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A bot called Arthur has collected the following story from the RSS feeds:

China's population is big -- 1.4 billion big -- and its internet user population is creeping toward similar heights.

A government department called the China Internet Network Information Center ran a report to find out just how many citizens were jumping online. The result was 802 million, and the agency estimates that 29.68 million of those people came online only recently, in the first half of this year, as pointed out by Bloomberg.

This is the first time China's internet using population has crossed the 800 million mark, according to the report. For perspective, that number is greater than the internet populations of Japan, Russia and the US combined.

[Ed's Note: Some links removed because they contained tracking information]

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hubie writes:

Over at The New Stack is a brief but entertaining history of the editor vi and Vim.

"The editor was optimized so that you could edit and feel productive when it was painting slower than you could think. Now that computers are so much faster than you can think, nobody understands this anymore," Joy said. "It was a world that is now extinct. People don't know that vi was written for a world that doesn't exist anymore."

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captain normal writes:

California wildfires: Verizon throttled data during crisis

Santa Clara County's fire chief has complained the company throttled an emergency vehicle's data rate to about 0.5% of its normal level.

The limit was enforced despite Verizon being told it was hampering efforts to tackle the wildfire.

Verizon said a mistake had been made.

However, it highlighted that the fire department had subscribed to a contract that stated data throughput would be cut after a usage limit had been hit.

"Regardless of the plan emergency responders choose, we have a practice to remove data speed restrictions when contacted in emergency situations," a spokeswoman told the Mercury News newspaper.

"In this situation, we should have lifted the speed restriction when our customer reached out to us.

"We are reviewing the situation and will fix any issues going forward."

quietus writes:

Bullying and harassment are just plain wrong. (Alyson Fox, director of grants, Wellcome Trust)

A top geneticist has lost her funding based on bullying allegations, reports Nature.

The top scientist, Nazneen Rahman, was accused by scientists and staff at the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) in London of bullying behavior. Following the allegations, the ICR commissioned a law firm to carry out an independent investigation. Rather than waiting for a disciplinary hearing, Ms Rahman instead notified the ICR that she would leave after her research grant would be finished come October.

Now the UK biomedical charity which funded Ms Rahman's research has decided to act earlier, and pulled her funding. This, the Wellcome Trust claims, is in line with their new anti-bullying policy. In this, the Trust, as a first in the UK, followed the lead of the US National Science Foundation.

While the NSF's policy focused on sexual harassment, the Trust's policy takes things a bit further.

Their policy defines bullying as a misuse of power that can make people feel vulnerable, upset, humiliated, undermined or threatened. It says harassment is unwanted physical, verbal or non-verbal conduct that has the purpose or effect of violating someone else's dignity, or creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment for them.

It should be noted though that the Trust bases its decision on allegations without having detailed knowledge of these allegations; nor has Ms Rahman been able (or willing) to defend herself against these allegations.

The Trust states that bullying "causes significant harm, stops people achieving their full potential and stifles good research."

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aristarchus writes:

The Hugo awards, being the favorite they are with SN readers, are out again!

As posted at The Vox.

The first-ever threepeat of the Hugo Awards — the prestigious, long-running fantasy awards handed out annually at WorldCon — just issued a giant rejection of right-wing gatekeeping in the struggle to diversify the world of science fiction and fantasy writing.

N.K. Jemisin's groundbreaking fantasy series the Broken Earth trilogy has won critical acclaim, been optioned for development as a TV series, and received numerous accolades from the sci-fi and fantasy community. And on August 19, it achieved yet another milestone when Jemisin became the first author in the Hugos' 65-year history to win back-to-back awards for every book in a trilogy. Jemisin won the award for Best Novel three years in a row, starting with The Fifth Season in 2016, The Obelisk Gate in 2017, and now The Stone Sky in 2018.

Meanwhile, The Verge reports:

The 2018 Hugo Awards were held last night at the World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose, California. The Hugo award, voted on by members of the fan community, is considered the highest honor for science fiction and fantasy literature.

