think having someone with the kind of intellectual gravity of Linus Torvalds saying ‘No, it’s going in there,’ that kind of says an awful lot about how reliable Rust already is and how much potential there is for the future as well,” she said.

Rumbul believes that there will be an increased interest in the language, which is still relatively new (It first made its debut in 2010) compared to some of the other languages out there to choose from. “I suspect that because Rust is now in the kernel, and it’s just being talked about much … more widely, that it will seem like an attractive prospect to a lot of people that are looking to develop their skills and their knowledge,” she said. Rumbul hopes people will also be inspired to participate in the language as contributors and maintainers, because those are some of the less popular roles within open source, but are extremely critical to the health of a language, she explained.
The Rust Foundation also launched a new security team in September to ensure best practices (including a dedicated security engineer). Their first initiative will be a security audit and threat modeling exercises.

“We want to basically shore up,” Rust operations director Marcey tells SD Times, “to ensure that Rust itself is actually as secure as we always say it is.”

In this year’s Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 86.73% of developers said they love Rust.

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A Light-powered Catalyst Could Be Key For Hydrogen Economy

“Rice University researchers have engineered a key light-activated nanomaterial for the hydrogen economy,” the University announced this week.

“Using only inexpensive raw materials, a team from Rice’s Laboratory for Nanophotonics, Syzygy Plasmonics Inc. and Princeton University’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment created a scalable catalyst that needs only the power of light to convert ammonia into clean-burning hydrogen fuel….”

The research follows government and industry investment to create infrastructure and markets for carbon-free liquid ammonia fuel that will not contribute to greenhouse warming. Liquid ammonia is easy to transport and packs a lot of energy, with one nitrogen and three hydrogen atoms per molecule. The new catalyst breaks those molecules into hydrogen gas, a clean-burning fuel, and nitrogen gas, the largest component of Earth’s atmosphere. And unlike traditional catalysts, it doesn’t require heat. Instead, it harvests energy from light, either sunlight or energy-stingy LEDs….

“This discovery paves the way for sustainable, low-cost hydrogen that could be produced locally rather than in massive centralized plants,” said Peter Nordlander, also a Rice co-author.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot for submitting the story (via Phys.org.

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Will Made-in-China EV’s Bring New Competition for Automakers?

The Washington Post reports:
China is already a huge manufacturer of electric vehicles for its own market, and it is increasingly making EVs for overseas buyers, too. Made-in-China EVs are hitting U.S. dealerships and European auto shows, providing new competition to Western and Japanese automakers that have long dominated the global vehicle market.
Examples from the article:
Polestar 2, from “an automaker headquartered in Sweden and controlled by Chinese billionaire Li Shufu… The company says it will start manufacturing its next model, the Polestar 3, in the United States in 2024.”Nio ET7, “an EV company founded in Shanghai by entrepreneur William Li. The company is selling its ET7 sedan in the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, and has said it aims to enter the U.S. market in 2025.”China’s largest automaker, the state-owned SAIC, “bought the British MG brand in the early 2000s and is now selling several electric MG models in Europe.”

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Telnet Gets Stubborn Sony Camera Under Control

Hackaday writes
According to [Venn Stone], technical producer over at Linux GameCast, the Sony a5000 is still a solid option for those looking to shoot 1080p video despite being released back in 2014. But while the camera is lightweight and affordable, it does have some annoying quirks — namely an overlay on the HDMI output (as seen in the image above) that can’t be turned off using the camera’s normal configuration menu. But as it so happens, using some open source tools and the venerable telnet, you can actually log into the camera’s operating system and fiddle with its settings directly.

A grassroots tool for unlocking Sony cameras apparently also unlocks developer options — including a telnet server on its WiFi interface. (There’s a video of the whole procedure on Linux Gamecast Weekly’s web site.)

Venn Stone (the podcast’s technical producer/engineer) is apparently also a long-time Slashdot reader — and also describes himself on the podcast as “not a fan of articial software limitations.”

