SoylentNews

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Today, open-source software powers the world. It didn't have to be that way. The Open Invention Network's (OIN) origins are rooted in a turbulent era for open source. In the mid-2000s, Linux faced existential threats from copyright and patent litigation. Besides, the infamous SCO lawsuit and Microsoft's claims that Linux infringed on hundreds of its patents cast a shadow over the ecosystem.

Business leaders became worried. While SCO's attacks petered out, patent trolls -- formally known as Patent Assertion Entities (PAEs) -- were increasing their attacks. So, open-source friendly industry giants, including IBM, Novell, Philips, Red Hat, and Sony, formed the Open Invention Network (OIN) to create a bulwark against patent threats targeting Linux and open-source technologies. Founded in 2005, the Open Invention Network (OIN) has evolved into a global community comprising over 4,000 participants, ranging from startups to multinational corporations, collectively holding more than three million patents and patent applications.

At the heart of OIN's legal strategy is a royalty-free cross-license agreement. Members agree not to assert their patents against the Linux System, creating a powerful network effect that shields open-source projects from litigation. As OIN CEO Keith Bergelt explained, this model enables "broad-based participation by ensuring patent risk mitigation in key open-source technologies, thereby facilitating open-source adoption."

This approach worked then, and it continues to work today. 

As more companies realized the value of open source, they joined in increasing numbers. Indeed, in 2018, Microsoft not only joined the OIN, but the company also shocked the world by offering its entire 60,000 patent portfolio to all of the open-source patent consortium's members. 

Why? Because it made good business sense. As Microsoft VP and Deputy General Counsel Burton Davis explained in 2022: "Microsoft is committed to open source, and continues to invest and collaborate across the broad open-source landscape. As a beneficiary and active participant in the open-source ecosystem, Microsoft is committed to doing its part, together with the broader open-source community, to protect this valuable resource from patent risk and other challenges."

taylorvich writes:

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-04-left-arm-reveals-vaccination-site.html

Sydney scientists have revealed why receiving a booster vaccine in the same arm as your first dose can generate a more effective immune response more quickly. The study, led by the Garvan Institute of Medical Research and the Kirby Institute at UNSW Sydney and published in the journal Cell, offers new insight that could help improve future vaccination strategies.

The researchers found that when a vaccine is administered, specialized immune cells called macrophages became "primed" inside lymph nodes. These macrophages then direct the positioning of memory B cells to more effectively respond to the booster when given in the same arm.

The findings, made in mice and validated in human participants, provide evidence to refine vaccination approaches and offer a promising new approach for enhancing vaccine effectiveness.

"This is a fundamental discovery in how the immune system organizes itself to respond better to external threats—nature has come up with this brilliant system and we're just now beginning to understand it," says Professor Tri Phan, Director of the Precision Immunology Program at Garvan and co-senior author.

Scientia Professor Anthony Kelleher, Director of the Kirby Institute and co-senior author says, "A unique and elegant aspect of this study is the team's ability to understand the rapid generation of effective vaccine responses. We did this by dissecting the complex biology in mice and then showed similar findings in humans. All this was done at the site of the generation of the vaccine response, the lymph node."

Immunization introduces a harmless version of a pathogen, known as a vaccine antigen, into the body, which is filtered through lymph nodes—immune 'training camps' that train the body to fight off the real pathogen. The researchers previously discovered that memory B cells, which are crucial for generating antibody responses when infections return, linger in the lymph node closest to the injection site.

Using state-of-the-art intravital imaging at Garvan, the team discovered that memory B cells migrate to the outer layer of the local lymph node, where they interact closely with the macrophages that reside there. When a booster was given in the same location, these 'primed' macrophages—already on alert—efficiently captured the antigen and activated the memory B cells to make high-quality antibodies.

