A family who spent nine years in a basement "waiting for the end of time" have been discovered by police in the Netherlands after one of them turned up at a local pub, reports say. The BBC reports: A man of 58 and a family with young adults aged 18 to 25 were living at a farm in the province of Drenthe. They were found after the eldest of the children ordered beer at a bar in the nearby village of Ruinerwold. He then told staff he needed help, broadcaster RTV Drenthe reported. The older man, who has been arrested, was initially assumed to be the father, but local mayor Roger de Groot later told reporters that was not the case. Nor was the man the owner of the farmhouse, Mr de Groot said, adding: "I've never seen anything like it."

The public broadcaster said that the family had been living in isolation waiting for the end of time. Unconfirmed reports said the children's father was among those found. Bar owner Chris Westerbeek described how a man had come in, ordered five beers and drunk them. "Then I had a chat with him and he revealed he had run away and needed help... then we called the police," he said. He added: "He had long hair, a dirty beard, wore old clothes and looked confused. He said he'd never been to school and hadn't been to the barber for nine years." "He said he had brothers and sisters who lived at the farm. He said he was the oldest and wanted to end the way they were living." Officers visited the remote farmhouse and carried out a search. They discovered a hidden staircase behind a cupboard in the living room that led down to a basement room where the family were housed.

Anyone who has taken an Uber, sent a Slack message or enjoyed a free beer at a WeWork owes a little something to Masayoshi Son. The New York Times: Through his Japanese conglomerate SoftBank and a $100 billion investment fund, Mr. Son plowed huge sums into these and other companies that aim to change how people work, travel and live. His investments enabled the young companies to throw caution to the wind and run up big losses as they expanded at a breakneck pace in recent years. Even in the start-up world, where idealism is abundant and losses are a badge of honor, Mr. Son's approach and ambition stood out.

His early bet on the Chinese technology giant Alibaba earned a return of more than $100 billion and cemented his reputation as a farsighted investor. He has outlined a 300-year plan to make SoftBank a leader in artificial intelligence, robotics and other advanced technologies. But this year, his grand designs collided with reality. In what may turn out to be a reckoning for Mr. Son, Wall Street has started running from companies backed by SoftBank and its Vision Fund. The chief executive of WeWork stepped down this week after a botched initial public offering. Uber's stock has fallen nearly 30 percent from its I.P.O. price in May. And shares in Slack, which provides a workplace messaging service, have tumbled more than 40 percent from their first day of trading in June.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Chicago Tribune: Plastic debris makes up about 80% of the litter on Great Lakes shorelines. Nearly 22 million pounds enter the Great Lakes each year -- more than half of which pours into Lake Michigan, according to estimates calculated by the Rochester Institute of Technology. Regardless of size, as plastics linger in the water, they continue to break down from exposure to sunlight and abrasive waves. Microplastics have been observed in the guts of many Lake Michigan fish, in drinking water and even in beer. Perhaps the most worrisome aspect is that the impact of microplastics on human health remains unclear. Plastics are known to attract industrial contaminants already in the water, like PCBs, while expelling their own chemical additives intended to make them durable, including flame retardants.

While there are still more questions than answers about potential health consequences, one thing is clear: Southern Lake Michigan is a hot spot for plastics. Once plastics enter the lake, they follow lake currents, potentially migrating to other states but largely remaining trapped at the southern end. What goes into Lake Michigan typically stays there. While water from the other Great Lakes moves downstream, Lake Michigan's only major outflow is the Chicago River (and the water it intermittently exchanges with Lake Huron at the Straits of Mackinac). As a result, a drop of water that enters Lake Michigan stays for about 62 years, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. A study published last year found that around 85% of fish caught from three major Lake Michigan tributaries -- the Milwaukee, St. Joseph and Muskegon rivers -- had microplastics in their digestive tracts.

