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An anonymous reader shared this report from the blog OMG Ubuntu: Ubuntu first switched to using Wayland as its default display server in 2017 before reverting the following year. It tried again in 2021 and has stuck with it since. But while Wayland is what most of us now log into after installing Ubuntu, anyone doing so on a PC or laptop with an NVIDIA graphics card present instead logs into an Xorg/X11 session. This is because NVIDIA's proprietary graphics drivers (which many, especially gamers, opt for to get the best performance, access to full hardware capabilities, etc) have not supported Wayland as well as as they could've. Past tense as, thankfully, things have changed in the past few years. NVIDIA's warmed up to Wayland (partly as it has no choice given that Wayland is now standard and a 'maybe one day' solution, and partly because it wants to: opportunities/benefits/security). With the NVIDIA + Wayland sitch' now in a better state than before — but not perfect — Canonical's engineers say they feel confident enough in the experience to make the Ubuntu Wayland session default for NVIDIA graphics card users in Ubuntu 24.10.

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PLUS: Grab's fintech profits surges; TSMC exec gets ASML sticker shock; US and China talk about AI, and more.

ASIA IN BRIEF  Jean Qing Liu, the president of China's top rideshare biz DiDi (and daughter of Lenovo founder Liu Chuanzhi) on Sunday "informed the Company and its board of directors her wish to resign from her current position as a director and president, with a view to focusing on the company's talent and organization, development of supporting functions and social responsibility work."…

This week the nonprofit Linux Foundation announced the launch of the High Performance Software Foundation, which "aims to build, promote, and advance a portable core software stack for high performance computing" (or HPC) by "increasing adoption, lowering barriers to contribution, and supporting development efforts." It promises initiatives focused on "continuously built, turnkey software stacks," as well as other initiatives including architecture support and performance regression testing. Its first open source technical projects are: - Spack: the HPC package manager. - Kokkos: a performance-portable programming model for writing modern C++ applications in a hardware-agnostic way. - Viskores (formerly VTK-m): a toolkit of scientific visualization algorithms for accelerator architectures. - HPCToolkit: performance measurement and analysis tools for computers ranging from desktop systems to GPU-accelerated supercomputers. - Apptainer: Formerly known as Singularity, Apptainer is a Linux Foundation project providing a high performance, full featured HPC and computing optimized container subsystem. - E4S: a curated, hardened distribution of scientific software packages. As use of HPC becomes ubiquitous in scientific computing and digital engineering, and AI use cases multiply, more and more data centers deploy GPUs and other compute accelerators. The High Performance Software Foundation will provide a neutral space for pivotal projects in the high performance computing ecosystem, enabling industry, academia, and government entities to collaborate on the scientific software. The High Performance Software Foundation benefits from strong support across the HPC landscape, including Premier Members Amazon Web Services (AWS), Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories; General Members AMD, Argonne National Laboratory, Intel, Kitware, Los Alamos National Laboratory, NVIDIA, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory; and Associate Members University of Maryland, University of Oregon, and Centre for Development of Advanced Computing. In a statement, an AMD vice president said that by joining "we are using our collective hardware and software expertise to help develop a portable, open-source software stack for high-performance computing across industry, academia, and government." And an AWS executive said the high-performance computing community "has a long history of innovation being driven by open source projects. AWS is thrilled to join the High Performance Software Foundation to build on this work. In particular, AWS has been deeply involved in contributing upstream to Spack, and we're looking forward to working with the HPSF to sustain and accelerate the growth of key HPC projects so everyone can benefit." The new foundation will "set up a technical advisory committee to manage working groups tackling a variety of HPC topics," according to the announcement, following a governance model based on the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

