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  • 'Music Copyright Lawsuits Are Scaring Away New Hits', Argues Rolling Stone
    A new article in Rolling Stone argues that the forgotten 2013 hit song "Blurred Lines", which a court later ruled infringed on a 1977 song by Marvin Gaye, turned copyright law into "a minefield" -- for the music industry. While copyright laws used to protect only lyrics and melodies (a prime example is the Chiffons' successful suit against George Harrison in 1976 for the strong compositional similarities between his "My Sweet Lord" and their "He's So Fine"), the "Blurred Lines" case raised the stakes by suggesting that the far more abstract qualities of rhythm, tempo, and even the general feel of a song are also eligible for protection -- and thus that a song can be sued for feeling like an earlier one. Sure enough, a jury in 2019 ruled that Katy Perry owed millions for ostensibly copying the beat of her hit "Dark Horse" from a little-known song by Christian rapper Flame, stunning both the music business and the legal community. "They're trying to own basic building blocks of music, the alphabet of music that should be available to everyone," Perry's lawyer Christine Lepera warned in the case's closing arguments. That case, which Perry's team is currently in the process of appealing, suggests a second point: Plaintiffs in copycat cases are largely targeting megahit songs because they've seen where the money is, and the increasing frequency of those court battles in headlines is causing an avalanche effect of further infringement lawsuits.... While some record labels may have the budget to hire on-call musicologists who vet new releases for potential copyright claims, smaller players who can't afford that luxury are turning toward a tried-and-true form of protection: insurance. Lucas Keller -- the founder of music management company Milk and Honey, which represents writers and producers who've worked with everyone from Alessia Cara and Carrie Underwood to 5 Seconds of Summer and Muse -- recently began encouraging all his songwriter clients to purchase errors-and-omissions insurance, which protects creative professionals from legal challenges to their intellectual property. "We all feel like the system has failed us," Keller says. "There are a lot of aggressive lawyers filing lawsuits and going ham on people." (He's particularly critical of publishers whose rosters are heavier on older catalogs than new acts: "Heritage publishers who aren't making a lot of money are coming out of the woodwork and saying, âWe're going to take a piece of your contemporary hit....'â") Artists are understandably reluctant to publicly disclose that they have copyright insurance, which could open them up to an increase in lawsuits. But music attorney Bob Celestin, who's helped represent acts like Pusha T and Missy Elliott, says it is safe to assume that the majority of artists who show up in Top 10 chart positions are covered in this way... The popularity of cheap music-production software, which offers the same features to every user, has added another layer of risk. "Music is now more similar than it is different, for the first time," says Ross Golan, a producer and songwriter who has released songs with stars like Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber. "People are using the same sample packs, the same plug-ins, because it's efficient." Then there's the issue of the finite number of notes, chord progressions, and melodies available...

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  • The End of Windows 7 'Marks the End of the PC Era Too'
    ZDNet's UK editor-in-chief Steve Ranger argues the end of Windows 7 "marks the end of the PC era, too." When Windows 7 launched, the iPhone and its app store were around but were still novelties, while the iPad hadn't arrived yet. If you wanted to get work -- or pretty much anything -- done on a computer, you needed a PC. Just over a decade later, the picture is much more complicated. PC sales have been in decline for the last seven years; a slide which only ended with a small increase last year, largely because businesses needed to buy new PCs to run Windows 10, after bowing to the inevitable and upgrading. In many scenarios and use cases the PC has been superseded by the smartphone, the tablet or digital assistants embodied in various other devices. And it's not just the PC -- Windows is no longer the defining product for Microsoft that it once was. That's not to say the PC is dead, of course: I'm typing on one now, and it will remain the primary device I use to do my job for the foreseeable future. Many office and knowledge workers will feel the same. But there are now plenty of other options: I could be using a tablet or dictating to my phone... And outside of work I barely touch a PC at all. And even the definition of the PCs is getting blurry. PC makers have come up with a late burst of creativity that has delivered all manner of weird and occasionally wonderful new shapes and sizes. Microsoft's Surface is a PC that looks a lot like a tablet; Lenovo's X1 Fold is a folding screen that can be a tablet, or a mini laptop or a desktop. Folding and detachable PCs are now mainstream.

