Yes, Torvalds said he'd love to have one of the new M1-powered Apple laptops, but it won't run Linux and, in an exclusive interview he explains why getting Linux to run well on it isn't worth the trouble. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes via ZDNet: Recently, on the Real World Technologies forum, Linux's creator Linus Torvalds was asked what he thought of the new M1-powered Apple laptops. Torvalds replied, "I'd absolutely love to have one if it just ran Linux." You may think, "what's the problem? Doesn't Linux run on practically every processor on the planet from 80386s to IBM s390x to the ARM family of which Apple's M1 chip is a child?" Well, yes, yes it does. But it takes more than a processor to run a computer.

Torvalds would like to run Linux on these next-generation Macs. As he said, "I've been waiting for an ARM laptop that can run Linux for a long time. The new Air would be almost perfect, except for the OS. And I don't have the time to tinker with it, or the inclination to fight companies that don't want to help." Aye, there's the rub. In an exclusive interview, Torvalds expanded on why he can't see porting Linux to the M1-based Macs. "The main problem with the M1 for me is the GPU and other devices around it, because that's likely what would hold me off using it because it wouldn't have any Linux support unless Apple opens up."

Still, while Torvalds knows Apple opening up their chipsets "seems unlikely, but hey, you can always hope." Even if that "wasn't an issue," Torvalds continued, "My personal hope would be more cores. Even in a laptop, I don't care about 20-hour battery life (and I wouldn't get it building kernels anyway). I'd rather plug it in a bit more often, and have 8 big cores." As for the Mac's limited RAM -- no more than 16GBs on current models -- he can live with that. "16GBs is actually ok by me because I don't tend to do things that require a lot more RAM. All I do is read email, do git and kernel compiles. And yes, I have 64GB in my desktop, but that's because I have 32 cores and 64 threads, and I do hugely parallel builds. Honestly, even then 32GB would be sufficient for my loads." That said, other developers and power users may want more from the new Macs, Torvalds thinks. "The people who really want tons of memory are the ones doing multiple VMs or huge RAW file photography and video."

Earlier this year, Twitter started flagging disputed and potentially misleading tweets. Now, it's expanding the feature so that you'll also get a warning if you attempt to "like" a disputed tweet. Engadget reports: Tapping the heart button on a post that's been labeled as misleading will trigger a prompt with a "Find out more" button to pop up. App experimental feature researcher Jane Manchun Wong discovered the expanded function earlier this month. The tweets she tested, which were related to the elections, showed a warning that says "Official sources may not have called the race when this was tweeted."

A week after election day, Twitter revealed that it labeled 300,000 tweets as misleading between October 27th and November 11th. Out of all those, 456 were blocked from being retweeted or liked and were hidden behind a warning before they could even be viewed. The company says its efforts have led to a 29 percent decrease in quoted tweets containing misleading information. In other Twitter news, the company said today that it would relaunch its verification process early next year along with brand-new guidelines for users seeking out that small, blue badge.

The European Union could produce enough batteries by 2025 to power its fast-growing fleet of electric vehicles without relying on imported cells, European Commission Vice President Maros Sefcovic said on Tuesday. Reuters reports: As part of its plan to become climate neutral by 2050, the EU wants to boost local production of the building blocks for green industries -- including hydrogen fuel to make low-carbon steel and batteries to power clean vehicles. "I am confident that by 2025, the EU will be able to produce enough battery cells to meet the needs of the European automotive industry, and even to build our export capacity," Sefcovic told the online European Conference on Batteries. Today, China hosts roughly 80% of the world's lithium-ion cell production, but Europe's capacity is set to expand fast.

Europe has 15 large-scale battery cell factories under construction, including Swedish company Northvolt's plants in Sweden and Germany, Chinese battery maker CATL's German facility, and South Korean firm SK Innovation's second plant in Hungary. Sefcovic said by 2025 planned European facilities would produce enough cells to power at least 6 million electric vehicles.

