Long-time Slashdot reader rinka shares an article about "the place where the Sun will be re-born on Earth": The world's best scientists are trying to create a 'miniature Sun' on Earth to tap its fusion energy, costing over €20 billion... [G]lobally ITER is the most expensive science project on Earth ever to be undertaken in the 21st century. The total weight of the ITER reactor will be about 28,000 tonnes...

Being made collaboratively by USA, Russia, South Korea, China, Japan, European Union and India as equal partners or participating in this mega effort are countries that together hold 50% of the world's population accounting for about 85% of the global GDP... Dr Mark Henderson, a scientist at ITER, said, "This place to me is the coolest place on Earth, because here in the near future we will have a little Sun on Earth and it will be a 150 million degrees Celsius so it will be the hottest place on Earth, ten times hotter than our Sun...."

The project is a herculean effort and operations are expected to start by 2025. Later a full scale electricity generating unit called the DEMO reactor is scheduled to be completed by 2040... On being asked how much carbon dioxide the main culprit for global warming would be released from the ITER project Dr Luce quips "only the carbon dioxide the scientists exhale". The radioactive substances generated from reactions would be the sort that can die off in a hundred years.
Its ultimate goal is to create "an unlimited supply of clean energy."

DevNull127 writes: The 77th World Science Fiction Convention announced the winners of the 2019 Hugo Awards at a ceremony Sunday night.

Here's some of the highlights. At least two of these stories can be read (for free) online:

BEST NOVELETTE: "If at First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again," by Zen Cho. The entire text is availabe online in the B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog, where it was published in November of 2018.

BEST SHORT STORY: "A Witch's Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies," by Alix E. Harrow. The complete text is available online, published in Apex Magazine in February 2018.

BEST NOVEL: The Calculating Stars, which presents an alternate history in which a meteor "decimates the U.S. government and paves the way for a climate cataclysm that will eventually render the earth inhospitable to humanity. This looming threat calls for a radically accelerated timeline in the earth's efforts to colonize space..."

BEST NOVELLA: Artificial Condition: The Murderbot Diaries #2. ("it has only vague memories of the massacre that spawned that title, and it wants to know more...")

BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION, LONG FORM: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
The Daily Dot reports that there was also one very unusual winner: Archive of Our Own (AO3), the fan-run, nonprofit website that's home to more than 5 million transformative works like fanfiction, fanart, and podfics, won one of science fiction's most prestigious awards at Worldcon Sunday night.

The website (which is part of the Organization of Transformative Works) won the Hugo for best related works, a widespread category that sometimes encompasses making-of books, pieces of criticism, and biographies. Fellow nominees included a book on Ursula K. Le Guin's writing, a Hugo Award retrospective, a website that campaigned to sponsor Worldcon memberships for Mexican creators, and Lindsay Ellis' video series on The Hobbit...

The very existence of AO3's nomination was a way of legitimizing fanfiction as a form of expression. But its win validates it even further, particularly in the science-fiction and fantasy community...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: A French security researcher has found a critical vulnerability in the blockchain-based voting system Russian officials plan to use next month for the 2019 Moscow City Duma election. Pierrick Gaudry, an academic at Lorraine University and a researcher for INRIA, the French research institute for digital sciences, found that he could compute the voting system's private keys based on its public keys. This private keys are used together with the public keys to encrypt user votes cast in the election. Gaudry blamed the issue on Russian officials using a variant of the ElGamal encryption scheme that used encryption key sizes that were too small to be secure. This meant that modern computers could break the encryption scheme within minutes.

What an attacker can do with these encryption keys is currently unknown, since the voting system's protocols weren't yet available in English, so Gaudry couldn't investigate further. "Without having read the protocol, it is hard to tell precisely the consequences, because, although we believe that this weak encryption scheme is used to encrypt the ballots, it is unclear how easy it is for an attacker to have the correspondence between the ballots and the voters," the French researcher said. "In the worst case scenario, the votes of all the voters using this system would be revealed to anyone as soon as they cast their vote." The Moscow Department of Information Technology promised to fix the reported issue. "We absolutely agree that 256x3 private key length is not secure enough," a spokesperson said in an online response. "This implementation was used only in a trial period. In few days the key's length will be changed to 1024."