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  • Internet Pioneers Fight For Control of .Org Registry By Forming a Nonprofit Alternative
    Reuters reports that a group of "prominent internet pioneers" now has a plan to block the $1.1 billion sale of the .org internet domain registry to Ethos Capital. The group has created their own nonprofit cooperative to offer an alternative: "There needs to be a place on the internet that represents the public interest, where educational sites, humanitarian sites, and organizations like Wikipedia can provide a broader public benefit," said Katherine Maher, the CEO of Wikipedia parent Wikimedia Foundation, who signed on to be a director of the new nonprofit. The crowd-sourced research tool Wikipedia is the most visited of the 10 million .org sites registered worldwide... Hundreds of nonprofits have already objected to the transaction, worried that Ethos will raise registration and renewal prices, cut back on infrastructure and security spending, or make deals to sell sensitive data or allow censorship or surveillance... "What offended me about the Ethos Capital deal and the way it unfolded is that it seems to have completely betrayed this concept of stewardship," said Andrew McLaughlin, who oversaw the transfer of internet governance from the U.S. Commerce Department to ICANN, completed in 2016. Maher and others said the idea of the new cooperative is not to offer a competing financial bid for .org, which brings in roughly $100 million in revenue from domain sales. Instead, they hope that the unusual new entity, formally a California Consumer Cooperative Corporation, can manage the domain for security and stability and make sure it does not become a tool for censorship. The advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which previously organized a protest over the .org sale that drew in organizations including the YMCA of the United States, Greenpeace, and Consumer Reports, is also supporting the cooperative. "It's highly inappropriate for it to be turned over to a commercial venture at all, much less one that's going to need to recover $1 billion," said EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn.

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  • Apple's Stock Rose 86% in 2019 -- Partly Because Of AirPods
    "Shares of Apple gained 86.2% in 2019, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence," reports the Motley Fool: The tech stock's share price tracked relatively closely with momentum for the broader market for much of the year and then dramatically outperformed from September through December thanks to strong performance for its wearables products. iPhone Sales were down from 2018, but they still came in ahead of expectations, and the company's business was lifted by strong performance for its wearables segment... Growth for Apple's services segment (which includes revenue generated from the company's mobile app store and subscription-based offerings like Apple Music) also slowed in the year. However, explosive growth for AirPods, promising momentum for the Apple Watch, and the promise of a bigger tech and feature leap for the iPhone line in 2020 powered a great year for Apple stock. Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst at Bernstein Research, estimates that AirPod sales came in at roughly $6 billion in 2019 and nearly doubled compared to 2018. The Bernstein analyst projects that AirPod revenue will hit $15 billion in 2020.

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  • After Mishap with Boeing Spacecraft, NASA Faces a Dilemma
    An anonymous reader quotes the Washington Post: As it probes why Boeing's Starliner spacecraft suffered a serious setback during a flight test last month that forced the cancellation of its planned docking with the International Space Station, NASA faces a high-stakes dilemma: Should the space agency require the company to repeat the uncrewed test flight, or allow the next flight to proceed, as originally planned, with astronauts on board? The answer could have significant ramifications for the agency, and put astronauts' lives on the line, at a time when NASA is struggling to restore human spaceflight from the United States since the Space Shuttle fleet was retired in 2011. Forcing Boeing to redo the test flight without anyone on board would be costly, possibly requiring the embattled company, already struggling from the consequences of two deadly crashes of its 737 Max airplane, to spend tens of millions of dollars to demonstrate that its new spacecraft is capable of meeting the space station in orbit. But if NASA moves ahead with the crewed flight, and something goes wrong that puts the astronauts in danger, the agency would come under withering criticism that could plague it for years to come... For now, NASA is moving cautiously. It has formed an independent team with Boeing to examine what went wrong with the Starliner during last month's test flight. NASA also is reviewing data to help it determine if the capsule achieved enough objectives during its truncated flight to assure NASA that its astronauts will be safe.... If NASA does force Boeing to perform another test flight, it's not clear who would have to pay the tens of millions of dollars such a mission would cost.

