For the third straight day, "More than 1,000 US flights have been," reports CNN, "as airlines struggle to recover from a global tech outage that left thousands of passengers stranded at airports." More than 1,200 flights into, within or out of the United States were canceled by early Sunday afternoon, while more than 5,000 U.S. flights were delayed, according to the tracking website FlightAware.com... On Saturday, 2,136 US flights were canceled, and more than 21,300 flights were delayed... USA Today notes that Friday several U.S. airlines issued ground stops (according to America's Federal Aviation Administration) "which caused a domino effect into Sunday." They note that "most of the cancellations and delays Sunday are likely to be caused by airline crews and equipment being out of place."

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The Verge reports that for machines that aren't automatically receiving Crowdstrike's newly-released software fix, Microsoft has released a recovery tool that creates a bootable USB drive. Some IT admins have reported rebooting PCs multiple times will get the necessary update, but for others the only route is having to manually boot into Safe Mode and deleting the problematic CrowdStrike update file. Microsoft's recovery tool now makes this recovery process less manual, by booting into its Windows PE environment via USB, accessing the disk of the affected machine, and automatically deleting the problematic CrowdStrike file to allow the machine to boot properly. This avoids having to boot into Safe Mode or a requirement of admin rights on the machine, because the tool is simply accessing the disk without booting into the local copy of Windows. If a disk is protected by BitLocker encryption, the tool will prompt for the BitLocker recovery key and then continue to fix the CrowdStrike update.

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"It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President," U.S. President Joe Biden announced today. "And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term." In an announcement posted on X.com, Biden thanked the American people. ("Together, we overcame a once in a century pandemic and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.") The short statement also said he would "speak to the Nation later this week in more detail." The Associated Press reports that "His wife, first lady Jill Biden, responded by reposting the president's letter announcing his decision and adding red heart emojis." CNN reports that "most Biden campaign staff, including some senior staff, found out from the president's post on X." In a subsequent X post, Biden endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to be the Democratic party's nominee for president.

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Harry R. Lewis has been a Harvard CS professor — teaching both Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg — and the dean of Harvard college. Born in 1947, Lewis remembers flipping the 18 toggle switches on Harvard's PDP-4 back in 1966 — up ("click!") or down ("CLACK"). And he thinks there's a lesson for today from a time when "Computers were experienced as physical things." [T]he machine had a personality because it had a body you could feel and listen to. You could tell whether it was running smoothly by the way it sounded... Unlike the unreliable mechanical contraptions of yore, today's computers — uninteresting though they may be to look at if you can find them at all — mostly don't break down, so we have fewer reasons to remember their physicality. Does it matter that the line between humans and the machines we have created has so blurred? Of course it does. We have known for a long time that we would eventually lose the calculation game to our creations; it has happened. We are likely to lose Turing's "Imitation Game" too, in which a computer program, communicating with a human via typed text, tries to fool the user into confusing it with a human at another keyboard. (ChatGPT and its ilk are disturbingly convincing conversationalists already.) Our challenge, in the presence of ubiquitous, invisible, superior intelligent agents, will be to make sure that we, and our heirs and successors, remember what makes us human... All computers can do is pretend to be human. They can be, in the language of the late philosopher Daniel Dennett '63, counterfeit humans... The first error is suggesting that computers can be digitally trained to be superior versions of human intellects. And the second is inferring that human judgment will not be needed once computers get smart enough... [N]o AI system can be divorced from the judgments of the humans who created it... Only hubristic humans could think that their counterfeits might completely substitute for human companionship, wisdom, curiosity, and judgment.â Even back in 1966, Lewis says he learned two lessons that "have stood the test of time. Be careful what you ask them for. And it can be hard to tell what they are doing." One example? "In those pre-miniaturization days, the ordinary operation of the central processor generated so much radiation that you would put a transistor radio on the console and tune it in between AM stations. From the other side of the room, the tone of the static indicated whether the machine had crashed or not."