However, a public key of a length of 1024 bits may not be enough, according to Gaudry, who believes officials should use one of at least 2048 bits instead.

"Despite decades of research, there's no viable roadmap for how to scale quantum cryptography to secure real-world data and communications for the masses," according to IEEE Spectrum.

Wave723 shares their report: A handful of companies now operate or pay for access to networks secured using quantum cryptography in the United States, China, Austria, and Japan. According to a recent industry report, six startups plus Toshiba are leading efforts to provide quantum cryptography to governments, large companies (including banks and financial institutions), and small to medium enterprises. But these early customers may never provide enough demand for these services to scale...

From a practical standpoint, then, it doesn't appear that quantum cryptography will be anything more than a physically elaborate and costly -- and, for many applications, largely ignorable -- method of securely delivering cryptographic keys anytime soon. This is in part because traditional cryptography, relying as it does on existing computer networks and hardware, costs very little to implement. Whereas quantum crypto requires an entirely new infrastructure of delicate single-photon detectors and sources, and dedicated fiber optic lines. So its high price tag must be offset by a proven security benefit it could somehow deliver -- a benefit that has remained theoretical at best.
Though it was supposed to replace mathematical cryptography, "Math may get the last laugh," the article explains. "An emerging subfield of mathematics with the somewhat misleading name 'post-quantum cryptography' now appears better situated to deliver robust and broadly scalable cryptosystems that could withstand attacks from quantum computers." They quote the security engineer at a New York cybersecurity firm who says quantum cryptography "seems like a solution to a problem that we don't really have."

The article ends by suggesting that research may ultimately be applicable to quantum computers -- which could then be used to defeat math-based cryptography. But riffing on the article's title, sjames (Slashdot reader #1,099) quips that instead of giving quantum cryptography a reboot, maybe it just needs the boot.

America's lawmakers are scrutinizing the blanket protections in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which lets online companies moderate their own sites without incurring legal liability for everything they host.

schwit1 shared this article from the New York Times: Last month, Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, said in a hearing about Google and censorship that the law was "a subsidy, a perk" for big tech that may need to be reconsidered. In an April interview, Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California called Section 230 a "gift" to tech companies "that could be removed."

"There is definitely more attention being paid to Section 230 than at any time in its history," said Jeff Kosseff, a cybersecurity law professor at the United States Naval Academy and the author of a book about the law, The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet .... Mr. Wyden, now a senator [and a co-author of the original bill], said the law had been written to provide "a sword and a shield" for internet companies. The shield is the liability protection for user content, but the sword was meant to allow companies to keep out "offensive materials." However, he said firms had not done enough to keep "slime" off their sites. In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Wyden said he had recently told tech workers at a conference on content moderation that if "you don't use the sword, there are going to be people coming for your shield."

There is also a concern that the law's immunity is too sweeping. Websites trading in revenge pornography, hate speech or personal information to harass people online receive the same immunity as sites like Wikipedia. "It gives immunity to people who do not earn it and are not worthy of it," said Danielle Keats Citron, a law professor at Boston University who has written extensively about the statute. The first blow came last year with the signing of a law that creates an exception in Section 230 for websites that knowingly assist, facilitate or support sex trafficking. Critics of the new law said it opened the door to create other exceptions and would ultimately render Section 230 meaningless.
The article notes that while lawmakers from both parties are challenging the protections, "they disagree on why," with Republicans complaining that the law has only protected some free speech while still leaving conservative voices open to censorship on major platforms.

The Times also notes that when Wyden co-authored the original bill in 1996, Google didn't exist yet, and Mark Zuckerberg was 11 years old.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times, written by philosophy professor Lori Gruen: Sarah, who could have been deemed the world's smartest chimp, was brought to the United States from Africa as an infant to work with David and Ann Premack in a series of experiments designed to find out what chimpanzees might think. In order to determine what, if anything, might be on Sarah's mind, she was one of the first chimpanzees to be taught a human language. The Premacks taught her to use plastic magnetic tokens that varied in size and color to represent words. She formed sentences by placing the tokens in a vertical line. Ann Premack noted that her earliest words named "various interesting fruits," so that Sarah "could both solve her problem and eat it."

