Panos Panay, the chief product officer at Microsoft leading Windows development and the company's Surface line, is leaving Microsoft. From a report: In an announcement on Monday, Microsoft told employees: "After nearly 20 years at the company, Panos Panay has decided to leave Microsoft." Panay first joined Microsoft in 2004 as a group program manager. After overseeing the company's Surface line, Panay became the company's chief product officer in 2018, where he led the development of Windows 11.

Intel has showed off its initial work on developing a glass core substrate and associated packaging process for its chips. AnandTech: As a result of their progress with research and development on the class cores, Intel is now planning on introducing glass core substrates to its products in the second half of this decade, allowing them to package chips in more complex, and ultimately higher-performing configurations. There's a lot to unpack from Intel's relatively short announcement, but at a high level, glass core substrates have been under research for over a decade as a replacement for organic substrates, which are widely used in current-generation processors.

Essentially the medium that typical silicon dies sit on, substrates play an important part in chip packaging. First and foremost, they provide the structural stability for a chip (silicon dies are quite fragile and flimsy), and they are also the means through which signals from silicon dies are carried, either to other on-package dies (i.e. chiplets), or to the large number of relatively sizable pins/pads on the back side of a chip. And, as chip sizes have increased over the years -- and the number of pins/signals required by high-end chips has, as well -- so has the need for newer and better materials to use as a substrate, which is what's been driving Intel's latest accomplishment.

"We have heard you," Unity posted on Twitter/X on Sunday afternoon. "We apologize for the confusion and angst the runtime fee policy we announced on Tuesday caused."

"We are listening, talking to our team members, community, customers, and partners, and will be making changes to the policy. We will share an update in a couple of days. Thank you for your honest and critical feedback."

Within 90 minutes Unity's tweet had been viewed over 1 million times. Pushback had built over the last five days to Unity's announcement that next year they'd charge developers per game installation (beyond certain thresholds). IGN reports: Unity tried to clarify the policy, saying it will only count "net new installs" on any devices starting January 1 and devs would not be paying fees on re-installations, "fraudulent" installs via botnets and the like, trial version, web and streaming games, and charity-related installs. Unity also claimed that "90 percent of customers will not be affected by this change."

The development community did not take kindly to these proposed changes and clarifications, and many teams across the globe, including Rust 2 developer Facepunch Studios, said they won't be making their games in Unity now. Others, like Massive Monster, threatened to delete its Unity-made game Cult of the Lamb on January 1 should these changes happen.

The pushback got so severe that Unity offices in San Francisco and Austin had to close due to what it called a credible death threat.

From an EFF announcement this week: Technical standards like fire and electrical codes developed by private organizations but incorporated into public law can be freely disseminated without any liability for copyright infringement, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.
The judge ruled that posting the materials constituted fair use — so the nonprofit group doing the posting won't be liable for copyright infringement. The American Bar Association Journal reports: The decision is a victory for public-domain advocate Carl Malamud and the group that he founded, Public.Resource.org. The group posts legal materials on its websites, including the standards developed by the three organizations that sued... "It has been over 10 years since plaintiffs filed suit in this case," said Malamud in a press release by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "The U.S. Court of Appeals has found decisively in favor of the proposition that citizens must not be relegated to economy-class access to the law."
In 2012 Carl Malamud answered questions from Slashdot readers.

And now, finally, from the EFF's announcement: Tuesday's ruling by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upholds the idea that our laws belong to all of us, and we should be able to find, read, and share them free of registration requirements, fees, and other roadblocks... "In a nation governed by the rule of law, private parties have no business controlling who can read, share, and speak the rules to which we are all subject," EFF Legal Director Corynne McSherry said. "We are pleased that the Court of Appeals upheld what other U.S. courts, including the Supreme Court, have said for almost 200 years: No one should control access to the law."
Or, as the EFF puts it on another page, "Copyright cannot trump the essential public interest..."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: Thursday America's Energy Department released an interactive map showing America's clean energy investments, "for tracking the industrial revitalization happening across the country, fostered by a clean energy transition..."