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Last year two different tourists — following GPS directions — drove their cars straight into the same harbor in Hawaii. And then last weekend — at the same harbor — it happened again. "This time it was different," reports a local news station. "The driver was a local..." Multiple witnesses say the Prius was actually parked at the top of the ramp and that an enforcement officer with the Department of Land and Natural Resources told the owner she had to move it. Witnesses also said that the woman had an issue getting the car started. Eventually, she was able to start the vehicle and called out that the car was running. Then the car went down the ramp.... More from Hawaii News Now: This follows another viral incident, captured on video in May of last year, showing another SUV sinking in the water with its passengers inside. "The GPS led them into the water," said one witness. Then, a few weeks later, it happened again. Witnesses say the driver, also an out-of-state visitor, was following their GPS directions. "The first time I heard it, the thought in my head was, you got to be joking," said Hawaii County Mayor Mitch Roth. "The third was — are you serious? This is just another form of people not paying attention to what they're doing." The news outlet reached out to the Department of Land and Natural Resources — and specifically to its Division of Boating & Ocean Recreation, to ask whether the harbor's boat ramp had adequate lighting and signage. They responded that a boat ramp descending into the waters of the Pacific ocean is "hard to miss" — and called the recent incidents "operator error." Meanwhile in Wyoming, SFGate reports that "an SUV with five people inside plunged about 9 feet deep into a 105-degree geyser at Yellowstone National Park after it 'inadvertently drove off the roadway' last Thursday, National Park Service officials said."

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12 years on Mars — and NASA's Curiosity rover "has made its most unusual find to date," reports CNN — rocks made of pure sulfur. "And it all began when the 1-ton rover happened to drive over a rock and crack it open, revealing yellowish-green crystals never spotted before on the red planet." "I think it's the strangest find of the whole mission and the most unexpected," said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "I have to say, there's a lot of luck involved here. Not every rock has something interesting inside...." White stones had been visible in the distance, and the mission scientists wanted a closer look. The rover drivers at JPL, who send instructions to Curiosity, did a 90-degree turn to put the robotic explorer in the right position for its cameras to capture a mosaic of the surrounding landscape. On the morning of May 30, Vasavada and his team looked at Curiosity's mosaic and saw a crushed rock lying amid the rover's wheel tracks. A closer picture of the rock made clear the "mind-blowing" find, he said... "No one had pure sulfur on their bingo card," Vasavada said... Members of the team were stunned twice — once when they saw the "gorgeous texture and color inside" the rock and then when they used Curiosity's instruments to analyze the rock and received data indicating it was pure sulfur, Vasavada said. Vasavada also was grateful for the original landing site where Curiosity began methodically exploring back in 2012. "I'm glad we chose something that was 12 years' worth of science."

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Who wrote the code for Windows' notorious "Blue Screen of Death? It's "been a source of some contention," writes SFGate: A Microsoft developer blog post from Raymond Chen in 2014 said that former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer wrote the text for the Ctrl+Alt+Del dialog in Windows 3.1. That very benign post led to countless stories from tech media claiming Ballmer was the inventor of the "Blue Screen of Death." That, in turn, prompted a follow-up developer blog post from Chen titled "Steve Ballmer did not write the text for the blue screen of death...." Chen then later tried to claim he was responsible for the "Blue Screen of Death," saying he coded it into Windows 95. Problem is, it already existed in previous iterations of Windows, and 95 simply removed it. Chen added it back in, which he sort of cops to, saying: "And I'm the one who wrote it. Or at least modified it last." No one challenged Chen's 2014 self-attribution, until 2021, when former Microsoft developer Dave Plummer stepped in. According to Plummer, the "Blue Screen of Death" was actually the work of Microsoft developer John Vert, whom logs revealed to be the father of the modern Windows blue screen way back in version 3.1. Plummer spoke directly with Vert, according to Vert, who'd remembered that he got the idea because there was already a blue screen with white text in both his machine at the time (a MIPS RISC box) and this text editor (SlickEdit)...

