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CNBC reports: Salesforce's deal to buy Slack is expected to be announced Tuesday after markets close, sources told CNBC's David Faber. The deal is expected to be about half cash and half stock, the sources said, and will price Slack at a premium to its current price. Salesforce is set to report quarterly earnings on Tuesday. Shares of Slack rose about 8% Monday on the news. Salesforce shares fell about 1.5%.

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European Union lawmakers are considering whether current rules aimed at limiting the practice of geoblocking across the bloc should be extended to cover access to streaming audio-visual content. From a report: Access to services like Netflix tends to be gated to individual EU Member States, meaning Europeans can be barred from accessing libraries of content offered elsewhere in the region. So if you're trying to use your Netflix subscription to access the service after moving to another Member State, or want to access inventory offered by Netflix elsewhere in Europe, the answer is typically a big fat no, as we've reported before. This undermines the core concept of the EU's Single Market (and the Digital Single Market -- aka the frictionless ecommerce end-goal which rules such as those limiting geoblocking aim to deliver). The Commission is alive to ongoing issues around online access to audio-visual content. In a review of the two-year-old Geo-blocking Regulation published today, it says it will kick off discussions with the audiovisual sector on ways to improve consumer access to this type of copyrighted content across the bloc.

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NBC News reports: Many urban centers have seen residents move out in large numbers since the start of stay-at-home orders in March, but the shift has been especially dramatic for San Francisco, a city that was already experiencing rapid change because of the tech industry. Software engineers, CEOs and venture capitalists have chosen to jump from the Bay Area to places such as Denver, Miami and Austin, Texas, citing housing costs, California's relatively high income tax and the Bay Area's general resistance to rapid growth and change. The scale of the departures is visible in vacant high-end apartments, moth-balled offices and quieter streets in neighborhoods popular with tech workers. And while no one is exactly celebrating, especially as Covid-19 has devastated the incomes of many people, some residents were ready to take a break from the rich.... Rents may have fallen 20 percent or more from a year ago, but they're still high by national standards, and many artists left the city a long time ago. Although some companies such as Pinterest have canceled leases, Google is expanding its offices in San Francisco, a sign of the tech industry's attachment to the city despite the local hostility and the predictions of a permanent work-from-home culture... Tracy Rosenberg, executive director of Media Alliance, a San Francisco nonprofit that is often critical of the power of tech companies, said she wonders whether tech workers will want to return to a place where they've received a mixed welcome. "The level of tech blowback in San Francisco and the Bay Area was going up in intensity," she said. "I think there'll be sort of a reluctance to come back and face that, because that was reaching a level that was hard to live with — when you are the cause of all social problems, in the eyes of a significant part of the population, at least."

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In an eloquent essay, Scottish-American historian Niall Ferguson argues that "We are living through a monetary revolution so multifaceted that few of us comprehend its full extent." The technological transformation of the internet is driving this revolution. The pandemic of 2020 has accelerated it... Covid-19 has been good for Bitcoin and for cryptocurrency generally. First, the pandemic accelerated our advance into a more digital word: What might have taken 10 years has been achieved in 10 months. People who had never before risked an online transaction were forced to try, for the simple reason that banks were closed. Second, and as a result, the pandemic significantly increased our exposure to financial surveillance as well as financial fraud. Both these trends have been good for Bitcoin.... What is happening is that Bitcoin is gradually being adopted not so much as means of payment but as a store of value. Not only high-net-worth individuals but also tech companies are investing. In July, Michael Saylor, the billionaire founder of MicroStrategy, directed his company to hold part of its cash reserves in alternative assets. By September, MicroStrategy's corporate treasury had purchased bitcoins worth $425 million. Square, the San Francisco-based payments company, bought bitcoins worth $50 million last month. PayPal just announced that American users can buy, hold and sell bitcoins in their PayPal wallets. This process of adoption has much further to run... Some economists, such as my friend Ken Rogoff, welcome the demise of cash because it will make the management of monetary policy easier and organized crime harder. But it will be a fundamentally different world when all our payments are recorded, centrally stored, and scrutinized by artificial intelligence — regardless of whether it is Amazon's Jeff Bezos or China's Xi Jinping who can access our data... Rather than seeking to create a Chinese-style digital dollar, Joe Biden's nascent administration should recognize the benefits of integrating Bitcoin into the U.S. financial system — which, after all, was originally designed to be less centralized and more respectful of individual privacy than the systems of less-free societies.