Mayor Eric Garcetti announced last week the city's first Transportation Technology Innovation Zone, an area where innovators can test their transportation technology solutions. Archinect reports: Located in the West San Fernando Valley, the zone is the result of a partnership between Mayor Garcetti and City Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, "designed to transform Warner Center into one of L.A.'s mobility innovation and workforce development hubs." "Transportation and technology each have the ability to connect communities, create jobs, and contribute to progress on sustainability, equity, and economic growth -- and Los Angeles takes pride in serving as a testing ground for dynamic and innovative mobility solutions," said Mayor Garcetti in his announcement. "The first-ever Transportation Technology Innovation Zone will unite local businesses, workers, and inventors around how to revolutionize mobility in the West Valley, and it will serve as a model for what's possible as more zones come online in areas across Los Angeles."

The new initiatives is one of the flagship programs of Urban Movement Labs (UML), the transportation solutions accelerator launched by Mayor Garcetti in November 2019. "L.A. is at the forefront of the mobility revolution in our country and across the globe," said Lilly Shoup, Interim Executive Director of Urban Movement Labs in a statement. "With initiatives like the Urban Movement Labs, which accelerates transportation solutions, and the Open Mobility Foundation, which gives policymakers the digital tools they need to govern emerging mobility, Mayor Garcetti and LADOT are leading the conversation on how to embed equity, sustainability, and accessibility into our urban mobility future."

Last month, Facebook announced a crackdown: The platform would no longer permit content that "denies or distorts the Holocaust" as part of its larger policy prohibiting hate speech. From a report: While noting that successful enforcement could take time, Monika Bickert, Facebook's vice president of content policy, explained the ban in a blog post. "Our decision is supported by the well-documented rise in anti-Semitism globally and the alarming level of ignorance about the Holocaust, especially among young people," she wrote. But as of mid-November, The Markup has found, numerous Facebook pages for well-known Holocaust denial groups remain active -- and for users who find the pages, Facebook's algorithms continue to recommend related content, effectively creating a network for pushing anti-Semitic content. Facebook has long struggled to tamp down on quick-traveling misinformation and shape-shifting conspiracy groups, but many of the discriminatory pages The Markup found either belonged to groups with a long history of prominence within the Holocaust denial movement or directly referenced well-known anti-Semitic or white nationalist memes, making them seem like obvious targets for Facebook's crackdown. It's unclear whether Facebook considers the posts and groups The Markup found unacceptable. The company did not announce how it would define Holocaust denialism, and the company did not respond to multiple requests for comment; all the pages and posts referenced in this article were still active as of Nov. 23 at 5 p.m. ET.

Snapchat on Monday launched Spotlight, a video tab within its app that, like TikTok, distributes videos based more on how popular they are than on who created them. Facebook in August launched its TikTok competitor, called Reels. From a report: Snapchat's news comes days after Twitter said it would be adding "Fleets," which are basically Snapchat stories for people who tweet. (Nearly every social media app has launched some version of Stories in the past few years.) Tech platforms used to focus on ways to create wildly different products to attract audiences. Today, they all have similar features, and instead differentiate themselves with their philosophies, values and use cases.

Twitter announced today that it would relaunch its verification process early next year along with brand-new guidelines for users seeking out that small, blue badge. From a report: Twitter's announcement confirms earlier reporting in June from app researcher Jane Manchun Wong suggesting that the company was creating a new verification system. In Twitter's Tuesday blog post, the company confirmed that this new system would roll out in "early 2021." Twitter is also asking for feedback on a draft proposal for verification. If no changes to this proposal are made, the accounts that would be eligible for verification would include government accounts, companies, brands, nonprofits, news media accounts, entertainment, sports, activists, organizers, and what Twitter refers to as "other influential individuals." Each type of account must meet specific requirements, like being profiled in a media outlet, in order to receive verification. The entirety of Twitter's draft policy can be viewed here. After receiving feedback, Twitter plans to release the final policy on December 17th. Twitter also announced new draft rules explaining when a verification badge could be taken away. If a verified user changes their display name or bio to mislead people on their true identity, Twitter could pull their badge. Repeat terms of service violations could also lead to loss of verified status.

