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Arch-based Manjaro Linux "has announced that Manjaro Project e.V. is now officially registered as a non-profit in Germany," reports Linuxiac, "and is therefore a legally separate entity from the commercial Manjaro GmbH & Co. KG... after months of internal wrangling over who was in charge of the project, who had access to the infrastructure and who didn't, and the relationship between the dev team and the commercial company..."
The restructuring goes back to March, when the Manjaro developers released the Manjaro 2.0 Manifesto, which was a very public critique of the way Manjaro was being run. The document claims that decision-making has effectively become the sole domain of the project founder, Philip Müller, with the other developers having very limited access to the infrastructure. There's also a concern about the drop in participation, the persistent technical issues, and the continued prioritization of commercial interests over the actual development of the distribution...
The manifesto proposed the transfer of all project infrastructure, domains, repositories and community funds to the new organization, together with arrangements for the use of the Manjaro trademark. The contributors were warning that they might well consider forking the distro if the talks didn't go their way. Müller then indicated that he'd be happy to talk about the proposed structure once the non-profit was in place. The association is now formally registered, and so one of the key aims of the manifesto has been realized...
Perhaps the most important point is the actual evolution of the distribution. The most recent testing and stable updates were kicked off by the Manjaro team themselves, without any oversight from Müller. This points to the developers having already started to operate on their own in an area which was previously the preserve of the project's founder. They're also in the process of optimizing their dev infrastructure, in part as a response to the continued automated bot attacks on the existing infrastructure.
Thanks to Slashdot reader king*jojo for sharing the news.
The restructuring goes back to March, when the Manjaro developers released the Manjaro 2.0 Manifesto, which was a very public critique of the way Manjaro was being run. The document claims that decision-making has effectively become the sole domain of the project founder, Philip Müller, with the other developers having very limited access to the infrastructure. There's also a concern about the drop in participation, the persistent technical issues, and the continued prioritization of commercial interests over the actual development of the distribution...
The manifesto proposed the transfer of all project infrastructure, domains, repositories and community funds to the new organization, together with arrangements for the use of the Manjaro trademark. The contributors were warning that they might well consider forking the distro if the talks didn't go their way. Müller then indicated that he'd be happy to talk about the proposed structure once the non-profit was in place. The association is now formally registered, and so one of the key aims of the manifesto has been realized...
Perhaps the most important point is the actual evolution of the distribution. The most recent testing and stable updates were kicked off by the Manjaro team themselves, without any oversight from Müller. This points to the developers having already started to operate on their own in an area which was previously the preserve of the project's founder. They're also in the process of optimizing their dev infrastructure, in part as a response to the continued automated bot attacks on the existing infrastructure.
Thanks to Slashdot reader king*jojo for sharing the news.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
UPDATE: FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said Saturday that U,S. airlines will likely cancel 4,000 to 5,000 of the roughly 41,000 flights scheduled for Saturday, reports Yahoo News. And as to the cause of the incident...
[U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean] Duffy said a router involved in the switch from copper wire to fiber "started flooding other routers in our air traffic control system." The system saw "over 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds," he said. That disrupted communications with airplanes and radar.
America's nationwide grounding of flights on Friday happened "amid growing scrutiny... of a new AI-powered air traffic management system" deployed by America's Federal Aviation Administration, reports Texas news station KXAN.
Ironically, that system is called SMART — but the outage happened "following warnings" from members of the U.S. Congress about this new AI system's safety, reliability and oversight:
In an Oct. 13 letter to the Government Accountability Office, more than 20 members of Congress requested an independent review of the FAA's development and implementation of its Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories system, known as SMART. The lawmakers questioned whether the technology was being deployed with adequate input from frontline air traffic controllers, sufficient training and appropriate safety evaluations... In their letter to the GAO, the lawmakers specifically questioned whether the FAA had adequately evaluated risks associated with SMART's artificial intelligence capabilities, including the potential for the technology to interfere with experienced controllers' decision-making or generate inaccurate safety-critical information. "The nation's frontline aviation safety workforce apparently had little to no input into SMART's development and have received limited training and information during the current deployment process," the lawmakers wrote. The letter also questioned the FAA's decision to initially pilot the technology in heavily congested airspace, including the National Capital Region.
"Our switches, our routers, actually got overloaded with data," U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy acknowledged Friday.
But FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said Saturday that officials have found "zero evidence of anything AI related" in Friday's outage, according to Yahoo News.
An article from The Hill.com notes that Duffy also said the new AI tool had nothing to do with the ground stop, and that he said the system "isn't plugged in."
"This is completely disconnected, and I love that some people have said this would be the root cause. By the way, if it was, I'll tell you that, but this is not even plugged in," he said. "So, there's no possible way SMART would have impacted."