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From a recent report: Greg Kroah-Hartman, the Linux Foundation fellow currently responsible for stable Linux kernel releases, shared the lessons he's learned as a kernel developer that are applicable to other developers at this year's Linux App Summit. He started by showing how he could succinctly distill the essence of the talk into a single four-word slide: "Don't make your users mad...." Kroah-Hartman explains that one of Linus Torvalds' most deeply-held convictions: don't break userspace. "Other operating systems have this rule as well — it's a very solid rule — because we always want you to upgrade. And we want you to upgrade without worrying about it. We don't want you to feel scared. If you see a new release, and we say, 'Hey, this fixes a bunch of problems,' we don't want you to feel worried about taking that. That's really really important — especially with security...." If you do make a change, make sure there truly is a compelling reason. "You have to provide enough reason and enough goodness to force somebody to take the time to learn to do something else. That's very rare." His example of this was systemd, which unified a variety of service configurations and initialization processes. "They did it right. They provided all the functionality, they solved a real problem that was there. They unified all these existing tools and problems in such a way that it was just so much better to use, and it provided enough impetus that everybody was willing to do the work to modify their own stuff and move to the new model. It worked. People still complain about it, but it worked. Everybody switched... It works well. It solves a real problem. "That was an example of how you can provide a compelling reason to move on — and make the change."

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Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike brings this report from AFP: Swiss politicians have voiced outrage and demanded an investigation after revelations that a second Swiss encryption company was allegedly used by the CIA and its German counterpart to spy on governments worldwide. "How can such a thing happen in a country that claims to be neutral like Switzerland?" co-head of Switzerland's Socialist Party, Cedric Wermuth, asked in an interview with Swiss public broadcaster SRF late Thursday. He called for a parliamentary inquiry after an SRF investigation broadcast on Wednesday found that a second Swiss encryption firm had been part of a spectacular espionage scheme orchestrated by U.S. and German intelligence services. A first investigation had revealed back in February an elaborate, decades-long set-up, in which the CIA and its German counterpart creamed off the top-secret communications of governments through their hidden control of a Swiss encryption company called Crypto. SRF's report this week found that a second but smaller Swiss encryption firm, Omnisec, had been used in the same way. That company, which was split off from Swiss cryptographic equipment maker Gretag in 1987, sold voice, fax and data encryption equipment to governments around the world until it halted operations two years ago. SRF's investigative program Rundschau concluded that, like Crypto, Omnisec had sold manipulated equipment to foreign governments and armies. Omnisec meanwhile also sold its faulty OC-500 series devices to several federal agencies in Switzerland, including its own intelligence agencies, as well as to Switzerland's largest bank, UBS, and other private companies in the country, the SRF investigation showed. The findings unleashed fresh outrage in Switzerland, which is still reeling from the Crypto revelations. The first compromised cryptography company "served for decades as a Trojan horse to spy on governments worldwide," according to the article, citing news reports from SRF, the Washington Post and German broadcaster ZDF. "The company supplied devices for encoded communications to some 120 countries from after World War II to the beginning of this century, including to Iran, South American governments, India and Pakistan. "Unknown to those governments, Crypto was secretly acquired in 1970 by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency together with the then West Germanyâ(TM)s BND Federal Intelligence Service."