"Macrophages are known to gobble up pathogens and clear away dead cells, but our research suggests the ones in the lymph nodes closest to the injection site also play a central role in orchestrating an effective vaccine response the next time around. So location does matter," says Dr. Rama Dhenni, the study's co-first author, who undertook the research as part of his Scientia Ph.D. program at Garvan.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

[Source]: GIZMODO

A California-based fusion company thinks it's cracked one of energy's toughest problems: how to make fusion efficient, powerful, and not absurdly expensive.

TAE Technologies, along with researchers from the University of California, says its reconfigured prototype—cheekily named Norm—could deliver 100 times the power of other fusion devices while running at half the cost of older designs.

The team's research, published in Nature Communications, focuses on improving something called a field-reversed configuration (FRC)—a setup that holds piping hot plasma in place without relying on the gigantic magnets seen in traditional fusion designs like tokamaks. According to a TAE release published this month, FRC-based machines can achieve 100 times the fusion output of typical tokamaks with similar magnetic field strengths and plasma volumes.

[...] If the claims hold up, this could be a major leap toward commercial fusion power, something that's remained perpetually "30 years away" for, well, more decades than that. But it's still early days—Norm is a prototype, not a power plant, though the terms are not mutually exclusive if Da Vinci has anything to say about it in 2030.

Nevertheless, probing new ways of inducing fusion reactions—and streamlining those processes to make them more efficient—is a positive step toward commercial fusion energy. But it's hard to be enthralled by those steps when you consider how many times the fusion timeline has slipped—and will probably keep slipping.

Hype or the real deal. What do you think ?

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A new way of generating clean power could run your lights with rain. 

Hydropower typically relies on the movement of water to create electricity through mechanical energy, such as spinning turbines in a dam. But a new method, described April 16 in ACS Central Science, skips the mechanics and harnesses tiny bursts of energy sparked when rain plunks into a narrow tube. 

“There is a lot of energy in rain,” says Siowling Soh, an engineer at the National University of Singapore. “If we can tap into this vast amount of energy, we can move toward a more sustainable society.”

Soh and colleagues’ technique relies on charge separation, a process where oppositely charged particles become spatially divided, creating a voltage between them. It’s the same phenomenon as shuffling across a rug then getting zapped when touching a light switch.

Previous experiments have found that water running through a conductive tube also creates charge separation. As the water flows, negatively charged hydroxide molecules accumulate on the tube’s surface, leaving an excess of positively charged hydrogen ions in the water. But the amount of charge separation is negligible, and the energy produced is outweighed by the power needed to pump water through the system. Soh wanted to find a way around that.

Instead of using a continuous flow of water, he and his team dripped rainlike drops into a tube two millimeters wide, about the width of a grain of rice. Inside the tube, the water driblets flowed with air pockets between them, creating a movement pattern called a plug flow. Plug flows trigger higher amounts of charge separation than continuous flows, Soh says, resulting in roughly 100,000 times as much energy.

canopic jug writes:

Wired has an interview about precautions to take with mobile devices if one cannot avoid crossing into the United States. The advice applies to all electronics.

[...] In some cases, it can involve an electronic search where they hook your phone up to a machine and it sucks all the information off of your phone and then they can do more complex data analysis on it. But what you should know is that if you're a US citizen, or if you're a green card holder, you can refuse to have your device searched at the border without being denied entry into the United States. You can have your phone confiscated, you can be brought into a little room and asked more questions. You will be scrutinized if you deny them the opportunity to search your phone, but they can't keep you from entering the country under normal circumstances.

[...] Lauren Goode: If you're a visa holder or a foreign visitor and you refuse, you can be detained or deported.

[...] Katie Drummond: That's a really interesting point. I feel like that's very smart-in-the-weeds guidance. Mike, here is a follow-up question: If someone turned a device to you and said, "Log into your X account on this computer," can you say, "I'm sorry, officer, I can't help you with that"?

Michael Calore: Yes. And the explanation there, which should be what you actually do so that you're not lying, is that you're using a strong password that is stored in your password manager and that you do not have access to your password manager.