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  • Equifax's Stock Rose More Than 50% In 2019
    "There's still time to file a claim for a share of the $425 million that Equifax agreed to cough up after hosing almost half of the country in its massive data breach a few years ago," writes a Pennyslvania newspaper columnist, pointing victims to equifaxbreachsettlement.com. "But unless you can prove you were an identity theft victim who lost money, or had to waste time cleaning up the mess, don't expect much of a payout. Victims are being hosed again." The breach affected an estimated 147 million Americans. Hackers exploited a known but unpatched website vulnerability and gained access to names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, driver's license numbers and credit card numbers. Facing lawsuits from federal and state consumer protection agencies, Equifax agreed to a settlement. It offered several ways for people to file claims, with a deadline of Jan. 22. The option that applies to most people is 10 years of free credit monitoring, or a cash payout of up to $125 for those who already have monitoring. But you aren't going to get anywhere near $125. The settlement called for a pot of only $31 million for those payouts. And based on the number of people who have applied, that's not enough to cover the maximum payment. You may not even get enough to buy a decent sandwich, according to Ted Frank, director of litigation for Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, which includes the Center for Class Action Fairness. "That's down to $6 or $7 now," Frank told CNBC in December. "Maybe even less than that." Frank spoke after the federal judge overseeing the settlement awarded $77.5 million of the $425 million settlement fund to the attorneys who represented consumers against Equifax. His organization had opposed that award as being too much. Meanwhile, the Motley Fool notes that in 2019 Equifax's stock rose 50.5% -- after dropping 21% in 2018 and remaining "relatively flat" in 2017. "The credit-reporting company's stock rose thanks to a series of earnings beats and with the shadow of the big 2017 data breach receding further into the rear view...."

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  • Microsoft's Azure Cloud Service Is Becoming More Popular Than Amazon's AWS At Big Companies
    Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been focusing the company on cloud services -- and CNBC reports on the results: A Goldman Sachs survey of technology executives at large companies last month showed that Microsoft remained the most popular supplier of public cloud services, even as Amazon leads the market overall in terms of revenue. Goldman Sachs based its latest findings on an information-technology spending survey of 100 IT executives at Global 2000 companies. It performs the survey each June and December. The latest survey showed that 56 executives are using Azure for cloud infrastructure, versus 48 using AWS. Across cloud infrastructure and platform as a service put together, Microsoft's lead has been increasing since December 2017, according to the analysts. Additionally, more respondents expect their companies to be using Azure than any other cloud in three years, the analysts wrote... The results lead the analysts to conclude that about 23% of IT workloads are now on public clouds, up from 19% in June, and they expect the percentage to reach 43% in three years. That leaves plenty of room for growth for other contenders, like Google, for example... About 91% of analysts surveyed by FactSet have the equivalent of buy ratings on Microsoft stock, including Goldman Sachs. In the original submission Slashdot reader soldersold wonders if it's pre-existing business relationships with Microsoft (plus a workforce that's already been trained and certified in their technologies). Another caveat: The survey only included large companies. It'd be interesting to hear from Slashdot readers working in the cloud about whether they're using AWS or Azure?