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Tasmania consists of the 26th-largest island in the world and its surrounding 334 islands — an island state of Australia with a population around 540,000 people, according to Wikipedia. Friday the Tasmanian government "declared that it has become the first Australian state, and one of just a handful of jurisdictions worldwide, to be powered entirely by renewable electricity," according to one news report: Tasmania joins the Australian Capital Territory as the only two Australian jurisdictions sourcing all of their electricity from renewable energy sources, and places Tasmania alongside countries like Scotland, Iceland and Costa Rica which have also made the transition to 100 per cent renewable electricity. The milestone was welcomed by environmental groups, saying that it was another example of what is being achieved by state and territory governments that are stepping in to show leadership on energy policy in a vacuum left by ongoing conflict both between and within political parties at a federal level... Tasmanian energy minister Guy Barnett added that the Tasmanian government would continue to support an expansion of the state's renewable energy capabilities, as the state looks to grow its role as a supplier of zero emissions energy to both mainland Australia and of green hydrogen into international export markets. "But there is more to do, which is why we have set a target to double our renewable generation to a global-leading target of 200 per cent of our current needs by 2040 — which we recently passed into law following the passing of legislation through both Houses of Parliament," Barnett added.

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NBC News calls it "the ghostly signal that reveals the engine of the universe." Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares their report: In research published Wednesday in the journal Nature, scientists reported that they've made the first detection of almost-ethereal particles called neutrinos that can be traced to carbon-nitrogen-oxygen fusion, known as the CNO cycle, inside the sun. It's a landmark finding that confirms theoretical predictions from the 1930s, and it's being hailed as one of the greatest discoveries in physics of the new millenium. "It's really a breakthrough for solar and stellar physics," said Gioacchino Ranucci of the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), one of the researchers on the project since it began in 1990. The scientists used the ultrasensitive Borexino detector at the INFN's Gran Sasso particle physics laboratory in central Italy — the largest underground research center in the world, deep beneath the Apennine Mountains, about 65 miles northeast of Rome. The detection caps off decades of study of the sun's neutrinos by the Borexino project, and reveals for the first time the main nuclear reaction that most stars use to fuse hydrogen into helium... Scientists calculate that the CNO cycle is the primary type of fusion in the universe. But it's hard to spot inside our relatively cool sun, where it accounts for only 1 percent of its energy... Ranucci said the Borexino detector has spent decades measuring neutrinos from the sun's main proton-proton chain reaction, but detecting its CNO neutrinos has been very difficult — only about seven neutrinos with the tell-tale energy of the CNO cycle are spotted in a day. The discovery required making the detector ever more sensitive over the last five years, Ranucci said, by shielding it from outside sources of radioactivity so that the inner chamber of the detector is the most radiation-free place on Earth.

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ABC News tells the story of Indonesia-based budget airline Lion Air, which had ordered over 200 Boeing 737 MAX 8s at a cost of $22 billion — and what happened on a flight the day before a fatal crash on October 29th, 2018: [A]fter its first flight in May 2017, the 737 MAX 8 went 17 months without incident. Then, on Oct. 28, 2018, Lion Air Flight 610 from Bali to Jakarta experienced an in-flight emergency as the plane suddenly began to nosedive after take-off. "All of us were screaming like we are in a roller coaster," said Rakhmat Robbi, a passenger on the flight. "To be honest, I [was] think[ing] it's almost like my last flight and this is my last day." The aircraft nosedived four times as the pilots struggled to regain control, according to Indonesia's National Transportation Safety Committee (NTSC). A third pilot who just happened to be in the cockpit was able to help the two pilots resolve the situation and the plane landed safely in Jakarta. However, according to the NTSC, the crew left incomplete notes about the details of the emergency. "The pilot reported that he had a problem with the speed and altitude indicated on [the] captain's side," said Capt. Nurcahyo Utomo, senior safety investigator of the NTSC. Nurcahyo said the captain failed to mention the plane's trim system had suddenly activated, causing it to repeatedly nose dive. "The pilots were able to control it," said aviation attorney Steven Marks. "They knew they had a problem. But they didn't understand exactly what the nature of the problem was." Early the next morning, on Oct. 29, 2018, the same plane departed from Jakarta to Pangkal Pinang, Indonesia. Just 13 minutes after takeoff, Lion Air Flight 610 plummeted into the Java Sea. Authorities launched a search and rescue mission immediately, but all 189 people on board died. The flight data recorder from Lion Air 610 revealed that the plane had gone out of control — it had moved up and down over 24 times before it finally dove into the sea at full speed. "I never knew... any case of the [sic] aircraft that fly down and up and up and down like this," Nurcahyo said. "I knew that the pilot was fighting with the plane." Nurcahyo said the NTSC asked Boeing about the kind of system on the 737 MAX that could have caused it to behave in such a manner. He said investigators were surprised to learn that Boeing had installed a flight control software program that could force the plane into a dive without the pilots' knowledge... MCAS was accidentally triggered on both Lion Air flights because a defective angle of attack (AOA) sensor had transmitted incorrect information about the position of the plane's nose. Although there are two AOA sensors on the 737 MAX, MCAS was only connected to one of them. "It's a lack of redundancy that appears to me to be unacceptable in airplane design," said aviation journalist Christine Negroni, author of the book "The Crash Detectives..." Boeing later told the pilots union of American Airlines it hadn't revealed the existence of MCAS in the 737 flight manual "on the grounds that it didn't want to inundate pilots with unnecessary information," according to the article. ABC also points out that a later investigation by the U.S. Congress "uncovered internal Boeing emails that showed some employees had raised concerns about the 737 MAX while it was still in development, and that they had questioned the safety culture of the company as well."