Like the previous couple of years, women almost completely swept the awards. N.K. Jemisin took home the top honor for The Stone Sky, the third installment of her Broken Earth trilogy. Other winners include Martha Wells for her first Murderbot novella All Systems Red, Suzanne Palmer for her novelette “The Secret Life of Bots,” and Rebecca Roanhorse for her short story “Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience™.” (Roanhorse also took home the John W. Campbell Jr. Award for Best New Writer.)

Jemisin’s win gives her a history-making hat trick: she’s won the top award for each Broken Earth installment, the first two having been for The Fifth Season and The Obelisk Gate. It’s a significant achievement, earned for Jemisin’s groundbreaking writing, blending of genres, and outstanding storytelling.

The complete list of nominees can be found in The Verge's story. Additional reporting can be found at the Guardian, on TOR.com, and elsewhere.

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stretch611 writes:

Valve has confirmed the rumours that were discussed here on SoylentNews earlier.

Today, Monday, August 21, Valve has released a new beta steam client for linux. It includes a modified distribution of Wine, called Proton, to provide compatibility with Windows game titles. This goes hand-in-hand with an ongoing testing effort of the entire Steam catalog, in order to identify games that currently work great in this compatibility environment, and find and address issues for the ones that don't. (includes a list of 27 initial games supported for beta)

We will be enabling more titles in the near future as testing results and development efforts progress; in the meantime, enthusiast users are also able to try playing non-whitelisted games using an override switch in the Steam client. Going forward, users can vote for their favorite games to be considered for Steam Play using platform wishlisting.

To make this happen, 2 years ago, Valve started funding/supporting development efforts of Proton and DXVK (the Direct3D 11 implementation based on Vulkan.) Modifications to Wine are submitted upstream if they're compatible with the goals and requirements of the larger Wine project; as a result, Wine users have been benefiting from parts of this work for over a year now.

Also reported on GamingOnLinux.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Accelerated melting of mountain glaciers in the Cascade Range could impact water supplies in the Pacific Northwest region over the coming decades, according to new research.

Seasonal snow and ice accumulation cause glaciers in the Cascade Range mountains to grow a little every winter and melt a little every summer. This annual melt provides water for much of the Pacific Northwest, which includes Washington, Oregon, Idaho and parts of Montana. Inhabitants of the region utilize this water for drinking, crop irrigation, generating hydroelectric power and other uses. Glacier melt provides supplementary water when less snowmelt is available, alleviating drought conditions or other impacts of dry periods.

Over the past several decades, warming air temperatures have caused Pacific Northwest glaciers to melt faster than usual, and scientists have wondered what impact this will have on future water supplies in the region.

In a new study, scientists used computer modeling to estimate the flow of mountain glacial melt in six river basins in the Pacific Northwest. They used the model to estimate glacier mass loss and meltwater volume from 1960 to the present, and predict future changes to glacier mass and meltwater volume through 2099. They looked at both low-elevation areas up to 1,100 meters (3,609 feet) in elevation and high-elevation areas up to 4,440 meters (14,436 feet) in elevation.

The study found lower-elevation glaciers in the Cascades reached their peak melt in the latter half of the 20th century. This means river basins fed by runoff from these glaciers will have less water available during the dry season over the coming decades, according to the study's authors. The results show that in some areas, declines in snow and glacier melt could lead to an 80 percent reduction in late summer river volumes by the end of the century.

The paper did not quantify consequences of changes in summer streamflow but some of these changes may have already begun impacting downstream systems, according to Chris Frans, formerly a Ph.D. student at the University of Washington in Seattle and now the lead on climate change studies for the northwest division of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Frans is the lead author of the new study in Water Resources Research, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

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A bot called Arthur has collected the following story from the RSS feeds:

America's major tech companies are pushing back against India's proposed data protection laws, with a lobby group led by ex-Cisco CEO John Chambers emerging as the protest organiser.

The move came a week after the proposals, first published at the end of July, were opened for comment by the Ministry of IT.

The draft copped criticism when it was published because of its "data localisation" provisions, which demanded local storage for some citizen data; and for banning the re-identification of anonymised data without offering protections for security researchers trying to improve security of anonymised data sets.