Surging Tesla shares have pushed the company's market capitalization to more than $515 billion, a fivefold increase since the start of the year. From a report: The traditionally volatile stock has continued to experience price swings. But since reaching a low for the year in March, Tesla's share price has been on an upwards trajectory that accelerated in August. Tesla's share price, which rose 4.6% in morning trading to $545.62, has helped blast its CEO Elon Musk into the upper stratosphere of Bloomberg's Billionaire Index. As of Tuesday, Musk's net worth had risen $7.24 billion to more than $128 billion. Only Amazon's Jeff Bezos stands in his way to becoming the world's wealthiest person. Tesla shares have been fueled over the past week by news that it will be added to the S&P 500 index in December. Since Friday, the company has added more than $52 billion to its market cap -- the equivalent of adding nearly one and a half Ford Motor Co., to its valuation.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: OneWeb has emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy under new ownership and says it will begin launching more broadband satellites next month. Similar to SpaceX Starlink, OneWeb is building a network of low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites that can provide high-speed broadband with much lower latencies than traditional geostationary satellites. After a launch in December, "launches will continue throughout 2021 and 2022 and OneWeb is now on track to begin commercial connectivity services to the UK and the Arctic region in late 2021 and will expand to delivering global services in 2022," OneWeb said in an announcement Friday.

In March this year, OneWeb filed for bankruptcy and reportedly laid off most of its staff. In July, OneWeb agreed to sell the business to a consortium including the UK government and Bharti Global Limited for $1 billion. In the Friday announcement, OneWeb said it has secured "all relevant regulatory approvals" needed to exit bankruptcy. "Together with our UK Government partner, we recognized that OneWeb has valuable global spectrum with priority rights, and we benefit from $3.3 billion invested to date and from the satellites already in orbit, securing our usage rights," Bharti founder and Chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal said.

The U.K.-based security company NCC Group and consumer advocacy group Which? have found vulnerabilities in 11 "smart" doorbells sold on popular platforms like Amazon and eBay. CyberScoop reports: One flaw could allow a remote attacker to break into the wireless network by swiping login credentials. Another critical bug, which has been around for years, could enable attackers to intercept and manipulate data on the network. The investigation focused on doorbells made by often obscure vendors, but which nonetheless earned top reviews and featured prominently on Amazon and eBay. The researchers raised concerns that some of the devices were storing sensitive data, including location data and audio and video captured by the doorbell's camera, on insecure servers. One device made by a company called Victure, for example, sent a user's wireless name and password, unencrypted, to servers in China, according to the researchers.

In a statement, Amazon said it requires products sold on its site to be compliant with applicable laws and regulations, and that it has tools to detect "unsafe or non-compliant products from being listed in our stores." eBay said it takes down listings that violate its safety standards, but that the devices flagged by the researchers did not meet that threshold. Victure did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The NCC Group-Which? team said they tried to contact the various vendors of the vulnerable smart doorbells, with mixed success. The unnamed vendor of one device, for example, removed an online listing for the product after the researchers shared their findings.

Foxconn plans to assemble key components for Google servers from its plant in Wisconsin, people familiar with the matter said, finally breathing life into a factory Donald Trump hailed as crucial to bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. Bloomberg reports: The Taiwanese company has decided to locate production for this new contract at the existing complex rather than make the components at home or in China, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing a sensitive move. The under-utilized factory should start mass production in the first quarter, timed with the release of Intel Corp.'s Ice Lake server chips, they said. Foxconn is setting up surface-mount technology assembly lines that it will use to place semiconductors onto circuit boards, they added. A Foxconn representative confirmed it's developing data center infrastructure and high-performance computing "capabilities" in Wisconsin, but declined to name any customers.