Duffy also asked Congress for $50 billion to rebuild what he described as an "incredibly old" air traffic control system.
Duffy had posted the day before that the AI system had been at least partially rolled out and that it was already working (adding "Soon this technology is going NATIONWIDE")
And Friday CNN's aviation analyst said they believed that AI system could be connected to the nationwide outage, calling it "a tremendous amount of coincidence," according to a report from Mediaite:
CNN Aviation Analyst: "Many times in the past, what we have seen, and this has gone back decades, is that because air traffic control is this piecemeal, mishmash of a whole bunch of different systems... some going back to radio, telephones and floppy disks... when they put in new computer systems, they often have difficulty talking with, communicating with, or working with the much older systems. And I have to say, it's a tremendous amount of coincidence... If they're putting in new software now, this new SMART system to start managing that, and now we have a communications outage, I'm — we've seen this so many times in the past. I don't know if they're linked, but it's just too much coincidence that they were trying to start that moving today, and now we have problems with the en route system.
So if I was to guess — and we haven't heard any, you know, it's not that it's threats or criminals or terrorists. We haven't heard anything like that. So I am guessing that once again we have a problem with new air traffic control computer systems, AI — you know, modern systems trying to communicate with old systems. And we have just seen this so many times in the past, and it's a big problem... Our whole national airspace system is you know, pieces and parts. It's kind of a Franken-system. And that would be my guess, that they are having computer issues by putting the new software in with the old, just because today they announced that that were going to do this new system.
KXAN describes some of the complexity of the newly-launched AI system:
According to the FAA, the system consolidates approximately 200 data streams, including airline schedules, flight paths, weather patterns, airport capacity, airspace conditions and air traffic controller staffing metrics. The agency says SMART uses artificial intelligence to analyze that information, predict traffic flows, identify potential conflicts and recommend adjustments to flight routes and departure schedules before disruptions occur. The FAA describes the technology as a shift from a reactive approach to a predictive one, allowing aviation officials to identify congestion, weather-related restrictions and other operational problems hours, days or even weeks in advance...
The congressional letter raised questions about whether the FAA's implementation strategy was moving faster than its safety evaluations, workforce training and independent oversight could support.
Ironically, the article points out that the FAA promoted anticipated benefits from the technology including fewer delays and flight cancellations. (Other anticipated benefits included improved on-time performance and faster recovery from weather disruptions.) Although the FAA has realized one of the system's anticipated benefits: reduced fuel consumption.
[U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean] Duffy said a router involved in the switch from copper wire to fiber "started flooding other routers in our air traffic control system." The system saw "over 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds," he said. That disrupted communications with airplanes and radar.
America's nationwide grounding of flights on Friday happened "amid growing scrutiny... of a new AI-powered air traffic management system" deployed by America's Federal Aviation Administration, reports Texas news station KXAN.
Ironically, that system is called SMART — but the outage happened "following warnings" from members of the U.S. Congress about this new AI system's safety, reliability and oversight:
In an Oct. 13 letter to the Government Accountability Office, more than 20 members of Congress requested an independent review of the FAA's development and implementation of its Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories system, known as SMART. The lawmakers questioned whether the technology was being deployed with adequate input from frontline air traffic controllers, sufficient training and appropriate safety evaluations... In their letter to the GAO, the lawmakers specifically questioned whether the FAA had adequately evaluated risks associated with SMART's artificial intelligence capabilities, including the potential for the technology to interfere with experienced controllers' decision-making or generate inaccurate safety-critical information. "The nation's frontline aviation safety workforce apparently had little to no input into SMART's development and have received limited training and information during the current deployment process," the lawmakers wrote. The letter also questioned the FAA's decision to initially pilot the technology in heavily congested airspace, including the National Capital Region.
"Our switches, our routers, actually got overloaded with data," U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy acknowledged Friday.
But FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said Saturday that officials have found "zero evidence of anything AI related" in Friday's outage, according to Yahoo News.
An article from The Hill.com notes that Duffy also said the new AI tool had nothing to do with the ground stop, and that he said the system "isn't plugged in."
"This is completely disconnected, and I love that some people have said this would be the root cause. By the way, if it was, I'll tell you that, but this is not even plugged in," he said. "So, there's no possible way SMART would have impacted."
Duffy also asked Congress for $50 billion to rebuild what he described as an "incredibly old" air traffic control system.
