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Twitter acquired the newsletter publishing company Revue for an undisclosed sum, part of an effort to expand its business and give writers who distribute their work on Twitter more features. From a report: Revue's service, which lets people manage newsletter publishing and subscriptions, will continue operating as a "standalone service" within Twitter, the company said Tuesday in a blog announcing the deal. Twitter will eliminate some of the service's fees to encourage more people to create newsletters, and will take a 5% cut on subscription revenue collected through Revue. Part of Revue's appeal to Twitter is that it could help expand the business outside of advertising, which generates more than 85% of Twitter's annual revenue, and give some of the site's more popular users a way to make money from their followers. "You can expect audience-based monetization to be an area that we'll continue to develop new ways to support," Twitter executives wrote in the blog. Twitter has also confirmed that it's considering options for its own subscription service.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With Mozilla's release of Firefox 85 on Tuesday, Adobe's once ubiquitous Flash technology is really gone for good. The software had been widely used to expand gaming, video and animation on the web, though Adobe stopped supporting it at the end of 2020. Firefox was the last major browser to support Flash. From a report: Apple, whose late boss Steve Jobs helped sink Flash by banning it from iPhones and iPads, ditched Flash with Safari 14 in September 2020. Google Chrome, the most widely used browser, completely excised it on Jan. 19 with version 88. Microsoft's Edge 88 followed suit on Jan. 21. The schedule of removals shows just how hard it is to advance technology foundations as widely used as the web. Browser makers for years wanted to remove Flash, replacing it with more advanced standards built directly into the web. Jobs' "Thoughts on Flash" letter in 2010 solidified the opposition, and Adobe started recognizing the software's doom by scrapping the Android version of Flash in 2011. It's taken years of effort to drop Flash completely. Adobe took until 2017 to announce that Flash would be completely unsupported at the end of 2020, and still some are willing to jump through lots of hoops to keep Flash around a little longer.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

YouTube has paid out more than $30 billion to creators, artists, and media organizations over the last three years, according to a new letter published by CEO Susan Wojcicki. From a report: In Wojcicki's first letter to creators of 2021, the CEO spent some time addressing YouTube's growth. The number of new channels that joined the company's Partner Program, which allows creators to earn advertising revenue, more than doubled in 2020. YouTube also "contributed approximately $16 billion to the U.S. GDP in 2019, supporting the equivalent of 345,000 full time jobs," according to an Oxford Economics report that Wojcicki highlights. The letter also focuses on the work YouTube's team still has in front of them. Mainly, transparency, especially where content strikes and advertising dollars are concerned. Wojcicki noted that at the "scale we operate, it's hard for creators to keep up with changing Community Guidelines." Wojcicki's letter states that YouTube wants to be better about communicating changes to avoid channel strikes. After three strikes within a 90-day period, a channel is terminated.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PepsiCo, the planetary purveyor of sugary drinks, greasy chips, and (weirdly) oatmeal, hummus, and gazpacho(?) is partnering with Beyond Meat, the publicly traded plant-based protein provider, on a poorly named joint venture to hawk new plant-based food and beverages to consumers. From a report: The PLANeT Partnership (which was clearly branded by the same genius behind the comic sans font), will combine Beyond Meat's skills with protein prestidigitation and PepsiCo's marketing and manufacturing savvy to flood the global market with new snacks and drinks, the two companies said. Neither company disclosed any financial terms and other pesky details around who, what, where, and when, except to say that the the joint venture operations will be managed through the newly created PLANeT Partnership. (If the companies put as much effort into running the business as they did with naming and branding it, Impossible Foods shouldn't have much to worry about... The capitalization and branding of this thing is an affront to the English language is all I'm saying.)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Amazon is enabling a new feature today that allows Alexa to proactively complete tasks around the house, such as turning off lights, based on your habits and frequent requests. Alexa has been able to sense these habits and ask about them since 2018 -- the company calls them "hunches" -- but before this update, Alexa would ask permission before acting on something like lowering the thermostat before you went to bed. If the new proactive hunches are enabled, though, Alexa will skip asking for permission for a task and just do it. While proactive hunches seem like they could make Alexa a lot more useful, having granular controls over what Alexa can automatically act on will be important. An Amazon support article seems to suggest you can select what types of hunches Alexa can complete on its own, but we've reached out to Amazon for more information on how much you can customize proactive hunches. In addition, Amazon is rolling out its Guard Plus security subscription service. "The service can alert you if Alexa picks up on certain types of sounds in your home and offers access to human agents who can call emergency services on your behalf, similar to ADT," reports The Verge. It'll cost $4.99 per month. The company is also rolling out an energy dashboard via the Alexa app that can monitor and estimate how much power compatible devices connected to Alexa use if their manufacturers support it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dan Riccio has served as senior VP of engineering overseeing all of Apple's hardware since 2012, but now he's stepping back from that role. A press release revealed he's focusing on a mysterious "new project" at Apple and will still report directly to CEO Tim Cook. Engadget reports: Exactly what that new project is remains unclear, although recent rumors have pointed to Apple's plans for augmented and virtual reality or building an electric car. Of course, maybe it's a differently color iPhone or an even-more-expensive pair of noise-cancelling headphones. Riccio previously lead the iPad team before taking over as senior VP, and oversaw projects all the way up to the recently-launched AirPods Max. Replacing Riccio on Apple's executive team is John Ternus, who has been the VP of hardware engineering since 2013, and is noted as a key figure in Apple's rollout of its new M1 CPUs. Meanwhile, Riccio will still hold the title of vice president of engineering and "play an instrumental role in shaping the future of Apple's products."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