"In the sample size of 74 fish representing 11 species, the invasive round goby had the highest concentrations, possibly from eating filter-feeding quagga mussels, which scientists suspect may be accumulating microplastics," the Chicago Tribune reports. "While detecting microplastics in the guts of Lake Michigan fish is significant, scientists are now studying if these pollutants build up or are excreted by the fish."

An unprecedented iPhone hacking operation, which attacked "thousands of users a week" until it was disrupted in January, has been revealed by researchers at Google's external security team. From a report: The operation, which lasted two and a half years, used a small collection of hacked websites to deliver malware on to the iPhones of visitors. Users were compromised simply by visiting the sites: no interaction was necessary, and some of the methods used by the hackers affected even fully up-to-date phones.

Once hacked, the user's deepest secrets were exposed to the attackers. Their location was uploaded every minute; their device's keychain, containing all their passwords, was uploaded, as were their chat histories on popular apps including WhatsApp, Telegram and iMessage, their address book, and their Gmail database. The one silver lining is that the implant was not persistent: when the phone was restarted, it was cleared from memory unless the user revisited a compromised site. However, according to Ian Beer, a security researcher at Google: "Given the breadth of information stolen, the attackers may nevertheless be able to maintain persistent access to various accounts and services by using the stolen authentication tokens from the keychain, even after they lose access to the device."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Netflix thought I was four different people. I was being paid through an app to watch its trailers over and over again, racking up digital points I could eventually trade for Amazon gift cards or real cash. But rather than just use my own phone, I bought four Android devices to churn through the trailers simultaneously, bringing in more money. I made a small "phone farm," able to fabricate engagement with advertisements and programs from companies like Netflix, as well as video game trailers, celebrity gossip shows, and sports too. No one was really watching the trailers, but Netflix didn't need to know that. The goal was to passively run these phones 24/7, with each collecting a fraction of a penny for each ad they "watched."

Hobbyists and those looking to make a bit of money across the U.S. have been doing the same, buying dozens or hundreds of phones to generate revenue so they can afford some extra household goods, cover a bill, buy a case of beer, or earn more income without driving for Uber or delivering for Grubhub. The farms are similar to those found overseas, often in China, where rows and rows of phones click and scroll through social media or other apps to simulate the engagement of a real human. Every few months, a video of these Chinese farms goes viral, but in bedroom cupboards, stacks in corners of living rooms, or custom setups in their garage, American phone farmers are doing a similar thing, albeit on a smaller scale. Motherboard spoke to eight people who run farms of various sizes, most of whom are located in the U.S.

In honor of FreeDOS's 25th birthday, project founder and coordinator Jim Hall agreed to answer the 10 best questions submitted by Slashdot readers. You asked and he answered! Read on for Jim's interview.

In late April of 2019 Slashdot reader Adam Bradley and engineer Chris Blackburn were "sitting in a pub on a Monday night when Chris happened across a somewhat unusual eBay listing..."

They eventually submitted the winning bid for an IBM 360 Model 20 mainframe -- €3,710 (about $4,141 USD) -- and proceeded to pick it up from an abandoned building "in the backstreets of Nuremberg, Germany." (Where they tackled several issues with a tiny door that hadn't been opened since the 1970s.) By day Adam is a railway software engineer, but he's also been involved in computer history for over a decade at The National Museum of Computing in Bletchley, England.

Along with engineer Peter Vaughan, the three are now blogging "the saga that unfurled...and how we eventually tackled the problems we discovered." But after much beer, whisky, and Weiner Schnitzel, Adam assures us the story ends with a victory: The machine will shortly be headed to the UK for a full restoration to working order. We're planning to blog the entire process and hope some of you might be interested in reading more about it.

"The New York Police Department used a photo of Woody Harrelson in its facial recognition program in an attempt to identify a beer thief who looked like the actor," reports the Associated Press: Georgetown University's Center on Privacy and Technology highlighted the April 2017 episode in "Garbage In, Garbage Out," a report on what it says are flawed practices in law enforcement's use of facial recognition. The report says security footage of the thief was too pixelated and produced no matches while high-quality images of Harrelson, a three-time Oscar nominee, returned several possible matches and led to one arrest.