Sarah's career established that not only do chimpanzees have complex thoughts, but also distinct personalities with strong preferences and prejudices. But this is just part of her remarkable life story. As she grew older she helped a diabetic chimpanzee named Abby, who she was living with, remember to get her medication. She was a loving, yet stern, aunt-like figure to a pair of young chimpanzees, Harper and Emma, and she helped Henry, a male chimpanzee who came from a situation of terrible abuse, get along with other chimpanzees. Since the time that Sarah was thought to have established that chimpanzees know what others might want or need, a growing number of investigators have tried to figure out if other animals have a theory of mind. Though there have always been skeptics, studies have suggested that crows, jays, ravens, other apes, monkeys, and maybe dogs, may know what others are thinking. In social animals, being able to glean what others might be thinking is a good strategy for getting along. For chimpanzees living in sanctuaries, it can facilitate care.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceAlert: A study published in 2017 has overturned a 100-year-old assumption on what exactly makes a neuron "fire," posing new mechanisms behind certain neurological disorders. To understand why this is important, we need to go back to 1907 when a French neuroscientist named Louis Lapicque proposed a model to describe how the voltage of a nerve cell's membrane increases as a current is applied. Once reaching a certain threshold, the neuron reacts with a spike of activity, after which the membrane's voltage resets. What this means is a neuron won't send a message unless it collects a strong enough signal. Lapique's equations weren't the last word on the matter, not by far. But the basic principle of his integrate-and-fire model has remained relatively unchallenged in subsequent descriptions, today forming the foundation of most neuronal computational schemes. According to the researchers, the lengthy history of the idea has meant few have bothered to question whether it's accurate.

The experiments approached the question from two angles -- one exploring the nature of the activity spike based on exactly where the current was applied to a neuron, the other looking at the effect multiple inputs had on a nerve's firing. Their results suggest the direction of a received signal can make all the difference in how a neuron responds. A weak signal from the left arriving with a weak signal from the right won't combine to build a voltage that kicks off a spike of activity. But a single strong signal from a particular direction can result in a message. This potentially new way of describing what's known as spatial summation could lead to a novel method of categorizing neurons, one that sorts them based on how they compute incoming signals or how fine their resolution is, based on a particular direction. Better yet, it could even lead to discoveries that explain certain neurological disorders.

A new study led by Haikun Wang, Xi Lu, and Yu Deng examines the relationship between economic growth and emissions to project that China's should peak in the early 2020s. Ars Technica reports: The analysis uses data from 50 Chinese cities for a representative sampling of the factors at work across the country. The cities combine to account for about 35% of national emissions, 30% of the population, and 50% of total gross domestic product (GDP). These cities vary widely, from types of industry to affluence to sources of power on the local grid. But the researchers see evidence that these metropolises follow an economic relationship known as the environmental Kuznets curve -- emissions per capita stops increasing once a certain GDP per capita is reached. The idea is basically that dirty growth eventually provides the resources to switch to cleaner options.

After adjusting for things like location (whether a city's electricity is supplied mainly by coal or by nuclear and renewables) and the population density of cities of different sizes, the researchers calculated that emissions reach a peak when per-capita emissions hit about 10 tons of CO2 per year. That happens at an average per-capita GDP of US$21,000. When China signed the Paris Agreement in 2015, it was at an average of about 7.5 tons of CO2 per person per year and a per-capita GDP of $13,500. Based on World Bank economic projections, the researchers calculate China should hit $21,000 -- and so peak emissions -- between 2021 and 2025. That would equate to peak national emissions of 13-16 billion tons of CO2 per year, compared to emissions of roughly 10 billion tons of CO2 in 2015. (For context, the United States is emitting around 5.5 billion tons of CO2 each year with a little less than a quarter of China's population.)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: Researchers have demonstrated a new algorithm for detecting so-called deepfake images -- those altered imperceptibly by AI systems, potentially for nefarious purposes. Initial tests of the algorithm picked out phony from undoctored images down to the individual pixel level with between 71 and 95 percent accuracy, depending on the sample data set used. The algorithm has not yet been expanded to include the detection of deepfake videos.