Previously:
(2025) Cell Phone OPSEC for Border Crossings
(2024) 'FYI. a Warrant Isn't Needed': Secret Service Says You Agreed to be Tracked With Location Data
(2024) CBP Needs Warrant To Search Phones, Says Yet Another Judge
(2023) Snowden Ten Years Later - Schneier on Security
(2019) We Got U.S. Border Officials to Testify Under Oath. Here's What We Found Out
(2018) U.S. Border Searches of Electronic Devices Rise 60% in 2017
(2016) US Government Pays $475,000 for Illegally Searching Woman's Vagina
(2016) US Customs Wants to Know Travelers' Social Media Account Names

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Are we getting a Starlink rival soon?

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy just confirmed that the company's Project Kuiper has begun deploying satellites in low-earth orbit. "Important moment for @ProjectKuiper as we just confirmed our first 27 production satellites are operating as expected in low Earth orbit," Jassy said on his status on X (formerly Twitter). "While this is the first step in a much longer journey to launch the rest of our low Earth orbit constellation, it represents an incredible amount of invention and hard work. Am really proud of the collective team."

This deployment will just be the first of many, especially as the company has previously sought permission to launch 3,236 satellites to deliver internet services around the globe. It took six years for Amazon to go from applying for permits from the FCC to launching its satellites, and it will probably take a few more years before it can fully launch the rest of its planned constellation. We will also likely have to wait a few more months before Amazon starts offering satellite internet services to its customers — after all, it took Starlink about one year and five months after the initial launch of its satellites before it could offer subscriptions.

[...] Still, Amazon's offering of a competing satellite internet service is crucial for consumers, as this will allow for competition and give customers the option to pick a service that fits their needs better. Another company is also trying to enter the satellite internet space — China-based SpaceSail already has 648 satellites in low-earth orbit and has agreements in place with Kazakhstan and Brazil, with plans to expand to 15,000 satellites by 2030. These new entrants in the low-earth orbit satellite internet industry will pressure Starlink to offer cheaper and better services. While this might be a cause for concern for Musk and his shareholders, this could be the ultimate win for the end-user.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) is a fork of KDE 3 which maintains the classic KDE approach and style. Trinity has received a new update, version 14.1.4, which introduces several small improvements:

"The key highlights of this version are: support for Unicode surrogate characters and planes above zero (for example emojis); new modern vector wallpapers and new colour themes; new control module to manage deb/rpm alternatives; tab support in kpdf; better context menu for tderandrtray and fixes to the handling of gamma settings; clickable links in calendar events; support for transparency, top and shadow borders and inactive windows in Dekorator; better integration of kxkb with setxkbmap, new options and various fixes for the tray feedback; ability to create VPN connections in tdenetworkmanager once again; several improvements to the codeine player; support for Ubuntu Plucky and upcoming Fedora 43." While not widely used, some projects, such as Q4OS, will likely have packages of Trinity 14.1.4 soon.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Learn about the escalating threat of volcanoes in Iceland and how a new warning system is helping to inform the public when eruptions will occur:

Although volcanic eruptions can strike when least expected, they sometimes give off warning signs that can be captured by advanced technology. One innovative way to monitor eruptions is now being put to the test at the Reykjanes Peninsula, a hotbed of volcanic activity in Iceland.

In a new study, researchers have reported the successful progress of an eruption warning system that uses distributed acoustic sensing (DAS), which can anticipate volcanic activity through magma movements beneath the surface.

The study, published in Science, demonstrates how DAS sensors at the Reykjanes Peninsula can give the public warnings on lava eruptions up to 30 minutes in advance. The key to this method is in fiber-optic cables that react to disturbances underground. With a system to monitor cables, scientists are tapping into unseen volcanic data like never before.