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RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) is a professional geologist, and asks: Did anyone feel a sudden wind through their hair at about 17:19+00:00 on Monday, particularly in the mid Pacific? No? Good. Nobody else did. Nobody noticed the asteroid whizzing past just above the Earth's atmosphere (for certain values of "above" including "not very far" and "373km above ground"). That's the closest natural body (i.e., not a spacecraft) documented in near-Earth space which hasn't actually hit the thick-enough parts of the atmosphere to glow, fragment, make sonic booms and dent automobiles. So, we dodged another bullet, and no windows were broken. This one probably wouldn't have done significant damage even if it had touched down in fire and fury — it was about half the size of the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor, and so around one eighth of the energy (and potential damage). Everyone can go back to bed and sleep easy. Right? But one tiny thing to disturb your sleep : we didn't see this one coming until after it had gone past us. Nor did we see it in it's close approaches on 2014-10-26.60152 or 2017-11-06.57008. And with another 39 projected Earth approaches before the next turn-of-century, it's pretty obvious that one day this is going to hit us. For those who know what an MPEC is [a Minor Planet Electronic Circular], Bill Grey has written up one of his "pseudo-MPECs" with links to other work on this object here, while the actual discovery record is here. The object has been given a formal name of 2020 VT4 unless the discoverers at the ATLAS Mauna Loa Observatory choose to give it a name ("COVID", or "hair-parter", or "hats-off", perhaps. Or just "Rupert".) Wikipedia has caught up too. There will be another close-pass, and an impact, one day. This doesn't change the odds of that happening (probability 1), but it might make it feel a little more immediate.

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Remember when Microsoft was criticized for enabling "workplace surveillance" over "productivity scores" in its Microsoft 365 office software which gave managers highly detailed profiles of each individual employee's activity. Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: The Microsoft 365 Productivity Score apparently has roots in another Microsoft patent application for Systems, Methods, and Software for Implementing a Behavior Change Management Program, which also lays out plans for as yet unimplemented features to automatically schedule hundreds of employees for months of productivity re-education, including preventing employees from scheduling meetings with others if the service deems it counter-productive. So, could the HAL 9000's "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" be considered prior art? But Microsoft "has even bigger ideas for using technology to monitor workers in the interest of maximizing organizational productivity," reports GeekWire: Newly surfaced Microsoft patent filings describe a system for deriving and predicting "overall quality scores" for meetings using data such as body language, facial expressions, room temperature, time of day, and number of people in the meeting. The system uses cameras, sensors, and software tools to determine, for example, "how much a participant contributes to a meeting vs performing other tasks (e.g., texting, checking email, browsing the Internet)." The "meeting insight computing system" would then predict the likelihood that a group will hold a high-quality meeting. It would flag potential challenges when an organizer is setting the meeting up, and recommend alternative venues, times, or people to include in the meeting, for example... A patent application made public Nov. 12 notes, "many organizations are plagued by overly long, poorly attended, and recurring meetings that could be modified and/or avoided if more information regarding meeting quality was available." The approach would apply to in-person and virtual meetings, and hybrids of the two... The filings do not detail any potential privacy safeguards. A Microsoft spokesperson declined to comment on the patent filings in response to GeekWire's inquiry. To be sure, patents are not products, and there's no sign yet that Microsoft plans to roll out this hypothetical system. Microsoft has established an internal artificial intelligence ethics office and a companywide committee to ensure that its AI products live by its principles of responsible AI, including transparency and privacy. However, the filings are a window into the ideas floating around inside Microsoft, and they're consistent with the direction the company is already heading.