aarondubrow shares a report from the Texas Advanced Computing Center: A new study in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America presents results from a new earthquake simulator, RSQSim, that simulates hundreds of thousands of years of seismic history in California. Coupled with another code, CyberShake, the framework can calculate the amount of shaking that would occur for each quake. [The framework makes use of two of the most powerful supercomputers on the planet: Frontera, at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, and Summit, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory]. The new approach improves [seismologists'] ability to pinpoint how big an earthquake might occur at a given location, allowing building code developers, architects, and structural engineers to design more resilient buildings that can survive earthquakes at a specific site.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Bad news, land-speed record fans: the project to set a new 1,000mph (1,609km/h) speed record is yet again in serious doubt. On Monday morning, the Bloodhound Land Speed Record Project revealed that it's looking for a new owner in order to try and break the existing record. Whoever steps in will need pretty deep pockets, too -- almost $11 million, in fact. Trying to set a new land-speed record is probably one of the harder activities one can engage in. You need to design and build a vehicle capable of going faster than 763mph (1,228km/h), twice within an hour. You need to find somewhere flat enough to run the car, presumably away from neighbors who might get annoyed by the window-shattering sonic booms. And while all that sounds like a serious challenge, perhaps the biggest problem is finding the money to make it all happen.[...] 2019 was a good year for Bloodhound. It found a new owner who saved it from life as a museum curio, and it even arrived in South Africa for the start of high-speed testing. Although it was only equipped with its Rolls Royce EJ200 jet engine, Bloodhound still reached 628mph (1,010kmh) that year. But going faster will require integrating Bloodhound's other propulsion source, a monopropellant rocket made by Nammo (a Norwegian aerospace and defense company). And the cost to do that and then conduct the test program to set a new record will require about $11 million, according to current owner Ian Warhurst. In a statement, he said: "When I committed to take the car high-speed testing in 2019, I allocated enough funding to achieve this goal on the basis that alternative funding would then allow us to continue to the record attempts. Along with many other things, the global pandemic wrecked this opportunity in 2020 which has left the project unfunded and delayed by a further 12 months. At this stage, in absence of further, immediate, funding, the only options remaining are to close down the program or put the project up for sale to allow me to pass on the baton and allow the team to continue the project."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Moderna's Covid vaccine appears to work against new, more infectious variants of the pandemic virus found in the UK and South Africa, say scientists from the US pharmaceutical company. The BBC reports: Early laboratory tests suggest antibodies triggered by the vaccine can recognize and fight the new variants. More studies are needed to confirm this is true for people who have been vaccinated. Current vaccines were designed around earlier variants, but scientists believe they should still work against the new ones, although perhaps not quite as well. There are already some early results that suggest the Pfizer vaccine protects against the new UK variant. For the Moderna study, researchers looked at blood samples taken from eight people who had received the recommended two doses of the Moderna vaccine. The findings are yet to be peer reviewed, but suggest immunity from the vaccine recognizes the new variants. Neutralizing antibodies, made by the body's immune system, stop the virus from entering cells. Blood samples exposed to the new variants appeared to have sufficient antibodies to achieve this neutralizing effect, although it was not as strong for the South Africa variant as for the UK one. Moderna says this could mean that protection against the South Africa variant might disappear more quickly. Moderna says it's investigating whether a redesigned vaccine would be more effective against the new variants. It's also testing whether giving a third booster shot might be beneficial.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Vancouver seaplane company says its retro-fitted all electric airplane is set to take to the skies for more test flights this year, as it pushes forward with its plans to make commercial air travel cheaper and greener. CBC.ca reports: "There's no wavering in our confidence and determination and interest in getting this done," said Harbour Air CEO Greg McDougall. Founded by McDougall in 1982, Harbour Air uses small propeller planes to fly commercial flights between the Lower Mainland, Seattle, Vancouver Island, the Gulf Islands and Whistler. In the last few years it has turned its attention to becoming a leader in green urban mobility, which would do away with the need to burn fossil fuels for air travel. In December 2019, McDougall flew one of Harbour Air's planes, a more than 60-year-old DHC-2 de Havilland Beaver float plane, which had been outfitted with a Seattle-based company's electric propulsion system, for three minutes over Richmond B.C. Harbour Air joined with Seattle-based company MagniX in early 2019 to design the e-plane's engine, which was powered by NASA-approved lithium-ion batteries that were also used on the International Space Station. At the time, based on the success of that inaugural flight, McDougall had hoped to be using the plane to fly passengers on its routes, such as between downtown Vancouver and downtown Victoria, by the end of this year. Now, that timeline has been pushed back at least one year due to the pandemic.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google says its new machine learning algorithms could replace cookie-based ad targeting without invading your privacy. Axios reports: Google has been testing a new API (a software interface) called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) that acts as an effective replacement signal for third-party cookies. The API exists as a browser extension within Google Chrome. The company said Monday that tests of FLoC to reach audiences show that advertisers can expect to see at least 95% of the conversions per dollar spent on ads when compared to cookie-based advertising. FLoC uses machine learning algorithms to analyze user data and then create a group of thousands of people based off of the sites that an individual visits. The data gathered locally from the browser is never shared. Instead, the data from the much wider cohort of thousands of people is shared, and that is then used to target ads. It's a big deal that Google says it's close to coming up with a technology that will replace cookies, because one of the toughest parts of phasing cookies out of internet ad-targeting is that there hasn't been a great solution for what to replace them with. [...] Google has other proposals to replace cookies in the works, so it's not guaranteed that FLoC will be the answer, but the company said it's highly encouraged by what it has seen so far.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: A well-known hacker has leaked the details of more than 2.28 million users registered on MeetMindful.com, a dating website founded in 2014, ZDNet has learned this week from a security researcher. The dating site's data has been shared as a free download on a publicly accessible hacking forum known for its trade in hacked databases. The leaked data, a 1.2 GB file, appears to be a dump of the site's users database. The content of this file includes a wealth of information that users provided when they set up profiles on the MeetMindful site and mobile apps. Some of the most sensitive data points included in the file include: Real names; Email addresses; City, state, and ZIP details; Body details; Dating preferences; Marital status; Birth dates; Latitude and longitude; IP addresses; Bcrypt-hashed account passwords; Facebook user IDs; and Facebook authentication tokens. Messages exchanged by users were not included in the leaked file; however, this does not make the entire incident less sensitive. The data leak, which is still available for download, was released by a threat actor who goes by the name of ShinyHunters. They also were responsible for leaking the details of millions of users registered on Teespring.