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Wikimedia Executives Receive Six-figure Golden Handshakes

Andreas Kolbe writes: The Wikimedia Foundation’s (WMF) recently released Form 990 shows that the organisation has developed a practice of handing outgoing managers six-figure severance payments, The Register reports. The foundation, which relies entirely on unpaid volunteers to generate the content of its websites, has taken around $300 million dollars over the past five years through fundraising banners placed on Wikipedia. The WMF says it is “committed to communicating with our volunteers, donors, and stakeholders in an open, accountable, and timely manner”, but has long been criticised for providing little transparency on the salaries of its executives, limiting itself to the legally required Form 990 disclosures that only become public two years after the event. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Wikimedia Executives Receive Six-figure Golden Handshakes

At $75,560, Housing a Prisoner in California Now Costs More Than a Year at Harvard

The cost of imprisoning each of California’s 130, 000 inmates is expected to reach a record $75, 560 in the next year, the AP reported. From the article: That’s enough to cover the annual cost of attending Harvard University and still have plenty left over for pizza and beer Gov. Jerry Brown’s spending plan for the fiscal year that starts July 1 includes a record $11.4 billion for the corrections department while also predicting that there will be 11, 500 fewer inmates in four years (alternative source) because voters in November approved earlier releases for many inmates. The price for each inmate has doubled since 2005, even as court orders related to overcrowding have reduced the population by about one-quarter. Salaries and benefits for prison guards and medical providers drove much of the increase. The result is a per-inmate cost that is the nation’s highest — and $2, 000 above tuition, fees, room and board, and other expenses to attend Harvard. Since 2015, California’s per-inmate costs have surged nearly $10, 000, or about 13%. New York is a distant second in overall costs at about $69, 000. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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At $75,560, Housing a Prisoner in California Now Costs More Than a Year at Harvard

Microsoft Leak Reveals New Windows 10 Workstation Edition For Power Users

Upon close inspection of the Windows 10 build that Microsoft accidentally pushed to insiders last week, several users are reporting discovering the reference of a new Windows 10 SKU. From a report: In a leaked slide, Microsoft describes the edition as “Windows 10 Pro for Workstation” with four main capabilities: 1. Workstation mode: Microsoft plans to optimize the OS by identifying “typical compute and graphics intensive workloads” to provide peak performance and reliability when Workstation mode is enabled. 2. Resilient file system: Microsoft’s file system successor to NTFS, dubbed ReFS, is enabled in this new version, with support for fault-tolerance, optimized for large data volumes, and auto-correcting. 3. Faster file handling: As workstation machines are typically used for large data volumes across networks, Microsoft is including the SMBDirect protocol for file sharing and high throughput, low latency, and low CPU utilization when accessing network shares. 4. Expanded hardware support: Microsoft is also planning to allow Windows 10 Pro for Workstation on machines with up to 4 CPUs and a memory limit of 6TB. Windows 10 Pro currently only supports 2 CPUs. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft Leak Reveals New Windows 10 Workstation Edition For Power Users

Pioneering Link-Sharing Site Del.icio.us Shuts Down

Long-time Slashdot reader brentlaminack writes: One of the first and best social bookmarking platforms, Del.icio.us has changed hands about four times, one was to Yahoo for > $15M. Its most recent relaunch was over a year back, which was their last blog entry. Now images are broken, little “advertisement” blocks show up with no advertisements, things seem moribund. What’s the deal? The Next Web reports: It’s the end of the road for social bookmarking website del.icio.us. After almost fifteen years, the site has been acquired by rival Pinboard, and will be shuttered on June 15, when it goes into read-only mode. While the site will continue to be viewable, users won’t be able to save any new bookmarks. Del.icio.us pioneered the social bookmarking paradigm. Its influence can be seen everywhere, from Reddit to Twitter… After del.icio.us was acquired by AVOS Systems in 2011, users fled to Pinboard in droves over complaints AVOS was fundamentally changing the makeup of the site. By purchasing del.icio.us, Pinboard is able to coax the few remaining del.icio.us users to jump ship. Depending on how much Pinboard paid for the site, how many users remain, and how many users Pinboard is able to convert, this could be a financially lucrative move. A Pinboard subscription costs $11 per annum. A late update to the article includes a quote from Pinboard founder Maciej Ceglowski. “In a statement, he said ‘I am the greatest.’ Ceglowski also confirmed the purchase price for del.icio.us, which was $35, 000.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Pioneering Link-Sharing Site Del.icio.us Shuts Down

Java 9 Delayed Due To Modularity Controversy

An anonymous reader quotes InfoWorld: Java 9 won’t be released on July 27 after all. Oracle has proposed that Java 9 Standard Edition be delayed until September 21 so the open source community that is finalizing Java 9 can address the ongoing controversy over a planned but later rejected approach to modularity, said Georges Saab, vice president of software development in the Java platform group at Oracle and chairman of the OpenJDK governing board… The [Java Platform Module System] measure was sent back to the proposal’s expert group for further discussion. Since then, the group has reached consensus on addressing the modularity concerns, Saab said. But they cannot rework Java 9 in time for the original July 27 release date… If the revised JSR 376 approved, as expected, work can proceed on implementing it in the official version of Java 9 SE. This setback for Java 9s upcoming upgrade, however, should just be temporary, with Oracle expecting a more rapid cadence of Java SE releases going forward, Saab said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Java 9 Delayed Due To Modularity Controversy