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Slashdot reader Iwastheone quotes CNN: A tall, silver, shining metal monolith discovered in the desert in southeastern Utah — which prompted theories of alien placement and drew determined hikers to its secret location — has now disappeared, the state's Bureau of Land Management said Saturday. The monolith was removed by an "unknown party" sometime Friday night, the agency said in a Facebook post. "We have received credible reports that the illegally installed structure, referred to as the 'monolith,' has been removed" from BLM public lands, the post said. "The BLM did not remove the structure, which is considered private property." The monolith was first discovered November 18 by officers from the Utah Department of Public Safety's Aero Bureau. They were flying by helicopter, helping the Division of Wildlife Resources count bighorn sheep in southeastern Utah, when they spotted something that seemed right out of "2001: A Space Odyssey..." Pilot Bret Hutchings guessed it was "between 10 and 12 feet high..." In an official statement, the Utah Department of Public Safety emphasized that it's still illegal to install structures or art on public lands, "no matter what planet you're from."

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Reuters reports: David Prowse, the English actor who played Darth Vader in the original Star Wars films, has died aged 85, his management company said on Sunday... The champion weightlifter-turned-actor starred as the body, but not the voice, of one of cinema's best-known villains. Director George Lucas opted to dub another voice onto Prowse's portrayal of the towering, masked antagonist Darth Vader in "Star Wars", "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Return of the Jedi". More from the Los Angeles Times: Born in Bristol, southwest England, in 1935, Prowse represented England in weightlifting at the Commonwealth Games in the 1950s before breaking into movies with roles that emphasized his commanding size, including Frankenstein's monster in a pair of horror films [and also in the 1967 comedy Casino Royale]. Director George Lucas saw Prowse in a small part in "A Clockwork Orange" and asked the 6-foot-6-inch actor to audition for the villainous Vader or the Wookiee Chewbacca in "Star Wars." Prowse later told the BBC he chose Darth Vader because "you always remember the bad guys." Physically, Prowse was perfect for the part. His lilting English West Country accent was considered less ideal, and his lines were dubbed by actor James Earl Jones. Prowse was also known to a generation of British children as the Green Cross Code Man, a superhero in a series of road safety advertisements. An anonymous reader writes: In 2011 he authored an autobiography titled Straight from the Force's Mouth (with a foreword by bodybuilder/Incredible Hulk actor Lou Ferrigno), and his differences with Lucasfilm are chronicled in a 2015 documentary about his career titled I Am Your Father. (You can watch its trailer on its page on Amazon Prime, though the full documentary is currently listed as "unavailable.") Wikipedia lists some of Prose's other roles, including: A Minotaur in the Doctor Who serial The Time Monster The Black Knight in the Terry Gilliam film JabberwockyA small role as Hotblack Desiato's bodyguard in the 1981 BBC TV adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