The NYPD also used a photo of a New York Knicks player to search its database for a man wanted for a Brooklyn assault, the report said.

"The stakes are too high in criminal investigations to rely on unreliable â" or wrong â" inputs," Georgetown researcher Clare Garvie wrote.... The Georgetown report says facial recognition has helped the NYPD crack about 2,900 cases in more than five years of using the technology.
And in Florida, Vice reports, law enforcement agencies "run roughly 8,000 of these searches per month."

Writing at Linux Journal, Glyn Moody reports that dozens of government IT systems are switching to open source software.

"The fact that this approach is not already the norm is something of a failure on the part of the Free Software community..." One factor driving this uptake by innovative government departments is the potential to cut costs by avoiding constant upgrade fees. But it's important not to overstate the "free as in beer" element here. All major software projects have associated costs of implementation and support. Departments choosing free software simply because they believe it will save lots of money in obvious ways are likely to be disappointed, and that will be bad for open source's reputation and future projects.

Arguably as important as any cost savings is the use of open standards. This ensures that there is no lock-in to a proprietary solution, and it makes the long-term access and preservation of files much easier. For governments with a broader responsibility to society than simply saving money, that should be a key consideration, even if it hasn't been in the past.... Another is transparency. Recently it emerged that Microsoft has been gathering personal information from 300,000 government users of Microsoft Office ProPlus in the Netherlands, without permission and without documentation.
He includes an inspiring quote from the Free Software Foundation Europe about code produced by the government: "If it is public money, it should be public code as well. But when it comes to the larger issue about the general usage of proprietary vs. non-proprietary software -- what do Slashdot's readers think?

Should all government IT systems be using open source software?

The world's largest beer maker is using low-cost sensors and machine learning to predict when motors at a Fort Collins, Colo. brewery might malfunction. From a report: The Anheuser-Busch InBev SA plant was the first among the company's 350 beverage-making facilities to test whether wireless sensors that can detect ultrasonic sounds -- beyond the grasp of the human ear -- can be analyzed to predict when machines need maintenance. "You can start hearing days in advance that something will go wrong, and you'll know within hours when it'll fail. It's really, for us, very practical," said Tassilo Festetics, vice president of global solutions for the company.

The project began about six months ago when Mr. Festetics's team installed 20 wireless sensors across three packaging lines motors to measure vibrations. The sounds picked up are transmitted in real time and then compared to a normal, functioning engine's sounds, which serve as a baseline and allow the program to identify anomalies. A key advantage is that the sensors are non-invasive and don't need to be placed inside a machine. Sensors have been used for predictive maintenance in the past, but they were unable to transmit information in real time. Advances in processing data at the edge of the network, referred to as edge computing, enables companies to collect and analyze real-time sensor data from machines.

In a wide-ranging interview, Nilay Patel of The Verge speaks with Bill Baxter, chief technology officer of Vizio, about what the company thinks of some TV vendors adding support for Apple's AirPlay 2, and other things. A remarkable exchange on the business of data collection and selling: Nilay Patel: I guess I have a philosophical question. You guys are committed to low price points and you often beat the industry at those price points. Can you hit those price points without the additional data collection that TV does if you don't have an ad business or a data business on top of the TV?
Bill Baxter: So that's a great question. Actually, we should have a beer and have a long, long chat about that. So look, it's not just about data collection. It's about post-purchase monetization of the TV. This is a cutthroat industry. It's a 6-percent margin industry, right? I mean, you know it's pretty ruthless. You could say it's self-inflicted, or you could say there's a greater strategy going on here, and there is. The greater strategy is I really don't need to make money off of the TV. I need to cover my cost.

