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Two days after the International Week of the Deaf, which is the last full week in September, YouTube is killing its "Community Contributions" feature for videos, which let content creators crowdsource captions and subtitles for their videos. Ars Technica reports: Once enabled by a channel owner, the Community Contributions feature would let viewers caption or translate a video and submit it to the channel for approval. YouTube currently offers machine-transcribed subtitles that are often full of errors, and if you also need YouTube to take a second pass at the subtitles for machine translation, they've probably lost all meaning by the time they hit your screen. The Community Caption feature would load up those machine-written subtitles as a starting point and allow the user to make corrections and add text that the machine transcription doesn't handle well, like transcribed sound cues for the deaf and hard of hearing. YouTube says it's killing crowd-source subtitles due to spam and low usage. "While we hoped Community Contributions would be a wide-scale, community-driven source of quality translations for Creators," the company wrote, "it's rarely used and people continue to report spam and abuse." The community does not seem to agree with this assessment, since a petition immediately popped up asking YouTube to reconsider, and so far a half-million people have signed. "Removing community captions locks so many viewers out of the experience," the petition reads. "Community captions ensured that many videos were accessible that otherwise would not be." Instead of the free, in-house solution YouTube already built and doesn't want to keep running, the company's shutdown post pushes users to paid, third-party alternatives like Amara.org. YouTube says that because "many of you rely on community captions," (what happened to the low usage?) "YouTube will be covering the cost of a 6 month subscription of Amara.org for all creators who have used the Community Contribution feature for at least 3 videos in the last 60 days."

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The existence of liquid water on Mars -- one of the more hotly debated matters about our cold, red neighbor -- is looking increasingly likely. From a report: New research published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy indicates there really is a buried reservoir of super-salty water near the south pole of the planet. Scientists say such a lake would significantly improve the likelihood that the red planet just might harbor microscopic life of its own. Some scientists remain unconvinced that what's been seen is liquid water, but the latest study adds weight to a tentative 2018 finding from radar maps of the planet's crust made by the Mars Express robot orbiter. That research suggested an underground "lake" of liquid water had pooled beneath frozen layers of sediment near the Martian south pole -- akin to the subglacial lakes detected beneath the Antarctic and the Greenland ice sheets on Earth. Earth's subglacial lakes are teeming with bacterial life, and similar life might survive in liquid reservoirs on Mars, scientists have speculated. "We are much more confident now," said Elena Pettinelli, a professor of geophysics at Italy's Roma Tre University, who led the latest research and the earlier study. "We did many more observations, and we processed the data completely differently." The planetary scientist and her team processed 134 observations of the region near the south pole with ground-penetrating radar from the Mars Express Orbiter between 2012 until 2019 -- more than four times as many as before, and covering a period of time more than twice as long. They then applied a new technique to the observation data that has been used to find lakes beneath the Antarctic ice sheet, as well as an older technique used in the 2018 study. Both methods indicate there is a "patchwork" of buried reservoirs of liquid in the region, Pettinelli said -- a large reservoir about 15 miles across, surrounded by several smaller patches up to 6 miles across.

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After losing its license to operate in London last November, deputy chief magistrate of Transport for London (TfL), Tanweer Ikram, granted Uber an 18-month license after winning their court appeal. "Despite their historical failings, I find them, now, to be a fit and proper person to hold a London PHV [private hire vehicle] operator's license," he concluded. Engadget reports: Uber's new licence runs for 18 months. It has "a number of conditions," according to TfL, that will allow the regulator to "closely monitor Uber's adherence to the regulations and to swiftly take action if they fail to meet the required standards." Jamie Heywood, Uber's regional general manager for Northern and Eastern Europe, added: "This decision is a recognition of Uber's commitment to safety and we will continue to work constructively with TfL. There is nothing more important than the safety of the people who use the Uber app as we work together to keep London moving." The UK's App Drivers and Couriers Union (ACDU) has "cautiously" welcomed the court's decision, but believes London mayor Sadiq Khan should take further action and limit the number of licensed drivers on the platform. "Such reductions, achieved through attrition, are necessary to ensure Uber can comfortably meet its compliance obligations including worker rights whilst giving TfL the breathing space necessary so that it can comfortably meet its responsibilities to ensure that Uber drivers and the traveling public are protected," the union said in a press release.