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This week the Computer Science Teachers Association conference kicked off Tuesday in Las Vegas, writes long-time Slashdot reader theodp. And the "TeachAI" education initiative teamed with the Computer Science Teachers Association to release three briefs "arguing that K-12 computer science education is more important than ever in an age of AI." From the press release: "As AI becomes increasingly present in the classroom, educators are understandably concerned about how it might disrupt the teaching of core CS skills like programming. With these briefs, TeachAI and CSTA hope to reinforce the idea that learning to program is the cornerstone of computational thinking and an important gateway to the problem-solving, critical thinking, and creative thinking skills necessary to thrive in today's digitally driven world. The rise of AI only makes CS education more important." To help drive home the point to educators, the 39-page Guidance on the Future of Computer Science Education in an Age of AI (penned by five authors from nonprofits CSTA and Code.org) includes a pretty grim comic entitled Learn to Program or Follow Commands. In the panel, two high school students who scoff at the idea of having to learn to code and instead use GenAI to create their Python apps wind up getting stuck in miserable warehouse jobs several years later as a result where they're ordered about by an AI robot. "The rise of AI only makes CS education more important," according to the group's press release, "with early research showing that people with a greater grasp of underlying computing concepts are able to use AI tools more effectively than those without." A survey by the group also found that 80% of teachers "agree that core concepts in CS education should be updated to emphasize topics that better support learning about AI." But I'd be curious to hear what Slashdot's readers think. Share your thoughts and opinions in the comments. Should children still be taught to code in the age of AI?

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The pace of China's clean energy transition "is roughly the equivalent of installing five large-scale nuclear power plants worth of renewables every week," according to a report from Australia's national public broadcaster ABC (shared by long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo): A report by Sydney-based think tank Climate Energy Finance (CEF) said China was installing renewables so rapidly it would meet its end-of-2030 target by the end of this month — or 6.5 years early. It's installing at least 10 gigawatts of wind and solar generation capacity every fortnight... China accounts for about a third of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. A recent drop in emissions (the first since relaxing COVID-19 restrictions), combined with the decarbonisation of the power grid, may mean the country's emissions have peaked. "With the power sector going green, emissions are set to plateau and then progressively fall towards 2030 and beyond," CEF China energy policy analyst Xuyang Dong said... [In China] the world's largest solar and wind farms are being built on the western edge of the country and connected to the east via the world's longest high-voltage transmission lines... Somewhat counterintuitively, China has built dozens of coal-fired power stations alongside its renewable energy zones, to maintain the pace of its clean energy transition. China was responsible for 95 per cent of the world's new coal power construction activity last year. The new plants are partly needed to meet demand for electricity, which has gone up as more energy-hungry sectors of the economy, like transport, are electrified. The coal-fired plants are also being used, like the batteries and pumped hydro, to provide a stable supply of power down the transmission lines from renewable energy zones, balancing out the intermittent solar and wind. Despite these new coal plants, coal's share of total electricity generation in the country is falling. The China Energy Council estimated renewables generation would overtake coal by the end of this year. CEF director Tim Buckley tells the site that China installed just 1GW of nuclear power last year — compared to 300GW of solar and wind. "They had grand plans for nuclear to be massive but they're behind on nuclear by a decade and five years ahead of schedule on solar and wind." Last year China accounted for 16% of the world's nuclear-generated power — but also more than half the world's coal-fired power generation, according to this year's analysis from the long-running International Energy Agency. The IEA estimated that in 2023, China's electricity demand rose by 6.4%, and they're predicting that by 2026 the country will see an increase "more than half of the EU's current annual electricity consumption." And yet in China "the rapid expansion of renewable energy sources is expected to meet all additional electricity demand..." according to the IEA analysis. "Coal-fired generation in China is currently on course to experience a slow structural decline, driven by the strong expansion of renewables and growing nuclear generation, as well as moderating economic growth." There's also some interesting stats on the "CO2 intensity" of power generation around the world. "The EU is expected to record the highest rate of progress in reducing emissions intensity, averaging an improvement of 13% per year. This is followed by China, with annual improvements forecast at 6%, and the United States at 5%." Long-time Slashdot reader Uncle_Meataxe shares a related article from Electrek ...

