Wimbledon is turning to big data to help improve fans' tennis knowledge, after discovering even ticket holders at the Championships were not aware of most of the players in the game. From a report: Crowds at this year's tournament -- expected to return to sold-out levels with easing of coronavirus restrictions -- are to be exposed to more facts and figures organisers hope will help get them "closer to the sport." AI-powered stats will seek to better explain the strengths and weaknesses in players' games but also predict upsets and rising stars, with data built in part from trawling newspaper headlines.

Alexandra Willis, the All England Club's director of communications and marketing, said the idea had come about before Covid. "We found that most fans didn't watch tennis the rest of the year," she said. "They also hadn't heard of most of the players [and] this was a specific barrier to engagement." Spectators at Wimbledon fortnight, as well as television viewers and app users, will have access to Win Factor, a tool that will aggregate data from a number of sources to better predict a player's chances of victory in a given match. Fans will be able to input their own match predictions while being encouraged to scour more information on some of the game's lesser-known players.

schwit1 shares a report from Task & Purpose: A fan of the popular mechanized combat simulator 'War Thunder' shared the specs of China's Type 99 Main Battle Tank online in order to win an argument over the game. [...] The latest incident, first reported by the OSINTtechnical Twitter account, involves information in Mandarin on the penetrator section of a Chinese tank round along with a technical diagram. While many of the original images have been taken down, they were essentially the schematics for a Chinese tank munition, presumably revealed to the world so a video game could more accurately depict what would happen if a Chinese tank and an American tank -- or British, French, Russian, German or Israeli tank -- met in combat. And this isn't the first time these forums have become an outlet for technical leaks. [...]

The most recent leak, the latest leak, from someone with access to the latest technical manuals from China's People's Liberation Army, occurred because a user wanted the game's Chinese battle tanks to have better in-game stats. While most of the information about the Chinese tank round was already known, it was still apparently more important for one gamer to prove another gamer wrong on a message board than it was to consider the implications of publishing the technical details of military munitions online.

The video game developer, Gaijin Entertainment, banned the user, telling Kotaku that, "Our community managers immediately banned the user and deleted his post, as the information on this particular shell is still classified in China. Publishing classified information on any vehicle of any nation at War Thunder forums is clearly prohibited, and the game developers never use it in their work."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple's Safari web browser has more than 1 billion users, according to an estimate by Atlas VPN. Only one other browser has more than a billion users, and that's Google's Chrome. But at nearly 3.4 billion, Chrome still leaves Safari in the dust. It's important to note that these numbers include mobile users, not just desktop users. Likely, Safari's status as the default browser for both the iPhone and iPad plays a much bigger role than its usage on the Mac. Still, it's impressive given that Safari is the only major web browser not available on Android, which is the world's most popular mobile operating system, or Windows, the most popular desktop OS. "The statistics are based on the GlobalStats browser market share percentage, which was then converted into numbers using the Internet World Stats internet user metric to retrieve the exact numbers," explains Atlas VPN in a blog post.

An anonymous reader shares a report: While not every user is actively monitoring hardware resource usage when gaming, enthusiasts and reviewers often turn the stats on to see how certain games and other applications are being handled by the hardware. During such a test run, CapFrameX, which developed a useful frametime analysis tool, noticed a weird anomaly when gauging the performance of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D on Lara Croft Shadow of the Tomb Raider (SotTR). The processor usage reported on Windows 11 is seemingly unusually low in one of the scenes in the game which is typically known to be quite intense on the CPU. Only one out the 16 threads seem to be reporting the correct usage whereas all the other threads are under 10% utilization. CapFrameX notes the issue though it isn't sure what could be causing it: " The core usage reporting on Window 11 is completely broken. Should be >80% for SotTR + this particular scene and settings. What happened? Did the recent update change the timer behavior?"

SlashData's "State of the Developer Nation" surveyed more than 20,000 developers in 166 countries, taken from December 2021 to February 2022, reports InfoWorld.

It found the most popular programming language is JavaScript — followed by Python (which apparently added 3.3 million new net developers in just the last six months). And Rust adoption nearly quadrupled over the last two years to 2.2 million developers.