Last week, India's IT minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad, said he had asked Amazon to set up servers in the country, to comply with the localisation requirements.

Prasad announced the move in a press conference, according to Entrackr, saying he was concerned at data being moved offshore without the consent of end users.

Reuters yesterday reported that companies including Amazon, Microsoft, and American Express want the issue raised at US-India trade talks in September.

The report quoted Mozilla global policy adviser Amba Kak as saying the issue is worth national-level negotiation, adding: "Data localisation is not just a business concern, it potentially makes government surveillance easier, which is a worry."

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A bot called Arthur has collected the following story from the RSS feeds:

Apple, which prides itself on design, faces a lawsuit alleging that its web page layout violates the law.

In a complaint [PDF] filed on Sunday in a Manhattan district court, plaintiff Himelda Mendez claims that Apple's website, by virtue of its availability in Apple Stores, violates Title III of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA).

Mendez is a visually impaired and legally blind person who uses a screen-reader, which can translate written website text into spoken words or tactile Braille.

The National Federation of the Blind estimates there are about 7.3mn people age 16 or older in the US with a visual disability.

According to the complaint, Apple's website code lacks alt-text attributes that allow screen readers to convey textual descriptions of graphics. Apple.com webpages, it's said, contain empty links with no text, which confuses screen-readers and those using them.

Then there's the issue of redundant links next to each other that all point to the same address, a situation that can be difficult for users of screen-readers to understand. Also, Apple's linked images, it's claimed, lack alt-text tags. That means screen-readers have no way to tell users the function of links.

"For screen-reading software to function, the information on a website must be capable of being rendered into text," the complaint says. "If the website content is not capable of being rendered into text, the blind or visually-impaired user is unable to access the same content available to sighted users."

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requerdanos writes:

A scientist named Dr. Shing-Chung (Josh) Wong has developed "a bio-inspired approach for a novel bead-on-string nanofiber with hydrophobicity/ hydrophilicity simultaneously by electrospinning-enabled technique, that can be used as a high-performance water harvester" to collect potable water from the air, even in desert environments:

To miniaturize water generation and improve the efficiency, Wong and his students at the University of Akron turned to electrospun polymers, a material they had already worked with for more than a decade. Electrospinning uses electrical forces to produce polymer fibers ranging from tens of nanometers up to 1 micrometer—an ideal size to condense and squeeze water droplets out of the air. These nanoscale fiber polymers offer an incredibly high surface-area-to-volume ratio, much larger than that provided by the typical structures and membranes used in water distillers.

By experimenting with different combinations of polymers that were hydrophilic—which attracts water—and hydrophobic—which discharges water, the group concluded that a water harvesting system could indeed be fabricated using nanofiber technology. Wong's group determined that their polymer membrane could harvest 744 mg/cm2/h, which is 91 percent higher than similarly designed membranes without these nanofibers.

Unlike existing methods, Wong's harvester could work in arid desert environments because of the membrane's high surface-area-to-volume ratio. It also would have a minimal energy requirement.

Wong says that the device should be inexpensive to construct, and he's looking for funding to build a prototype.

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chromas (from IRC) writes:

NBC News:

A solar-powered drone designed to take on the multimillion-dollar market for satellites in space has set a record by staying in flight at high altitude for nearly 26 days. Airbus has plenty of plans for its so-called pseudo-satellite, including possible military reconnaissance and monitoring the spread of wildfires, among other activities.

The European aerospace consortium Airbus announced that the latest model of its Zephyr drone had landed near Yuma, Arizona, late last week, after staying on the wing continuously for 25 days, 23 hours and 57 minutes, and breaking a world record for long-endurance flight.

The drone was driven by electric power from solar panels on its wings during daylight, when it flew at altitudes above 70,000 feet (21,300 meters), Airbus spokesman Alain Dupiech told Live Science.

At night, the drone used stored battery power, dropping to around 50,000 feet (15,240 meters) by morning — well above any clouds and bad weather, and higher than regular air traffic, except military spy planes , Dupiech said.