One component of the algorithm is a variety of a so-called "recurrent neural network," which splits the image in question into small patches and looks at those patches pixel by pixel. The neural network has been trained by letting it examine thousands of both deepfake and genuine images, so it has learned some of the qualities that make fakes stand out at the single-pixel level. Another portion of the algorithm, on a parallel track to the part looking at single pixels, passes the whole image through a series of encoding filters -- almost as if it were performing an image compression, as when you click the "compress image" box when saving a TIFF or a JPEG. These filters, in a mathematical sense, enable the algorithm to consider the entire image at larger, more holistic levels. The algorithm then compares the output of the pixel-by-pixel and higher-level encoding filter analyses. When these parallel analyses trigger red flags over the same region of an image, it is then tagged as a possible deepfake. The deepfake-detecting algorithm has been described in a recent IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: For the first time, doctors in the U.S. have used the powerful gene-editing technique CRISPR to try to treat a patient with a genetic disorder. "It is just amazing how far things have come," says Victoria Gray, 34, of Forest, Miss. "It is wonderful," she told NPR in an exclusive interview after undergoing the landmark treatment for sickle cell disease. Gray is the first patient ever to be publicly identified as being involved in a study testing the use of CRISPR for a genetic disease. "I always had hoped that something will come along," she says from a hospital bed at the Sarah Cannon Research Institute in Nashville, Tenn., where she received an infusion of billions of genetically modified cells. "It's a good time to get healed." But it probably will take months, if not years, of careful monitoring of Gray and other patients before doctors know whether the treatment is safe and how well it might be helping patients. "For the study, doctors are using cells taken from patients' own bone marrow that have been genetically modified with CRISPR to make them produce a protein that is usually only made by fetuses and by babies for a short time following birth," the report adds. "The hope is this protein will compensate for the defective protein that causes sickle cell disease and will enable patients to live normally for the rest of their lives."

How much bigger can video games get? Video games are only getting more costly, in more ways than one. And it doesn't seem like they're sustainable. From a report: There's the human cost, which Kotaku has chronicled extensively. Contract workers are continually undervalued and taken advantage of, as Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 developer Treyarch is reported to do.[...] That's only the start of it. When you adjust for inflation, the retail cost of video games has never been cheaper, and it's been this way for some time. The $60 price point for a standard big-budget release has held steady for nearly 15 years, unadjusted for inflation even as the cost to make big-budget video games has risen astronomically with player expectations. Since changing the price point seems to be anathema, we've seen the industry attempt to compensate with all manner of alternatives: higher-priced collector's editions, live service games that offer annual passes or regular expansions a la Destiny, microtransactions, and free-to-play games. Then you have loot boxes. [...]

Let's run down the Big Three. We're more than halfway through 2019, and Electronic Arts has only published one single-player game, the indie Sea of Solitude. Last year was much the same, with two indies as its only single-player releases: Fe and Unraveled 2. Activision's portfolio of single-player games looks even thinner: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is the only exclusively single-player, non-remake game that the publisher has released since 2015's Transformers: Devastation -- which itself is no longer available, thanks to an expired licensing agreement. Ubisoft is an exception, regularly releasing entries in single-player game franchises like Far Cry and Assassin's Creed. But it buttresses them with aggressive microtransactions and extensive season pass plans. (And the occasional diversion like Trials Rising and South Park: The Fractured But Whole.)

The big-budget single-player experience is now almost entirely the domain of first-party studios making marquee games for console manufacturers, which bankroll games like Spider-Man and God of War. The economics of first-party exclusives are totally different -- they're less about making money by themselves and more about drawing players into the console's ecosystem. This is worth considering, because as big publishers prioritize live, service-oriented games, the number of games on their schedules has dropped. If you look at the Wikipedia listings for EA, Ubisoft, and Activision games released by year, you'll get a stark -- if unscientific -- picture of how each big publisher's release slate has thinned out in the last five years, relying on recurring cash cows like sports games and annualized franchises and little else. In 2008, those three publishers released 98 games; in 2018 they released just 28, not including expansions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: When you order food through an app and tip the worker who delivers it, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the money you give goes directly to that person. But in reality, some delivery apps use your tip to make up the worker's base pay -- essentially stealing the money you're trying to give someone to maximize their profits. This isn't a new practice by any means, but a recent report from The New York Times highlights how DoorDash, the most popular food delivery app in the U.S., enforces it.