Duffy had posted the day before that the AI system had been at least partially rolled out and that it was already working (adding "Soon this technology is going NATIONWIDE")
And Friday CNN's aviation analyst said they believed that AI system could be connected to the nationwide outage, calling it "a tremendous amount of coincidence," according to a report from Mediaite:
CNN Aviation Analyst: "Many times in the past, what we have seen, and this has gone back decades, is that because air traffic control is this piecemeal, mishmash of a whole bunch of different systems... some going back to radio, telephones and floppy disks... when they put in new computer systems, they often have difficulty talking with, communicating with, or working with the much older systems. And I have to say, it's a tremendous amount of coincidence... If they're putting in new software now, this new SMART system to start managing that, and now we have a communications outage, I'm — we've seen this so many times in the past. I don't know if they're linked, but it's just too much coincidence that they were trying to start that moving today, and now we have problems with the en route system.
So if I was to guess — and we haven't heard any, you know, it's not that it's threats or criminals or terrorists. We haven't heard anything like that. So I am guessing that once again we have a problem with new air traffic control computer systems, AI — you know, modern systems trying to communicate with old systems. And we have just seen this so many times in the past, and it's a big problem... Our whole national airspace system is you know, pieces and parts. It's kind of a Franken-system. And that would be my guess, that they are having computer issues by putting the new software in with the old, just because today they announced that that were going to do this new system.
KXAN describes some of the complexity of the newly-launched AI system:
According to the FAA, the system consolidates approximately 200 data streams, including airline schedules, flight paths, weather patterns, airport capacity, airspace conditions and air traffic controller staffing metrics. The agency says SMART uses artificial intelligence to analyze that information, predict traffic flows, identify potential conflicts and recommend adjustments to flight routes and departure schedules before disruptions occur. The FAA describes the technology as a shift from a reactive approach to a predictive one, allowing aviation officials to identify congestion, weather-related restrictions and other operational problems hours, days or even weeks in advance...
The congressional letter raised questions about whether the FAA's implementation strategy was moving faster than its safety evaluations, workforce training and independent oversight could support.
Ironically, the article points out that the FAA promoted anticipated benefits from the technology including fewer delays and flight cancellations. (Other anticipated benefits included improved on-time performance and faster recovery from weather disruptions.) Although the FAA has realized one of the system's anticipated benefits: reduced fuel consumption.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"When we need medical care, we expect decisions about our treatment to be made by our doctors, not a tech company's algorithm," writes the EFF newsletter EFFector.
But in January America's federal government launched a program called WISeR that uses AI to evaluate authorization requests for certain procedures from America's federal health insurance program for seniors, Medicare. EFF sued for records and discovered "additional issues" with the program that they say "could jeopardize Medicare beneficiaries' access to care."
The records we received revealed that WISeR has resulted in widespread delays and denials of care, operational chaos, and reports of patient harm. Further documents obtained by EFF show a rushed and rocky rollout, highlighting the dangers that arise when governments treat AI like a silver bullet for complex problems.
EFF has now published hundreds of pages of documents obtained through our lawsuit, available here... The documents also highlight the need for more transparency about safeguards against inappropriate, AI-driven denials. EFF has long argued that AI has no place in consequential government decisions about peoples' rights or access to benefits, such as immigration enforcement and policing decisions. That's because using automated decision-making in these contexts risks decisions that violate people's rights or deprive them of benefits they're entitled to based on biased or inappropriate considerations and without proper due process or accountability if there is an error. By outsourcing decision-making to private AI companies without sufficient transparency, testing, or legal limits, WISeR jeopardizes seniors' access to medical care. Congress should step in to place greater legal limits on the use of automated decision-making in Medicare.
The new documents "show why we need stronger legal limits around government use of automated decision-making..." according to the newsletter. And another EFF page argues that the American public "still lacks the information needed to assess whether clinician review is providing meaningful oversight of AI systems and whether appropriate data is being used to evaluate prior authorization requests."
WISeR's payment structure gives vendors, as the government put it, "an incentive to deny as many claims as possible...." [One company] denied more requests than it approved in the first few months of the program, and CMS inquired about "denials that appear inaccurate or inconsistent with applicable criteria." Ultimately, the records obtained by EFF raise more questions than they answer about the safeguards used by WISeR vendors...
A growing body of scholarship points to the substantial limitations of "human in the loop" policies as guardrails for AI systems. AI-generated recommendations can unduly influence human decisions, leading reviewers to over-rely on automated judgements and rubber stamp them as correct. Even worse, at least one health insurance company actively pressured clinical reviewers to accept its AI systems' recommendations. Another company built a system that allowed clinical reviewers to reject claims without opening patient files; clinical reviewers using this system spent an average of just 1.2 seconds on each case..