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A Texas company that sells software that cities and states use to display results on election night was hit by ransomware last week, the latest of nearly a thousand such attacks over the past year against small towns, big cities and the contractors who run their voting systems. From a report: Many of the attacks are conducted by Russian criminal groups, some with shady ties to President Vladimir V. Putin's intelligence services. But the attack on Tyler Technologies, which continued on Friday night with efforts by outsiders to log into its clients' systems around the country, was particularly rattling less than 40 days before the election. While Tyler does not actually tally votes, it is used by election officials to aggregate and report them in at least 20 places around the country -- making it exactly the kind of soft target that the Department of Homeland Security, the F.B.I. and United States Cyber Command worry could be struck by anyone trying to sow chaos and uncertainty on election night. Tyler would not describe the attack in detail. It initially appeared to be an ordinary ransomware attack, in which data is made inaccessible unless the victim pays the ransom, usually in harder-to-trace cryptocurrencies. But then some of Tyler's clients -- the company would not say which ones -- saw outsiders trying to gain access to their systems on Friday night, raising fears that the attackers might be out for something more than just a quick profit. That has been the fear haunting federal officials for a year now: that in the days leading up to the election, or in its aftermath, ransomware groups will try to freeze voter registration data, election poll books or the computer systems of the secretaries of the state who certify election results. With only 37 days before the election, federal investigators still do not have a clear picture of whether the ransomware attacks clobbering American networks are purely criminal acts, seeking a quick payday, or Trojan horses for more nefarious Russian interference. But they have not had much success in stopping them. In just the first two weeks of September, another seven American government entities have been hit with ransomware and their data stolen. "The chance of a local government not being hit while attempting to manage the upcoming and already ridiculously messy election would seem to be very slim," said Brett Callow, a threat analyst at Emsisoft, a security firm.

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Universal Health Services, one of the largest healthcare providers in the U.S., has been hit by a ransomware attack. "Looks like another case of ransomware at over 400 hospital locations," writes Slashdot reader nickwinlund77. "They've had to go back to pen & paper for handling forms." TechCrunch reports: The attack hit UHS systems early on Sunday morning, according to two people with direct knowledge of the incident, locking computers and phone systems at several UHS facilities across the country, including in California and Florida. One of the people said the computer screens changed with text that referenced the "shadow universe," consistent with the Ryuk ransomware. "Everyone was told to turn off all the computers and not to turn them on again," the person said. "We were told it will be days before the computers are up again." It's not immediately known what impact the ransomware attack is having on patient care, or how widespread the issue is. UHS published a statement on Monday, saying its IT network "is currently offline, due to an IT security issue." "We implement extensive IT security protocols and are working diligently with our IT security partners to restore IT operations as quickly as possible. In the meantime, our facilities are using their established back-up processes including offline documentation methods. Patient care continues to be delivered safely and effectively," the statement said. "No patient or employee data appears to have been accessed, copied or otherwise compromised," it added.

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Apple and Epic met in a virtual court hearing on Monday to debate whether Fortnite should be allowed to remain in Apple's App Store while the two fight an even bigger battle over whether Apple is violating federal antitrust law. From a report: California Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said didn't issue any update to her previous ruling, which upheld Apple's ban on Fortnite while the antitrust case is ongoing. Instead she said the companies should expect to hear from her in writing. Rogers said that it's likely that the case, which she added was "the frontier of antitrust law," will be heard in July 2021. She recommended a trial by jury in order that the final judgement reached would be more likely stand up to appeal, although said it's up to Apple or Epic to request this. [...] In court on Monday, Rogers seemed less than impressed with the arguments put forward by Epic's legal team. She said that in the gaming industry, of which Epic is a part, it was standard practice for platforms to take 30% commission, as Apple does. She challenged Epic over its decision to circumvent Apple's policy in spite of its explicit contractual relations with the company, saying the company had "lied about it by omission." "You were not forthright," she said. "You were told you couldn't do it, and you did. There's an old saying, a rose by any other name is still a rose [...] There are plenty of people in the public could consider you guys heroes for what you did, but it's still not honest."