InfoWorld summarizes other findings from the survey: Java continues to experience strong and steady growth. Nearly 5 million developers have joined the Java community since the beginning of 2021.

PHP has grown the least in the past six month, with an increase of 600,000 net new developers between Q3 2021 and Q1 2022. But PHP is the second-most-commonly used language in web applications after JavaScript.

Go and Ruby are important languages in back-end development, but Go has grown more than twice as fast in the past year. The Go community now numbers 3.3 million developers.

The Kotlin community has grown from 2.4 million developers in Q1 2021 to 5 million in Q1 2022. This is largely attributed to Google making Kotlin its preferred language for Android development.

America's most populous state is shrinking — at least a little. The Associated Press reports: With an estimated 39,185,605 residents, California is still the U.S.'s most populous state, putting it far ahead of second-place Texas and its 29.5 million residents. But after years of strong growth brought California tantalizingly close to the 40 million milestone, the state's population is now roughly back to where it was in 2016 after declining by 117,552 people this year.
That's a drop of 0.29% — at least some of which seems attributable to the pandemic. California's population growth had been slowing even before the pandemic as baby boomers' aged, younger generations were having fewer children and more people were moving to other states. But the state's natural growth — more births than deaths — and its robust international immigration had been more than enough to offset those losses. That changed in 2020, when the pandemic killed tens of thousands of people above what would be expected from natural causes, a category demographers refer to as "excess deaths." And it prompted a sharp decline in international immigration because of travel restrictions and limited visas from the federal government.

California's population fell for the first time that year. At the time, state officials thought it was a outlier, the result of a pandemic that turned the world upside down. But the new estimate released Monday by the California Department of Finance showed the trend continued in 2021, although the decline was less than it had been in 2020. State officials pointed specifically to losses in international immigration. California gained 43,300 residents from other countries in 2021. But that was well below the annual average of 140,000 that was common before the pandemic.
The state's official demographer predicts California's population will go back to increasing in 2022.

And even with the decline, the article points out that California "had a record budget surplus last year, and is in line for an even larger one this year of as much as $68 billion — mostly the result of a progressive tax structure and a disproportionate population of billionaires."

UK households could save an average of $183 per year by switching off so-called vampire devices, British Gas research suggests. From a report: These are electronics that drain power even when they are on standby. The figures are based on research conducted on appliances in 2019 but have been updated by British Gas to reflect recent price increases. The Energy Saving Trust (EST) said consumers need to consider which devices they leave switched on. It estimates households would save around $68.5 per year by switching off all their devices when not in use. The organisation, which promotes sustainability and energy efficiency, did not give exact details of how it came to this figure. "Stats or prices related to individual appliances depend on several factors, including model, functionality and individual usage," it said.

This week at the 2022 NAB Show Streaming Summit, Google launched in general availability Media CDN, a platform for delivering content using the same infrastructure that powers YouTube. From a report: With a presence in over 1,300 cities across 200 countries, Google says that Media CDN is designed to -- in the company's words -- "automate all facets" of "serving content [close to users]." The pandemic led to an explosion in demand for streaming content as business closures and shelter-in-place orders forced folks to stay home.

Media CDN, which joins Google's CDN portfolio for web and API acceleration, is by no stretch of the imagination the first of its kind. There's plenty of CDNs optimized to serve media. But Google touts ostensibly unique benefits like delivery protocols tailored to individual users and network conditions and "industry-leading" offload rates. "With multiple tiers of caching, we minimize calls to origin -- even for infrequently accessed content," Google VP Shailesh Shukla wrote in a blog post yesterday. "This alleviates performance or capacity stress in the content origin and saves costs." Media CDN also features tools for ad insertion, allowing customers to dynamically inject video content with ads. Moreover, the service is "built with AI/ML" to power interactive experiences, Google says, like real-time stats during sporting events and purchase links embedded in virtual billboards.

"At first glance, U.S. Covid cases appear to have plateaued over the last two weeks," reports NBC News, "with a consistent average of around 30,000 per day..."