Here's Times reporter Andy Newman: "DoorDash offers a guaranteed minimum for each job. For my first order, the guarantee was $6.85 and the customer, a woman in Boerum Hill who answered the door in a colorful bathrobe, tipped $3 via the app. But I still received only $6.85. Here's how it works: If the woman in the bathrobe had tipped zero, DoorDash would have paid me the whole $6.85. Because she tipped $3, DoorDash kicked in only $3.85. She was saving DoorDash $3, not tipping me." "DoorDash's policy is the equivalent of a 'tipped wage,' a common practice in America where employers pay workers less than the minimum wage and rely on tips to make up the payments they owe," the report adds. "Apps like DoorDash are essentially just extending established bad labor practices into the world of tech."

Amazon Flex also uses tips to make up pay, even after being heavily criticized for it. Instacart was the same way, but it scrapped the policy and promised to retroactively compensate workers following outcry. Postmades, Grubhub, Seamless, and Uber Eats all confirmed to The Verge that customer tips are not used to subsidize workers' pay.

"NASA's orbiting Lunar Gateway is either essential for a moon landing or a boondoggle in the making," writes IEEE Spectrum.

the_newsbeagle writes: NASA is under pressure to put humans back on the moon by 2024... NASA's plan for meeting that ambitious target relies on building a space station in lunar orbit, called the Gateway. NASA says it will use its (over budget and behind schedule) SLS rocket and Orion crew capsule to dock at this (yet unbuilt) Gateway, then send down a lunar lander. Critics say this is a stupid and over-complicated plan.

This article by veteran space reporter Jeff Foust explains how NASA got itself into this situation.
From the article: Critics of the Gateway argue that NASA shouldn't just scale back the space station -- it should cancel the project altogether. If you want to go to the surface of the moon, the refrain goes, go there directly, as the Apollo missions did a half century ago. Building an outpost in lunar orbit adds expense, delay, and complications to a task that is already hard enough....

Critics say that technological alternatives are emerging in the commercial space sector. They look to Blue Origin, the space company founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos and based near Seattle. Blue Origin is building both a reusable heavy-lift rocket, called New Glenn, and a lunar lander known as Blue Moon. Another contender is Elon Musk's SpaceX, based in Hawthorne, Calif., which is also working on a fully reusable rocket. It will carry an upper stage called Starship, which the company says could land directly on the moon and carry heavy cargo. "Having that vehicle on the moon can basically serve as the core of a pretty significant lunar outpost, growing with time," said Paul Wooster, principal Mars development engineer at SpaceX.
The article ends by presenting two possibilities.

• "If NASA, heedful of sunk costs and political realities, continues to march toward the Gateway, we may indeed witness a triumphant return of NASA astronauts to the moon's surface in 2024..."
• "The determined billionaires behind SpaceX and Blue Origin might not wait around for NASA, and the next moon boots in the regolith might stamp a corporate logo in the dust."