Previously, the endurance record was held by an older prototype of the Zephyr drone, which stayed airborne 14 days in 2014.

Airbus hopes the latest Zephyr drone will take on some of the commercial market for satellite launches into Earth orbit, by carrying out tasks like high-altitude photography and environmental monitoring for weeks or months at a time.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

From the BBC:

Three Apple employees have been treated for minor injuries after an iPad battery reportedly exploded in an Amsterdam shop.

The three staff are believed to have breathed vapours released when the battery caught fire.

The incident, on 19 August, led to the shop in Amsterdam's Leidseplein being evacuated and closed.

Firefighters were called and they dealt with the iPad and made sure the shop was properly aired.

The shop has now re-opened.

Amsterdam's fire brigade tweeted that it had attended the incident and three people had been treated for breathing problems.

A Dutch media site said staff in the store had initially dealt with the fuming iPad by putting it in a sand-filled fire bucket.

This reportedly quelled the fire but not before some of the potentially harmful irritants had been released.

Apple news site 9to5mac said it had seen more incidents of similar faults since the electronics company had started its iPhone battery replacement programme.

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for takyon

An Imax spokesperson has confirmed to Variety that it will no longer be building a VR camera in partnership with Google. In the emailed statement, Imax said, "We've currently paused the development of the Imax VR camera while we continue to review the viability of our pilot program."

Imax and Google's VR project first began in 2016. The two companies had plans to develop a cinema-grade VR camera "to enable today's leading filmmakers and content creators to deliver the highest-quality 3D 360-degree content experiences to audiences worldwide." In 2017, Imax opened seven VR centers for its location-based VR pilot program. It's recently closed two of them, and the fates of the remaining five are up in the air.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/21/17763526/google-imax-vr-camera-project-hold

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for takyon

According to a paper released Monday in Nature Ecology & Evolution, the still-unidentified microbe that scientists believe is the ancestor to all cellular life on Earth was born sometime before 3.9 billion years ago. As it turns out, the last universal common ancestor — LUCA for short — emerged even earlier than scientists once believed.

Scientists previously pegged the LUCA's birth to a period 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago, but the new evidence examined in the study⁰ suggests it happened one hundred million years earlier. The researchers from the Universities of Bristol and Bath determined the LUCA's new age using the concept of the "molecular clock," which does away with all of the issues with relying on fossils to build Earth's early-life timeline. With early life fossils, there are always older ones waiting to be exposed, which may seem exciting but makes creating an early-life timeline very difficult. The molecular clock, in contrast, uses differences in the genomes of individual species to tell how much time has passed since they shared a common ancestor. The basic idea is that the more mutations two species share, the more time has passed since their evolutionary paths diverged.

The team applied a variant of this approach to some of the oldest existing fossils ever found, hoping they'd reveal when LUCA was born. "We used a relaxed clock framework, which means that the branches across the [evolutionary] tree can have differing rates of evolution," explains first author and University of Bristol Ph.D. candidate Holly Betts to Inverse. Because the differences in age that the molecular clock technique gives are relative, she explains, "you then use fossil calibrations to anchor the tree in real time."

Source: https://www.inverse.com/article/48247-early-life-domain-molecular-clock

⁰DOI: 10.1038/s41559-018-0644-x

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Mozilla plans to remove all legacy add-ons from their portal.

Support for Firefox ESR 52 will end on September 5, in two weeks, meaning there won't be any official Firefox version that supports legacy add-ons anymore.

Mozilla said today that following this date, it plans to start the process of disabling legacy add-on versions on its add-ons portal located at addons.mozilla.org (also known as the AMO).

"On September 6, 2018, submissions for new legacy add-on versions will be disabled," said Caitlin Neiman, Add-ons Community Manager at Mozilla.

"All legacy add-on versions will be disabled in early October, 2018. Once this happens, users will no longer be able to find [extensions] on AMO," she added.

Isn't modern FOSS great?/s

I can run old Blender if I need. Or go over all the archived .deb from past Debian releases. But Mozilla seems to be special. Time to call the Archive Team or the Wayback Machine.

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