"But disease experts say incomplete data likely masks an upward trend." "I do think we are in the middle of a surge, the magnitude of which I can't tell you," Zeke Emanuel, vice provost of global initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, said. The BA.2 omicron subvariant, which now accounts for about 72 percent of U.S. cases and is more contagious than the original omicron variant, is fueling that spread, Emanuel added. "It's much more transmissible. It's around. We just don't have a lot of case counts," he said.

Emanuel and other experts cite a lack of testing as the primary reason cases are underreported. At the height of the omicron wave in January, the U.S. was administering more than 2 million tests per day. That had dropped to an average of about 530,000 as of Monday, the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "The milder symptoms become, the less likely people are to test or show up in official case counts," said David Dowdy, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. More people also now have access to at-home rapid tests that are free or covered by insurance, and most of those test results don't get reported to state health departments or the CDC.

"Case counts and testing are progressively becoming shaky indicators because we're not catching everyone in the system," said Dr. Jonathan Quick, an adjunct professor at the Duke Global Health Institute.

Some local data, however, does reveal recent spikes. Average Covid cases have risen nearly 80 percent in Nebraska, 75 percent in Arizona, 58 percent in New York and 55 percent in Massachusetts over the last two weeks. Wastewater surveillance similarly suggests that infections are rising in Colorado, Ohio and Washington, among other states.
The Johns Hopkins epidemiologist emphasized that hospitalization figures are more important than case counts.

"If we're seeing an increase in cases, but not an increase in severe cases, I think it's a very valid question of does that matter?"

Decentralized finance (DeFi) firm Truflation is building a new gauge to track inflation independent from the government and in real-time. CoinDesk reports: Think of it as a competitor to the Consumer Price Index (CPI), and one where officials can't move the goalposts. "The framework that [the government] is using is a hundred years old ... and they have continuously tried to evolve that versus taking a fresh approach in an age where we've got everything computerized," Truflation founder Stefan Rust told CoinDesk in an interview. The team started building Truflation after former Coinbase (COIN) Chief Technology Officer Balaji Srinivasan challenged Web 3 developers to build a censorship-resistant inflation feed, claiming that "the centralized state isn't going to provide reliable inflation stats," and promising an investment of $100,000. On Friday it was announced that Truflation won the challenge.

The key difference between the CPI and the Truflation index is that while the government uses survey data to measure inflation, Truflation looks at price data. The CPI is measured in the form of a survey that collects about 94,000 prices per month for commodities and services and 8,000 rental housing units for the housing component. While the Truflation index is based on the same calculation model as the widely used CPI, it is different because it measures and reports inflation changes daily by using current real-market price data from sources like Zillow, Penn State and Nielsen, among others. About 40% of the data that is being looked at is the same goods basket that the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses. The remaining 60% is being substituted with data from other sources. Truflation, which runs on Chainlink and is therefore accessible and visible for everyone, currently measures a 13.2% inflation rate, as opposed to 7.9% measured by the CPI in March.

theodp shares a report from Chicago Sun-Times, written by Frank Main: When the school system [Chicago Public Schools] shifted to having students learn remotely in the spring of 2020 near the beginning of the pandemic, it lent students iPads, MacBooks and Windows computer devices so they could do school work and attend virtual classes from home. CPS then spent about $165 million to buy Chromebook desktop computers so that every student from kindergarten through senior year in high school who needed a computer could have one. Students borrowed 161,100 Chromebooks in September 2020. By June 2021, more than 210,000 of those devices had been given out. Of them, nearly 40,000 Chromebooks have been reported lost -- nearly a fifth of those that were lent.

"Schools have made repeated efforts to recover the lost devices from families without success," according to a written statement from CPS officials in response to questions about the missing school property. Also missing are more than 9,600 iPads, 114 televisions, 1,680 printers and 1,127 audiovisual projectors, among many other items. Officials say CPS has bought new computer devices to replace the missing ones. Longtime Slashdot reader theodp notes that "there were 340,658 students enrolled in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) at the start of the 2020-2021 school year."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Slate.com: On March 1, after a week of horror in Ukraine, reports came out that Russia's censorship office had threatened to block Russian Wikipedia. A 32-year-old who asked to be called Alexander soon made a plan to download a local copy of Russian-language Wikipedia to keep with him in eastern Russia. "I did it just in case," he told me over Instagram Messenger before sharing that he and his wife are "working on moving to another country" with their two dogs, Prime and Shaggy. (Instagram has been blocked in Russia, but many continue to access it using virtual private networks. On Monday, the Russian government officially declared Facebook and Instagram "extremist organizations.")

