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An anonymous reader shares a report: Prior to World War II the vast majority of telescopes built around the world were funded by wealthy people with an interest in the heavens above. However, after the war, two significant developments in the mid-20th century caused the burden of funding large astronomical instruments to largely shift to the government and academic institutions. First, as mirrors became larger and larger to see deeper into the universe, their costs grew exponentially. And then, with the advent of spaceflight, the expense of space-based telescopes expanded even further. But now the tide may be turning again. On Wednesday evening, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy, announced a major investment in not just one telescope project, but four. Each of these new telescopes brings a novel capability online; however, the most intriguing new instrument is a space-based telescope named Lazuli. This spacecraft, if successfully launched and deployed, would offer astronomers a more capable and modern version of the Hubble Space Telescope, which is now three decades old. A billionaire with a keen interest in science and technology, Schmidt and his wife did not disclose the size of his investment in the four telescopes, which collectively will be known as the Schmidt Observatory System. However, it likely is worth half a billion dollars, at a minimum.

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Logitech MX Anywhere 3S Mouse With Linux 6.19 Now Supports High Resolution Scrolling  Phoronix

Adam Wathan, the creator of the popular CSS framework Tailwind CSS, has let go of 75% of his engineering team -- reducing it from four people to one -- because AI-generated search answers have decimated traffic to the project's documentation pages. Traffic to Tailwind's documentation has fallen roughly 40% since early 2023 despite the framework being more popular than ever, Wathan wrote in a post. The documentation is the primary channel through which developers discover Tailwind's commercial products, and without that traffic the business has struggled to sustain itself; revenue has dropped close to 80%. The reduced team also means Wathan cannot currently prioritize implementing LLMS.txt, a proposed feature that would make documentation more accessible to large language models. "Tailwind is growing faster than it ever has and is bigger than it ever has been, and our revenue is down close to 80%," he wrote in the forum post.

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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has secured a temporary restraining order against Samsung, blocking the company from continuing to collect data through its smart TVs' Automated Content Recognition technology. The ACR system captured screenshots of what users were watching every 500 milliseconds, according to the state's lawsuit, and did so without consumer knowledge or consent. The District Court found good cause to believe Samsung's actions violated the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act. The TRO prohibits Samsung and any parties working in concert with the company from using, selling, transferring, collecting, or sharing ACR data tied to Texas consumers. Samsung is one of five major TV manufacturers the Texas Attorney General's office has sued over ACR deployment. Paxton previously secured a similar order against Hisense.

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I gave this security-centric Linux OS a try, and it's an ethical hacker's dream  XDA

Germany's Harz mountains, once known for their verdant spruce forests, have become a graveyard of skeletal trunks after a bark beetle outbreak ravaged the region starting in 2018 -- an infestation made possible by successive droughts and heatwaves that fatally weakened the trees. Between 2018 and 2021, Germany lost half a million hectares of forest, nearly 5% of the country's total. Since 2010, EU land carbon absorption has declined by a third, and Germany is now almost certain to miss its carbon sequestration targets, according to Prof Matthias Dieter, head of the Thunen Institute of Forestry. "You cannot force the forest to grow -- we cannot command how much their contribution should be towards our climate targets," he said. Foresters in the Harz are responding by abandoning monoculture plantations in favor of mixed-species approaches. Pockets of beech, firs, and sycamore are now being planted around surviving spruce. A 2018 study in Nature found tree diversity was the best protection against drought die-offs, and more recent PNAS research found that species richness protected tree growth during prolonged drought seasons. The approach marks a shift from Germany's pioneering modern forestry methods, which relied on single-species plantations now proved vulnerable to climate-driven disasters.

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This free tool gives you one easy way to install apps on Linux and Mac - here's how  ZDNET

The Myth of Linux Invincibility: Why Automated Patch Management is Key to Securing the Open Source Enterprise  Security Boulevard

The Myth of Linux Invincibility: Why Automated Patch Management is Key to Securing the Open Source Enterprise  Security Boulevard

The Myth of Linux Invincibility: Why Automated Patch Management is Key to Securing the Open Source Enterprise  Security Boulevard

Ethereum is the Linux of blockchain, says co-founder Vitalik Buterin  TradingView — Track All Markets

China has hacked the emails used by congressional staff on powerful committees in the US House of Representatives, as part of a massive cyber espionage campaign known as Salt Typhoon. An anonymous reader shares a report: Chinese intelligence accessed email systems used by some staffers [non-paywalled source] on the House China committee in addition to aides on the foreign affairs committee, intelligence committee and armed services committee, according to people familiar with the attack. The intrusions were detected in December. The attacks are the latest element of an ongoing cyber campaign against US communication networks by the Ministry of State Security, China's intelligence service. One person familiar with the attack said it was unclear if the MSS had accessed lawmakers' emails. The MSS has been operating Salt Typhoon for several years. It allows China to access the unencrypted phone calls, texts and voicemails of almost every American, and in some cases enables access to email accounts. Salt Typhoon has also intercepted the calls of senior US officials over the past couple of years, said people familiar with the campaign.

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Linux Foundation launches Agentic AI open standards hub  IT Brief UK

A 50-inch TV that would have set you back $1,100 at Best Buy during Black Friday 2001 now costs less than $200, and the price per area-pixel -- a metric accounting for both screen size and resolution -- has dropped by more than 90% over the past 25 years. The story behind this decline is largely one of liquid crystal display technology maturing from a niche product to a mass-manufactured commodity. LCDs represented just 5% of the TV market in 2004; by 2018, they commanded more than 95%. The largest driver of cost reduction has been the scaling up of "mother glass" sheets -- the large panels of extremely clear glass onto which semiconductor materials are deposited before being cut into individual displays. The first generation sheets measured roughly 12 by 16 inches. Today's Generation 10.5 sheets span 116 by 133 inches, nearly 100 times the original area. This scaling delivers substantial savings because equipment costs rise more slowly than glass area increases. Moving from Gen 4 to Gen 5 mother glass cut the cost per diagonal inch by 50%. Equipment costs per unit of panel area fell 80% between Gen 4 and Gen 8. Process improvements have compounded these gains: masking steps required for thin-film transistors dropped from eight to four, yields climbed from 50% to above 90%, and a "one drop fill" technique reduced liquid crystal filling time from days to minutes.

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I built a project management dashboard with Linux KDE Plasma widgets (no apps needed)  How-To Geek

GNOME’s Wayland Shift: Proposal to Disable Middle-Mouse Paste Sparks Debate  WebProNews

Linux 6.18 LTS vs. Liquorix Kernel On AMD Ryzen Threadripper Workstation Performance  Phoronix

Why do I use Linux? It's the apps, and here are 7 of my favorites  How-To Geek

5 reasons I stopped using Ubuntu  How-To Geek

China-Linked UAT-7290 Targets Telecoms with Linux Malware and ORB Nodes  The Hacker News