Month: February 2023

Enlarge / The Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan in China's central Hubei province in February 2021 as members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigated the origins of the COVID-19 coronavirus. (credit: Getty | Hector Retamal)

The US Department of Energy has updated its previously undecided stance on the origin of the pandemic coronavirus, now saying with "low confidence" that it most likely emerged through a laboratory accident, according to a classified intelligence document first reported by The Wall Street Journal on Sunday.

The change reignites a bitter, often partisan debate over the elusive beginnings of SARS-CoV-2's global devastation, a debate which is largely fueled by insufficient evidence on both sides.

Still, the Energy Department is in the minority. Of the eight elements of the intelligence community that have reviewed information on the origin of SARS-CoV-2, only two currently lean toward the so-called "lab leak" hypothesis. The other is the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which concluded with "moderate confidence" in 2021 that the pandemic was ignited by a lab leak, according to the WSJ. It's unclear what evidence that assessment is based upon.

Enlarge / Everything Asahi Linux's four-person team has done to make Linux work on Apple's M-series chips is remarkable, but "ready to run" is a stretch. (credit: Apple/Asahi Linux)

It's an odd thing to see the leaders of an impressive open source project ask the press and their followers to please calm down and stop celebrating their accomplishments.

But that's the situation the Asahi Linux team finds itself in after many reports last week that the recently issued Linux 6.2 kernel made Linux "ready to run" on Apple's M-series hardware. It is true that upstream support for Apple's M1 chips is present in 6.2 and that the 6.2 kernel will gradually make its way into many popular distributions, including Ubuntu and Fedora. Work on Apple's integrated GPU by the four-person Asahi core team has come remarkably far. And founder Linus Torvalds himself is particularly eager to see Linux running on his favorite portable hardware, going so far as to issue a kernel in August 2022 from an M2 MacBook Air.

But the builders of the one Linux system that runs pretty well on Apple silicon are asking everybody to please just give it a moment.