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Republican congressman Denver Riggleman was once a defense contractor for America's National Security Agency. But in 2004, he paid more than $5,000 to join an amateur expedition searching for Bigfoot. Not because he believed in the mythical ape-like creature said to live in the woods, according to the Washington Post, but "to indulge a lifelong fascination: Why do people — what kind of people — believe in Bigfoot?" "Now in one of his last acts as a Republican congressman from Virginia, Riggleman is asking the same questions of QAnon supporters and President-elect Joe Biden deniers." Months after his ouster by Rep.-elect Bob Good (R) in a contentious GOP convention, Riggleman has become one of the loudest voices in Congress warning of the infiltration of conspiracy theories into political discourse... To Riggleman, the book, "Bigfoot... It's Complicated," mirrors the way pockets of the country are falling into conspiracy wormholes — everything from extremist fringe groups such as QAnon and the "boogaloo" movement to President Trump's claims of widespread voter fraud. Like the Bigfoot hunters in the Olympic National Forest, they see what they want to see... Bigfoot believers have plenty in common with political extremists on both the far right and the far left, Riggleman said, lambasting a political ecosystem where, oftentimes, "facts don't matter." "They're all bat---- crazy. Right?" he said, not really joking. "All of them ascribe to a team mythology that might or might not be true. And they stay on that team regardless. And that is what's so dangerous about politics today. That's what I've been trying to say." Riggleman also criticized political operatives "asking for donations to help in a mythological quest of things that can't be proven," arguing this shared mythology can turn into a grift. "I saw it with Bigfoot. I'm seeing it with QAnon. It's about money. And sometimes crazy and money live in the same space."

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"Tesla's Sentry Mode is about to bring things to a whole new level by enabling Tesla owners to remotely see what their cars can see through Autopilot cameras," claims Electrek — citing a Twitter user named green "who has been revealing new Tesla features found in software updates." "It's not certain when the live camera update would arrive, provided it's not scrapped," writes Engadget, adding "Elon Musk has been teasing a 'hot' holiday software release, but 'green' warned that it might not make that release..." Some background from Electrek: For a while now, Tesla has been talking about better integrating its Tesla Sentry Mode feature into its mobile app. Sentry Mode is an integrated surveillance system inside Tesla's vehicles using the Autopilot cameras around the car and it has been changing the game when it comes to vandalizing parked cars. On several occasions, Sentry Mode videos went viral, and the vandals turned themselves in after online pressure. In other cases, video evidence helped police identify and find the vandals. The feature was built on top of "TeslaCam," a previously released integrated dashcam system with similar capability as Sentry mode, but used when someone is inside the car. TeslaCam helped several Tesla owners with insurance claims by proving that they weren't at fault in some accidents captured by the integrated dashcam system. In order to activate the TeslaCam and Sentry Mode features, owners have to plug a storage device, thumb drive, or SSD inside their Tesla and activate the features in the settings... Tesla owners can already have an extensive look at the status of their vehicles, including the doors open or close, same for windows, charge port, and more. Now they are going to be able to see around their vehicles even if no Sentry Mode event has been activated. That's only if the update is actually released. How do Slashdot's readers feel about the possibility of this feature? Does the world change when Tesla owners can remotely access their cars' cameras?

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"Earth just got 7 km/s faster and about 2000 light-years closer to the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy," reports Phys.org: But don't worry, this doesn't mean that our planet is plunging towards the black hole. Instead the changes are results of a better model of the Milky Way Galaxy based on new observation data, including a catalog of objects observed over the course of more than 15 years by the Japanese radio astronomy project VERA. CNET explains: Over the last 15 years, a Japanese radio astronomy project, VERA, has been gathering data. Using a technique called interferometry, VERA gathered data from telescopes across Japan and combined them with data from other existing projects to create what is essentially the most accurate map of the Milky Way yet. By pinpointing the location and velocity of around 99 specific points in our galaxy, VERA has concluded that the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A, at the center of our galaxy, is actually 25,800 light-years from Earth — almost 2,000 light-years closer than what we previously believed. In addition, the new model calculates Earth is moving faster than we believed. Older models clocked Earth's speed at 220 kilometers (136 miles) per second, orbiting around the galaxy's centre. VERA's new model has us moving at 227 kilometers (141 miles) per second.