JRR Tolkien Book ‘Beren and Luthien’ Published After 100 Years

seoras quotes a report from BBC: A new book by Lord of the Rings author JRR Tolkien is going on sale — 100 years after it was first conceived. Beren and Luthien has been described as a “very personal story” that the Oxford professor thought up after returning from the Battle of the Somme. It was edited by his son Christopher Tolkien and contains versions of a tale that became part of The Silmarillion. The book features illustrations by Alan Lee, who won an Academy Award for his work on Peter Jackson’s film trilogy. It is being published on Thursday by HarperCollins on the 10th anniversary of the last Middle Earth book, The Children of Hurin. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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JRR Tolkien Book ‘Beren and Luthien’ Published After 100 Years

Hollywood Sees Illegal Streaming Devices as ‘Piracy 3.0’

After hunting down torrent sites for more than a decade, Hollywood now has a more complex piracy threat to deal with. From a report: Piracy remains a major threat for the movie industry, MPA Stan McCoy said yesterday during a panel session at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. Much like Hollywood, copyright infringers are innovators who constantly change their “business models” and means of obtaining content. Where torrents were dominant a few years ago, illegal streaming devices are now the main threat, with McCoy describing their rise as Piracy 3.0. “Piracy is not a static challenge. The pirates are great innovators in their own right. So even as we innovate in trying to pursue these issues, and pursue novel ways of fighting piracy, the pirates are out there coming up with new business models of their own, ” McCoy said. “If you think of old-fashioned peer-to-peer piracy as 1.0, and then online illegal streaming websites as 2.0, in the audio-visual sector, in particular, we now face challenge number 3.0, which is what I’ll call the challenge of illegal streaming devices.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Hollywood Sees Illegal Streaming Devices as ‘Piracy 3.0’

Wikipedia’s Switch To HTTPS Has Successfully Fought Government Censorship

Determining how to prevent acts of censorship has long been a priority for the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, and thanks to new research from the Harvard Center for Internet and Society, the foundation seems to have found a solution: encryption. From a report: HTTPS prevents governments and others from seeing the specific page users are visiting. For example, a government could tell that a user is browsing Wikipedia, but couldn’t tell that the user is specifically reading the page about Tiananmen Square. Up until 2015, Wikipedia offered its service using both HTTP and HTTPS, which meant that when countries like Pakistan or Iran blocked the certain articles on the HTTP version of Wikipedia, the full version would still be available using HTTPS. But in June 2015, Wikipedia decided to axe HTTP access and only offer access to its site with HTTPS. The Harvard researchers began by deploying an algorithm which detected unusual changes in Wikipedia’s global server traffic for a year beginning in May 2015. This data was then combined with a historical analysis of the daily request histories for some 1.7 million articles in 286 different languages from 2011 to 2016 in order to determine possible censorship events. After a painstakingly long process of manual analysis of potential censorship events, the researchers found that, globally, Wikipedia’s switch to HTTPS had a positive effect on the number censorship events by comparing server traffic from before and after the switch in June of 2015. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Wikipedia’s Switch To HTTPS Has Successfully Fought Government Censorship

IT Crash Causes British Airways To Cancel All Flights

An anonymous reader quotes CNBC: British Airways canceled all flights from London’s Heathrow and Gatwick airports on Saturday as a global IT failure upended the travel plans of tens of thousands of people on a busy U.K. holiday weekend. The airline said it was suffering a “major IT systems failure” around the world. Chief executive Alex Cruz said “we believe the root cause was a power-supply issue and we have no evidence of any cyberattack.” He said the crash had affected “all of our check-in and operational systems.” BA operates hundreds of flights from the two London airports on a typical day — and both are major hubs for worldwide travel. Several hours after problems began cropping up Saturday morning, BA suspended flights up to 6 p.m. because the two airports had become severely congested. The airline later scrapped flights from Heathrow and Gatwick for the rest of the day. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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IT Crash Causes British Airways To Cancel All Flights

New OS/2 Warp Operating System ‘ArcaOS’ 5.0 Released

The long-awaited modern OS/2 distribution from Arca Noae was released Monday. martiniturbide writes: ArcaOS 5.0 is an OEM distribution of IBM’s discontinued OS/2 Warp operating system. ArcaOS offers a new set of drivers for ACPI, network, USB, video and mouse to run OS/2 in newer hardware. It also includes a new OS installer and open source software like Samba, Libc libraries, SDL, Qt, Firefox and OpenOffice… It’s available in two editions, Personal ($129 with an introductory price of $99 for the first 90 days [and six months of support and maintenance updates]) and Commercial ($239 with one year of support and maintenance). The OS/2 community has been called upon to report supported hardware, open source any OS/2 software, make public as much OS/2 documentation as possible and post the important platform links. OS2World insists that open source has helped OS/2 in the past years and it is time to look under the hood to try to clone internal components like Control Program, Presentation Manager, SOM and Workplace Shell. By Tuesday Arca Noae was reporting “excessive traffic on the server which is impacting our ordering and delivery process, ” though the actual downloads of the OS were unaffected, the server load issues were soon mitigated, and they thanked OS/2 enthusiasts for a “truly overwhelming response.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New OS/2 Warp Operating System ‘ArcaOS’ 5.0 Released