Brief items

Security quotes of the week

Many participants examined the effects of technology, especially artificial intelligence. We looked at whether—and when—we might be comfortable ceding power to an AI. Sometimes it's easy. I'm happy for an AI to figure out the optimal timing of traffic lights to ensure the smoothest flow of cars through the city. When will we be able to say the same thing about setting interest rates? Or designing tax policies?

— Bruce Schneier reports on his "Reimagining Democracy" workshop

There was the article recommending that visitors to Montreal try "a hamburger" and went on to explain that a hamburger was a "sandwich comprised of a ground beef patty, a sliced bun of some kind, and toppings such as lettuce, tomato, cheese, etc" and that some of the best hamburgers in Montreal could be had at McDonald's.

[...]

Like the TSA agents who are fed a steady stream of training data to hone their water-bottle-detection skills, Microsoft's humans in the loop are being asked to pluck atoms of difference out of a raging river of otherwise characterless slurry. They are expected to remain vigilant for something that almost never happens – all while they are racing the clock, charged with preventing a slurry backlog at all costs.

Automation blindness is inescapable – and it's the inconvenient truth that AI boosters conspicuously fail to mention when they are discussing how they will justify the trillion-dollar valuations they ascribe to super-advanced autocomplete systems. Instead, they wave around "humans in the loop," using low-waged workers as props in a Big Store con, just a way to (temporarily) cool the marks.

— Cory Doctorow

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Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 6.5-rc7, which was released on August 20. Linus Torvalds said that it looks to be the last rc needed for this development cycle, so 6.5 should be released next; meanwhile, for rc7:

[...] everything looks entirely normal. Drivers (GPU, networking and sound dominate - the usual suspects, in other words) and architecture fixes. The latter are mostly arm devicetree fixlets, but also some x86 cleanups and fallout from the embargo last week.

Stable updates: 6.4.12 and 6.1.47 were released on August 23.

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Distributions quote of the week

My latest startup venture is a return to my roots: I'm securing funding to buy Debian and make it private. There is already a mailing list for discussing this topic: debian-private.

The new, private Debian will make money by charging for the duration a bug is open. This will ensure sufficient funding to pay for fast development of the system, is a clear and simple business model, and has no perverse motivations for maximizing revenue.

— Lars Wirzenius

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LibreOffice 7.6 Community released

The Document Foundation has announced the release of LibreOffice 7.6 Community. It is the last release using the existing numbering scheme as the office suite will move to date-based release numbers starting with LibreOffice 24.2 in February, 2024. Highlights of this release include support for document themes, including import and export of them, a new navigation panel for Impress and Draw, zoom-gesture support, font-handling improvements, and lots more; the release notes have all the details.

LibreOffice 7.6 Community's new features have been developed by 148 contributors: 61% of code commits are from the 52 developers employed by three companies sitting in TDF's Advisory Board – Collabora, Red Hat and allotropia – or other organizations, 15% are from 7 developers at The Document Foundation, and the remaining 24% are from 89 individual volunteers.

Other 202 volunteers – representing hundreds of other people providing translations – have committed localizations in 160 languages. LibreOffice 7.6 Community is released in 120 different language versions, more than any other free or proprietary software, and as such can be used in the native language (L1) by over 5.4 billion people worldwide. In addition, over 2.3 billion people speak one of those 120 languages as their second language (L2).

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SUSE to be acquired, taken private

SUSE's long story of corporate ownership is gaining a new chapter; the company has announced that its majority shareholder (Marcel LUX III SARL) will be acquiring the remaining shares, and will take the company private and off of the stock exchange. "SUSE’s Management Board and Supervisory Board support the strategic opportunity from delisting of the company as it will allow SUSE to focus fully on its operational priorities and execution of its long-term strategy."

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