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"The TIOBE Index sets out to reflect the relative popularity of computer languages," writes i-Programmer, "so it comes as something of a surprise to see two languages dating from the 1950's in this month's Top 20. Having broken into the the Top 20 in April 2021 Fortran has continued to rise and has now risen to it's highest ever position at #10... The headline for this month's report by Paul Jansen on the TIOBE index is: Fortran in the top 10, what is going on? Jansen's explanation points to the fact that there are more than 1,000 hits on Amazon for "Fortran Programming" while languages such as Kotlin and Rust, barely hit 300 books for the same search query. He also explains that Fortran is still evolving with the new ISO Fortran 2023 definition published less than half a year ago.... The other legacy language that is on the rise in the TIOBE index is COBOL. We noticed it re-enter the Top 20 in January 2024 and, having dropped out in the interim, it is there again this month. More details from TechRepublic: Along with Fortran holding on to its spot in the rankings, there were a few small changes in the top 10. Go gained 0.61 percentage points year over year, rising from tenth place in May 2023 to eighth this year. C++ rose slightly in popularity year over year, from fourth place to third, while Java (-3.53%) and Visual Basic (-1.8) fell. Here's how TIOBE ranked the 10 most popular programming languages in May: Python C C++ Java C# JavaScript Visual Basic Go SQL Fortran On the rival PYPL ranking of programming language popularity, Fortran does not appear anywhere in the top 29. A note on its page explains that "Worldwide, Python is the most popular language, Rust grew the most in the last 5 years (2.1%) and Java lost the most (-4.0%)." Here's how it ranks the 10 most popular programming languages for May: Python (28.98% share) Java (15.97% share) JavaScript (8.79%) C# (6.78% share) R (4.76% share) PHP (4.55% share) TypeScript (3.03% share) Swift (2.76% share) Rust (2.6% share)

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"Blue Origin's tourism rocket has launched passengers to the edge of space for the first time in nearly two years," reports CNN, "ending a hiatus prompted by a failed uncrewed test flight." The New Shepard rocket and capsule lifted off at 9:36 a.m. CT (10:36 a.m. ET) from Blue Origin's facilities on a private ranch in West Texas. NS-25, Blue Origin's seventh crewed flight to date, carried six customers aboard the capsule: venture capitalist Mason Angel; Sylvain Chiron, founder of the French craft brewery Brasserie Mont-Blanc; software engineer and entrepreneur Kenneth L. Hess; retired accountant Carol Schaller; aviator Gopi Thotakura; and Ed Dwight, a retired US Air Force captain selected by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 to be the nation's first Black astronaut candidate... Dwight completed that challenge and reached the edge of space at the age of 90, making him the oldest person to venture to such heights, according to a spokesperson from Blue Origin... "It's a life-changing experience," he said. "Everybody needs to do this." The rocket booster landed safely a couple minutes prior to the capsule. During the mission, the crew soared to more than three times the speed of sound, or more than 2,000 miles per hour. The rocket vaulted the capsule past the Kármán line, an area 62 miles (100 kilometers) above Earth's surface that is widely recognized as the altitude at which outer space begins... "And at the peak of the flight, passengers experienced a few minutes of weightlessness and striking views of Earth through the cabin windows."