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The UK is at risk of losing the contract for the expansion of a flagship European weather research centre based in Reading because of Brexit. From a report: The European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) has been based in Berkshire for the last 45 years but its future EU-funded activities are now the subject of an international battle. At stake is a planned new facility with up to 250 jobs, and nine countries -- including France, Germany, Spain, Ireland and Italy -- are vying for the business. "As a consequence of Brexit, a competition to relocate all ECMWF EU-funded activities from Reading in the UK to an EU member state is taking place during 2020," an official briefing note from one member state said. ECMWF, which is also a key body for climate-change research, is backed by 34 countries, 22 of them EU member states. In addition to weather forecasting, it operates a number of EU-funded programmes, including two services from the EU's Copernicus satellite Earth-observation programme, monitoring the atmosphere and the climate crisis.

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Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, writing at CNBC: In the first few years of Netflix, we were growing fast and needed to hire more software engineers. With my new understanding that high talent density would be the engine of our success, we focused on finding the top performers in the market. In Silicon Valley, many of them worked for Google, Apple, and Facebook -- and they were being paid a lot. We didn't have the cash to lure them away in any numbers. But, as an engineer, I was familiar with a concept that has been understood in software since 1968, referred to as the "rock-star principle." The rock-star principle is rooted in a famous study that took place in a basement in Santa Monica, California. At 6:30 a.m., nine trainee programmers were led into a room with dozens of computers. Each was handed a manila envelope, explaining a series of coding and debugging tasks they would need to complete to their best ability in the next 120 minutes. The researchers expected that the best programmer would outperform his average counterpart by a factor of two or three. But it turned out that the most skilled programmer far outperformed the worst. He was 20 times faster at coding, 25 times faster at debugging, and 10 times faster at program execution than the programmer with the lowest marks. This study has caused ripples across the software industry since it was published, as managers grapple with how some programmers can be worth so much more than their perfectly adequate colleagues. With a fixed amount of money for salaries and a project I needed to complete, I had a choice: Hire 10 to 25 average engineers, or hire one "rock-star" and pay significantly more than what I'd pay the others, if necessary. Over the years, I've come to see that the best programmer doesn't add 10 times the value. He or she adds more like a 100 times. Bill Gates, whom I worked with while on the Microsoft board, purportedly went further. He is often quoted as saying, "A great lathe operator commands several times the wages of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer." In the software industry, this is a known principle (although still much debated). I started thinking about where this model applied outside the software industry. The reason the rock-star engineer is so much more valuable than his counterparts isn't unique to programming. The great software engineer is incredibly creative and can see conceptual patterns that others can't.

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Amazon expects to nearly triple its workforce in Vancouver, where software engineers are cheap, smart and plentiful. From a report: The online retail giant plans to occupy a bunker-like former Canada Post mailing center that's being redeveloped into a new 1.1 million square-foot office to house 8,000 jobs by 2023, Jesse Dougherty, a vice president and Vancouver site lead at Amazon, said by phone. Currently, the company has 2,700 full-time employees at its city hub. It also plans to add 500 jobs in Toronto, according to a statement released Monday. A weak loonie, lower wages and a steady flow of graduates make Canada an attractive place to expand for tech companies whose largest expense is labor. The average wage of a software developer in Vancouver last year was $92,726, compared to $141,785 in San Francisco or $128,067 in Amazonâ(TM)s hometown of Seattle, according to a July report by real estate firm CBRE Group Inc. Once rental costs are folded in, the cost of running a 500-employee operation in the Canadian city is half that of a similar-sized operation in the Bay Area, it found.