Taiwan counts Washington as an essential diplomatic, economic and military ally amid rising tensions with Beijing. Foxconn, which operates most of its factories in central and southern China, won Google's business because it was the only contract manufacturer capable of establishing a surface-mount technology line on American soil, one of the people said. Shanghai-listed Foxconn Industrial Internet Co., its cloud business unit, will oversee the server business in Wisconsin, another person familiar with Foxconn's operations said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Comcast's 1.2TB monthly data cap is coming to 12 more states and the District of Columbia starting January 2021. The unpopular policy was already enforced in most of Comcast's 39-state US territory over the past few years, and the upcoming expansion will for the first time bring the cap to every market in Comcast's territory. Comcast will be providing some "courtesy months" in which newly capped customers can exceed 1.2TB without penalty, so the first overage charges for these customers will be assessed for data usage in the April 2021 billing period.

Comcast's data cap has been imposed since 2016 in 27 of the 39 states in Comcast's cable territory. The cap-less parts of Comcast's network include Northeastern states where the cable company faces competition from Verizon's un-capped FiOS fiber-to-the-home broadband service. But last week, an update to Comcast's website said that the cap is coming to Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia. The cap is also coming to parts of Virginia and Ohio where it wasn't already implemented. In all, Comcast has nearly 28 million residential Internet customers. "Comcast's overage charges are $10 for each additional block of 50GB, up to a maximum of $100 each month," notes Ars. "Customers can avoid overage charges by spending an extra $30 a month on unlimited data or $25 for the 'xFi Complete' plan that includes unlimited data and the rental cost for Comcast's xFi gateway modem and router."

New submitter thegreatbob shares a report: The General Image Manipulation Program, GIMP, has turned 25. A brief celebration post detailed how the package started life as a July 1995 Usenet thought bubble by then-student Peter Mattis, who posted the following to several newsgroups: Suppose someone decided to write a graphical image manipulation program (akin to photoshop). Out of curiosity (and maybe something else), I have a few (2) questions: What kind of features should it have? (tools, selections, filters, etc.) What file formats should it support? (jpeg, gif, tiff, etc.)" Four months later, Mattis and fellow University of California Berkeley student Spencer Kimball delivered what they described as software "designed to provide an intuitive graphical interface to a variety of image editing operations."

The software ran on Linux 1.2.13, Solaris 2.4, HPUX 9.05, and SGI IRIX. The answer to the file format support question turned out to be GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and XPM. The rest is history. Richard Stallman gave Mattis and Kimball permission to change the "General" in its name to "GNU", reflecting its open-source status. Today the program is released under the GNU General Public License. As the program added features such as layers, it grew more popular and eventually became a byword for offering a FOSS alternative to Photoshop even though the project pushes back against that description. The project's celebration page says volunteers did their "best to provide a sensible workflow to users by using common user interface patterns. That gave us a few questionable monikers like 'Photoshop for Linux', 'free Photoshop', and 'that ugly piece of software'. We still can wholeheartedly agree with the latter one only!"

Bernard Meyer, reporting for CyberNews: In a collaboration between CyberNews Sr. Information Security Researcher Mantas Sasnauskas and researchers James Clee and Roni Carta, suspicious backdoors have been discovered in a Chinese-made Jetstream router, sold exclusively at Walmart as their new line of "affordable" wifi routers. This backdoor would allow an attacker the ability to remotely control not only the routers, but also any devices connected to that network. CyberNews reached out to Walmart for comment and to understand whether they were aware of the Jetstream backdoor, and what they plan to do to protect their customers. After we sent information about the affected Jetstream device, a Walmart spokesperson informed CyberNews: "Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We are looking into the issue to learn more. The item in question is currently out of stock and we do not have plans to replenish it."