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"China's navy has apparently tested out a hypersonic rail gun," reports Futurism, describing it as "basically a device that uses a series of electromagnets to accelerate a projectile to incredible speeds." But "during a demonstration of its power, things didn't go quite as planned." As the South China Morning Post reports, the rail gun test lobbed a precision-guided projectile — or smart bomb — nine miles into the stratosphere. But because it apparently didn't go up as high as it was supposed to, the test was ultimately declared unsuccessful. This conclusion came after an analysis led by Naval Engineering University professor Lu Junyong, whose team found with the help of AI that even though the winged smart bomb exceeded Mach 5 speeds, it didn't perform as well as it could have. This occurred, as Lu's team found, because the projectile was spinning too fast during its ascent, resulting in an "undesirable tilt." But what's more interesting is the project itself. "Successful or not, news of the test is a pretty big deal given that it was just a few months ago that reports emerged about China's other proposed super-powered rail gun, which is intended to send astronauts on a Boeing 737-size ship into space.... which for the record did not make it all the way to space..." Chinese officials, meanwhile, are paying lip service to the hypersonic rail gun technology's potential to revolutionize civilian travel by creating even faster railways and consumer space launches, too. Japan and France also have railgun projects, according to a recent article from Defense One. "Yet the nation that has demonstrated the most continuing interest is China," with records of railgun work dating back as far as 2011: The Chinese team claimed that their railgun can fire a projectile 100 to 200 kilometers at Mach 6. Perhaps most importantly, it uses up to 100,000 AI-enabled sensors to identify and fix any problems before critical failure, and can slowly improve itself over time. This, they said, had enabled them to test-fire 120 rounds in a row without failure, which, if true, suggests that they solved a longstanding problem that reportedly bedeviled U.S. researchers. However, the team still has a ways to go before mounting an operational railgun on a ship; according to one Chinese article, the projectiles fired were only 25mm caliber, well below the size of even lightweight naval artillery. As with many other Chinese defense technology programs, much remains opaque about the program... While railguns tend to get the headlines, this lab has made advances in a wide range of electric and electromagnetic applications for the PLA Navy's warships. For example, the lab's research on electromagnetic launch technology has also been applied to the development of electromagnetic catapults for the PLAN's growing aircraft carrier fleet... While it remains to be seen whether the Chinese navy can develop a full-scale railgun, produce it at scale, and integrate it onto its warships, it is obvious that it has made steady advances in recent years on a technology of immense military significance that the US has abandoned. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Tangential for sharing the news.

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Bcachefs lead developer Kent Overstreet today sent out his feature pull request of all the new file-system code that is ready in time for the Linux 6.10 merge window...

"The computer scientist regarded as the 'godfather of artificial intelligence' says the government will have to establish a universal basic income to deal with the impact of AI on inequality," reports the BBC: Professor Geoffrey Hinton told BBC Newsnight that a benefits reform giving fixed amounts of cash to every citizen would be needed because he was "very worried about AI taking lots of mundane jobs". "I was consulted by people in Downing Street and I advised them that universal basic income was a good idea," he said. He said while he felt AI would increase productivity and wealth, the money would go to the rich "and not the people whose jobs get lost and that's going to be very bad for society". "Until last year he worked at Google, but left the tech giant so he could talk more freely about the dangers from unregulated AI," according to the article. Professor Hinton also made this predicction to the BBC. "My guess is in between five and 20 years from now there's a probability of half that we'll have to confront the problem of AI trying to take over". He recommended a prohibition on the military use of AI, warning that currently "in terms of military uses I think there's going to be a race".

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Earlier this week the Washington Post reported that America's Defense department "is growing concerned that the United Launch Alliance, one of its key partners in launching national security satellites to space, will not be able to meet its needs to counter China and build its arsenal in orbit with a new rocket that ULA has been developing for years." In a letter sent Friday to the heads of Boeing's and Lockheed Martin's space divisions, Air Force Assistant Secretary Frank Calvelli used unusually blunt terms to say he was growing "concerned" with the development of the Vulcan rocket, which the Pentagon intends to use to launch critical national security payloads but which has been delayed for years. ULA, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, was formed nearly 20 years ago to provide the Defense Department with "assured access" to space. "I am growing concerned with ULA's ability to scale manufacturing of its Vulcan rocket and scale its launch cadence to meet our needs," he wrote in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post. "Currently there is military satellite capability sitting on the ground due to Vulcan delays...." ULA originally won 60 percent of the Pentagon's national security payloads under the current contract, known as Phase 2. SpaceX won an award for the remaining 40 percent, but it has been flying its reusable Falcon 9 rocket at a much higher rate. ULA launched only three rockets last year, as it transitions to Vulcan; SpaceX launched nearly 100, mostly to put up its Starlink internet satellite constellation. Both are now competing for the next round of Pentagon contracts, a highly competitive procurement worth billions of dollars over several years. ULA is reportedly up for sale; Blue Origin is said to be one of the suitors... In a statement to The Post, ULA said that its "factory and launch site expansions have been completed or are on track to support our customers' needs with nearly 30 launch vehicles in flow at the rocket factory in Decatur, Alabama." Last year, ULA CEO Tory Bruno said in an interview that the deal with Amazon would allow the company to increase its flight rate to 20 to 25 a year and that to meet that cadence it was hiring "several hundred" more employees. The more often Vulcan flies, he said, the more efficient the company would become. "Vulcan is much less expensive" than the Atlas V rocket that the ULA currently flies, Bruno said, adding that ULA intends to eventually reuse the engines. "As the flight rate goes up, there's economies of scale, so it gets cheaper over time. And of course, you're introducing reusability, so it's cheaper. It's just getting more and more competitive." The article also notes that years ago ULA "decided to eventually retire its workhorse Atlas V rocket after concerns within the Pentagon and Congress that it relied on a Russian-made engine, the RD-180. In 2014, the company entered into a partnership with Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin to provide its BE-4 engines for use on Vulcan. However, the delivery of those engines was delayed for years — one of the reasons Vulcan's first flight didn't take place until earlier this year." The article says Cavelli's letter cited the Pentagon's need to move quickly as adversaries build capabilities in space, noting "counterspace threats" and adding that "our adversaries would seek to deny us the advantage we get from space during a potential conflict." "The United States continues to face an unprecedented strategic competitor in China, and our space environment continues to become more contested, congested and competitive."