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A coalition of tech companies announced today the launch of Open Web Docs, a new initiative to help write documentation for Web APIs, JavaScript, and other web tooling and platforms. From a report: The new project does not view itself as a replacement for MDN Web Docs, a website hosted by Mozilla, where all browser makers agreed to move the official Web API documentation back in October 2017, and stop developing their own, often diverging, documentation sites. Instead, in a press release and FAQ today, the Open Web Docs team said their role is to fund, coordinate, and contribute to MDN Docs going forward. The new initiative comes after Mozilla laid off 250 employees last summer, including many of its MDN Web Docs staff. Open Web Docs comes to fill this void and provide the labor force needed to continue updating the MDN Web Docs portal.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Korea's ETNews, Apple is expected to feature blood glucose monitoring via an optical sensor in the Apple Watch Series 7. MacRumors reports: The report, which mainly focuses on the blood glucose capabilities of the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4, explains that Apple is intending to bring blood glucose monitoring to the upcoming Apple Watch Series 7 using a non-invasive optical sensor. Measuring blood glucose levels, also known as blood sugar levels, is vital to managing conditions such as diabetes. Normally, measuring blood glucose requires testing a drop of blood in a blood sugar meter or using an implanted continuous glucose monitor (CGM). The ability to observe any major increases or decreases in blood glucose may raise awareness of a potential health condition or simply help to improve a user's diet. Apple is said to have secured patents around blood glucose monitoring, and the company is now purportedly "focusing on securing reliability and stability prior to commercialization of the technology." The Apple-designed optical sensor is believed to be a skin-top continuous monitoring solution that does not require an implant. [...] The Apple Watch Series 7 is expected to arrive later this year, but there have been few rumors around what the new models may feature. While there have been reports of microLED displays and solid-state buttons with haptic feedback for the Apple Watch, these are not directly expected for the Apple Watch Series 7.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Camel Pilot writes: Pyston 2.1, a closed-source but faster and highly-compatible implementation of the Python programming language, significantly outperforms Python 3 in a variety of benchmarks. All the system details and benchmarks in full can be found over on OpenBenchmarking.org.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Renewable energy became the biggest source of electricity in the European Union in 2020, beating fossil fuels for the first time. Germany and Spain also hit that milestone individually last year -- so did the UK, which officially left the EU in January 2020. From a report: Renewables powered 38 percent of electricity in the EU last year, according to a report released today by energy think tanks Ember and Agora Energiewende. That gives renewable energy a narrow lead over fossil fuel-fired generation, which accounted for 37 percent of Europe's electricity. The remaining quarter comes from nuclear energy. The rise of renewables is good news for the health of the planet. Still, renewable energy will need to grow at an even faster rate to stave off a future with more climate change-induced disasters. "Renewables overtaking fossils is an important milestone in Europe's clean energy transition. However, let's not be complacent," Patrick Graichen, director of Agora Energiewende, said in a statement. "Post-pandemic recovery [programs] need to go hand-in-hand with accelerated climate action."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Variety: AMC Theatres, the world's largest cinema chain, has raised $917 million in new equity and debt capital, the company said on Monday. "This increased liquidity should allow the company to make it through this dark coronavirus-impacted winter," the company said, adding that its "financial runway has been extended deep into 2021." AMC has raised the finances from Dec. 14, 2020. Of the $917 million, AMC has raised $506 million of equity, from the issuance of 164.7 million new common shares, along with the previously announced securing of $100 million of additional first-lien debt and the concurrent issuance of 22 million new common shares to convert $100 million of second-lien debt into equity. In addition, the company has executed commitment letters for $411 million of incremental debt capital in place through mid-2023, unless repaid before then, through the upsizing and refinancing of its European revolving credit facility. The chain says that it presumes that it will continue to make progress in its ongoing dialogue with theater landlords about the amounts and timing of owed theater lease payments, and is hopeful that the ongoing vaccination push will result in an increase in cinema attendance. As a result, AMC shares soared 36% in premarket trade Monday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Can a pair of unique spectacles banish nearsightedness without surgical intervention? Japan's Kubota Pharmaceutical Holdings says its wearable device can do just that, and it plans to start releasing the product in Asia, where many people grapple with myopia. From a report: The device, which the company calls Kubota Glasses or smart glasses, is still being tested. It projects an image from the lens of the unit onto the wearer's retina to correct the refractive error that causes nearsightedness. Wearing the device 60 to 90 minutes a day corrects myopia according to the Japanese company. Kubota Pharmaceutical has not disclosed additional details on how the device works. Through further clinical trials, it is trying to determine how long the effect lasts after the user wears the device, and how many days in total the user must wear the device to achieve a permanent correction for nearsightedness. Myopia is often results from the cornea and the retina in the eye being too far apart. This inhibits the proper focusing of light as it enters the eye and causes distant objects to look blurry. Asian are prone to nearsightedness. Of people aged 20 and under, 96% of South Koreans, 95% of Japanese, 87% of Hong Kongers, 85% of Taiwanese and 82% of Singaporeans are affected by the condition, according to Kubota.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Twitter unveiled a feature Monday meant to bolster its efforts to combat misinformation and disinformation by tapping users in a fashion similar to Wikipedia to flag potentially misleading tweets. From a report: The new system allows users to discuss and provide context to tweets they believe are misleading or false. The project, titled Birdwatch, is a standalone section of Twitter that will at first only be available to a small set of users, largely on a first-come, first-served basis. Priority will not be provided to high-profile people or traditional fact-checkers, but users will have to use an account tied to a real phone number and email address. "Birdwatch allows people to identify information in Tweets they believe is misleading or false, and write notes that provide informative context," Twitter Vice President of Product Keith Coleman wrote in a press release. "We believe this approach has the potential to respond quickly when misleading information spreads, adding context that people trust and find valuable." While Birdwatch will initially be cordoned off to a separate section of Twitter, the company said "eventually we aim to make notes visible directly on Tweets for the global Twitter audience, when there is consensus from a broad and diverse set of contributors."