Besides the Walmart-exclusive Jetstream router, the cybersecurity research team also discovered that low-cost Wavlink routers, normally sold on Amazon or eBay, have similar backdoors. The Wavlink routers also contain a script that lists nearby wifi and has the capability to connect to those networks. We have also found evidence that these backdoors are being actively exploited, and there's been an attempt to add the devices to a Mirai botnet. Mirai is malware that infects devices connected to a network, turns them into remotely controlled bots as part of a botnet, and uses them in large-scale attacks. The most famous of these is the 2016 Dyn DNS cyberattack, which brought down major websites like Reddit, Netflix, CNN, GitHub, Twitter, Airbnb and more.

President-elect Joe Biden's top technology adviser helped craft California's landmark online privacy law and recently condemned a controversial federal statute that protects internet companies from liability, indicators of how the Biden administration may come down on two key tech policy issues. From a report: Bruce Reed, a former Biden chief of staff who is expected to take a major role in the new administration, helped negotiate with the tech industry and legislators on behalf of backers of a ballot initiative that led to the 2018 California Consumer Privacy Act. Privacy advocates see that law as a possible model for a national law. Reed also co-authored a chapter in a book published last month denouncing the federal law known as Section 230, which makes it impossible to sue internet companies over the content of user postings. Both Republicans and Democrats have called for reforming or abolishing 230, which critics say has allowed abuse to flourish on social media. Reed, a veteran political operative, was chief of staff for Biden from 2011 to 2013, when Biden was U.S. vice president. In that role, he succeeded Ron Klain, who was recently named incoming White House chief of staff. Reed then served as president of the Broad Foundation, a major Los Angeles philanthropic organization, and later as an adviser to Laurene Powell Jobs' Emerson Collective in Palo Alto, California.

Google is loosening control over the core of its Chrome browser, a move that helps Microsoft, Samsung and Brave build competitors while advancing the search giant's vision of the web. From a report: Over the past six months, Google welcomed a new outside developer into the leadership of its Chromium project, the software that powers the similarly named browser. The Alphabet subsidiary is also granting outsiders access to its previously proprietary software development system and allows outside features even when Google doesn't incorporate them into the flagship Chrome browser.

Chromium is open-source software, which means anyone can modify and use it. Even with open source projects, however, outsiders can have trouble convincing organizers to accept their changes and additions, making it harder to contribute and benefit. Google took pains to draw attention to the changes at the BlinkOn conference earlier this week. "It's really cool to see so many people and groups with different priorities coming together and finding solutions that not only meet their individual agendas but also advance the common goal of improving the web," said Danyao Wang, a Chrome engineer at Google.

Romello Goodman, a software engineer at The New York Times, writing at Increment: Like a sourdough starter passed through the hands of many bakers -- some novices, some experienced -- a codebase reflects how teammates communicate with one another. It's a snapshot of our thinking and our best attempts at codifying norms and assumptions. It's a conversation in which each person contributes and is in conversation with those who came before them. With each new feature or bug report, we understand our code better. We identify areas where new logic doesn't quite fit with existing logic. We're constantly in touch with our own past decisions and those of our coworkers. We're working together, trying to harmonize and match one another's thinking patterns and assumptions. We trust one another to make decisions for the good of the team and the organization. Every piece of new code adds to the culture and cultivates our shared understanding.

If code is sourdough, we have an opportunity to better appreciate the histories and context that have gone into it. In software, we tend to think of legacy code as something that should be thrown away or rewritten, often conflating a codebase's age with its health and viability. But code doesn't age in a vacuum. If sourdough can be passed down from person to person over decades, then so can code. The preservation of decisions and experience is tied to the preservation of our codebase. Even when the code itself is no longer being updated, documentation around the logic or the underlying platform and adjacent technologies can keep a codebase and its culture vibrant. You can then pass that culture on for another team to bake with. It might just taste better than you'd expect.