Alexander wasn't the only Russian citizen to make a local copy of Wikipedia. Data suggests that after the threats of censorship, Russians started torrenting Wikipedia in droves. Currently, Russia is the country with the most Wikipedia downloads—by a landslide. Before the invasion, it rarely broke the top 10, but after the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, it has kept a solid hold on first place. The 29-gigabyte file that contains a downloadable Russian-language Wikipedia was downloaded a whopping 105,889 times during the first half of March, which is a more than 4,000 percent increase compared with the first half of January. According to Stephane Coillet-Matillon, who leads Kiwix, the organization that facilitates these downloads, Russian downloads now constitute 42 percent of all traffic on Kiwix servers, up from just 2 percent in 2021. "We had something similar back in 2017 when Turkey blocked Wikipedia," he said, "but this one is just another dimension." "Wikipedia routinely makes a dump of its databases available publicly, which Kiwix compresses into an archive so it can be more easily shared," adds Slate. "The entirety of English Wikipedia, from 'List of Informally Named Dinosaurs' to 'Floor' to 'Skunks as Pets' and everything in between, is 87 GB with pictures or 47 GB without. Russian-language Wikipedia is even smaller, continuing 1.8 million articles compared with English Wikipedia's 6.4 million."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios, written by Erica Pandey and Mike Allen: The rising power and prominence of the nation's loudest, meanest voices obscures what most of us personally experience: Most people are sane and generous -- and too busy to tweet. It turns out, you're right. We dug into the data and found that, in fact, most Americans are friendly, donate time or money, and would help you shovel your snow. They are busy, normal and mostly silent. These aren't the people with big Twitter followings or cable-news contracts -- and they don't try to pick fights at school board meetings. So the people who get the clicks and the coverage distort our true reality.

Three stats we find reassuring:

1. 75% of people in the U.S. never tweet.
2. On an average weeknight in January, just 1% of U.S. adults watched primetime Fox News (2.2 million). 0.5% tuned into MSNBC (1.15 million).
3. Nearly three times more Americans (56%) donated to charities during the pandemic than typically give money to politicians and parties (21%). The report also highlights a Gallup 2021 poll, showing that 42% of Americans identified as independents.

Backblaze has published its first SSD edition of the Drive Stats report. A Slashdot reader writes: This edition focuses exclusively on their SSDs as opposed to their quarterly and annual Drive Stats reports which, until last year, focused exclusively on HDDs. Initially they expect to publish the SSD edition twice a year, although that could change depending on its value to readers. They'll continue to publish the HDD Drive Stats reports quarterly. It's an interesting look at SSD reliability in a commercial environment and may be useful to anyone wondering what drive they should (or shouldn't) consider for their own deployment.

Industry analysts and former Mozilla employees are concerned about Firefox's future, reports Ars Technica, warning that the ultimate fate of Firefox "has larger implications for the web as a whole." Since its release in 2008, [Google's] Chrome has become synonymous with the web: it's used by around 65 percent of everyone online and has a huge influence on how people experience the Internet. When Google launched its AMP publishing standard, websites jumped to implement it. Similar plans to replace third-party cookies in Chrome — a move that will impact millions of marketers and publishers — are shaped in Google's image.

"Chrome has won the desktop browser war," says one former Firefox staff member, who worked on browser development at Mozilla but does not want to be named, as they still work in the industry. Their hopes for a Firefox revival are not high. "It's not super reasonable for Firefox to expect to win back even any browser share at this point." Another former Mozilla employee, who also asked not to be named for fear of career repercussions, says: "They're just going to have to accept the reality that Firefox is not going to come back from the ashes...."