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GameStop shares surged to a record Monday, before pulling back and giving up much of their gains, the latest sign that frenetic trading by individual investors is leading to outsize stock-market moves. From a report: Class A shares of the Texas-based games retailer surged as much as 145% to $159.18 in morning trading, before reversing course and briefly turning lower. By midday, the stock was up 27% at $82.55, up more than 330% in 2021. The rapid swings prompted the New York Stock Exchange to briefly halt trading multiple times. The rally has been fueled by individual investors, encouraging each other on social media to pile into GameStop shares and options. The buying pressure has led money managers to switch out of substantial bets that the stock would fall, analysts said. This resulted in a short squeeze, in which rising prices prompt investors to buy back shares they had sold short to cut their losses, pushing the stock higher still. The company has become a high-profile battleground between bullish chatroom-driven day traders, especially on online platform Reddit, and hedge fund short sellers, who have been betting against the stock. GameStop has been the most-actively traded stock by customers of Fidelity Investments in recent sessions, with buy orders outnumbering sell orders by more than four-to-one, according to the brokerage. "We broke it. We broke GME at open," one Reddit user wrote Monday after the NYSE halted trading, referring to GameStop's stock-market ticker. The tussle over the company, with a modest market value of about $5 billion at Friday's close and four years of declining sales, exemplifies the increased sway of retail investors. Many poured into the market during the coronavirus lockdown, congregating on online platforms to swap trading ideas and to boast about winning bets. From last week: Gaming the System: How GameStop Stock Surged 1,500% In Nine Months.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dutch police arrested two individuals late last week for allegedly selling data from the Dutch health ministry's COVID-19 systems on the criminal underground. From a report: The arrests came after an investigation by RTL Nieuws reporter Daniel Verlaan who discovered ads for Dutch citizen data online, advertised on instant messaging apps like Telegram, Snapchat, and Wickr. The ads consisted of photos of computer screens listing data of one or more Dutch citizens. The reporter said he tracked down the screengrabs to two IT systems used by the Dutch Municipal Health Service (GGD) -- namely CoronIT, which contains details about Dutch citizens who took a COVID-19 test, and HPzone Light, one of the DDG's contact-tracing systems. Verlaan said the data had been sold online for months for prices ranging from $36 to $60 per person. Buyers would receive details such as home addresses, emails, telephone numbers, dates of birth, and a person's BSN identifier (Dutch social security number).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google employees from across the globe are forming a union alliance, weeks after more than 200 workers at the search engine giant and other units of parent company Alphabet formed a labor union for U.S. and Canadian offices. From a report: Alpha Global was formed in coordination with UNI Global Union, a union federation that represents about 20 million workers globally, and includes unions from countries such as the United States, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, and the UK, UNI Global Union said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A third class action lawsuit has been filed in Europe against Apple seeking compensation -- for what Italy's Altroconsumo consumer protection agency dubs "planned obsolescence" of a number of iPhone 6 models. From a report: The action relates to performance throttling Apple applied several years ago to affected iPhones when the health of the device's battery had deteriorated -- doing so without clearly informing users. It later apologized. The class action suit in Italy is seeking $72.8 million in compensation -- based on at least $72.8 in average compensation per iPhone owner. Affected devices named in the suit are the iPhone 6, 6S, 6 Plus and 6S Plus, per a press release put out by the umbrella consumer organization, Euroconsumers, which counts Altroconsumo a a member. The suit is the third to be filed in the region over the issue -- following suits filed in Belgium and Spain last month. A fourth -- in Portugal -- is slated to be filed shortly.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Flights at hundreds of airports worldwide are in danger of being disrupted by rising sea levels, according to a new study. From a report: More than 260 airports around the globe are currently at risk of coastal flooding, and dozens could be below mean sea level by the turn of the century, the research published in the journal Climate Risk Management found. Hundreds more could be in danger depending on the amount of sea level rise driven by global warming between now and 2100. Airports in Asia and the Pacific topped the list. Researchers looked at several different factors to come up with the rankings, including the likelihood of flooding from extreme sea levels, flood protection and the impact on flights. They found that up to one-fifth of air travel routes could be affected.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Many Tesla fans view the electric carmaker as a world leader in self-driving technology. CEO Elon Musk himself has repeatedly claimed that the company is less than two years away from perfecting fully self-driving technology. But in an interview with Germany's Manager magazine, Waymo CEO John Krafcik dismissed Tesla as a Waymo competitor and argued that Tesla's current strategy was unlikely to ever produce a fully self-driving system. "For us, Tesla is not a competitor at all," Krafcik said. "We manufacture a completely autonomous driving system. Tesla is an automaker that is developing a really good driver assistance system." For Musk, these two technologies exist along a continuum. His plan is to gradually make Tesla's Autopilot software better until it's good enough to work with no human supervision. But Krafcik argues that's not realistic. "It is a misconception that you can just keep developing a driver assistance system until one day you can magically leap to a fully autonomous driving system," Krafcik said. "In terms of robustness and accuracy, for example, our sensors are orders of magnitude better than what we see on the road from other manufacturers."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earth's ice is melting faster today than in the mid-1990s, new research suggests, as climate change nudges global temperatures ever higher. From a report: Altogether, an estimated 28 trillion metric tons of ice have melted away from the world's sea ice, ice sheets and glaciers since the mid-1990s. Annually, the melt rate is now about 57 percent faster than it was three decades ago, scientists report in a study published Monday in the journal The Cryosphere. "It was a surprise to see such a large increase in just 30 years," said co-author Thomas Slater, a glaciologist at Leeds University in Britain. While the situation is clear to those depending on mountain glaciers for drinking water, or relying on winter sea ice to protect coastal homes from storms, the world's ice melt has begun to grab attention far from frozen regions, Slater noted.