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Slashdot covered Barrett Brown back in 2011 and 2012. The New York Times calls him "an activist associated with the hacker group Anonymous, and a political prisoner recently denied asylum in Britain, all of which sounds a bit dreary until we hear tell of it through Brown's unhinged self-regard." They're reviewing Brown's "extraordinary" new memoir, My Glorious Defeats: Hacktivist, Narcissist, Anonymous," a book they call "deranged, hyperbolic, and true." A "machine" that focuses attention on little-known social issues, Anonymous has gone after the Church of Scientology, Koch Industries, websites hosting child pornography and the Westboro Baptist Church. The public tends to be confused by nebulous digital activities, so it was, in the collective's heyday, helpful to have Brown act as a translator between the hackers and mainstream journalists. "The year 2011 ended as it began," he writes, "with a sophisticated hack on a state-affiliated corporation that ostensibly dealt in straightforward security and analysis while secretly engaging in black ops campaigns against activists who'd proven troublesome to powerful clients." This particular corporation was Stratfor, a company that spied on activists for the government... Brown waited for the feds to come back and drag him to jail. He also says he tried to get off suboxone in order to avoid the painful possibility of prison withdrawal, and stopped taking Paxil, inducing a manic state, all of which is given as explanation for his regrettable next move, which was to set up a camera and start talking. The feds had threatened his mother, he told the internet, and in response he was threatening Robert Smith, the lead agent on his case. He found himself in custody the same night. Brown was then subjected to the kind of nonsense the Department of Justice is prone to inflicting on those involved in shadowy internet activities that, in fact, almost no one in the legal process understands. He was charged with participating in the hack of Stratfor, though he was not really involved and cannot code, and although the whole thing was organized by an F.B.I. informant. Brown had also retweeted a Fox News host's call to murder Julian Assange; the prosecution presented this as if he were himself calling for the murder of Assange. But generally, Brown's primary victim is himself. "My thirst for glory and hatred for the state," he writes, "were incompatible with an orthodox criminal defense, in which the limiting of one's sentence is the sole objective." In his cell, with an eraser-less pencil he needs a compliant guard to repeatedly sharpen, he writes "The Barrett Brown Review of Arts and Letters and Jail." His mother types it up; The Intercept publishes. He develops the character he will play in his memoir: a self-aware narcissist and addict. He wins a National Magazine Award, and is especially pleased that his column "Please Stop Sending Me Jonathan Franzen Novels," wins while Franzen is in attendance. "The state is an afterthought here — a litany of absurdist horrors too stupid to appall..." the review concludes. "We're left with a man who refuses to look away from the deep structure of the world, an unstable position from which there is no sanctuary. My Glorious Defeats is deranged, hyperbolic and as true a work as I have read in a very long time."

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2017 Slashdot headline: "People Keep Finding Hidden Cameras in Their Airbnbs." Nearly seven years later, CNN launched their own investigation of "Airbnb's hidden camera problem". CNN: "Across North America, police have seized thousands of images from hidden cameras at Airbnb rentals, including people's most intimate moments... It's more than just a few reported cases. And Airbnb knows it's a problem. In this deposition reviewed by CNN, an Airbnb rep said 35,000 customer support tickets about security cameras or recording devices had been documented over a decade. [The deposition estimates "about" 35,000 tickets "within the scope of the security camera and recording devices policy."] Airbnb told CNN a single complaint can involve multiple tickets. CNN actually obtained the audio recording of an Airbnb host in Maine admitting to police that he'd photographed a couple having sex using a camera hidden in a clock — and also photographed other couples. And one Airbnb guest told CNN he'd only learned he'd been recorded "because police called him, months later, after another guest found the camera" — with police discovering cameras in every single room in the house, concealed inside smoke detectors. "Part of the challenge is that the technology has gotten so advanced, with these cameras so small that you can't even see them," CNN says. But even though recording someone without consent is illegal in every state, CNN also found that in this case and others, Airbnb "does not contact law enforcement once hidden cameras are discovered — even if children are involved." Their reporter argues that Airbnb "not only fails to protect its guests — it works to keep complaints out of the courts and away from the public." They spoke to two Florida attorneys who said trying to sue Airbnb if something goes wrong is extremely difficult — since its Terms of Service require users to assume every risk themselves. "The person going to rent the property agrees that if something happens while they're staying at this accommodation, they're actually prohibited from suing Airbnb," says one of the attorneys. "They must go a different route, which is a binding arbitration." (When CNN asked if this was about controlling publicity, the two lawyers answered "absolutely" and "100%".) And when claims are settled, CNN adds, "Airbnb has required guests to sign confidentiality agreements — which CNN obtained — that keep some details of legal cases private." Responding to the story, Airbnb seemed to acknowledge guests have been secretly recorded by hosts, by calling such occurrences "exceptionally rare... When we do receive an allegation, we take appropriate, swift action, which can include removing hosts and listings that violate the policy. "Airbnb's trust and safety policies lead the vacation rental industry..."

