An anonymous reader shares some free streaming media options: There's over 10,000 public domain audiobooks at LibriVox.org, created by volunteers reading public domain works. (If you've got time, why not record yourself reading your own favorite public domain poem or novel?) And there's also a lot of free audiobooks (and ebooks) available through Hoopla, a free "digital media" service that's partnering with many public libraries across North America. They're not just offering books; there's also movies, music, TV shows, and even comic books.

As always, Amazon's audiobook service Audible offers a free one-month trial. But they've now also announced a new free service for "as long as the schools are closed... Kids everywhere can instantly stream an incredible collection of stories..."
You can also stream over 6,500 full-length movies over at archive.org, including Night of the Living Dead and The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz.

They've even got a collection of classic cartoons, like Tom and Jerry, Betty Boop, the Pink Panther, and lots of Popeye (including one where Popeye runs for president against Bluto.)

And an archive.org blog post explains that that's just the beginning: If gaming is more your speed, then check out the MS-DOS Games in our Software Library. This collection includes dozens of classic favorites such as Pac-Man, Sim City, The Oregon Trail, Doom, Prince of Persia, Donkey Kong, and Tetris, as well as many more lesser-known titles such as Aliens Ate My Baby Sitter! and Freddy Pharkas, Frontier Pharmacist. Enjoy simulations of popular board and card games such as Monopoly [press F1 to begin], Stratego, Hearts, or Mah Jong, as well as flight simulators, sports games, and this treat for Monty Python fans.
They also have recordings of old-time radio shows -- as well as an archive of live music. ("Our most popular collection by far is The Grateful Dead, but you could also explore Smashing Pumpkins, Robert Randolph (and the Family Band), Disco Biscuits, Death Cab for Cutie, John Mayer, or Grace Potter and the Nocturnals...")

And then there's this: Relive the 80's and 90's (and learn how to style your scarf) with the Ephemeral VHS collection, or roam the cosmos with the NASA Image of the Day gallery. Learn about the history of advertising with this collection of retro TV ads or enjoy some psychedelic screensavers. No matter how long you're stuck indoors, the Internet Archive will have something new to offer you — so happy hunting!
Share your reactions -- and your own finds and suggestions -- in the comments! And in these days of social distancing, what are the best free entertain sites that you've found?

A senior Russian official says an upcoming digital assets bill will ban the issuing and selling of cryptocurrencies.

Forbes reports: "We believe there are big risks of legalizing the operations with the cryptocurrencies, from the standpoint of financial stability, money laundering prevention and consumer protection," Russia's central bank head of legal, Alexey Guznov, told Russia news agency Interfax this week in comments translated to English via Google. "We are opposed to the fact that there are institutions that organize the release of cryptocurrency and facilitate its circulation," Guznov said, adding the coming bill "directly formulates a ban on the issue, as well as on the organization of circulation of cryptocurrency, and introduces liability for violation of this ban...."

However, Guznov admitted that Russia would not be able to completely ban bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. "Nobody is going to ban owning cryptocurrencies," Guznov said, adding people will not be punished for owning crypto "if they made their deal in a jurisdiction that does not prohibit that."

America's Food and Drug Administration has approved a coronavirus test from a company called Cepheid.

It can deliver its results in about 45 minutes, "much faster than current tests that require a sample to be sent to a centralized lab, where results can take days," reports The Hill: The test has been designed to operate on any of Cepheid's more than 23,000 automated GeneXpert Systems worldwide, of which 5,000 are in the U.S., the company said. The systems are already being used to test for conditions such as HIV and tuberculosis. The systems do not require users to have specialty training to perform testing and are capable of running around the clock.

"An accurate test delivered close to the patient can be transformative" and can "help alleviate the pressure" that the COVID-19 outbreak has put on health facilities, David Persing, Cepheid's chief medical and technology officer, said in a statement.

Linus Torvalds himself "changed around the kernel's pipe code to use exclusive waits when reading or writing," reports Phoronix.

"While this doesn't mean much for traditional/common piping of data, the GNU Make job-server is a big benefactor as it relies upon a pipe for limiting the parallelism" -- especially on high-core-count CPUs.

This drew an interesting follow-up from Slashdot reader rockyb, who was wondering if anyone could verify that GNU Make 4.3 speeds up build times: I updated and released a fork of that called remake which includes hooks to profile a build, and has a complete debugger in it (although most of the time the better tracing that is in there is enough).

The most recent version has a feature though that I really like and use a lot which is adding an option to look in parent directories for a Makefile if none is found in the current directory.

You can download the source code from either github or sourceforge. Both have a full list of the release notes.

Sorry, at the time of this writing no packagers have picked up the newest release. Repology has a list of packages for older versions though.