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Monday said the company will make its office facilities available for COVID-19 vaccination clinics, as tech giants aim to speed up distribution efforts in the US. From a report: The company said it's partnering with the health care provider One Medical for the clinics, which will be opened "as needed" at Google buildings, parking lots and open spaces. For now, Google is targeting its campuses in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the company is headquartered; Los Angeles; New York City; and Kirkland, Washington, outside of Seattle. [...] The company also said it will use artificial intelligence from its Google Cloud division to help health care providers and pharmacies with the logistics of vaccine distribution. That includes detecting changes in the temperature of vaccine doses, which must be stored in cool conditions. Google also said it's committing more than $150 million in free ads and other investments to public health agencies and nonprofits promoting vaccine education.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"We have made the difficult decision to retire the Tucows Downloads site," writes CEO Elliot Noss in a blog post at Tucows.com/retired:We're pleased to say that much of the software and other assets that made up the Tucows Downloads library have been transferred to our friends at the Internet Archive for posterity. The shareware downloads bulletin board system (BBS) that would become Tucows Downloads was founded back in 1993 on a library computer in Flint, MI. What started as a place for people in the know to download software became the place to download software on the burgeoning Internet. Far more quickly than anyone could have imagined. A lot has changed since those early years. Tucows has grown and evolved as a business. It's been a long time since Tucows has been TUCOWS, which stood for The Ultimate Collection of Winsock Software. Today, Tucows is the second-largest domain name registrar in the world behind Go Daddy and the largest wholesaler of domain names in the world with customers like Shopify and other global website builder platforms. Hover offers domain names and email at retail to help people brand their life online. OpenSRS (and along the way our acquisitions of Enom, Ascio and EPAG) are the SaaS platforms upon which tens of thousands of customers have built their own domain registration businesses, registering tens of millions of domains on behalf of their customers. Ting Internet is building fiber-optic networks all over the U.S. At the same time, we're building the Mobile Services Enabler SaaS platform that is powering DISH's entry into the US mobile market. Point is, we're keeping busy. For the past several years, history, well sentimentality, has been the only reason to keep Tucows Downloads around. We talked about shutting the site down before. Most seriously in 2016 when instead, we decided to go ad-free, keeping the site up as a public service. Today is different. Tucows Downloads is old. Old sites are a maintenance challenge and therefore a risk. Maintaining the Tucows Downloads site pulls people away from the work that moves our businesses forward. Tucows Downloads has had an incredible run. Retiring it is the right move but that doesn't alter the fact that it will always hold a special place in hearts and our story. We're thankful to the thousands of software developers who used Tucows Downloads to get their software in front of millions of people, driving billions of downloads over more than 25 years. Thank you.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reuters reports on big changes at BP (the company formerly known as British Petroleum):Its geologists, engineers and scientists have been cut to less than 100 from a peak of more than 700 a few years ago, company sources told Reuters, part of a climate change-driven overhaul triggered last year by CEO Bernard Looney. "The winds have turned very chilly in the exploration team since Looney's arrival. This is happening incredibly fast," a senior member of the team told Reuters. Hundreds have left the oil exploration team in recent months, either transferred to help develop new low-carbon activities or laid off, current and former employees said. The exodus is the starkest sign yet from inside the company of its rapid shift away from oil and gas, which will nevertheless be its main source of cash to finance a switch to renewables for at least the next decade. BP declined to comment on the staffing changes, which have not been publicly disclosed... Looney made his intentions clear internally and externally by lowering BP's production targets and becoming the first oil major CEO to promote this as a positive to investors seeking a long-term vision for a lower-carbon economy. BP is cutting some 10,000 jobs, around 15% of its workforce, under Looney's restructuring, the most aggressive among Europe's oil giants including Royal Dutch Shell and Total. The 50-year-old, a veteran oil engineer who previously headed the oil and gas exploration and production division, aims to cut output by 1 million barrels per day, or 40%, over the next decade while growing renewable energy output 20 fold. Elsewhere Reuters reports that due to the pandemic, acquisitions of new onshore and offshore exploration licences for the top five Western energy companies "dropped to the lowest in at least five years," citing data from Oslo-based consultancy Rystad Energy.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"It was weird to own a Zune in 2005," remembers a new article in the Verge. "It is even weirder to own a Zune in 2021 — let alone 16 of them. And yet, 27-year-old Conner Woods proudly shows off his lineup on a kitchen table."They come in all different colors, shapes, and sizes, and each can be identified by that telltale black plastic D-pad just below the screen. He owns the entire scope of the brief Zune lineup — from the svelte Zune 4 to the chunky Zune HD — and among the microscopic community of people who still adore Microsoft's much-derided MP3 player, no collection of dead tech could possibly be more enviable. Woods picked up his Zune foraging habit during the pandemic, while he was furloughed from his job working security at Best Buy. "I taught myself to solder, began buying up dead Zunes, and repairing and flipping them for a profit," he says. "At some point I ran across some rare ones and couldn't bring myself to part with them." He counts a particularly rare model bearing the Halo 3 logo and another with the Gears of War seal, but to fully understand the depths of Woods' obsession, you need to look past the gadgets and into the great beyond. Click through his post on the r/Zune subreddit, and wander into his veritable shrine of forgotten Zune detritus. Woods owns multiple Zune-stamped traveling cases and boombox docks. He has a Zune-branded stress ball as well as a Zune tinderbox, complete with matches that are dyed in the brand's customary burnt orange and fiery purple. My personal favorite: a Rubik's cube that, when solved, reveals the Zune's polyhedral insignia on all of the white squares, as if to say the answer to one of history's most vexing logic puzzles is, eternally, Zune. The article also suggests the Zune exemplified Microsoft's inherent "squareness" at the start of the 2000s. "The product was entirely functional, sure, but for reasons that remain difficult to articulate — the video game insignias, the oversized trackpad, their baffling bulkiness — it was also about a million times less chic than the iPod. (That same inscrutable problem flags Bing, Cortana, the ill-fated Windows Phone, etc.) "But today, almost a decade after Microsoft terminated the brand, there is a small bastion of diehards who are still loving and listening to their Zunes." And one of them has even added a 128GB SSD to their Zune's motherboard.