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"If there is no alternative, then the whole thing can collapse around you," says Ron Delnevo. He's the chair of The Payment Choice Alliance, "which campaigns against the move towards a cashless society." He's part of those arguing "the chaos caused by the global IT outage last week underlines the risk of moving towards a cashless society," writes the Observer: Authorities in China and the US have fined businesses for not accepting cash. Delnevo said the U.K. should have a law requiring all businesses to take cash. Martin Quinn, campaign director for the PCA, said using cash allowed for anonymity. "I don't want my data sold on, and I don't want banks, credit card companies and even online retailers to know every facet of my life," he said. Budgeting by using cash is also easier for some, he added. The article includes some interesting statistics from a U.K. bank trade association. "The number of people who never use cash, or use it less than once a month, reached 23.1 million in 2021, but declined to 21.6m last year." The GMB [general trade] Union said the outage reinforced what it had been saying for years: that "cash is a vital part of how our communities operate". "When you take cash out of the system, people have nothing to fall back on, impacting on how they do the everyday basics."

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SolarWinds still faces some legal action over its infamous 2020 breach, reports NextGov.com. But a U.S. federal judge has dismissed most of the claims from America's Securities and Exchange Commission, which "alleged the company defrauded investors because it deliberately hid knowledge of cyber vulnerabilities in its systems ahead of a major security breach discovered in 2020." Slashdot reader krakman shares this report from the Washington Post: "The SEC's rationale, under which the statute must be construed to broadly cover all systems public companies use to safeguard their valuable assets, would have sweeping ramifications," [judge] Engelmayer wrote in a 107-page decision. "It could empower the agency to regulate background checks used in hiring nighttime security guards, the selection of padlocks for storage sheds, safety measures at water parks on whose reliability the asset of customer goodwill depended, and the lengths and configurations of passwords required to access company computers," he wrote. The federal judge also dismissed SEC claims that SolarWinds' disclosures after it learned its customers had been affected improperly covered up the gravity of the breach... In an era when deeply damaging hacking campaigns have become commonplace, the suit alarmed business leaders, some security executives and even former government officials, as expressed in friend-of-the-court briefs asking that it be thrown out. They argued that adding liability for misstatements would discourage hacking victims from sharing what they know with customers, investors and safety authorities. Austin-based SolarWinds said it was pleased that the judge "largely granted our motion to dismiss the SEC's claims," adding in a statement that it was "grateful for the support we have received thus far across the industry, from our customers, from cybersecurity professionals, and from veteran government officials who echoed our concerns." The article notes that as far back as 2018, "an engineer warned in an internal presentation that a hacker could use the company's virtual private network from an unauthorized device and upload malicious code. Brown did not pass that information along to top executives, the judge wrote, and hackers later used that exact technique." Engelmayer did not dismiss the case entirely, allowing the SEC to try to show that SolarWinds and top security executive Timothy Brown committed securities fraud by not warning in a public "security statement" before the hack that it knew it was highly vulnerable to attacks. The SEC "plausibly alleges that SolarWinds and Brown made sustained public misrepresentations, indeed many amounting to flat falsehoods, in the Security Statement about the adequacy of its access controls," Engelmayer wrote. "Given the centrality of cybersecurity to SolarWinds' business model as a company pitching sophisticated software products to customers for whom computer security was paramount, these misrepresentations were undeniably material."