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The enemy of my enemy is my best friend

Analysis  With its newly formed partnership with Arm server processor designer Ampere Computing, Qualcomm is slowly establishing itself as AI infrastructure startups' best friend.…

America's Federal Trade Commission and 17 states filed an antitrust suit against Amazon in September. This week Amazon responded in court about its usage of Signal's "disappearing messages" feature. Long-time Slashdot reader theodp shares GeekWire's report: At a company known for putting its most important ideas and strategies into comprehensive six-page memos, quick messages between executives aren't the place for meaningful business discussions. That's one of the points made by Amazon in its response Monday to the Federal Trade Commission's allegations about executives' use of the Signal encrypted communications app, known for its "disappearing messages" feature. "For these individuals, just like other short-form messaging, Signal was not a means to send 'structured, narrative text'; it was a way to get someone's attention or have quick exchanges on sensitive topics like public relations or human resources," the company says as part of its response, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Seattle. Of course, for regulators investigating the company's business practices, these offhanded private comments between Amazon executives could be more revealing than carefully crafted memos meant for wider internal distribution. But in its filing this week, Amazon says there is no evidence that relevant messages have been lost, or that Signal was used to conceal communications that would have been responsive to the FTC's discovery requests. The company says "the equally logical explanation — made more compelling by the available evidence — is that such messages never existed." In an April 25 motion, the FTC argued that the absence of Signal messages from Amazon discussing substantive business issues relevant to the case was a strong indication that such messages had disappeared. "Amazon executives deleted many Signal messages during Plaintiffs' pre-Complaint investigation, and Amazon did not instruct its employees to preserve Signal messages until over fifteen months after Amazon knew that Plaintiffs' investigation was underway," the FTC wrote in its motion. "It is highly likely that relevant information has been destroyed as a result of Amazon's actions and inactions...." Amazon's filing quotes the company's founder, Jeff Bezos, saying in a deposition in the case that "[t]o discuss anything in text messaging or Signal messaging or anything like that of any substance would be akin to business malpractice. It's just too short of a messaging format...." The company's filing traces the initial use of Signal by executives back to the suspected hacking of Bezos' phone in 2018, which prompted the Amazon founder to seek ways to send messages more securely.