The map aims to show how both the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act "are leading to announcements of historic levels of private sector investments in the United States," which the head of America's Energy Department credited for "a manufacturing renaissance across the U.S." A senior White House energy advisor specifically described it as "a clean energy boom" and called the map "a great resource for understanding the widespread and important impact this boom is having on communities all across our nation."

The announcement notes 500 "planned investments in at least 450 new or expanded clean energy manufacturing facilities, totaling over $160 billion in announced private and public sector investments" in solar, battery, and offshore wind manufacturing projects — as well as in electric vehicle assembly, components, and chargers. Ford received over $12 billion for battery pack/cell projects and EV assembly, along with billions more for Ford's joint venture with BlueOval SK to build a battery plant. And six of the projects are Tesla — totalling over $2 billion for projects in battery materials, cells, packs, and EV assembly.

When Linus Torvalds announced Linux kernel 6.6's first release candidate, it included a newly-stable version of KSMBD, which is Samsung's in-kernel server for the SMB protocol (for sharing files/folders/printers over a network).

An announcement in 2021 had said that "For many cases the current userspace server choices were suboptimal either due to memory footprint, performance or difficulty integrating well with advanced Linux features."

LWN noted at the time that Linux has been using "the user-space Samba solution since shortly after the beginning." In a sense, ksmbd is not meant to compete with Samba; indeed, it has been developed in cooperation with the Samba project. It is, however, meant to be a more performant and focused solution than Samba is; at this point, Samba includes a great deal of functionality beyond simple file serving. Ksmbd claims significant performance improvements on a wide range of benchmarks...One other reason — which tends to be spoken rather more quietly — is that a new implementation can be licensed under GPLv2, while Samba is GPLv3.
The Register notes that when Samba switched to GPL 3, "one result was that Apple dropped Samba from Mac OS X and replaced it with its own, in-house server called SMBX." And they also remember that a month after its debut in 2021, "Linux sysadmins got to enjoy KSMBD's first security exploit." What's changed now is that it has faced considerable security testing and as a result it is no longer marked as experimental. It's been developed with the assistance of the Samba team, which itself documents how to use it. It's compatible with existing Samba configuration files. As the team says, "It is not meant to replace the existing Samba fileserver 'smbd', but rather be an extension and will integrate with Samba in the future...."

KSMBD is also important in that placing such core server functionality right inside the kernel represents a significant potential attack surface for crackers... The new bcachefs file system will not be going into kernel 6.6, and its developer is not happy.
"It's taken some time to get KSMBD to a state that was considered stable," points out Linux magazine. That time has come, and KSMBD is planned for Linux kernel 6.6.: But why is KSMBD important? First off, it promises considerable performance gains and better support for modern features such as Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA)... KSMBD also adds enhanced security, considerably better performance for both single and multi-thread read/write, better stability, and higher compatibility. In the end, hopefully, this KSMBD will also mean easier share setups in Linux without having to jump through the same hoops one must with the traditional Samba setup.

This week saw an announcement from the University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering. A new type of vaccine "has shown in the lab setting that it can completely reverse autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis and type 1 diabetes — all without shutting down the rest of the immune system." A typical vaccine teaches the human immune system to recognize a virus or bacteria as an enemy that should be attacked. The new "inverse vaccine" does just the opposite: it removes the immune system's memory of one molecule. While such immune memory erasure would be unwanted for infectious diseases, it can stop autoimmune reactions like those seen in multiple sclerosis, type I diabetes, or rheumatoid arthritis, in which the immune system attacks a person's healthy tissues. The inverse vaccine, described in Nature Biomedical Engineering, takes advantage of how the liver naturally marks molecules from broken-down cells with "do not attack" flags to prevent autoimmune reactions to cells that die by natural processes. Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering researchers coupled an antigen — a molecule being attacked by the immune system — with a molecule resembling a fragment of an aged cell that the liver would recognize as friend, rather than foe. The team showed how the vaccine could successfully stop the autoimmune reaction associated with a multiple-sclerosis-like disease...