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In January of the year 2000, Pokémon was sued by stage magician Uri Geller for $97 million (over a Pokémon card with a similar name that carried the magician's trademark bent spoon). 20 years later, Kotaku reports... Spoon-bending magician Uri Geller gave Nintendo permission to use the character Kadabra on Pokémon cards today, after a 20 year legal dispute in which Geller claimed the Pokémon's Japanese name and image were too close to his own. "I am truly sorry for what I did 20 years ago," Geller tweeted today. "Kids and grownups I am releasing the ban. It's now all up to #Nintendo to bring my #kadabra #pokemon card back. It will probably be one of the rarest cards now! Much energy and love to all!" As Screenrant explains, while Kadabra is a word associated with magic, the Pokémon's Japanese name — variously written as Yungerer, Yungeller, and Yun Geller — seems to be a reference to Geller... Geller sued Nintendo over Kadabra in 2000, seeking damages and insisting the card stop being used in sets. "Nintendo turned me into an evil, occult Pokémon character. Nintendo stole my identity by using my name and my signature image," Geller said at the time.

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California's state air quality mandates require each region to have a feasible plan for a 19% reduction in emissions by 2035. But "after a barrage of criticism from Silicon Valley businesses and Bay Area mayors, Metropolitan Transportation Commission planners have backed off a requirement to have employees from big companies work from home three days a week," reports the Bay Area News Group. Instead a compromise plan approved unanimously by commissioners last week "calls for big companies to have 60% of their employees take sustainable commutes — by transit, bike or carpooling — by 2035." Lawmakers, mayors and the business community railed against the remote work mandate, saying it would undercut the Bay Area's economy and encourage large companies to re-locate to cheaper regions. Transit supporters said work-from-home requirements would cut train and bus use without clear proof it would reduce the mileage of vehicle trips and emissions. The new proposal calls for no more than 40 percent of a company's workforce to commute by auto on an average workday by 2035. Farms and employers with fewer than 50 workers would be exempt. The plan encourages companies to subsidize transit passes, bikes, on-site employee housing, and commuter shuttles, as well as helping workers afford housing in walkable, transit-rich communities. Many large tech companies like Google and Facebook already provide shuttles and subsidize transit for their workers. It also suggests companies discourage workers from single-vehicle commutes by reducing parking spaces and raising parking fees, compressing work schedules and eliminating personal desks in favor of shared work spaces. The new proposal was designed with input from state lawmakers, the mayors of San Francisco and San Jose, county supervisors, and officials from the tech industry and transit groups, MTC commissioner Nick Josefowitz said. "This is a much more effective policy," said Josefowitz, chief of policy at the regional think tank SPUR. "This is figuring out how to do it better with everybody at the table." Gwen Litvak of the business coalition Bay Area Council said the work-from-home mandate would have hurt urban centers and businesses. "The compromise will help revitalize downtowns, and gives business critical flexibility to have workers carpool, use public transit, ride bikes or walk, or even work remotely, but by their own choice," she said. San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo said the revisions better reflect how his city is evolving — from a suburban, car-centric culture to a city focused on developing a dense commercial and residential core supported by a robust transit network... Liccardo said part of Silicon Valley's success springs from having talented employees working side-by-side, exchanging ideas and innovations. Remote work reduces some creative energy. "We cannot impose mandates that contradict the laws of human nature and the laws of creative industry," he said.