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  • Thoughts on Our Possible Future Without Work
    There's a new book called A World Without Work by economics scholar/former government policy adviser Daniel Susskind. The Guardian succinctly summarizes its prognostications for the future: It used to be argued that workers who lost their low-skilled jobs should retrain for more challenging roles, but what happens when the robots, or drones, or driverless cars, come for those as well? Predictions vary but up to half of jobs are at least partially vulnerable to AI, from truck-driving, retail and warehouse work to medicine, law and accountancy. That's why the former US treasury secretary Larry Summers confessed in 2013 that he used to think "the Luddites were wrong, and the believers in technology and technological progress were right. I'm not so completely certain now." That same year, the economist and Keynes biographer Robert Skidelsky wrote that fears of technological unemployment were not so much wrong as premature: "Sooner or later, we will run out of jobs." Yet Skidelsky, like Keynes, saw this as an opportunity. If the doomsayers are to be finally proven right, then why not the utopians, too...? The work ethic, [Susskind] says, is a modern religion that purports to be the only source of meaning and purpose. "What do you do for a living?" is for many people the first question they ask when meeting a stranger, and there is no entity more beloved of politicians than the "hard-working family". Yet faced with precarious, unfulfilling jobs and stagnant wages, many are losing faith in the gospel of work. In a 2015 YouGov survey, 37% of UK workers said their jobs made no meaningful contribution. Susskind wonders in the final pages "whether the academics and commentators who write fearfully about a world with less work are just mistakenly projecting the personal enjoyment they take from their jobs on to the experience of everyone else". That deserves to be more than an afterthought. The challenge of a world without work isn't just economic but political and psychological... [I]s relying on work to provide self-worth and social status an inevitable human truth or the relatively recent product of a puritan work ethic? Keynes regretted that the possibility of an "age of leisure and abundance" was freighted with dread: "For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy." The state, Susskind concedes with ambivalence, will need to smooth the transition. Moving beyond the "Age of Labour" will require something like a universal basic income (he prefers a more selective conditional basic income), funded by taxes on capital to share the proceeds of technological prosperity. The available work will also need to be more evenly distributed. After decades of a 40-hour week, the recent Labour manifesto, influenced by Skidelsky, promised 32 hours by 2030. And that's the relatively easy part. Moving society's centre of gravity away from waged labour will require visionary "leisure policies" on every level, from urban planning to education, and a revolution in thinking. "We will be forced to consider what it really means to live a meaningful life," Susskind writes, implying that this is above his pay grade. The review concludes that "if AI really does to employment what previous technologies did not, radical change can't be postponed indefinitely. "It may well be utopia or bust."

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  • Are We Teaching Engineers the Wrong Way to Think?
    Tech columnist Chris Matyszczyk summarizes the argument of four researchers who are warning about the perils of pure engineer thought: They write, politely: "Engineers enter the workforce with important analysis skills, but may struggle to 'think outside the box' when it comes to creative problem-solving." The academics blame the way engineers are educated. They explain there are two sorts of thinking -- convergent and divergent. The former is the one with which engineers are most familiar. You make a list of steps to be taken to solve a problem and you take those steps. You expect a definite answer. Divergent thinking, however, requires many different ways of thinking about a problem and leads to many potential solutions. These academics declare emphatically: "Divergent thinking skills are largely ignored in engineering courses, which tend to focus on a linear progression of narrow, discipline-focused technical information." Ah, that explains a lot, doesn't it? Indeed, these researchers insist that engineering students "become experts at working individually and applying a series of formulas and rules to structured problems with a 'right' answer." Oddly, I know several people at Google just like that. Fortunately, the researchers are also proposing this solution: "While engineers need skills in analysis and judgment, they also need to cultivate an open, curious, and kind attitude, so they don't fixate on one particular approach and are able to consider new data."