Mozilla's financial declarations from 2020 said that despite the layoffs it is in a healthy place, and it expects its financial results for 2021 to show revenue growth. However, Mozilla and Firefox acknowledge that for its long-term future it needs to diversify the ways it makes money. These efforts have ramped up since 2019. The company owns read-it-later service Pocket, which includes a paid premium subscription service. It has also launched two similar VPN-style products that people can subscribe to. And the company is pushing more into advertising as well, placing ads on new tabs that are opened in the Firefox browser.... Selena Deckelmann, senior vice president of Firefox, says Firefox is likely to continue looking for ways to keep personalizing people's online browsing. "I'm not sure that what's going to come out of that is going to be what people traditionally expect from a browser, but the intention will always be to put people first," she says. Just this week, Firefox announced a partnership with Disney — linked to a new Pixar film — that involves changing the color of the browser and ads to win subscriptions to Disney+. The deal speaks both to Firefox's personalization push and the strange roads its search for revenue streams can lead down.

Deckelmann adds that Firefox doesn't need to be as big as Chrome or Apple's Safari, the second largest browser, to succeed. "All we really want is to be a viable choice," Deckelmann says. "Because we think that this makes a better Internet for everybody to have these different options."
Interesting stats from the article:

• "Mozilla's own statistics show a drop of around 30 million monthly active users from the start of 2019 to the start of 2022."

• Mozilla's figures now also show around 215 million Firefox Desktop clients active in the past 28 days — a number which has stayed stable.

• Yet In 2008, a full 20% of the 1.5 billion people online were using Firefox to surf the web — including more than half the web surfers in Indonesia, Macedonia, and Slovenia.

• "Across all devices, the browser has slid to less than 4 percent of the market," writes Ars Technica. "On mobile it's a measly half a percent..."

• Next year, Firefox's "lucrative search deal with Google — responsible for the vast majority of its revenue" — is set to expire.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Setting up a Raspberry Pi board has always required a second computer, which is used to flash your operating system of choice to an SD card so your Pi can boot. But the Pi Foundation is working on a new version of its bootloader that could connect an OS-less Pi board directly to the Internet, allowing it to download and install the official Raspberry Pi OS to a blank SD card without requiring another computer. To test the networked booting feature, you'll need to use the Pi Imager on a separate computer to copy an updater for the bootloader over to an SD card -- Pi firmware updates are normally installed along with new OS updates rather than separately, but since this is still in testing, it requires extra steps.

Once it's installed, there are a number of conditions that have to be met for network booting to work. It only works on Pi 4 boards (and Pi 4-derived devices, like the Pi 400 computer) that have both a keyboard and an Ethernet cable connected. If you already have an SD card or USB drive with a bootable OS connected, the Pi will boot from those as it normally does so it doesn't slow down the regular boot process. And you'll be limited to the OS image selection in the official Pi imager, though this covers a wide range of popular distributions, including Ubuntu, LibreELEC, a couple of retro-gaming emulation OSes, and Homebridge. For other OSes, downloading the image on a separate PC and installing it to an SD card manually is still the best way to go. To learn more about installing the bootloader or download the Pi OS over a network, you can view the Raspberry Pi Foundation's documentation here.

"Steam Deck Verified list is ramping up!" writes Slashdot reader segaboy81, sharing a breakdown of some notable stats via a Neowin article: As of this writing, there are 136 Steam Deck Verified titles, which will alone give Steam Deck the largest launch library of any console, ever. In fact, at this time yesterday the Steam Deck Verified list was at 99 titles. This means there has been over a 30% jump in verified titles overnight. Let's look at the breakdown.

Of the 136 verified titles, 64 of them were developed with Unity. That could be an indication of how popular the engine is, but in all of Steam there are 26,142 titles that use it, out of 110,014. That's less than a quarter of all titles. But what about publishers? Square Enix tops this list and the top developers list, but not by a lot. Of the verified games, nine are published by Square, while five are published and developed by them. Among those titles is the awesome Power Wash simulator, which has a whopping 95.26% user rating. Neowin also notes that 48 of the verified titles "have been released since 2021" and over a third "have been released within the last 14 months."

America's Internal Revenue Service created an uproar with early plans to require live-video-feed selfies to verify identities for online tax services (via an outside company called ID.me).

But Wired points out that more than 20 U.S. federal agencies are already using a digital identification system (named Login.gov and built on services from LexisNexis) that "can use selfies for account verification."