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week the Democratic party took control of all three branches of the U.S. government — and the BBC's North America technology reporter notes they dislike Facebook even more now than during the Cambridge Analytica scandal:Since then, Democrats — Joe Biden included — have been appalled by what Facebook has allowed on its platform. Talking to a CNN anchor in late 2019 Joe Biden said, "You can't do what they can do on Facebook, and say anything at all, and not acknowledge when you know something is fundamentally not true. I just think it's all out of hand." When you're a billionaire, perhaps it doesn't matter that the president doesn't like you much. But what President Biden has a chance to do now is restructure Big Tech and reformulate the relationship that social media companies have with their users. That could be devastating for Facebook. Its most obvious problem is the potential repealing of Section 230... Joe Biden has said he wants it removed. In fact, in that same New York Times interview from a year ago he said he wanted it "revoked immediately". That could spell disaster for Zuckerberg. Suddenly all the things people post, all of the defamatory and fraudulent things people say — would be the responsibility of Facebook. It's hard to see how Facebook functions in its current form without Section 230. And that's before we get into Facebook's anti-trust problems. It's currently being sued by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and 46 states for "illegally maintaining its monopoly position" by buying up the competition. The FTC has also said it's looking at "unwinding Facebook's prior acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp" — i.e. breaking the firm up. Facebook will, of course, fight that. But Biden seems a pretty willing ally to those who want to split up Big Tech. In 2019, he said that breaking up companies such as Facebook was "something we should take a really hard look at". Jameel Jaffer, a media legal expert at Columbia University, told me: "I would expect the Biden administration to be pretty aggressive in enforcing the anti-trust laws. And to have the whole spectrum of harms in mind, not just the democratic harms, but harms relating to user privacy and consumer welfare." President Biden is even reportedly thinking of creating an anti-trust tsar, designed specifically to restore competition in areas like Big Tech.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's an interesting tidbit from The Wall Street Journal:ICQ was a pioneering, mid-1990s internet messaging service then used on bulky PCs on dial-up. It was a precursor to AOL Instant Messenger, and was last in vogue when the TV show "Friends" was in its prime and PalmPilots were cutting edge. It's been modernized over the years, and now is an app for smartphones. Lately it has skyrocketed up Hong Kong's app charts, with downloads jumping 35-fold in the week ending Jan. 12. "It recalls my childhood memories," said 30-year-old risk consultant Anthony Wong, who used ICQ when he was in grade school. He has since connected with more than two dozen friends on the platform after some bristled this month at a privacy policy update by WhatsApp that would allow some data to be stored on parent Facebook Inc.'s servers. Back in 1998 Slashdot's CmdrTaco wrote a story about ICQ being ported to Palm Pilot, and linked to a Wired story about ICQ security flaws.In fact, you can almost tell the history of ICQ just with Slashdot headlines. - AIM and ICQ to be Integrated (2002) - Russian Company Buys ICQ (2010) What's happened since? ICQ's entry on Wikipedia cites a 2018 article in a Russia newspaper.According to a Novaya Gazeta article published in May 2018, Russian intelligence agencies have access to online reading of ICQ users' correspondence. The article examined 34 sentences of Russian courts, during the investigation of which the evidence of the defendants' guilt was obtained by reading correspondence on a PC or mobile devices. Of the fourteen cases in which ICQ was involved, in six cases the capturing of information occurred before the seizure of the device. The reason for the article was the blocking of the Telegram service and the recommendation of the Advisor to the President of the Russian Federation Herman Klimenko to use ICQ instead.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In March Andrew Yang's nonprofit gave $1,000 one-time grants to a thousand residents in the Bronx. This week a new article in the New Yorker asks one of those grant recipients how they feel about Yang's newest proposal as he runs to be New York's mayor: to give the city's public-housing residents billions of dollars in a "Borough Bucks" currency that would hopefully recirculate in the community:"I was like, you know, am I the only person here that would love to live in a society where we can actually barter our talents and skills, instead of depending on this economy that's not working for us?" Yang made a similar point when I asked him about the origins of the Borough Bucks proposal. "If you're going to invest resources in a community, your preference is that the resources circulate within the community, particularly if you can serve multiple goals," he said. "They're just imaginative ways for communities to unlock resources." The article also notes that in an earlier run for the U.S. presidency, "his pitch was that the economy needed to be modernized to account for automation and other technological advances. In his mayoral run, his pitch is that New York City should become the 'anti-poverty' city." But they explored the larger question of whether Yang sees a growing acceptance for universal basic incomes:I asked Yang about the debate, now happening in Congress, about whether Biden should push for fourteen-hundred-dollar stimulus checks in the next bailout package, or two-thousand-dollar checks, or two thousand dollars a month until the economy rebounds. Yang said that he favored the last proposal. I asked him how he felt about the fact that even as other candidates in the race were attacking him, several — Eric Adams, the former nonprofit executive Dianne Morales, and the City Council member Carlos Menchaca — had expressed interest in the U.B.I. policies he had championed. "I would love to check out their plans," Yang said. "It's an idea whose time has come. I'm certainly very proud to have contributed to the idea's popularity, but anyone who wants to adapt a version of it, like, fantastic."