Jeffrey Hubbell [lead author of the new paper] and his colleagues knew that the body has a mechanism for ensuring that immune reactions don't occur in response to every damaged cell in the body — a phenomenon known as peripheral immune tolerance, which is carried out in the liver. They discovered in recent years that tagging molecules with a sugar known as N-acetylgalactosamine (pGal) could mimic this process, sending the molecules to the liver where tolerance to them develops. "The idea is that we can attach any molecule we want to pGal and it will teach the immune system to tolerate it," explained Hubbell. "Rather than rev up immunity as with a vaccine, we can tamp it down in a very specific way with an inverse vaccine."

In the new study, the researchers focused on a multiple-sclerosis-like disease in which the immune system attacks myelin, leading to weakness and numbness, loss of vision and, eventually mobility problems and paralysis. The team linked myelin proteins to pGal and tested the effect of the new inverse vaccine. The immune system, they found, stopped attacking myelin, allowing nerves to function correctly again and reversing symptoms of disease in animals. In a series of other experiments, the scientists showed that the same approach worked to minimize other ongoing immune reactions...

Initial phase I safety trials of a glycosylation-modified antigen therapy based on this preclinical work have already been carried out in people with celiac disease, an autoimmune disease that is associated with eating wheat, barley and rye, and phase I safety trials are under way in multiple sclerosis. Those trials are conducted by the pharmaceutical company Anokion SA, which helped fund the new work and which Hubbell cofounded and is a consultant, board member, and equity holder. The Alper Family Foundation also helped fund the research.

"There are no clinically approved inverse vaccines yet, but we're incredibly excited about moving this technology forward," says Hubbell.
Thanks to Slashdot reader laughingskeptic for sharing the news.

Unity announced a new pricing model this week, charging developers per game install beyond certain thresholds. This move has faced severe backlash from developers, criticizing Unity's communication, clarity, trust issues, and perceived exploitation of indie teams. The Verge adds: Many developers and even publishers took to social media to register their anger and to call on Unity to reverse its decision. [...] "This decision puts studios in a position where we might not be able to justify using Unity for our future titles," read a post on X (formerly Twitter) from developer Aggro Crab. "If these changes aren't rolled back, we'll be heavily considering abandoning our Unity expertise." Many developers shared a similar sentiment, explaining they were considering abandoning Unity as a game engine.

Other game developers, like Massive Monster, were more drastic, which, via the official account for its game Cult of the Lamb, threatened to delist the game entirely. Though the post was a tongue-in-cheek joke, it's one being repeated by other developers. "[Please] buy our game," posted the official Viewfinder account. "But don't install it after January 1, 2024." Other game makers wondered how Unity could put forth such a statement without considering all the ways it could negatively impact its users. According to a post on the Unity forums from someone who claimed to be an employee, objections were raised internally. "Know also that all of the concerns that are understandably blowing up at the moment have been raised internally by many weeks before this announcement," the alleged employee wrote. "Why it was decided to rush this out anyway in this way I can only speculate about."

NASA on Thursday said it has named a new director of research into what the government calls "unidentified anomalous phenomenon," or UAP, while the U.S. space agency's chief said an expert panel that urged deeper fact-finding on the matter found no evidence of an extraterrestrial origin for these objects. You can read the study team's full report here (PDF). Reuters reports: Administrator Bill Nelson made the announcement about the new research chief -- without disclosing the person's identity -- after the independent panel of experts recommended in a new report that NASA increase its efforts to gather information on UAP and play a larger role in helping the Pentagon detect them. [...] The NASA panel, comprising experts in fields ranging from physics to astrobiology, was formed last year and held its first public meeting in June. "The NASA independent study team did not find any evidence that UAP have an extraterrestrial origin, but we don't know what these UAP are," Nelson said, adding that a goal of the agency is to "shift the conversation about UAP from sensationalism to science."

"The mission of NASA is to find out the unknown," Nelson said. "Whatever we find, we're going to tell you," Nelson added, promising transparency on any discoveries. The new UAP research director will handle "centralized communications, resources and data analytical capabilities to establish a robust database for the evaluation of future UAP," NASA said. Nelson told Reuters he does not know the name of the new director. Dan Evans, a senior research official in NASA's science unit and a member of the study team, said harassment that other panel members had received from the public during their work was "in part" why the new director's identity was being kept secret.