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Parts of the Persian Gulf "have seen the heat index, or how it feels when factoring in the humidity, reach 140 to 150 degrees Fahrenheit (60 to 65 Celsius)," reports the Washington Post, "fueled by an intense heat dome, the warmest water temperatures in the world and the influence of human-caused climate change." Temperatures at the Persian Gulf International Airport in Asaluyeh, Iran, climbed to 108 (42 C) on Wednesday and 106 (41 C) on Thursday, with both days recording a peak heat index of 149 (65 C). In Dubai, the temperature topped out at 113 (45 C) on Tuesday and the heat index soared to 144 (62 C). Other extreme heat indexes in recent days include 141 (61 C) in Abu Dhabi and 136 (58 C) at Khasab Air Base in Oman. Last August, this same region experienced even more extreme heat indexes, climbing as high as 158 degrees (70 C). The maximum air temperatures this week — generally between 105 and 115 (41 and 46 C) — have only been somewhat above normal. But the dew points — which are a measure of humidity — have been excessive, climbing well into the 80s (27 to 32 C). In the United States, any dew point over 70 degrees (21 C) is considered uncomfortably humid. It's the very high dew points that have propelled heat indexes up to 30 degrees (16 C) above actual air temperatures. The extreme humidity levels are tied to bathtub-like water temperatures in the Persian Gulf, the warmest in the world. According to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data, sea surface temperatures are as warm as 95 degrees (35 C). Largely because of the high humidity, nighttime minimum temperatures have also remained exceptionally warm, in many cases staying above 85 (29 C). Temperatures in Iranshar, Iran, only dropped to 97 (36 C) on Wednesday night, its hottest July night on record. "Researchers have identified the Persian Gulf among the regions most likely to regularly exceed life-threatening heat thresholds during the next 30 to 50 years," the article adds. And it also cites new heat records reported for the region by weather historian Maximiliano Herrera. "The United Arab Emirates saw a scorching high temperature of 123 while Adrar, Algeria, tied its record of 122 (50 C). Cities in both Kuwait and Iraq reached 126 (52 C), and Al Ahsa, Saudi Arabia, notched a record of 124 (51 C)... "The same heat dome that's in the Persian Gulf region has spread record heat northward into Eastern Europe, westward into northern Africa, and eastward into India, Pakistan and Indonesia. In Eastern Europe, high temperatures surpassed 104 (40 C), with some locations staying above 85 degrees (29 C) at night."

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A new report "explores the current state of secure software development," according to an announcement from the Linux Foundation, "and underscores the urgent need for formalized industry education and training programs," noting that many developers "lack the essential knowledge and skills to effectively implement secure software development." The report analyzes a survey of nearly 400 software development professionals performed by and the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) and Linux Foundation Research: Survey findings outlined in the report show nearly one-third of all professionals directly involved in development and deployment — system operations, software developers, committers, and maintainers — self-report feeling unfamiliar with secure software development practices. This is of particular concern as they are the ones at the forefront of creating and maintaining the code that runs a company's applications and systems. "Time and again we've seen the exploitation of software vulnerabilities lead to catastrophic consequences, highlighting the critical need for developers at all levels to be armed with adequate knowledge and skills to write secure code," said David A. Wheeler, director of open source supply chain security for the Linux Foundation. "Our research found that a key challenge is the lack of education in secure software development. Practitioners are unsure where to start and instead are learning as they go. It is clear that an industry-wide effort to bring secure development education to the forefront must be a priority." OpenSSF offers a free course on developing secure software (LFD121) and encourages developers to start with this course. Survey results indicate that the lack of security awareness is likely due to most current educational programs prioritizing functionality and efficiency while often neglecting essential security training. Additionally, most professionals (69%) rely on on-the-job experience as a main learning resource, yet it takes at least five years of such experience to achieve a minimum level of security familiarity. "The top reason (44%) for not taking a course on secure software development is lack of knowledge about a good course on the topic," according to the announcement — which includes this follow-up quote from Intel's Christopher Robinson (co-chair of the OpenSSF Education SIG). "Based on these findings, OpenSSF will create a new course on security architecture which will be available later this year which will help promote a 'security by design' approach to software developer education."