The Solomon Islands Government has defended its decision to place a temporary ban on Facebook, a move it says is aimed at tackling cyberbullying and online defamation. From a report: The ban, which has not yet come into effect, received an angry response online after it was announced last week. Communications officials are expected to meet with internet and telecommunications providers in Solomon Islands to discuss how they will block the world's largest social media network. Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare told the nation's Parliament the ban was necessary in order to preserve national unity. "Cyberbullying on Facebook is widespread, people have been defamed by users who use fake names, and people's reputations that have been built up over the years [are destroyed] in a matter of minutes," he said. Mr Sogavare said the planned ban mainly targeted young people, but said it was aimed at protecting them from "vile abusive language" and not an attempt at silencing them.

In some of the most remote and impoverished corners of the world, where respiratory illnesses abound and trained medical professionals fear to tread, diagnosis is increasingly powered by artificial intelligence and the internet. From a report: In less than a minute, a new app on a phone or a computer can scan an X-ray for signs of tuberculosis, Covid-19 and 27 other conditions. TB, the most deadly infectious disease in the world, claimed nearly 1.4 million lives last year. The app, called qXR, is one of many A.I.-based tools that have emerged over the past few years for screening and diagnosing TB. The tools offer hope of flagging the disease early and cutting the cost of unnecessary lab tests. Used at large scale, they may also spot emerging clusters of disease.

"Among all of the applications of A.I., I think digitally interpreting an image using an algorithm instead of a human radiologist is probably furthest along," said Madhukar Pai, the director of the McGill International TB Center in Montreal. Artificial intelligence cannot replace clinicians, Dr. Pai and other experts cautioned. But the combination of A.I. and clinical expertise is proving to be powerful. "The machine plus clinician is better than the clinician, and it's also better than machine alone," said Dr. Eric Topol, the director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in San Diego and the author of a book on the use of A.I. in medicine. In India, where roughly one-quarter of the world's TB cases occur, an app that can flag the disease in remote locations is urgently needed.

This week Purism began shipping its mass-produced Librem 5 phone to customers, according to announcement from the company: The Librem 5 is a one-of-a-kind general-purpose computer in a phone form-factor that Purism has designed and built from scratch following a successful crowdfunding campaign that raised over $2.2 million. Both the hardware and software design is focused on respecting the end user's freedom and giving them control over their privacy and security.

The Librem 5 doesn't run Android nor iOS but instead runs the same PureOS operating system as Purism's laptops and mini PC.

The Librem 5 has unique hardware features including a user-removable cellular modem, WiFi card, and battery. Like with Librem laptops, the Librem 5 also features external hardware kill switches that cut power to the cellular modem, WiFi/Bluetooth, and front and back cameras and microphone so that the user can control when these devices are in use. All hardware switches can also be triggered together to enable "lockdown mode" which also disables the GPS, accelerometer and all other sensors...

Another unique feature of the Librem 5 is convergence: the ability to connect the Librem 5 to a monitor or laptop dock and use it as a desktop computer running the same full-sized desktop applications as on Librem laptops. When in a phone form-factor, applications behave much like "responsive websites" and change their appearance for the smaller screen. This allows you to use the Librem 5 as a phone, a desktop, or a laptop with the same applications and same files.
Their announcement notes their work on software making desktop applications "adaptive" to phone form factors, adding "This suite of software has now become the most popular software stack to use on other handheld Linux hardware." And they close with an appreciative comment from Purism's founder and CEO Todd Weaver:

"Shipping the Librem 5 has been an immense multi-year developmental effort. It is the culmination of people's desire to see an alternative to Android and iOS and fund it, coupled with dedication from a team of experts addressing hardware, kernel, operating system, and applications that has turned a lofty near-impossible goal into reality. We have built a strong foundation and with the continued support of customers, the community, and developers, we will continue to deliver revolutionary products like the Librem 5 running PureOS."