[...] For the past few years, an international team of researchers has been working toward a solution to catch volcanic activity before it can impact the public. This collaboration led to the development of a DAS system focused on an underground fiber-optic cable.

"The deployment was extremely fast," said Jiaxuan Li, the study's first author and a geophysicist at the University of Houston, in a statement. "We were able to set up our system on a 100-kilometer-long fiber cable within 10 days after a substantial magma intrusion event on November 10, 2023. About a month later, we recorded the first eruption with our system."

The DAS system entails directing lasers into unused underground cables; when vibrations pass through the cables (during an earthquake, for example), the lasers go through what is called a "phase-change," allowing researchers to collect data on seismic waves.

The system can be applied to underground volcanic activity as well. As magma moves upward to surge above the surface, it warps and compresses the ground. The researchers say cable sensors can measure changes in the ground much more precisely than GPS or satellite imaging.

Data from the sensors set up in the Reykjanes Peninsula have allowed researchers to create an early-warning system that could inform the public of an eruption 30 minutes to several hours before it occurs.

Journal Reference: DOI: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adu0225

Original Submission

braddollar writes:

Today the U.S. House of Representatives passed the TAKE IT DOWN Act, giving the powerful a dangerous new route to manipulate platforms into removing lawful speech that they simply don't like. President Trump himself has said that he would use the law to censor his critics. The bill passed the Senate in February, and it now heads to the president's desk.

The takedown provision in TAKE IT DOWN applies to a much broader category of content—potentially any images involving intimate or sexual content—than the narrower NCII definitions found elsewhere in the bill.

Original Submission

Analysis-Google, X Next Targets as Europe Stays Tough on Tech Regulation

upstart writes:

Analysis-Google, X next targets as Europe stays tough on tech regulation:

BRUSSELS (Reuters) -Alphabet's Google and Elon Musk's X may be the next to face fines from European regulators, as they stay tough on Big Tech despite concerns of retaliatory U.S. tariffs, according to three sources with direct knowledge of the matter.

EU antitrust regulators on Wednesday imposed the first penalties under landmark EU legislation aimed at curbing the power of Big Tech, doling out total fines of 700 million euros ($797 million) to Apple and Meta for violating the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and orders to stop anti-competitive practices.

U.S. President Donald Trump has taken issue with the new rules, believing they amount to a tariff on U.S. companies. But EU antitrust chief Teresa Ribera dismissed fears that she may cave to U.S. pressure and soften enforcement of the rules.

"Apple and Meta have fallen short of compliance with the DMA by implementing measures that reinforce the dependence of business users and consumers on their platforms," Ribera said in a statement on Wednesday. "All companies operating in the EU must follow our laws and respect European values," she said.

The EU's determination to press ahead with the fines raises a question over possible retaliatory action by the U.S., according to the International Association of Privacy Professionals.

"The U.S. Administration has declared it will consider responsive actions like tariffs to combat certain foreign government policies levied against U.S. companies," said Joe Jones, the IAPP's director of research and insights.

The DMA, which was cited by Trump in an Executive Order in February, sets out a list of dos and don'ts for tech giants to make it easier for people to move between competing online services such as social media platforms, internet browsers and app stores and for smaller rivals to compete.

Imposing the fines shows that the European Commission has "bite" despite Trump's threat to slap tariffs on EU countries that fine U.S. companies, said one senior Commission official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The Agonizing Task of Turning Europe's Power Back on

upstart writes:

The Agonizing Task of Turning Europe's Power Back On:

At 12:30 pm local time on Monday, the power went out. Across Spain and Portugal, trains and traffic lights abruptly stopped working.

Reports emerged of people being stuck in lifts, and Google Maps live data showed traffic jams in big cities, including Madrid and Barcelona, as they became gridlocked. Major airports warned passengers of delays due to the blackout. Its cause is still unknown. The blackout is estimated to have affected the entirety of Portugal and Spain and small regions in France.