Unity, the tech company behind one of the most popular engines for creating video games, is scrambling to clarify how a price increase for its services will work, after its announcement Tuesday morning broadly infuriated the game development community. From a report: The fees, which Unity said are essential for funding development of its tech, left many game makers wondering if having a hit game through Unity would cost them more money than they could make. Developers spoke throughout the day of delaying their games to switch to rival Epic Games' Unreal Engine or other services on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. But by the evening, Unity exec Marc Whitten was updating Axios on the policies, potentially defusing some concerns raised by game creators.

The new "Runtime Fee" announced Tuesday morning is tied to a player's installations of a game, an action that previously didn't cost developers anything. With Unity's new plan, developers who use Unity's free tier of development services would owe Unity $0.20 per installation once their game hit thresholds of 200,000 downloads and earn $200,000 in revenue. Developers paying over $2,000 a year for a Unity Pro plan would have to hit higher thresholds and would be charged with lower fees. The newfee system will begin at the start of 2024. [...] After initially telling Axios earlier Tuesday that a player installing a game, deleting it and installing it again would result in multiple fees, Unity's Whitten told Axios that the company would actually only charge for an initial installation. (A spokesperson told Axios that Unity had "regrouped" to discuss the issue.) He hoped this would allay fears of "install-bombing," where an angry user could keep deleting and re-installing a game to rack up fees to punish a developer.

Intel has unveiled Thunderbolt 5, the latest iteration of its a standard aimed at enabling super-fast connectivity. From a report: With Thunderbolt 5, Intel promises a significant leap in connectivity speed and bandwidth, delivering enhanced performance for computer users. The unveiling of a prototype laptop and dock accompanied the announcement, providing a glimpse into the future of Thunderbolt technology.

Thunderbolt 5 will offer an impressive 80 gigabits per second (Gbps) of bi-directional bandwidth, enabling lightning-fast data transfer and connectivity. Additionally, with the introduction of Bandwidth Boost, Thunderbolt 5 will reach up to 120 Gbps, ensuring an unparalleled display experience for users. These advancements represent two to three times more bandwidth than Thunderbolt 4. And it can deliver up to 240 watts of power.

HMD Global, the Finnish company best known for producing Nokia-branded smartphones, has revealed plans to launch its own line of mobile devices. From a report: On Monday, HMD Global CEO Jean-Francois Baril announced on Linkedin that the company will be expanding its portfolio with a new HMD brand that will co-exist alongside its Nokia phones and collaborations with "exciting new partners" that have yet to be disclosed. "It has been a great journey as 'HMD -- the home of Nokia phones' -- an exclusive position we have held for the past six years," said Baril. "Now we are ready for the next step on our journey -- to enter the market independently as a force to create a new world for telecommunications focused on consumer needs."

Popular Science reports that America's Department of Energy "is providing a nearly $400 million loan to a startup aimed at scaling the manufacturing and deployment of a zinc-based alternative to rechargeable lithium batteries."

If realized, Eos Energy's utility- and industrial-scale zinc-bromine battery energy storage system could provide cheaper, vastly more sustainable options for the country's burgeoning renewable power infrastructure... Unlike lithium-ion and lithium iron phosphate batteries, alternatives such as the Eos Z3 design rely on zinc-based cathodes alongside a water-based electrolyte, notes MIT Technology Review. This important distinction both increases their stability, as well as makes it incredibly difficult for them to support combustion. Zinc-bromine batteries meanwhile also boast lifespans as long as 20 years, while existing lithium options only manage between 10 and 15 years. What's more, zinc is considered the world's fourth most produced metal...

The U.S. Department of Energy also notes that "over time," Eos expects to source almost all of its materials within the U.S., thus better insulating its product against the market volatility and supply chain issues. While the Department of Energy previously issued similar loans to battery recycling and geothermal energy projects, last week's announcement marks the first funding offered to a manufacturer of lithium-battery alternatives.
MIT's article notes that Eos's semi-autonomous facility in Pennsylvania already produces around 540 megawatt-hours annually — and it isn't operating at full capacity. This new loan could boost factory toward full-power. The $398-million loan funds "up to four state-of-the-art production lines," according to the announcement from the U.S. Energy Department.