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Microsoft Corp. was wrapped into a massive cybersecurity attack late last year," reports MarketWatch, "but the unprecedented intrusion may actually end up being a positive for the company's bottom line." UBS analyst Karl Keirstead, who has a buy rating and a $243 price target, said while Microsoft products were leveraged by hackers in the attack on SolarWinds Corp.'s Orion IT management software, because they are commonplace, "the broader cyber-security community are not pointing fingers at Microsoft." Keirstead noted that the attack actually drove more customers into public cloud infrastructures like Azure, Amazon.com Inc.'s and Alphabet Inc.'s Google Cloud "given a view that cloud data centers are more secure and that constantly patching/updating on-premise software like Orion presents a security risk that can be transferred to Microsoft, Amazon or Google." "Bottom line, we believe this cyber-security attack could be a modest net positive for Microsoft," Keirstead said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week Digital Reality data center services announced it was also relocating its headquarters from the San Francisco Bay Area to Texas, citing factors like a low cost of living and "supportive business climate". (Though it will still maintain a "significant" presence in the Bay Area.) And Align Technology (makers of the Invisalign orthodontic dental aligners) also announced it had relocated its global corporate headquarters from San Jose, California to Tempe, Arizona, citing a "favorable corporate operating environment, low cost of living and overall quality of life." NBC News writes that "while Silicon Valley is by no means ceasing to be the center of the technology industry," there's still an "undeniable migration" that's happening:Shervin Pishevar, a venture capitalist, bought a house in Miami Beach in 2018. In late 2020, Jonathan Oringer, who founded Shutterstock and became an investor, moved to Miami, as did other notable venture capitalists, including Keith Rabois and David Blumberg. It's not just Miami experiencing this migration. Last month, Oracle, the tech giant, announced it is moving its corporate headquarters from Redwood City, California, to Austin, Texas. Other such moves include Palantir, which decamped for Denver, while Elon Musk said last month he had moved himself to Austin. Hewlett Packard Enterprise also announced last month it was moving its headquarters from San Jose, California, in favor of a Houston suburb... It's significant enough that while the San Francisco Bay Area continues to gain tech workers, the rate of increase is down by over 35 percent — the single largest drop of any tracked metropolitan area — according to self-reported data tracked by LinkedIn. Experts following this migration predict these numbers may grow. "There's a mini-exodus of tech companies leaving the Valley, and I think that's going to accelerate in 2021," said Dan Ives, a financial analyst with Wedbush Securities. But the reasons many businesses are moving are more complex than people may think. Tax experts say companies aren't moving their corporate headquarters necessarily for business tax incentives. Instead, it may be a long-term play to help them pay workers relatively less where the cost of living is lower... "You're going to always have the vast majority of tech companies coming out of the Valley, and you can't create that anywhere else," Ives said. "But when you look at an Austin: It's creating a mini Silicon Valley at half the cost for an average employee..." Tax experts suspect Oracle and its peers may over time phase out higher-paid employees in California in favor of lower-paid employees in Texas. These companies can also ease off giving employees raises because they are living somewhere with a lower cost of living. "Even though a lot of companies are saying they can let people work from anywhere, most are saying we're not going to cut salary, but we're going to slow the rate of increase of salary," said Brian Kropp, an analyst with the IT service management company Gartner. Kropp said he spoke with high-level representatives from several "Fortune 200 type companies" who are exploring moving their corporate headquarters. In short, shifting employees from California to Texas could represent long-term corporate cost savings, which means larger payouts for these companies' top executives. "The compounding effect translates to a 3 or 5 percent margin that moves straight to profit," Kropp said... Kropp says some companies are also worried about the increase in state laws targeting businesses and executives. But there could be another culprit, argues Darien Shanske, a law professor at the University of California, Davis who NBC identiies as an expert on state and local taxation. "California has blown it, but not because of tax policy — its decades-long problem of not producing enough housing," he said. "It's probably cheaper and easier to build that in Austin."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"We messed up today," the Xbox Live Gold team wrote late Friday night, "and you were right to let us know." Their blog post's new title? "No Changes to Xbox Live Gold Pricing, Free-to-Play Games to be Unlocked." Forbes reports:It has been a very strange few days for Microsoft and Xbox fans. On Friday, Microsoft announced that for effectively no real reason, it was doubling the price of Xbox Live Gold from $60 a year to $120 a year. Immediately, this generated massive pushback from both players, who would bear those costs, and the press, who dubbed Xbox Live Gold suddenly "the worst deal in gaming." It took all of maybe 14 hours for Microsoft to come back and...kill the entire idea. Not only that, as in addition to reverting the planned price increase, they also announced that they were working on making all free-to-play games able to be played without needing Xbox Live Gold, a long-requested change, which would roll out over the next few months... Microsoft is trying very hard to push people into signing up for Ultimate and Game Pass, and this price increase was meant to be a win-win for them. Either people were now close enough to the yearly price of Ultimate where they'd just do that instead, or they would be paying twice as much for Gold which meant more sub revenue anyways. What could go wrong? What is not clear, however, is why Microsoft did not anticipate the reaction.... Citing a Twitter thread from analyst Daniel Ahmad, the article concludes that "Microsoft knows that it is losing the console sales battle, and they will likely continue to lose it to Sony. "So their main desire is to increase Game Pass adoption as much as possible to essentially be the definitive game subscription service in the market before others catch up."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"A two-episode series which debuted on Chinese streaming platforms last week has been described as the first reality competition to focus on programmers," reports the I Programmer web site:The show, sponsored by the Ant Group, an affiliate company of the Chinese Alibaba Group, is called Ranshaoba tiancaichengxuyuan, which roughly translates to "Burn Bright! Genius Programmer," and followed four teams engaged on a challenge akin to the hackathons that take place on Kaggle and similar platforms. News of the show comes in a report China's first variety show about computer programmers seeks to mold Chinese IT idols in Global Times, the English-language newspaper published by People's Daily, which is the official newspaper of Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. Ji Yuqiao reported that twenty programmers took part in the show and were divided into four teams that competed to win a prize of 1 million yuan ($154,152). Some of the competitors were graduates of top universities such as Tsinghua University in China and Carnegie Mellon University in the US, while others were high school dropouts. Four professors at Peking University and Tsinghua University acted as mentors to these young talents on the show. Contestants were tasked with protecting wild animals from poachers in a virtual world. With a time limit of 48 hours they had to design algorithms to detect and identify wild animals based on the limited data resources in the game.