"Traffic lights aren't working. The streets are chaotic because there is an officer at every crossing," says Gustavo, who lives in Madrid. "Water doesn't reach flats at the top of buildings because the pumps are electric, and the very few shops that are open are only taking cash."

This is every electrical engineer's nightmare scenario, says Paul Cuffe, assistant professor of the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at University College Dublin. "The reason we don't have widespread outages all the time is because system operators are very conservative and very proactive about using big safety margins to make sure this doesn't happen," he says. Engineers plan for failures in grids or surges in consumer demand that could destabilize the power supply. "These things are unusual, but to a power engineer the latent threat of it happening is always there."

Spain's electricity operator Red Eléctrica said in a post on X a few hours after the initial blackout that it had recovered power in some areas of Cataluña and Aragón in the northeast; País Vasco, Galicia, La Rioja, Asturias, Navarra, and Castilla y Léon in the north; Extremadura in the east; and Andalucía in the south.

Experts believe that getting the grid back up and running in both countries could take between a few hours to several days, depending on the area. While the grid is powering back up, emergency services will likely be prioritized over things like stable internet connection, they say.

There is a well-rehearsed sequence of steps that now happens, says Cuffe. They are going to be doing what is called a "black start"—a process that gradually reconnects power stations to form a functioning grid again. Electrical supply and demand has to be balanced to avoid further blackouts, meaning as power stations come online, only portions of the grid can come online with them, with the country gradually powering up, step by step. There should be a team within the grid operator that plans for this and that has identified which generators to bring online first, he explains.

"You should be anticipating every failure that can happen, and you should survive any one of them," Cuffe says. From the control room, engineers should be able to tell what parts of the grid are definitely functioning so they won't be flying blind—but it will still take time.

"Even with a completely healthy grid, to do that black start could take 12 hours or 16 hours. You have to do it sequentially, and it takes a long time. I'm sure there are engineers in vans swarming all over the place as we speak trying to make all this happen," Cuffe says. "It's like assembling some hellishly complicated Ikea furniture."

The biggest issue is that without an established, obvious cause for the blackout in the first place, it will be difficult for engineers to know where to reestablish power first without triggering another outage.

"The challenge is to constantly match supply and demand," says Ketan Joshi, an independent climate and energy consultant. "You need to perform that balancing act, not just plugging everything back in there." Joshi describes it as a blackout "in reverse."

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The Kali Linux project has published an advisory, letting its users know of an upcoming problem with package management. "Bad news for Kali Linux users! In the coming day(s), apt update is going to fail for pretty much everyone out there:

        Missing key 827C8569F2518CC677FECA1AED65462EC8D5E4C5, which is needed to verify signature.

Reason is, we had to roll a new signing key for the Kali repository. You need to download and install the new key manually, here's the one-liner:

        sudo wget https://archive.kali.org/archive-keyring.gpg -O /usr/share/keyrings/kali-archive-keyring.gpg

Now your Kali is ready to keep rolling! Sorry for the inconvenience."

The advisory explains why this problem is happening: "This is not only you, this is for everyone, and this is entirely our fault. We lost access to the signing key of the repository, so we had to create a new one. At the same time, we froze the repository (you might have noticed that there was no update since Friday 18th), so nobody was impacted yet. But we're going to unfreeze the repository this week, and it's now signed with the new key. As a result, there's a bit of manual work for you."

Original Submission

Mojibake Tengu writes:

Site: https://tmuxai.dev/ Github: https://github.com/alvinunreal/tmuxai

Is it dangerous? Probably. Though, so is everything else in a terminal. Stay safe, do not antagonize LLMs. Be careful about what you ask for.

It was inevitably coming. This one is cute:

TmuxAI

TmuxAI is a non-intrusive terminal assistant that works alongside you in a tmux window. TmuxAI's design philosophy mirrors the way humans collaborate at the terminal. Just as a colleague sitting next to you, TmuxAI observes your screen, understand context from what's visible, and helps accordingly.