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  • 'Top Programming Skills' List Shows Employers Want SQL
    Former Slashdot contributor Nick Kolakowski is now a senior editor at Dice Insights, where he's just published a list of the top programming skills employers were looking for during the last 30 days. If you're a software developer on the hunt for a new gig (or you're merely curious about what programming skills employers are looking for these days), one thing is clear: employers really, really, really want technologists who know how to build, maintain, and scale everything database- (and data-) related. We've come to that conclusion after analyzing data about programming skills from Burning Glass, which collects and organizes millions of job postings from across the country. The biggest takeaway? "When it comes to programming skills, employers are hungriest for SQL." Here's their ranking of the top most in-demand skills: SQLJava"Software development""Software engineering"PythonJavaScriptLinuxOracleC#Git The list actually includes the top 18 programming skills, but besides languages like C++ and .NET, it also includes more generalized skills like "Agile development," "debugging," and "Unix." But Nick concludes that "As a developer, if you've mastered database and data-analytics skills, that makes you insanely valuable to a whole range of companies out there."

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DistroWatch

  • Development Release: Ubuntu 18.04 Beta 2
    Steve Langasek has announced the availability of the second and final beta build of Ubuntu 18.04, including all official Ubuntu sub-projects. This is a long-term support (LTS) version the final release of which is scheduled for April 26: "The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the final beta....
  • Distribution Release: NixOS 18.03
    NixOS is an independently developed Linux distribution which is configured and managed using the Nix package manager. The NixOS project has released a new version, NixOS 18.03, which includes version 2.0 of the Nix package manager minor upgrades to the GNOME and KDE Plasma desktops along with several....
  • Development Release: Fedora 28 Beta
    The Fedora team has launched a new testing version of their Red Hat sponsored project. The new development release, Fedora 28 Beta, features 64-bit ARM support and GNOME 3.28. VirtualBox guest additions are now included by default. The big new feature though across all Fedora editions is the....
  • BSD Release: OpenBSD 6.3
    OpenBSD is a security-focused operating system with a focus on correct code and accurate documentation. The project has released OpenBSD 6.3 which introduces SMP support on the ARM64 architecture, includes ISO support in the virtual machine daemon (vmd) and makes memory allocation more efficient. There have also been....
  • DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 757
    This week in DistroWatch Weekly: Review: Gatter Linux 0.8News: Red Hat turns 25, Ubuntu's minimal desktop option, super long term support kernels, new shortcuts in elementary OS, FreeBSD 10.3 reaching EoLBook review: UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook (Fifth Edition)Released last week: Slax 9.4.0, heads 0.4, Qubes OS....
  • Distribution Release: Redcore Linux 1803
    Redcore Linux is a Gentoo-based distribution which strives to be easy to install and features the LXQt desktop environment. The project's latest snapshot release includes several security improvements, such as running a hardened Linux kernel and compiling software with address space layout randomization (ASLR). "The Redcore Linux team....
  • BSD Release: TrueOS 18.03
    TrueOS is a FreeBSD-based operating system which features a graphical system installer and a rolling release platform. The TrueOS team has announced the availability of a new snapshot, TrueOS 18.03, which includes fixes for the Meltdown and Spectre classes of CPU bugs. "The TrueOS team is pleased to....
  • BSD Release: pfSense 2.4.3
    Jim Pingle has announced the release of pfSense 2.4.3, the latest update of the specialist FreeBSD-based operating system for firewalls and routers: "We are excited to announce the release of pfSense software version 2.4.3, now available for new installations and upgrades. pfSense software version 2.4.3 brings security patches,....
  • Development Release: Pop!_OS 18.04 Testing
    Pop!_OS is an Ubuntu-based distribution developed by System76 which features the GNOME desktop. The distribution's developers have published a testing snapshot for the upcoming version of Pop!_OS 18.04. This testing snapshot includes a new installer that offers full disk encryption. However, the new installer also has the limitation....
  • Distribution Release: Qubes OS 4.0
    Andrew David Wong has announced the release of Qubes OS 4.0, a major new update of the project's security-oriented desktop Linux distribution based on Fedora 25: "After nearly two years in development and countless hours of testing, we're pleased to announce the stable release of Qubes OS 4.0.....