And then I need to make money off those TVs. They live in households for 6.9 years -- the average lifetime of a Vizio TV is 6.9 years. You would probably be amazed at the number of people come up to me saying, "I love Vizio TVs, I have one" and it's 11 years old. I'm like, "Dude, that's not even full HD, that's 720p." But they do last a long time and our strategy -- you've seen this with all of our software upgrades including AirPlay 2 and HomeKit -- is that we want to make things backward compatible to those TVs. So we're continuing to invest in those older TVs to bring them up to feature level comparison with the new TVs when there's no hardware limitation that would otherwise prevent that.

And the reason why we do that is there are ways to monetize that TV and data is one, but not only the only one. It's sort of like a business of singles and doubles, it's not home runs, right? You make a little money here, a little money there. You sell some movies, you sell some TV shows, you sell some ads, you know. It's not really that different than The Verge website.

Patel: One sort of Verge-nerd meme that I hear in our comments or on Twitter is "I just want a dumb TV. I just want a panel with no smarts and I'll figure it out on my own." But it sounds like that lifetime monetization problem would prevent you from just making a dumb panel that you can sell to somebody.
Baxter: Well, it wouldn't prevent us, to be honest with you. What it would do is, we'd collect a little bit more margin at retail to offset it. Again, it may be an aspirational goal to not have high margins on our TV business because I can make it up downstream. On the other hand, I'm actually aggregating that monetization across a large number of users, some of which opt out. It's a blended revenue model where, in the end, Vizio succeeds, but you know, it's not wholly dependent on things like data collection.

Organizations desperate for software engineering talent tend to follow similar plays when it comes to attracting student developers about the enter the workforce, including offering perks like free food, beer, and ping pong. However, student developers have a much stronger appetite for other workplace elements when making employment decisions, according to a Tuesday report from HackerRank. From a news writeup: The three most important criteria students look for in job opportunities are professional growth and learning (58%), work/life balance (52%), and having interesting problems to solve (46%), according to a survey of 10,350 student developers worldwide. These far outpaced compensation (18%) and perks (11%), which they view as "nice to haves" rather than deal breakers, the survey found.

For many student developers, a computer science degree is not enough to teach them the skills they will need in the workforce, the report found. Nearly two-thirds (65%) said they rely partially on self-teaching to learn to code, and 27% say they are totally self-taught. Only 32% said they were entirely taught at school, the survey found.

Apple has not documented some high-severity bugs it patched that were reported to it by Google's Project Zero researchers. From a report: While it's good news that Apple beat Project Zero's 90-day deadline for patching or disclosing the bugs it finds, the group's Ivan Fratric recently argued that the practice endangered users by not fully informing them why an update should be installed. This time the criticism comes from Project Zero's Ian Beer, who's been credited by Apple with finding dozens of serious security flaws in iOS and macOS over the years. Beer posted a blog about several vulnerabilities in iOS 7 he found in 2014 that share commonalities with several bugs he has found in iOS 11.4.1, some of which he's now released exploits for.

Beer notes that none of the latest issues is mentioned in the iOS 12 security bulletin even though Apple did fix them. The absence of information about them is a "disincentive" for iOS users to patch, Beer argues. "Apple are still yet to assign CVEs for these issues or publicly acknowledge that they were fixed in iOS 12," wrote Beer. "In my opinion a security bulletin should mention the security bugs that were fixed. Not doing so provides a disincentive for people to update their devices since it appears that there were fewer security fixes than there really were."

A new study from Nature Plants has identified the one climate-related issue that can unite people from myriad political backgrounds -- beer. From a report: Led by Wei Xie, an agricultural scientist at Peking University, the paper finds that regions that grow barley, the primary crop used to brew beer, are projected to experience severe droughts and heat waves due to anthropogenic climate change. According to five climate models that used different projected temperature increases for the coming century, extreme weather events could reduce barley yields by 3 to 17 percent. Barley harvests are mostly sold as livestock fodder, so beer availability could be further hindered by the likely prioritization of grain yields to feed cattle and other farm animals, rather than for brewing beer.