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In an elaborate scam in January, "a finance worker, was duped into attending a video call with people he believed were the chief financial officer and other members of staff," remembers CNN. But Hong Kong police later said that all of them turned out to be deepfake re-creations which duped the employee into transferring $25 million. According to police, the worker had initially suspected he had received a phishing email from the company's UK office, as it specified the need for a secret transaction to be carried out. However, the worker put aside his doubts after the video call because other people in attendance had looked and sounded just like colleagues he recognized. Now the targeted company has been revealed: a major engineering consulting firm, with 18,500 employees across 34 offices: A spokesperson for London-based Arup told CNN on Friday that it notified Hong Kong police in January about the fraud incident, and confirmed that fake voices and images were used. "Unfortunately, we can't go into details at this stage as the incident is still the subject of an ongoing investigation. However, we can confirm that fake voices and images were used," the spokesperson said in an emailed statement. "Our financial stability and business operations were not affected and none of our internal systems were compromised," the person added... Authorities around the world are growing increasingly concerned about the sophistication of deepfake technology and the nefarious uses it can be put to. In an internal memo seen by CNN, Arup's East Asia regional chairman, Michael Kwok, said the "frequency and sophistication of these attacks are rapidly increasing globally, and we all have a duty to stay informed and alert about how to spot different techniques used by scammers." The company's global CIO emailed CNN this statement. "Like many other businesses around the globe, our operations are subject to regular attacks, including invoice fraud, phishing scams, WhatsApp voice spoofing, and deepfakes. "What we have seen is that the number and sophistication of these attacks has been rising sharply in recent months." Slashdot reader st33ld13hl adds that in a world of Deep Fakes, insurance company USAA is now asking its customers to authenticate with voice. (More information here.) Thanks to Slashdot reader quonset for sharing the news.

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The thinktank InfluenceMap produces "data-driven analysis on how business and finance are impacting the climate crisis." Their web site says their newest report documents "How automaker lobbying threatens the global transition to electric vehicles." This report analyses the climate policy engagement strategies of fifteen of the largest global automakers in seven key regions (Australia, EU, Japan, India, South Korea, UK, US). It shows how even in countries where major climate legislation has recently passed, such as the US and Australia, the ambition of these policies has been weakened due to industry pressure. All fifteen automakers, except Tesla, have actively advocated against at least one policy promoting electric vehicles. Ten of the fifteen showed a particularly high intensity of negative engagement and scored a final grade of D or D+ by InfluenceMap's methodology. Toyota is the lowest-scoring company in this analysis, driving opposition to climate regulations promoting battery electric vehicles in multiple regions, including the US, Australia and UK. Of all automakers analyzed, only Tesla (scoring B) is found to have positive climate advocacy aligned with science-based policy. CleanTechnica writes that Toyota "led on hybrid vehicles (and still does), so it's actually not surprising that it has been opposed to the next stage of climate-cutting auto evolution — it's clinging on to its lead rather than continuing to innovate for a new era." More from InfluenceMap: Only three of fifteen companies — Tesla, Mercedes Benz and BMW — are forecast to produce enough electric vehicles by 2030 to meet the International Energy Agency's updated 1.5 degreesC pathway of 66% electric vehicle (battery electric, fuel cell and plug-in hybrids) sales according to InfluenceMap's independent analysis of industry-standard data from February 2024. Current industry forecasts analyzed for this report show automaker production will reach only 53% electric vehicles in 2030. Transport is the third-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions globally, and road transport is failing to decarbonize at anywhere near the rate of many other industries. InfluenceMap's report also finds that Japanese automakers are the least prepared for an electric vehicle transition and are engaging the hardest against it. "InfluenceMap highlights that these anti-EV efforts in the industry are often coming from industry associations rather than coming directly from automakers, shielding them a bit from inevitable public backlash," writes CleanTechnica. "Every automaker included in the study except Tesla remains a member of at least two of these groups," InfluenceMap reports, "with most automakers a member of at least five." Thanks to Slashdot reader Baron_Yam for sharing the news.

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Released over a year ago was Golang 1.20 with support for Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) and has since been improved with Go 1.21 for 2~7% faster Go binaries thanks to this optimization approach also found with other compilers. The engineers at Cloudflare have put out a blog post this week praising Go's PGO support and the CPU savings they are seeing as a result...

While EROFS is seeing Zstd support and Bcachefs is seeing performance optimizations with the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel, over on the mature EXT4 file-system side the changes are mostly small. There are some minor changes, more folio conversion work, and also adding support for the FS_IOC_GETFSSYSFSPATH ioctl that has been seeing some standardization and adoption by the common Linux file-systems...