It notes that the technology is "specifically designed for long-duration grid-scale stationary battery storage that can assist in meeting the energy grids' growing demand with increasing amounts of renewable energy penetration." If finalized, the project is expected to manufacture 8 GWh of storage capacity annually by 2026. That is enough to provide electricity to over 300,000 average U.S. homes instantaneously or meet the annual electricity needs of approximately 130,000 homes if fully charged and discharged daily. The project is expected to create up to 50 union contractor construction jobs and as many as 650 new operations jobs when at full operational capacity...

Critically, Eos batteries are non-flammable and do not require active cooling to operate. The batteries can achieve 100% depth of discharge...

The SEC has approved the Nasdaq's request to operate the first exchange AI-driven order type. CoinTelegraph reports: Called the dynamic midpoint extended life order (M-ELO), the new system expands on the M-ELO automated order type by making it "dynamic," meaning it will use artificial intelligence to update and, essentially, recalibrate itself in real-time. Order types are a set of software instructions that execute specific trade pairs at exact market pricing thresholds. This form of automation has been around for a while, but the new AI-driven order type is the first of its kind to use real-time reinforcement learning AI to execute orders

This should have the follow-on effect of substantially speeding up orders placed with the system. In a blog post accompanying the approval announcement, Nasdaq states that dynamic M-ELO demonstrated a "20.3% increase in fill rates and an 11.4% reduction in mark-outs" during its research and testing. According to a data sheet published by Nasdaq: "Calculated on a symbol-by-symbol basis, this new functionality analyzes 140+ data points every 30 seconds to detect market conditions and optimize the holding period prior to which a trade is eligible to execute." By adjusting the holding periods for orders in real time, as opposed to the traditional system that simply applies static timeouts to orders, fill rates should increase without a significant increase in market impact.

The Internal Revenue Service has started using artificial intelligence to investigate tax evasion at multibillion-dollar partnerships as it looks for ways to better police hedge funds, private equity groups, real estate investors and large law firms. From a report: The announcement on Friday demonstrated how a more muscular I.R.S. is using some of the $80 billion allocated through last year's Inflation Reduction Act to target the wealthiest Americans and tackle the kinds of cases that had become too complex and cumbersome for the beleaguered agency to handle. The agency's new funding is intended to help the I.R.S. raise more federal revenue by cracking down on tax cheats and others who use sophisticated accounting maneuvers to avoid paying what they owe. But the allocation has been politically contentious, with Republicans claiming that the I.R.S. will use the funding to harass small businesses and middle-class taxpayers.

Earlier this year, Republicans succeeded in clawing back $20 billion as part of an agreement to raise the nation's borrowing cap. That political fight has put the onus on Democrats and the Biden administration to show that the funding is primarily enabling the I.R.S. to target the rich. "These are complex cases for I.R.S. teams to unpack," Daniel Werfel, the I.R.S. commissioner, said in a briefing with reporters. "The I.R.S. has simply not had enough resources or staffing to address partnerships; in a real sense, we've been overwhelmed in this area for years."

Google is killing off the last vestiges of Google Play Movies & TV, a service that sold premium Hollywood films and TV shows as part of Google's once-cohesive string of Google Play content stores. From a report: The company emailed users of Android TV to say that the "Google Play Movies & TV app will no longer be available on your Android TV device from 05 October 2023. You can continue to buy or rent movies directly through the Shop tab on your Android TV." Play Movies has been going through a slow death as Google shuffles around its media content. The smartphone Play Movies app became "Google TV" in 2022, and that same year, the Play Store app was stripped of movie and TV sales.

On third-party smart TVs (this is a different category than today's Android TV announcement) the app was killed in 2021. On Android TV, the new "Shop" tab seems to just be an OS-integrated Google TV content store. If you think this sounds confusing, you're not alone. Google's support page reflects the ridiculous state of Google's video apps, instructing users that "in Your Library, you can find content that you bought from: Google Play Movies & TV, YouTube, Android TV, Google TV." How any normal person is supposed to understand that pile of Google media brands, and how it works across phones, the web, and various smart TV OSes, is beyond me.