As the government expands its use of automated decision-making, the potential for consequential mistakes increases rapidly. The records we've obtained so far raise questions about the rushed rollout and lack of guardrails for automated decision-making by the U.S. government. EFF urges transparency, oversight, and legal limits to protect people from the harms of automated decision-making in high risk systems.
But in January America's federal government launched a program called WISeR that uses AI to evaluate authorization requests for certain procedures from America's federal health insurance program for seniors, Medicare. EFF sued for records and discovered "additional issues" with the program that they say "could jeopardize Medicare beneficiaries' access to care."
The records we received revealed that WISeR has resulted in widespread delays and denials of care, operational chaos, and reports of patient harm. Further documents obtained by EFF show a rushed and rocky rollout, highlighting the dangers that arise when governments treat AI like a silver bullet for complex problems.
EFF has now published hundreds of pages of documents obtained through our lawsuit, available here... The documents also highlight the need for more transparency about safeguards against inappropriate, AI-driven denials. EFF has long argued that AI has no place in consequential government decisions about peoples' rights or access to benefits, such as immigration enforcement and policing decisions. That's because using automated decision-making in these contexts risks decisions that violate people's rights or deprive them of benefits they're entitled to based on biased or inappropriate considerations and without proper due process or accountability if there is an error. By outsourcing decision-making to private AI companies without sufficient transparency, testing, or legal limits, WISeR jeopardizes seniors' access to medical care. Congress should step in to place greater legal limits on the use of automated decision-making in Medicare.
The new documents "show why we need stronger legal limits around government use of automated decision-making..." according to the newsletter. And another EFF page argues that the American public "still lacks the information needed to assess whether clinician review is providing meaningful oversight of AI systems and whether appropriate data is being used to evaluate prior authorization requests."
WISeR's payment structure gives vendors, as the government put it, "an incentive to deny as many claims as possible...." [One company] denied more requests than it approved in the first few months of the program, and CMS inquired about "denials that appear inaccurate or inconsistent with applicable criteria." Ultimately, the records obtained by EFF raise more questions than they answer about the safeguards used by WISeR vendors...
A growing body of scholarship points to the substantial limitations of "human in the loop" policies as guardrails for AI systems. AI-generated recommendations can unduly influence human decisions, leading reviewers to over-rely on automated judgements and rubber stamp them as correct. Even worse, at least one health insurance company actively pressured clinical reviewers to accept its AI systems' recommendations. Another company built a system that allowed clinical reviewers to reject claims without opening patient files; clinical reviewers using this system spent an average of just 1.2 seconds on each case..
As the government expands its use of automated decision-making, the potential for consequential mistakes increases rapidly. The records we've obtained so far raise questions about the rushed rollout and lack of guardrails for automated decision-making by the U.S. government. EFF urges transparency, oversight, and legal limits to protect people from the harms of automated decision-making in high risk systems.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"The forest is us, and we are it too."
How native forest in Mozambique's Gorongosa National Park is getting a helping hand from an unlikely partner: coffee farming.
People are poor and telling them not to cut forest wood makes no sense. There was no motivation for them to guard the forest. So an innovation to plant and embed coffee trees amongst the fast-growing indigenous trees quickly won over local communities. They realized that with coffee trees they can harvest the beans, earn from sales and exports, find jobs cultivating and tending and be able to afford food, healthcare or education for their kids.
People are poor and telling them not to cut forest wood makes no sense. There was no motivation for them to guard the forest. So an innovation to plant and embed coffee trees amongst the fast-growing indigenous trees quickly won over local communities. They realized that with coffee trees they can harvest the beans, earn from sales and exports, find jobs cultivating and tending and be able to afford food, healthcare or education for their kids.
Although booster exploded, company caught upper stage for first time in campaign to make megarocket reusable
SpaceX’s megarocket Starship returned to its Texas launch tower on Saturday, a milestone in the company’s efforts to make the craft suitable for human spaceflight.
The 171ft (52-meter) bullet-shaped upper stage descended into the clutch of the tower’s mechanical arms, ending a 22hr mission where the craft orbited Earth 14 times.
Continue reading...STARBASE (ANP/AFP) - De ruimtevaartonderneming SpaceX heeft voor het eerst met behulp van onder meer robotarmen van een lanceertoren de terugkeer van de Starship-raket volledig gecontroleerd gerealiseerd. De Starship-raket was ongeveer twintig uur eerder gelanceerd vanaf de Starbase in Texas voor een testvlucht. Daarna is de bovenste trap van de raket gecontroleerd teruggekeerd en opgevangen door robotarmen boven de lanceerinrichting.
Het was de eerste keer dat SpaceX van Elon Musk deze 'opvang' uitprobeerde. Het zou een belangrijke stap zijn op weg naar herbruikbare raketten.