dryriver writes: The line "sharks with fricking lasers" was once popular on Slashdot. It sounds like a joke, but a never-made James Bond movie co-written back in the day by Sean Connery was actually going to feature robotic sharks carrying stolen NATO nukes in order to attack New York. Bond was going to stop the sharks inside the New York sewer system, waterski out of the sewers, paraglide up to the Statue of Liberty's head, then fight a Bond villain inside said head, with the villain's "blood trickling out of the Statue of Liberty's eye like tears" at the end of the fight. All this was going to happen without the consent of Cubby Broccoli, the official producer of the Bond movies. Why did the movie never get made? The producers of competing Bond movies were fighting in court over who has what rights to the franchise and characters. In the end, "Bond fights robot sharks with nukes" was scrapped, and "Never Say Never Again," a remake of "Thunderball," was made instead. This featured stolen nukes as well, but unfortunately no robot sharks or other "Austin Powers" style silliness.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Several people have been killed after an apparent arson attack gutted a building at Kyoto Animation, one of Japan's most renowned anime studios. NHK reports that 33 people are confirmed dead and many more have been injured. An explosion was heard around the studio at around 10.30AM local time. Police are questioning a man in his 40s who was seen spreading and lighting a gasoline-like liquid in the 1st Studio building, which is said to be where most of Kyoto Animation's mainline production takes place. The Mainichi Shinbun newspaper reports that the man said he started the fire. Kyoto Animation, also known as KyoAni, is best known for series like K-On! and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzimiya, and release standalone feature A Silent Voice in 2016. Netflix picked up the streaming rights to KyoAni's Violet Evergarden series and made it available worldwide last year.

UPDATE: Several sources are now reporting that the man who set fire to the building screamed angrily, "they faked it." According to The Daily Beast, "The word he used in Japanese, pakuri, can reference stealing an idea, ripping off a product, or plagiarizing someone else's work."

Jiaming Luo and Regina Barzilay from MIT and Yuan Cao from Google's AI lab in Mountain View, California, have developed a machine-learning system capable of deciphering lost languages, and they've demonstrated it on a script from the Mediterranean island of Crete. The script, Linear B, appeared after 1400 BCE, when the island was conquered by Mycenaeans from the Greek mainland. MIT Technology Review reports: Luo and co put the technique to the test with two lost languages, Linear B and Ugaritic. Linguists know that Linear B encodes an early version of ancient Greek and that Ugaritic, which was discovered in 1929, is an early form of Hebrew. Given that information and the constraints imposed by linguistic evolution, Luo and co's machine is able to translate both languages with remarkable accuracy. "We were able to correctly translate 67.3% of Linear B cognates into their Greek equivalents in the decipherment scenario," they say. "To the best of our knowledge, our experiment is the first attempt of deciphering Linear B automatically."

That's impressive work that takes machine translation to a new level. But it also raises the interesting question of other lost languages -- particularly those that have never been deciphered, such as Linear A. In this paper, Linear A is conspicuous by its absence. Luo and co do not even mention it, but it must loom large in their thinking, as it does for all linguists. Yet significant breakthroughs are still needed before this script becomes amenable to machine translation. For example, nobody knows what language Linear A encodes. Attempts to decipher it into ancient Greek have all failed. And without the progenitor language, the new technique does not work.

Robert Epstein, an American psychologist, professor, author and journalist critical of Google, argues that Google's monopoly on search can be broken by making its index public. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report via Bloomberg: Different tech companies pose different kinds of threats. I'm focused here on Google, which I've been studying for more than six years through both experimental research and monitoring projects. (Google is well aware of my work and not entirely happy with me. The company did not respond to requests for comment.) Google is especially worrisome because it has maintained an unopposed monopoly on search worldwide for nearly a decade. It controls 92 percent of search, with the next largest competitor, Microsoft's Bing, drawing only 2.5%. Fortunately, there is a simple way to end the company's monopoly without breaking up its search engine, and that is to turn its "index" -- the mammoth and ever-growing database it maintains of internet content -- into a kind of public commons.

Doesn't Google already share its index with everyone in the world? Yes, but only for single searches. I'm talking about requiring Google to share its entire index with outside entities -- businesses, nonprofit organizations, even individuals -- through what programmers call an application programming interface, or API. Google already allows this kind of sharing with a chosen few, most notably a small but ingenious company called Startpage, which is based in the Netherlands. In 2009, Google granted Startpage access to its index in return for fees generated by ads placed near Startpage search results. With access to Google's index -- the most extensive in the world, by far -- Startpage gives you great search results, but with a difference. Google tracks your searches and also monitors you in other ways, so it gives you personalized results. Startpage doesn't track you -- it respects and guarantees your privacy -- so it gives you generic results. Some people like customized results; others treasure their privacy. In closing, Epstein writes that dozens of Startpage variants would turn up within months of opening up access to Google's index. "Many would target niche audiences -- some small, perhaps, like high-end shoppers, and some huge, like all the world's women, and most of these platforms would do a better job of serving their constituencies than Google ever could," he writes.