Chinese oil giant Sinopec last month made a surprise announcement that mostly flew under the radar. It's now expecting gasoline demand in China to peak this year, two years earlier than its previous outlooks. The main culprit? The surging number of electric vehicles on the road. Bloomberg: Calling peaks is often a no-win endeavor for industry analysts. The call will either be correct but seem obvious after the fact, or wrong and lead to years of mockery. But this isn't an analyst calling a peak; it's China's largest fuel distributor. Sinopec knows the fuel business, and more importantly, it has an interest in the business remaining robust. Saying it's all downhill from here for gasoline is quite a statement.

China has been the largest driver of global growth for refined oil products like gasoline and diesel over the last two decades. But EV adoption rates in China are now soaring, with August figures likely to show plug-in vehicles hitting 38% of new passenger-vehicle sales. That's up from just 6% in 2020 and is starting to materially dent fuel demand. Fuel demand in two and three-wheeled vehicles is already in structural decline, with BNEF estimating that 70% of total kilometers traveled by these vehicles already switched over to electric. Fuel demand for cars will be the next to turn, since well over 5% of the passenger-vehicle fleet is now either battery-electric or plug-in hybrid. The internal combustion vehicle fleet is also becoming more efficient due to rising fuel-economy targets.

An anonymous reader shares a report: AMD last week announced what are probably the last major GPU launches of this generation of graphics cards: the $449 Radeon RX 7700 XT and $499 Radeon RX 7800 XT. AMD's pricing and performance numbers pit the cards against Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4060 Ti (specifically the $499 16GB version) and the $599 RTX 4070. AMD's pricing is aggressive enough that Nvidia is quietly cutting the prices of some 16GB RTX 4060 Ti cards to $449, to match the RX 7700 XT.

The announcement about the $50 reduction was buried toward the bottom of an email that Nvidia sent to GPU reviewers ahead of AMD's launch next week; it also drew attention to Nvidia-specific features like DLSS upscaling and frame generation, which compete with AMD's GPU-agnostic FSR, plus recent DLSS improvements that improve ray-tracing performance.

Microsoft will unbundle its chat and video app Teams from its Office suite and make it easier for rival products to work with its software, the U.S. company said on Thursday in a move aimed at staving off a possible EU antitrust fine. From a report: The proposed changes came a month after the European Commission launched an investigation into Microsoft's tying of Office and Teams following a complaint by Salesforce-owned workspace messaging app Slack in 2020. Microsoft's preliminary concessions failed to address concerns. The EU competition enforcer on Thursday said it took note of the company's announcement and declined further comment.

Teams was added to Office 365 in 2017 for free. It eventually replaced Skype for Business and gained in popularity during the pandemic due in part to its video conferencing. "Today we are announcing proactive changes that we hope will start to address these concerns in a meaningful way, even while the European Commission's investigation continues and we cooperate with it," [...] The changes, effective from Oct. 1, will apply in Europe and Switzerland.

Microsoft is discontinuing Visual Studio for Mac, committing to security updates and platform update compatibility for the next 12 months. 9to5Mac reports: "With today's announcement, we're redirecting our resources and focus to enhance Visual Studio and VS Code, optimizing them for cross-platform development," the company said in the announcement. "No new framework, runtime, or language support will be added to Visual Studio for Mac." The company added: "We will also continue to provide runtime and workload updates so you can continue building and shipping applications built on .NET 6, .NET 7, and the Mono frameworks. While not officially supported, we've also enabled rudimentary support for .NET 8 in Visual Studio for Mac for building and debugging applications."

Once the wheels fall off Visual Studio for Mac, Microsoft recommends accessing its IDE through Windows in a machine virtual on the Mac or in the cloud. Otherwise, Microsoft points to cross-platform compatible developer technology that will run on macOS: "The recently announced C# Dev Kit, .NET MAUI, and Unity Extensions for VS Code are available in preview and are intended to augment VS Code's capabilities for .NET and C# developers. These extensions operate natively across all supported platforms, including macOS, and the experience using these will continue to be improved as they move from preview to GA and beyond."