It's run by America's General Services Administration, or GSA.... The GSA's director of technology transformation services Dave Zvenyach says facial recognition is being tested for fairness and accessibility and not yet used when people access government services through Login.gov. The GSA's administrator said last year that 30 million citizens have Login.gov accounts and that it expects the number to grow significantly as more agencies adopt the system.

"ID.me is supplying something many governments ask for and require companies to do," says Elizabeth Goodman, who previously worked on Login.gov and is now senior director of design at federal contractor A1M Solutions. Countries including the UK, New Zealand, and Denmark use similar processes to ID.me's to establish digital identities used to access government services. Many international security standards are broadly in line with those of the U.S., written by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Goodman says that such programs need to provide offline options such as visiting a post office for people unable or unwilling to use phone apps or internet services....
In fact, Wired argues that in many cases, a selfie or biometric data is virtually required by U.S. federal security guidelines from 2017: NIST's 2017 standard says that access to systems that can leak sensitive data or harm public programs should require verifying a person's identity by comparing them to a photo — either remotely or in person — or using biometrics such as a fingerprint scanner. It says that a remote check can be done either by video with a trained agent, or using software that checks for an ID's authenticity and the "liveness" of a person's photo or video.... California's Employment Development Department said that ID.me blocked more than 350,000 fraudulent claims in the last three months of 2020. But the state auditor said an estimated 20 percent of legitimate claimants were unable to verify their identities with ID.me.

Caitlin Seeley George, director of campaigns and operations with nonprofit Fight for the Future, says ID.me uses the specter of fraud to sell technology that locks out vulnerable people and creates a stockpile of highly sensitive data that itself will be targeted by criminals. ...

Microsoft is planning to launch a public preview of its Android apps for Windows 11 next month, alongside some taskbar improvements and redesigned Notepad and Media Player apps. Windows chief Panos Panay outlined the upcoming changes to Windows 11 in a blog post today, and they appear to be part of Windows 11's first big update. From a report: The taskbar improvements include a mute and unmute feature and likely the ability to show a clock on secondary monitors. Both were missing at the launch of Windows 11, but Microsoft is still working on improving the taskbar further to bring back missing functionality like drag and drop. The upcoming Windows 11 next month will also include the weather widget returning to the taskbar, something Microsoft started testing last month. Microsoft is also redesigning its Notepad and Media Player apps, and both include dark modes and design tweaks that more closely match Windows 11.

The big new addition will be Android apps on Windows 11, though. Panay says this will be a "public preview," indicating that the feature will still be in beta when it's widely available next month. Microsoft first started testing Android apps on Windows 11 with testers in October, and the feature allows you to install a limited number of apps from Amazon's Appstore. There are a variety of workarounds to get Google Play Store running on Windows 11, but Microsoft isn't officially supporting this. Panay also shared a variety of stats about how important Windows has become over the past couple of years. Windows 10 and Windows 11 now run on 1.4 billion devices each month, and the PC market has experienced strong growth throughout the pandemic.

The number of malware infections targeting Linux devices rose by 35% in 2021, most commonly to recruit IoT devices for DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks. BleepingComputer reports: A Crowdstrike report looking into the attack data from 2021 summarizes the following:

- In 2021, there was a 35% rise in malware targeting Linux systems compared to 2020.
- XorDDoS, Mirai, and Mozi were the most prevalent families, accounting for 22% of all Linux-targeting malware attacks observed in 2021.
- Mozi, in particular, had explosive growth in its activity, with ten times more samples circulating in the wild the year that passed compared to the previous one.
- XorDDoS also had a notable year-over-year increase of 123%.
[...]
The Crowstrike findings aren't surprising as they confirm an ongoing trend that emerged in previous years. For example, an Intezer report analyzing 2020 stats found that Linux malware families increased by 40% in 2020 compared to the previous year. In the first six months of 2020, a steep rise of 500% in Golang malware was recorded, showing that malware authors were looking for ways to make their code run on multiple platforms. This programming, and by extension, targeting trend, has already been confirmed in early 2022 cases and is likely to continue unabated.