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An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN: Netflix will start phasing out its Basic plan, its cheapest advertising-free plan, which costs $11.99 per month in the United States, the company said on Thursday. The company had previously stopped accepting new sign-ups for the Basic plan, instead pushing customers to Netflix's ad-supported plan, which costs $6.99 per month. However, existing users were allowed to keep the basic plan. In January, the company said it would retire its cheapest ad-free tier in Canada and the UK. On Thursday, the company said the US and France are next. Basic users in the US who want an ad-free viewing experience on Netflix will now have two choices: Netflix's Standard plan, which costs $15.49 per month, and its Premium plan, which costs $22.99 per month... The company reported a record-high 277.65 million subscribers on its streaming platform Thursday, far outpacing streaming competitors like Disney+, Peacock and Max... Overall, Netflix added 8.05 million new subscribers in its second quarter. Netflix's surge in new subscribers has been fueled in part by the company's effort to push users who share passwords to create their own accounts. The article adds that Netflix's stock has climbed more than 35% in 2024.

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Slashdot reader Thelasko shared Friday's article from Digital Trends: Nearly every flight in the U.S. is grounded right now following a CrowdStrike system update error that's affecting everything from travel to mobile ordering at Starbucks — but not Southwest Airlines flights. Southwest is still flying high, unaffected by the outage that's plaguing the world today, and that's apparently because it's using Windows 3.1. Yes, Windows 3.1 — an operating system that is 32 years old. Southwest, along with UPS and FedEx, haven't had any issues with the CrowdStrike outage. In responses to CNN, Delta, American, Spirit, Frontier, United, and Allegiant all said they were having issues, but Southwest told the outlet that its operations are going off without a hitch. Some are attributing that to Windows 3.1. Major portions of Southwest's systems are reportedly built on Windows 95 and Windows 3.1...

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"Many people over the past few days have been lashing out at Mozilla," writes the blog Its FOSS, "for enabling Privacy-Preserving Attribution by default on Firefox 128, and the lack of publicity surrounding its introduction." Mozilla responded that the feature will only run "on a few sites in the U.S. under strict supervision" — adding that users can disable it at any time ("because this is a test"), and that it's only even enabled if telemetry is also enabled. And they also emphasize that it's "not tracking." The way it works is there's an "aggregation service" that can periodically send advertisers a summary of ad-related actions — again, aggregated data, from a mass of many other users. (And Mozilla says that aggregated summary even includes "noise that provides differential privacy.") This Privacy-Preserving Attribution concept "does not involve sending information about your browsing activities to anyone... Advertisers only receive aggregate information that answers basic questions about the effectiveness of their advertising." More from It's FOSS: Even though Mozilla mentioned that PPA would be enabled by default on Firefox 128 in a few of its past blog posts, they failed to communicate this decision clearly, to a wider audience... In response to the public outcry, Firefox CTO, Bobby Holley, had to step in to clarify what was going on. He started with how the internet has become a massive cesspool of surveillance, and doing something about it was the primary reason many people are part of Mozilla. He then expanded on their approach with Firefox, which, historically speaking, has been to ship a browser with anti-tracking features baked in to tackle the most common surveillance techniques. But, there were two limitations with this approach. One was that advertisers would try to bypass these countermeasures. The second, most users just accept the default options that they are shown... Bas Schouten, Principal Software Engineer at Mozilla, made it clear at the end of a heated Mastodon thread that "[opt-in features are] making privacy a privilege for the people that work to inform and educate themselves on the topic. People shouldn't need to do that, everyone deserves a more private browser. Privacy features, in Firefox, are not meant to be opt-in. They need to be the default. "If you are 'completely anti-ads' (i.e. even if their implementation is private), you probably use an ad blocker. So are unaffected by this." This has already provoked a discussion among Slashdot readers. "It doesn't seem that evil to me," argues Slashdot reader geekprime. "Seems like the elimination of cross site cookies is a privacy enhancing idea." (They cite Mozilla's statement that their goal is "to inform an emerging Web standard designed to help sites understand how their ads perform without collecting data about individual people. By offering sites a non-invasive alternative to cross-site tracking, we hope to achieve a significant reduction in this harmful practice across the web.") But Slashdot reader TheNameOfNick disagrees. "How realistic is the part where advertisers stop tracking you because they get less information from the browser maker...?" Mozilla has provided simple instructions for disabling the feature: Click the menu button and select Settings. In the Privacy & Security panel, find the Website Advertising Preferences section. Uncheck the box labeled Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement.