The net result will be a decline in affordable access to beer, which is the most commonly imbibed alcoholic beverage in the world. Within a few decades, this luxury may be out of reach for hundreds of millions of people, including those in affluent nations where breweries are a major industry. Price spikes are estimated to range from $4 to over $20 for a standard six-pack in nations like the US, Ireland, Denmark, and Poland.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Alcohol is responsible for more than 5% of all deaths worldwide, or around 3 million a year, new figures have revealed. The data, part of a report from the World Health Organization, shows that about 2.3 million of those deaths in 2016 were of men, and that almost 29% of all alcohol-caused deaths were down to injuries -- including traffic accidents and suicide. The report, which comes out every four years, reveals the continued impact of alcohol on public health around the world, and highlights that the young bear the brunt: 13.5% of deaths among people in their 20s are linked to booze, with alcohol responsible for 7.2% of premature deaths overall. It also stresses that harm from drinking is greater among poorer consumers than wealthier ones. While the proportion of deaths worldwide that have been linked to alcohol has fallen to 5.3% since 2012, when the figure was at 5.9%, experts say the findings make for sobering reading.

"These devices kind of look like cell phone chargers, so they probably thought they had some kind of street value," said the co-founder of Roambee, a shipping-monitoring services company, in a classic story shared by a reader: [He's] talking about the hundred or so GPS tracking devices that were stolen recently from the company's Dela Cruz Avenue labs. "The moment we realized they had a box of trackers, we went into recovery mode," Subramanian said. "We notified the police and equipped them to track the devices, and in about 5 or 6 hours, it was done...." It wasn't long before the police were using Roambee's software to locate the devices and the thieves. "We were able to pinpoint the location of these trackers to a warehouse in Union City and two of the devices had gone mobile, and the thieves were driving around with them in the East Bay," Subramanian said. The two men were arrested in Alameda.
Before stealing 100 battery-powered GPS-tracking devices, one of the thieves also grabbed a beer out of the office refrigerator -- and cut themselves -- leaving behind both fingerprints and an actual blood sample.

The company is now using this 2017 episode as an instructive case study. "Roambee wirelessly synced with all 100 devices and remotely set them to stealth mode (so there's no blinking LEDs to alert the thieves) and then switched the location reporting intervals from once every hour to once every minute."

Jack Wallen, writing for TechRepublic: For a company to support Linux, they have to consider supporting: Multiple file systems, multiple distributions, multiple desktops, multiple init systems, multiple kernels. If you're an open source developer, focusing on a single distribution, that's not a problem. If you're a company that produces a product (and you stake your living on that product), those multiple points of entry do become a problem. Let's consider Adobe (and Photoshop). If Adobe wanted to port their industry-leading product to Linux, how do they do that? Do they spend the time developing support for ext4, btrfs, Ubuntu, Fedora, GNOME, Mate, KDE, systemd? You see how that might look from the eyes of any given company?

It becomes even more complicated when companies consider how accustomed to the idea of "free" (as in beer) Linux users are. Although I am very willing to pay for software on Linux, it's a rare occasion that I do (mostly because I haven't found a piece of must-have software that has an associated cost). Few companies will support the Linux desktop when the act of supporting means putting that much time and effort into a product that a large cross-section of users might wind up unwilling to pay the price of admission. That's not to say every Linux user is unwilling to shell out the cost for a piece of software. But many won't.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Even the occasional drink is harmful to health, according to the largest and most detailed research carried out on the effects of alcohol, which suggests governments should think of advising people to abstain completely. The uncompromising message comes from the authors of the Global Burden of Diseases study, a rolling project based at the University of Washington, in Seattle, which produces the most comprehensive data on the causes of illness and death in the world. Alcohol, says their report published in the Lancet medical journal, led to 2.8 million deaths in 2016. It was the leading risk factor for premature mortality and disability in the 15 to 49 age group, accounting for 20% of deaths. The study was carried out by researchers at the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), who investigated levels of alcohol consumption and health effects in 195 countries between 1990 to 2016. They used data from 694 studies to work out how common drinking was and from 592 studies including 28 million people worldwide to work out the health risks. According to the report, "27.1% of cancer deaths in women and 18.9% in men over 50 were linked to their drinking habits." The biggest causes of death linked to alcohol in younger people were tuberculosis (1.4% of deaths), road injuries (1.2%), and self-harm (1.1%).