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Google today announced it will make it easier to install and use third-party app stores with the release of Android 12 next year. From a report: Google also reiterated its existing Payments Policy for in-app purchases of digital goods: Android developers who want to distribute apps and games on Google Play, must use Play's billing system. Google is offering a 1-year grace period for developers who aren't complying with this policy: The deadline is September 30, 2021. Today's announcements today are a direct response to Epic's war with Apple and Google over the 30% cut they take of every purchase on the iOS App Store and the Google Play store, respectively. On August 13, Epic updated Fornite for Android and iOS to use its own billing service, resulting in Apple and Google deleting Fortnite from their app stores. Epic then turned around and sued both tech giants. The lawsuits could define how all developers, from individuals to massive corporations, distribute apps on the world's duopoly of mobile operating systems.

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Forget artificial sweeteners. Researchers are now developing new forms of real sugar, to deliver sweetness with fewer calories. But tricking our biology is no easy feat. From a report: Until the late eighteenth century, when sugar production started to become mechanized, most people consumed very little of what nutritionists call "free" or "added" sugars -- sweeteners other than, say, the lactose naturally present in milk and the fructose naturally present in fruit. In 1800, an average American would have lived and died never having encountered a single manufactured candy, let alone the array of sugar-sweetened yogurts, snacks, sauces, dressings, cereals, and drinks that now line supermarket shelves. Today, that average American ingests more than nineteen teaspoons of added sugar every day. Not only does most of that never come into contact with our taste buds; our sweet receptors are also less effective than those for other tastes. Our tongues can detect bitterness at concentrations as low as a few parts per million, but, for a glass of water to taste sweet, we have to add nearly a teaspoon of sugar. DouxMatok's method of restructuring sugar crystals was invented by Baniel's father, Avraham, an industrial chemist. He patented the technique five years ago, when he was ninety-six; today, at the age of a hundred and one, he has finally retired. At one point during my visit, Eran sifted through a pile of his father's memorabilia -- black-and-white photographs, identification cards, university certificates -- to find illustrations for a forthcoming presentation about the company. Many of the photographs were new to Eran, and, as he tried to place them, the outline of his father's life emerged: a six-year-old Polish boy sent to boarding school in what was then the British Palestine Mandate; a student at the University of Montpellier; a promising young scientist, strikingly handsome, exempted from serving in the British Army's Palestine Regiment so that he could make bombs in the basement of a paint factory near Haifa. [...] Estella Belfer, a pastry chef who is a judge on the TV show "Bake-Off Israel," hopes to use Incredo exclusively one day, but, recently, she told me about some of the challenges of cooking with it. "To make chocolate, it's easy. I just substitute the sugar with a smaller amount. In shortbread cookies, it is an improvement -- it makes them crispier," she said. "But in the cupcakes and the sponge cakes -- this is where there is an art to using Incredo sugar." Sugar is responsible for much of the tender, springy texture of a good cake; Incredo sugar behaves exactly the same way, but there's a lot less of it, which creates a problem. Belfer told me that she has successfully blended other ingredients, including soluble fibre and plant proteins, to restore the missing bulk and fluffiness -- "but it's not easy."

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Gateway, the major PC brand of the 1990s with the iconic cow-spotted logo, is back -- well, kind of. Acer now owns the company and has decided to start selling Gateway-branded laptops again, exclusively at Walmart. From a report: As is often the case with Walmart-exclusive laptops, the main attraction is the price. On the most affordable end is the Gateway Ultra Thin series, which starts with a $179 11.6-inch laptop with an AMD A4, and spans up to a $499 15.6-inch model with a Core i5. There's also a $199 11.6-inch touchscreen 2-in-1 available, powered by an Intel Celeron processor. The names aren't very interesting, but they do come in a variety of fun colors, including purple, blue, green, and rose gold, as well as black. On the higher end is the Gateway Creators series, two 15.6-inch laptops meant for media editing and gaming. No funky colors on these -- they only come in black -- but they do seem to have some decent specs. You can choose the $799 rig with a Ryzen 5 4600H and an Nvidia GTX 1650 GPU or a $999 model with a Core i5 and an RTX 2060. That puts them a step above the Ultra Thin series in price, but they're still fairly inexpensive as creator-focused machines go. I would guess thatâ(TM)s at least partially because they don't seem to have a lot of storage -- only 256GB each.