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QAnon "was first championed by a handful of people who worked together to stir discussion of the 'Q' posts, eventually pushing the theory on to bigger platforms and gaining followers — a strategy that proved to be the key to Qanon's spread and the originators' financial gain..." reports NBC News, in an article shared by long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo . "NBC News has found that the theory can be traced back to three people who sparked some of the first conversation about Qanon and, in doing so, attracted followers who they then asked to help fund Qanon 'research.'" In November 2017, a small-time YouTube video creator and two moderators of the 4chan website, one of the most extreme message boards on the internet, banded together and plucked out of obscurity an anonymous and cryptic post from the many conspiracy theories that populated the website's message board. Over the next several months, they would create videos, a Reddit community, a business and an entire mythology based off the 4chan posts of "Q," the pseudonym of a person claiming to be a high-ranking military officer. The theory they espoused would become Qanon, and it would eventually make its way from those message boards to national media stories and the rallies of President Donald Trump. Now, the people behind that effort are at the center of a fractious debate among conspiracy enthusiasts, some of whom believe the three people who first popularized the Qanon theory are promoting it in order to make a living. Others suggest that these original followers actually wrote Q's mysterious posts... Qanon was just another unremarkable part of the "anon" genre until November 2017, when two moderators of the 4chan board where Q posted predictions, who went by the usernames Pamphlet Anon [real name: Coleman Rogers] and BaruchtheScribe, reached out to Tracy Diaz, according to Diaz's blogs and YouTube videos. BaruchtheScribe, in reality a self-identified web programmer from South Africa named Paul Furber, confirmed that account to NBC News. "A bunch of us decided that the message needed to go wider so we contacted Youtubers who had been commenting on the Q drops," Furber said in an email... As Diaz tells it in a blog post detailing her role in the early days of Qanon, she banded together with the two moderators. Their goal, according to Diaz, was to build a following for Qanon — which would mean bigger followings for them as well... Diaz followed with dozens more Q-themed videos, each containing a call for viewers to donate through links to her Patreon and PayPal accounts. Diaz's YouTube channel now boasts more than 90,000 subscribers and her videos have been watched over 8 million times. More than 97,000 people follow her on Twitter. Diaz, who emerged from bankruptcy in 2009, says in her YouTube videos that she now relies on donations from patrons funding her YouTube "research" as her sole source of income. Diaz declined to comment on this story. "Because I cover Q, I got an audience," Diaz acknowledged in a video that NBC News reviewed last week before she deleted it. To reach a more mainstream audience (older people and "normies," who on their own would have trouble navigating the fringe message boards), Diaz said in her blog post she recommended they move to the more user-friendly Reddit. Archives listing the three as the original posters and moderators show they created a new Reddit community... Their move to Reddit was key to Qanon's eventual spread. There, they were able to tap into a larger audience of conspiracy theorists, and drive discussion with their analysis of each Q post. From there, Qanon crept to Facebook where it found a new, older audience via dozens of public and private groups... As Qanon picked up steam, growing skepticism over the motives of Diaz, Rogers, and the other early Qanon supporters led some in the internet's conspiracy circles to turn their paranoia on the group. Recently, some Qanon followers have accused Diaz and Rogers of profiting from the movement by soliciting donations from their followers. Other pro-Trump online groups have questioned the roles that Diaz and Rogers have played in promoting Q, pointing to a series of slip-ups that they say show Rogers and Diaz may have been involved in the theory from the start. Those accusations have led Diaz and Rogers to both deny that they are Q and say they don't know who Q is.

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Growl is being retired after surviving for 17 years. Its page on GitHub explains: Growl is a notification system for OS X. Growl has been around since 2004, and was originally called Global Notifications Center. The name was changed to Growl (like the noise a dog makes) since we felt the name Notifications Center was too geeky. We were wrong about that haha. Growl was meant as a proof of concept which became something more for a long period of time. Before Growl was made developers either had to pop up a very basic window or some other ugliness nobody liked. Working with developers on Adium and Colloquy who wanted to implement their own custom notifications into their applications is what birthed this project. Growl is a retired project, we couldn't think of another thing to change which would be substantial enough to bring out a new updated release. Growl is stable and should work for as long as intel based programs work. Anyone who wants to run Growl is free to do so in an unsupported fashion. Lead developer Christopher Forsythe writes at 336699.org: With the announcement of Apple's new hardware platform, a general shift of developers to Apple's notification system, and a lack of obvious ways to improve Growl beyond what it is and has been, we're announcing the retirement of Growl as of today. It's been a long time coming. Growl is the project I worked on for the longest period of my open source career... There's even a SourceForge project for Global Notifications Center still out there if you want to go find it... Without Growl I do not know that we would have any sort of decent notification system in OS X, iOS, Android or who knows what else... For developers we recommend transitioning away from Growl at this point. The apps themselves are gone from the app store, however the code itself still lives. Everything from our rake build system to our code is available for use on our GitHub page.

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