A Linux patch has been posted for delivering a quirk so that the Bigscreen Beyond VR Headset can properly behave under Linux and in turn also jives with the likes of SteamVR...

Alongside all of the other pull requests by Ingo Molnar submitted at the start of the week during the opening of the Linux 6.10 merge window were the scheduler updates. As usual, the kernel scheduler work continues to see various tweaks and refinements to enhance its behavior...

Linux's Turbostat utility that is developed by Intel for reporting idle/power state statistics, temperatures, and other useful data on modern Intel/AMD processors has seen its changes submitted for the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel...

The Washington Post reports that America took "one of its biggest steps yet to keep fossil fuels in the ground," announcing Thursday that it will end new coal leasing in the Powder River Basin, "which produces nearly half the coal in the United States... "It could prevent billions of tons of coal from being extracted from more than 13 million acres across Montana and Wyoming, with major implications for U.S. climate goals." A significant share of the nation's fossil fuels come from federal lands and waters. The extraction and combustion of these fuels accounted for nearly a quarter of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions between 2005 and 2014, according to a study by the U.S. Geological Survey. In a final environmental impact statement released Thursday, Interior's Bureau of Land Management found that continued coal leasing in the Powder River Basin would harm the climate and public health. The bureau determined that no future coal leasing should happen in the basin, and it estimated that coal mining in the Wyoming portion of the region would end by 2041. Last year, the Powder River Basin generated 251.9 million tons of coal, accounting for nearly 44 percent of all coal produced in the United States. Under the bureau's determination, the 14 active coal mines in the Powder River Basin can continue operating on lands they have leased, but they cannot expand onto other public lands in the region... "This means that billions of tons of coal won't be burned, compared to business as usual," said Shiloh Hernandez, a senior attorney at the environmental law firm Earthjustice. "It's good news, and it's really the only defensible decision the BLM could have made, given the current climate crisis...." The United States is moving away from coal, which has struggled to compete economically with cheaper gas and renewable energy. U.S. coal output tumbled 36 percent from 2015 to 2023, according to the Energy Information Administration. The Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign estimates that 382 coal-fired power plants have closed down or proposed to retire, with 148 remaining. In addition, the Environmental Protection Agency finalized an ambitious set of rules in April aimed at slashing air pollution, water pollution and planet-warming emissions spewing from the nation's power plants. One of the most significant rules will push all existing coal plants by 2039 to either close or capture 90 percent of their carbon dioxide emissions at the smokestack. "The nation's electricity generation needs are being met increasingly by wind, solar and natural gas," said Tom Sanzillo, director of financial analysis at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, an energy think tank. "The nation doesn't need any increase in the amount of coal under lease out of the Powder River Basin."

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Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike shared this report from Ars Technica: The United States Marine Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC) is currently evaluating a new generation of robotic "dogs" developed by Ghost Robotics, with the potential to be equipped with gun systems from defense tech company Onyx Industries, reports The War Zone. While MARSOC is testing Ghost Robotics' quadrupedal unmanned ground vehicles (called "Q-UGVs" for short) for various applications, including reconnaissance and surveillance, it's the possibility of arming them with weapons for remote engagement that may draw the most attention. But it's not unprecedented: The US Marine Corps has also tested robotic dogs armed with rocket launchers in the past. MARSOC is currently in possession of two armed Q-UGVs undergoing testing, as confirmed by Onyx Industries staff, and their gun systems are based on Onyx's SENTRY remote weapon system (RWS), which features an AI-enabled digital imaging system and can automatically detect and track people, drones, or vehicles, reporting potential targets to a remote human operator that could be located anywhere in the world. The system maintains a human-in-the-loop control for fire decisions, and it cannot decide to fire autonomously. On LinkedIn, Onyx Industries shared a video of a similar system in action. In a statement to The War Zone, MARSOC states that weaponized payloads are just one of many use cases being evaluated. MARSOC also clarifies that comments made by Onyx Industries to The War Zone regarding the capabilities and deployment of these armed robot dogs "should not be construed as a capability or a singular interest in one of many use cases during an evaluation."

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