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Around 40 per cent of staff in British and American corporations have access to sensitive data that they don't need to complete their jobs, according to recent research. From a report: In a survey commissioned by IT security firm Forcepoint of just under 900 IT professionals, 40 per cent of commercial sector respondents and 36 per cent working in the public sector said they had privileged access to sensitive data through work. Worryingly, of that number, about a third again (38 per cent public sector and 36 per cent private) said they had access privileges despite not needing them. Overall, out of more than 1,000 respondents, just 14 per cent from the private sector thought their org was fully aware of who had the keys to their employers' digital kingdoms. Carried out by the US Ponemon Institute, a research agency, the survey also found that about 23 per cent of IT pros across the board reckoned that privileged access to data and systems was handed out willy-nilly, or, as Forcepoint put it in a statement, "for no apparent reason." Access management is a critical topic for IT security bods, especially as COVID-19-induced remote working introduces challenges for the monitoring of data access and intra-org flows.

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A system Google set up to promote competition on Android has left some smaller search engines having trouble gaining traction, fueling rivals' complaints about the tech giant's compliance with a European Union antitrust decision ahead of potential U.S. charges. From a report: Since March, Alphabet-owned Google has been showing people in Europe who set up new mobile devices running the company's Android operating system what it calls a "choice screen," a list of rival search engines that they can select as the device's default. The system is part of Google's compliance with a 2018 decision that found the company used Android's dominance to strong-arm phone makers into pre-installing its search engine. But some small search engines that are relatively popular in Europe failed to win spots in large European countries in the latest round of auctions to appear on the choice screen, according to people familiar with the results. The results, which cover the fourth quarter of the year, are set to be announced on Monday. DuckDuckGo, maker of a U.S.-based search engine that doesn't collect data about its users, lost the auction in all but four small European countries, the people said. Berlin-based Ecosia, which donates most of its profit to planting trees, also didn't win a slot in any large European country, the people added. The major winners of the auctions -- which offer three spots in each of 31 countries to outside search engines -- include Microsoft's Bing, as well as a handful of other small search engines, the people said. Google doesn't participate in the auctions but is offered automatically as a choice in every country along with the auction winners. The elimination of some smaller search engines gives fodder to Google rivals who have complained that the company has crafted its compliance with the EU's antitrust decisions in ways that don't fundamentally change the competitive landscape.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: The past seven months have been a big strain on families like Mandi Boren's. The Borens are cattle ranchers on a remote slice of land near Idaho's Owyhee Mountains. They have four kids -- ranging from a first grader to a sophomore in high school. When the lockdown first hit, Boren first thought it might be a good thing. Home schooling temporarily could be more efficient, plus there'd be more family time and help with the chores. "I thought, I'll be able to get my kids' schooling done in a few hours and then they'll be to work with dad, and no problem it will be great," Boren says, chuckling. "Well, it didn't turn out so great." That's because all four kids -- in addition to Boren, who telecommutes -- were suddenly plugged into the family's satellite Internet, which is spotty on a good day. You can forget trying to use Zoom or Google Classroom. "I soon found out that our Internet speeds were so slow, we had to spread it out all week long actually," Boren says. "We were doing schooling on Saturdays and Sundays as well." Her kids started back to school in person, at least for now. Across the country as American schools struggle with whether to reopen or stay virtual, many rural districts are worried their students will fall even further behind than their city peers. This pandemic has shone a glaring light on a lot of inequalities. The federal government estimates that more than a third of rural America has little or no Internet. In numerous recent interviews, educators have told NPR they're concerned the rural-urban divide will only worsen if kids can't get online to learn. This past spring, when the lockdowns began, many rural districts amid the crisis had to resort to delivering paper copies of school work to students who didn't have Internet or cell phone service at home. "I don't know why anybody would rationally think 'we can just hand you a packet, and here you're going to go teach yourself,' that's basically what was going on," says Dr. Leslie Molina, principal at McDermitt Combined Schools in northern Nevada. She says all 105 of her students qualify for free or reduced lunch. Most live on the Fort McDermitt Reservation and about 75% have no Internet access at home.