And he calls this telnet-enabled tweak “the most hack-y thing I’ve done in recent memory” — even creating a playlist of 1990s hacker music to more fully enjoy the moment.

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Valve Introduces Proton Next

Proton Next has been announced by Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais on Twitter, as an easier way to check out and test the upcoming stable releases of new Proton versions for Linux desktop and Steam Deck. GamingOnLinux reports: It is mostly the same as the Release Candidate for Proton 7.0-5 that was put up in October. However, it’s now its own entry in Steam as Proton Next. This makes it far easier to test, since you can set it to games individually, instead of opting into a Beta with the current main version of Proton. This new Proton Next will only become available when there is a new version of Proton ready for testing, and once stable it will be retired. So games you’ve set to it, would likely just get bumped to the main version of Proton since it would replace it. The changelog and patch notes are available here.

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Microsoft Argues Nintendo Offers a ‘Broader Range of Mature Content’ than Xbox

An anonymous reader shares a report: According to Microsoft, Nintendo “offers a broader range of mature content than Xbox.” Microsoft’s statements came about as part of its response to the UK CMA about wanting to buy Activision. Despite some claiming that Nintendo is more family-friendly, Switch in particular has proven otherwise. Microsoft highlighted the Nintendo-published Bayonetta 3, the console-exclusive Shin Megami Tensei V, and other third-party titles such as The Witcher 3 and NieR: Automata. Ultimately Microsoft is looking to prove that Nintendo is as much a competitor as Sony is with PlayStation, and was looking to provide “evidence that Nintendo Switch is not just a console aimed at the family friendly customer segment but more broadly at a diverse group of gamers across all demographics.”

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Netflix is Working on ‘Brand-New AAA PC Game’

Netflix has put up more than a dozen job listings on its website for Netflix Games Studio’s Los Angeles office. From a report: These listings give us a few hints about the company’s plans for the new studio. In particular, Netflix is hiring a game director to work on “a brand-new AAA PC game.” Last month at TechCrunch Disrupt, Netflix VP of Gaming Mike Verdu originally announced that his company was opening a new studio in Southern California. Verdu also said that Chacko Sonny would be leading the studio. Sonny is the former executive producer on Overwatch.

Sonny left Blizzard Entertainment, the company behind Overwatch, while the company was dealing with a California lawsuit for sexual harassment and discrimination as well as an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. He was also in charge of the development of Overwatch 2. And now it seems like Netflix wants to put together the core team for the initial project of Netflix Games Studio in Los Angeles. The game director will be in charge of a AAA PC game. That would be the company’s first PC game as Netflix currently only offers games for smartphones and tablets. In the video game industry, AAA projects are major games with very large budgets and development teams.

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FDA Approves Most Expensive Drug Ever, a $3.5 Million-per-Dose Gene Therapy For Hemophilia B

U.S. health regulators this week approved the first gene therapy for hemophilia, a $3.5 million one-time treatment for the blood-clotting disorder. From a report: The Food and Drug Administration cleared Hemgenix, an IV treatment for adults with hemophilia B, the less common form of the genetic disorder which primarily affects men. Currently, patients receive frequent, expensive IVs of a protein that helps blood clot and prevent bleeding. Drugmaker CSL Behring, based in Pennsylvania, announced the $3.5 million price tag shortly after the FDA approval, saying its drug would ultimately reduce health care costs because patients would have fewer bleeding incidents and need fewer clotting treatments.

According to a study cited by the National Library of Medicine, the price makes Hemgenix the most expensive medicine in the world, easily topping Novartis’ Zolgensma gene therapy for spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), which costs right around $2 million per dose and is also a single-dose medicine. Like most medicines in the U.S., most of the cost of the new treatment will be paid by insurers, not patients, including private plans and government programs. After decades of research, gene therapies have begun reshaping the treatment of cancers and rare inheritable diseases with medicines that can modify or correct mutations embedded in people’s genetic code. Hemgenix is the first such treatment for hemophilia and several other drugmakers are working on gene therapies for the more common form of the disorder, hemophilia A.

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