"These aren't just alternatives to Google, they are competitors -- thousands of search platforms, each with its special focus and emphasis, each drawing on different subsets of information from Google's ever-expanding index, and each using different rules to decide how to organize the search results they display. Different platforms would likely have different business models, too, and business models that have never been tried before would quickly be tested."

We're reviving an old Slashdot tradition -- the review. Whenever there's something especially geeky -- or relevant to our present moment -- we'll share some thoughts. And I'd like to start with Jonathan Coulton's amazing 2017 album Solid State, and its trippy accompanying graphic novel adaptation by Matt Fraction. I even tracked down Jonathan Coulton on Friday for his thoughts on how it applies to our current moment in internet time...

"When I started work on Solid State, the only thing I could really think of that I wanted to say was something like, 'The internet sucks now'," Coulton said in 2017 in an epilogue to the graphic novel. "It's a little off-brand for me, so it was a scary place to start..."

So what does he think today? And what did we think of his album...?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: Hong Kong's protesters are using AirDrop, a file-sharing feature that allows Apple devices to send photos and videos over Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, to breach China's Great Firewall in order to spread information to mainland Chinese visitors in the city. Leaving AirDrop settings open allows anyone in the vicinity to send files to your device. A protest held yesterday (July 7) in Tsim Sha Tsui, one of Hong Kong's most popular tourist districts, had a clear aim: to tell people from mainland China about the city's opposition to a hated extradition bill, which has mobilized millions of people over the past several weeks to multiple protests and presented the most critical challenge to the local government in decades.

But news of the protest has been heavily censored in mainland China, with any mention of the mass movement wiped off the Chinese internet. Even songs alluding to the city have been scrubbed. As such, many Chinese tourists were visibly confused by the large march, which organizers say drew an estimated 230,000 people. Hong Kong's protesters have therefore turned to Apple's AirDrop feature to get their message across to their mainland Chinese compatriots. That the messages are written in simplified Chinese -- Hong Kongers use traditional Chinese -- confirm that the intended audience is Chinese tourists.

Mexican physicist Rafael Gonzalez has found the solution to spherical aberration in optical lenses, solving the 2,000-year-old Wasserman-Wolf problem that Isaac Newton himself could not solve. Newton invented a telescope that solved the chromatic aberration, but not the spherical aberration. PetaPixel reports: Fast forward to 2018 when Hector A. Chaparro-Romo, a doctoral student at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), who had been trying to solve this problem for 3 years, invited Rafael G. Gonzalez-Acuna, a doctoral student from Tec de Monterrey, to help him solve the problem. At first, Gonzalez did not want to devote resources to what he knew to be a millenary, impossible to solve problem. But upon the insistence of Hector Chaparro, he decided to accept the challenge. After months of working on solving the problem, Rafael Gonzalez recalls, "I remember one morning I was making myself a slice of bread with Nutella, when suddenly, I said out loud: Mothers! It is there!" He then ran to his computer and started programming the idea. When he executed the solution and saw that it worked, he says he jumped all over the place. It is unclear whether he finished eating the Nutella bread. Afterwards, the duo ran a simulation and calculated the efficacy with 500 rays, and the resulting average satisfaction for all examples was 99.9999999999%. Which, of course, is great news for gear reviewers on YouTube, as they will still be able to argue about the 0.0000000001% of sharpness difference among lens brands. Their findings were published in the journal Applied Optics. They also published an article in Applied Optics that gives an analytical solution to the Levi-Civita problem formulated in 1900. "The Levi-Civita problem, which has existed without a solution for over a century, was also considered a mythical problem by the specialized community," reports PetaPixel.

"In this [algebraic] equation we describe how the shape of the second aspherical surface of the given lens should be given a first surface, which is provided by the user, as well as the object-image distance," explains Gonzalez. "The second surface is such that it corrects all the aberration generated by the first surface, and the spherical aberration is eliminated."