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Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot quotes Quanta magazine: It was an old idea of Stephen Hawking's: Unseen "primordial" black holes might be the hidden dark matter. It fell out of favor for decades, but a new series of studies has shown how the theory can work... Their very blackness makes it hard to estimate how many black holes inhabit the cosmos and how big they are. So it was a genuine surprise when the first gravitational waves thrummed through detectors at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in September 2015. Previously, the largest star-size black holes had topped out at around 20 times the mass of the sun. These new ones were about 30 solar masses each — not inconceivable, but odd. Moreover, once LIGO turned on and immediately started hearing these sorts of objects merge with each other, astrophysicists realized that there must be more black holes lurking out there than they had thought. Maybe a lot more. The discovery of these strange specimens breathed new life into an old idea — one that had, in recent years, been relegated to the fringe. We know that dying stars can make black holes. But perhaps black holes were also born during the Big Bang itself. A hidden population of such "primordial" black holes could conceivably constitute dark matter, a hidden thumb on the cosmic scale... Following a flurry of recent papers, the primordial black hole idea appears to have come back to life. In one of the latest, published last week in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Karsten Jedamzik, a cosmologist at the University of Montpellier, showed how a large population of primordial black holes could result in collisions that perfectly match what LIGO observes. "If his results are correct — and it seems to be a careful calculation he's done — that would put the last nail in the coffin of our own calculation," said Ali-Haïmoud, who has continued to play with the primordial black hole idea in subsequent papers too. "It would mean that in fact they could be all the dark matter." "It's exciting," said Christian Byrnes, a cosmologist at the University of Sussex who helped inspire some of Jedamzik's arguments. "He's gone further than anyone has gone before...." And with every subsequent observing run, LIGO has increased its sensitivity, allowing it to eventually either find such small black holes or set strict limits on how many can exist. "This is not one of these stories like string theory, where in a decade or three decades we might still be discussing if it's correct," Byrnes said.

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The Linux Foundation has announced that its free Introduction to Linux training course on edX has surpassed one million enrollments. The course helps students develop a good working knowledge of Linux using both the graphical interface and command line across the major Linux distribution families. No prior knowledge or experience is required, making the course a popular first step for individuals interested in pursuing a career in IT. Introduction to Linux has helped countless individuals launch their IT careers. Jules Bashizi Irenge for example, completed the course then proceeded to intermediate Essentials of System Administration training and received a Linux Foundation Certified SysAdmin (LFCS) certification, and now is a PhD candidate who has contributed over 200 patches to the Linux kernel. Fabian Pichardo also followed the introductory course with Essentials of System Administration and LFCS, and now is employed full time as a software developer. "To have introduced over a million individuals to Linux is a tremendous milestone," said Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin. "One of our primary goals is to bring more talent into the open source community, and offering free, high quality training that is accessible to anyone who wants it is essential to achieving that goal...." The Linux Foundation has been an incredible partner of edX for the past six years, bringing dozens of courses in high-tech and in-demand fields to our platform of 34 million learners," said Anant Agarwal, edX Founder and CEO. "Introduction to Linux, their very first offering, has been a true blockbuster - it's one of our top 10 most popular courses of all time. We're thrilled to congratulate Linux Foundation on reaching 1 million enrollments and look forward to bringing accessible high-tech education to countless more learners, together." Introduction to Linux remains open for new enrollments. There is no cost to complete the course, and verified certificates of completion are available for $99. The Linux Foundation offers two dozen free training courses on open source projects including Linux, Kubernetes, Hyperledger, and more in partnership with edX.