"Worldwide we need to revisit alcohol control policies and health programs, and to consider recommendations for abstaining from alcohol," said the report's senior author, Professor Emmanuela Gakidou. "These include excise taxes on alcohol, controlling the physical availability of alcohol and the hours of sale, and controlling alcohol advertising. Any of these policy actions would contribute to reductions in population-level consumption, a vital step toward decreasing the health loss associated with alcohol use."

An anonymous reader shares a report from NPR about ecologist Chelsea Rochman, who has dedicated her career to studying how microplastics are getting into the food chain and affecting everything from beer to fish: Since modern plastic was first mass-produced, 8 billion tons have been manufactured. And when it's thrown away, it doesn't just disappear. Much of it crumbles into small pieces. Scientists call the tiny pieces "microplastics" and define them as objects smaller than 5 millimeters -- about the size of one of the letters on a computer keyboard. Researchers started to pay serious attention to microplastics in the environment about 15 years ago. They're in oceans, rivers and lakes. They're also in soil. Recent research in Germany found that fertilizer made from composted household waste contains microplastics. And, even more concerning, microplastics are in drinking water. In beer. In sea salt. In fish and shellfish. How microplastics get into animals is something of a mystery, and Chelsea Rochman is trying to solve it.

Since she started studying microplastics, Rochman has found them in the outflow from sewage treatment plants. And they've shown up in insects, worms, clams, fish and birds. To study how that happens, [researcher Kennedy Bucci] makes her own microplastics from the morning's collection. She takes a postage stamp-size piece of black plastic from the jar, and grinds it into particles using a coffee grinder. "So this is the plastic that I feed to the fish," she says. The plastic particles go into beakers of water containing fish larvae from fathead minnows, the test-animals of choice in marine toxicology. Tanks full of them line the walls of the lab. Bucci uses a pipette to draw out a bunch of larvae that have already been exposed to these ground-up plastic particles. The larva's gut is translucent. We can see right into it. "You can see kind of a line of black, weirdly shaped black things," she points out. "Those are the microplastics." The larva has ingested them. Rochman says microplastic particles can sicken or even kill larvae and fish in their experiments.

Google has removed the open-source Ahoy! extension from the Chrome store with little explanation. The tool facilitated access to more than 1,700 blocked sites in Portugal by routing traffic through its own proxies. TorrentFreak reports: After servicing 100,000 users last December, Ahoy! grew to almost 185,000 users this year. However, progress and indeed the project itself is now under threat after arbitrary action by Google. "Google decided to remove us from Chrome's Web Store without any justification," team member Henrique Mouta informs TF. "We always make sure our code is high quality, secure and 100% free (as in beer and as in freedom). All the source code is open source. And we're pretty sure we never broke any of the Google's marketplace rules."

Henrique says he's tried to reach out to Google but finding someone to help has proven impossible. Even re-submitting Ahoy! to Google from scratch hasn't helped the situation. "I tried and resubmitted the plugin but it was refused after a few hours and without any justification," Henrique says. "Google never reached us or notified us about the removal from Chrome Web Store. We never got a single email justifying what happened, why have we been removed from the store, or/and what are we breaching and how can we fix it." TorrentFreak reached out to Google asking why this anti-censorship tool has been removed from its Chrome store. Despite multiple requests, the search giant failed to respond to us or the Ahoy! team. Thankfully, the Ahoy! extension is still available on Firefox.