Lots more information on the 2 links provided. I don't know how many tmux users we have in our community--JR

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2025-04-framework-stars-dissolve-neutrons-forge.html

Understanding the origin of heavy elements on the periodic table is one of the most challenging open problems in all of physics. In the search for conditions suitable for these elements via "nucleosynthesis," a Los Alamos National Laboratory-led team is going where no researchers have gone before: the gamma-ray burst jet and surrounding cocoon emerging from collapsed stars.

As proposed in an article in The Astrophysical Journal, high-energy photons produced deep in the jet could dissolve the outer layers of a star into neutrons, causing a series of physical processes that result in the formation of heavy elements.

"The creation of heavy elements such as uranium and plutonium necessitates extreme conditions," said Matthew Mumpower, physicist at Los Alamos. "There are only a few viable yet rare scenarios in the cosmos where these elements can form, and all such locations need a copious amount of neutrons. We propose a new phenomenon where those neutrons don't pre-exist but are produced dynamically in the star."

Free neutrons have a short half-life of about 15 minutes, limiting scenarios in which they are available in the abundance required to form heavy elements. The key to producing the heaviest elements on the periodic table is known as the rapid neutron-capture process, or "r process," and it is thought to be responsible for the production of all naturally occurring thorium, uranium and plutonium in the universe.

The team's framework takes on the challenging physics of the r process and resolves them by proposing reactions and processes around star collapses that could result in heavy element formation.

In addition to understanding the formation of heavy elements, the proposed framework helps address critical questions around neutron transport, multiphysics simulations, and the observation of rare events—all of which are of interest for national security applications that can glean insights from the research.

In the scenario Mumpower proposes, a massive star begins to die as its nuclear fuel runs out. No longer able to push up against its own gravity, a black hole forms at the star's center. If the black hole is spinning fast enough, frame-dragging effects from the extremely strong gravity near the black hole wind up the magnetic field and launch a powerful jet. Through subsequent reactions, a broad spectrum of photons is created, some of which are at high energy.

The jet blasts through the star ahead of it, creating a hot cocoon of material around the jet, "like a freight train plowing through snow," Mumpower said. At the interface of the jet with the stellar material, high-energy photons (that is, light) can interact with atomic nuclei, transmuting protons to neutrons.

Existing atomic nuclei may also be dissolved into individual nucleons, creating more free neutrons to power the r process. The team's calculations suggest the interaction with light and matter can create neutrons incredibly fast, on the order of a nanosecond.

Because of their charge, protons get trapped in the jet by the strong magnetic fields. Neutrons, which are chargeless, are plowed out of the jet into the cocoon. Having experienced a relativistic shock, the neutrons are extremely dense compared with the surrounding stellar material, and thus the r process may ensue, with heavy elements and isotopes forged and then expelled out into space as the star is ripped apart.

More information: Matthew R. Mumpower et al, Let There Be Neutrons! Hadronic Photoproduction from a Large Flux of High-energy Photons, The Astrophysical Journal (2025). DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/adb1e3

Original Submission

looorg writes:

Urinals have had the same or a similar design since its invention or introduction. Sometimes it leaves things to be desired, that or the aim of the people using them. New designs promises to lower water consumption and collect more, or lead to less spillage. By changing the geometry. Lets hope it's not piss-poor-math.

"Splash-free urinals for global sustainability and accessibility: Design through physics and differential equations "

We theoretically predict and experimentally validate that when the impinging angle is below an invariant critical value of ⁠~30°, the flow rate of splashback under human urination conditions can be significantly suppressed. We propose novel urinal designs that were generated by solving differential equations derived from the isogonal curve problem to ensure the urine stream impacts at or below this critical angle. Experiments validate that these designs can substantially reduce splashback to only 1.4% of the splash of a common contemporary commercial urinal.

https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/4/4/pgaf087/8098745?login=false

Original Submission