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An anonymous reader quotes Teslarati: On August 19th this year, astronomers using the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System observatory in Hawaii spotted an object destined to enter Earth orbit this fall. Designated as object 2020 SO, the item is now believed to be a rocket booster from NASA's Surveyor 2 mission which crash landed on the Moon in 1966 during the Apollo-era of the Cold War's space race. "I suspect this newly discovered object 2020 SO to be an old rocket booster because it is following an orbit about the Sun that is extremely similar to Earth's, nearly circular, in the same plane, and only slightly farther away the Sun at its farthest point," Dr. Paul Chodas, the director of NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies, explained in comments to CNN. "That's precisely the kind of orbit that a rocket stage separated from a lunar mission would follow, once it passes by the Moon and escapes into orbit about the Sun. It's unlikely that an asteroid could have evolved into an orbit like this, but not impossible," he said. This specific type of event has only happened once before, namely in 2002 with a Saturn V upper stage from Apollo 12, according to Dr. Chodas.

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"More top-tier computer OEMs are now offering a broad assortment of Linux desktops," reports ZDNet. "In the latest move, Lenovo, currently the top PC vendor in the world according to Gartner, will roll Ubuntu Linux 20.04 LTS out across 30 of Lenovo's ThinkPads and ThinkStations..." While Lenovo started certifying most of its laptop and PC line on the top Linux distributions since June 2020, this is a much bigger step. Now, instead of simply acknowledging its equipment will be guaranteed to run Linux, Lenovo's selling Ubuntu Linux-powered hardware to ordinary Joe and Jane users. Previously, you could only buy most of these machines if you were a business and had specified you wanted Ubuntu on a customized bid. Now, nearly 30 Ubuntu-loaded devices will now be available for purchase via Lenovo.com. These include 13 ThinkStation and ThinkPad P Series Workstations and an additional 14 ThinkPad T, X, X1, and L series laptops, all with the 20.04 LTS version of Ubuntu... No one's predicting a "Year of the Linux desktop." Companies such as Dell and Lenovo aren't predicting such a game-changing event, but they're selling largely to enterprise companies, which have seen the virtues of using high-end Linux desktops for powerful, forward-looking technologies such as AI, ML, containers, and cloud-native computing. "Our announcement of device certification in June was a step in the right direction to enable customers to more easily install Linux on their own," explains Lenovo's vice president of PCSD software and cloud — but now they're going even further. "Our goal is to remove the complexity and provide the Linux community with the premium experience that our customers know us for. This is why we have taken this next step to offer Linux-ready devices right out of the box."

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The U.S. government has readied an antitrust lawsuit against Google's search engine, accusing the company of "crushing competition to protect and extend monopoly," according to news reports: The move comes after a 14-month long investigation, where the U.S. Department of Justice probed whether Google distorts search results to favour its own products and shuts off access to competitors, sources told Bloomberg. This is significant as Google enjoys a major 90 percent control of the U.S. online search segment and generates an enviable $100 billion revenue. Rivals have long complained of abuse of power to "snuff out the competition".... Sources told Bloomberg action is expected within the next week or two, after the State attorneys general and Justice Department lawyers complete final preparations for the case this week in Washington. Officials met with Google reps the previous week to discuss accusations of search bias against competitors and providing of Google and other partners as default to users... "It's impossible for small search engine competitors to compete with Google's deep pockets and outbid it for valuable placements like Apple's browser," Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of DuckDuckGo, said in his complaint to the Department of Justice. In a recent statement, a spokesperson for DuckDuckGo said the company is pleased that the DoJ "is going to finally address the elephant in the room: Google's obvious, overwhelming, and anti-competitive dominance in search," adding that "a world without search defaults" would benefit consumers. Google's search engine "decides the fates of thousands of businesses online," notes Bloomberg, "and has funded Google's expansion into email, online video, smartphone software, maps, cloud computing, autonomous vehicles and other forms of digital ads."

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