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Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Bob Newhart, whose stammering, deadpan unflappability carried him to stardom as a standup comedian and later in television and movies, has died at age 94. He remains best known for the television shows, "The Bob Newhart Show" (1972-78) and "Newhart" (1982-90), both of which were built around his persona as a reasonable man put-upon by crazies. A younger crowd may remember Newhart from his roles in the movie "Elf" (2003) and TV's "The Big Bang Theory" (2013-18). Less known about Newhart is that he was an early Commodore PET owner, recalling for the LA Times in 2001: "I remember leafing through a copy of Popular Science magazine and seeing an ad for a Commodore computer that had 8- or 16 kilobytes [in 1977]. It had an awful-looking screen, and it was $795. I thought I'd better get one because I had sons who were going to be in high school and might want to know about computers. Later, I moved up to the 64 KB model and thought that was silly because it was more memory than I would ever possibly need. "I got them for the kids and then found I was fascinated by them. The first ones had tape drives. You would get a program like a word processor, put the tape in and then walk away for about a half an hour while the computer loaded it. But the first time I used a spell checker and it corrected a word, I thought, 'We are getting close to God here."

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"More pieces of a broken wind turbine off the coast of Massachusetts are falling into the Atlantic Ocean," reports CBS News on Thursday. "The CEO of Vineyard Wind was at Nantucket's Select Board meeting Wednesday evening, apologizing and answering questions about the initial break when he suddenly had to leave because the situation is getting worse." CNN reports the debris has been "prompting beach closures and frustrating locals at the peak of the summer season" since the blade broke a week ago, and then folded over: Since then, foam debris and fiberglass — including some large and dangerously sharp pieces — have washed onto beaches. A "significant part" of the remaining damaged blade detached from the turbine early Thursday morning, Vineyard Wind said in a news release. The US Coast Guard confirmed to CNN it has located a 300-foot piece of the blade. There are few answers to what caused the turbine to fail, and the incident has prompted questions and anger from city officials and Nantucket residents... The shards of turbine forced officials to close beaches earlier this week, though they have since reopened. [Nantucket select board chair Brooke Mohr] said the town would monitor for additional debris and adjust schedules accordingly. "Public safety is our most immediate concern, these fiberglass pieces are quite sharp," Mohr said, making swimming unsafe... The federal government is conducting its own investigation and has ordered Vineyard Wind to stop all its wind turbines producing electricity until it can be determined whether any other blades were impacted, a Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement spokesperson said in a statement. The federal government has also ordered the companies to preserve any equipment that could help determine the cause of the failure. The federal suspension order effectively halts further construction on Vineyard Wind, the first large-scale wind farm being installed in the US. The wind farm, a joint venture of Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, has 10 turbines up and running so far with plans to install 62 total... The project was set to double the number of turbines spinning off the East Coast, and state leaders in Massachusetts have viewed it as a big boost to the state's ability to generate electricity. Now the project is in limbo, and could remain so until the investigation is complete. The article quotes the head of government affairs at wind blade manufacturer GE Vernova as saying a breaking wind turbine is "highly unusual and rare." But Vineyard Wind CEO Klaus Skoust Møller called it a "very serious situation" and apologized to local residents. Meanwhile, the Boston Herald reported Friday that the Nantucket Select Board "is set to pursue litigation against the wind energy company in connection to the blade failure..." Town officials, residents and local mariners have all said they didn't learn of the incident until Monday evening, roughly 48 hours after the fact and just hours before debris started to wash ashore, prompting beaches to close Tuesday... The "significant portion" of the 107-meter blade that detached from the turbine Thursday morning sunk to the ocean floor. Crews were slated to recover the fiberglass "in due course," town officials wrote in a Friday update... Residents are not taking kindly to Vineyard Wind's assertion that the debris — fiberglass fragments ranging in size from small pieces to larger sections, typically green or white — is not toxic. Vineyard Wind has deployed a crew of 56 contractors to assist in the cleanup of the island's beaches, and town officials said Friday that no town staff are actively engaged in removing the debris. The wind energy company reported Wednesday that crews had removed 17 cubic yards of debris, enough to fill more than six truckloads. "The joint venture of Connecticut-based Avangrid and Denmark-based Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners is developing a plan to test water quality around the island while working on a process for financial claims."

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