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jalopnik shares a story for our times:Adobe's Flash, the web browser plug-in that powered so very many crappy games, confusing interfaces, and animated icons of the early web like Homestar Runner is now finally gone, after a long, slow, protracted death. For most of us, this just means that some goofy webgame you searched for out of misplaced nostalgia will no longer run. For a select few in China, though, the death of Flash meant being late to work, because the city of Dalian in northern China was running their railroad system on it. Yes, a railroad, run on Flash, the same thing used to run "free online casinos" and knockoff Breakout games in mortgage re-fi ads... Hell, YouTube used to run on Flash until 2015. It wasn't all stupid little web games but, that said, I can't for the life of me fathom why anyone would want to run a freaking railroad network on it, with physical, multi-ton moving railcars full of human beings on it. So, when Adobe finally killed Flash-based content from running, this Tuesday Dalian's railroad network found itself ground to a halt for 20 hours. The railroad's technicians did get everything back up and running, but the way they did this is fascinating, too. They didn't switch the rail management system to some other, more modern codebase or software installation; instead, they installed a pirated version of Flash that was still operational. The knockoff version seems to be known as "Ghost Version." This, along with installing an older version of the Flash player to work with the knockoff Flash server setup, "solved" the problem, and the railroad was back up and running.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After their house was vandalized, long-time Slashdot reader lsllll needs some help finding a battery-powered, wifi-enabled camera that can dump motion-detected videos to a local server:There are some nice cameras out there that'll work for nearly 5 months off a rechargeable battery. You can even pair them with a solar panel which would keep them constantly topped off. But none of them offer anything other than local storage (free on SD card) or in the cloud (subscription). Obviously, being a programmer and a sysadmin, I realize that the effort to dump a video to a cloud service and opening a connection to a local FTP/SMB server require the same bandwidth, battery usage. So this decision to not support local FTP/SMB servers must be intentional and the way everything is going nowadays: juice the customers for as much money as you can after they've purchased your product. The question is, are the any cameras out there that run on rechargeable batteries, support WiFi, and dump videos to a local server? Share your suggestions in the comments!Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: A new web quiz challenge visitors, "Can you tell a coder from a cannibal? A mathematician from a murderer? Try to spot who liked hacking away at corpses rather than computers." One commenter on BoingBoing says the quiz brought back memories of doing IT recruitment in the 1990s. "After a few months at that job, I started to wonder if spending so much time staring at soulless equipment wasn't affecting people. Too many candidates were completely humorless, culturally clueless, or sporting a thousand-yard stare..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader The Grim Reefer shares a report from the BBC: Babylon 5 and Lost actress Mira Furlan has died at the age of 65, her family and management have confirmed. Furlan played Minbari Ambassador Delenn in the 1990s sci-fi TV drama, Babylon 5, and Danielle Rousseau in the noughties mystery drama, Lost. Her family told the BBC the Croatian actress died on Wednesday due to complications with West Nile Virus... A message on Furlan's Twitter account, confirmed to be taken from the autobiography she was working on, read: "I look at the stars. It's a clear night and the Milky Way seems so near. That's where I'll be going soon." Babylon 5 J Michael Straczynski wrote on Twitter, "It is a night of great sadness, for our friend and comrade had gone down the road where we cannot reach her. But as with all things, we will catch up with her in time, and I believe she will have many stories to tell us, and many new roles to share with the universe."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ZDNet takes a look at a new nonprofit group called the Organization for Ethical Source (OES): The OES is devoted to the idea that the free software and open-source concept of "Freedom Zero" are outdated. Freedom Zero is "the freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose." It's fundamental to how open-source software is made and used... They hate the notion that open-source software can be used for any purpose including "evil" purposes. The group states: The world has changed since the Open Source Definition was created — open source has become ubiquitous, and is now being leveraged by bad actors for mass surveillance, racist policing, and other human rights abuses all over the world. The OES believes that the open-source community must evolve to address the magnitude and complexity of today's social, political, and technological challenges... How does this actually work in a license...? The Software shall not be used by any person or entity for any systems, activities, or other uses that violate any Human Rights Laws. "Human Rights Laws" means any applicable laws, regulations, or rules (collectively, "Laws") that protect human, civil, labor, privacy, political, environmental, security, economic, due process, or similar rights.... This latest version of the license was developed in collaboration with a pro-bono legal team from Corporate Accountability Lab (CAL). It has been adopted by many open-source projects including the Ruby library VCR; mobile app development tool Gryphon; Javascript mapping library react-leaflet; and WeTransfer's entire open-source portfolio... The organization adds, though, the license's most significant impact may be the debate it sparked between ethical-minded developers and open-source traditionalists around the primacy of Freedom Zero. The article includes this quote from someone described as an open source-savvy lawyer. "To me, ethical licensing is a case of someone with a very small hammer seeing every problem as a nail, and not even acknowledging that the nail is far too big for the hammer."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Threatpost reports:On the heels of a ransomware attack against the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA), attackers have now reportedly published more than 4,000 files stolen from the agency — including contracts and strategy documents. After hitting SEPA on Christmas Eve with the attack, cybercriminals encrypted 1.2GB of information. The attack has affected SEPA's email systems, which remain offline as of Thursday, according to the agency. However, SEPA, which is Scotland's environmental regulator, stressed on Thursday that it will not "engage" with the cybercriminals. "We've been clear that we won't use public finance to pay serious and organized criminals intent on disrupting public services and extorting public funds," said SEPA chief executive Terry A'Hearn in a statement... SEPA's email and other systems remain down, and "what is now clear is that with infected systems isolated, recovery may take a significant period," according to the agency in its update. "A number of SEPA systems will remain badly affected for some time, with new systems required..." The incident also points to ransomware actors evolving from previously destroying critical data or bringing companies' services and operations to a standstill, to now threatening to disclose sensitive data publicly, Joseph Carson, chief security scientist and Advisory CISO at Thycotic told Threatpost.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Late last week, a website called Faces of the Riot appeared online, showing nothing but a vast grid of more than 6,000 images of faces, each one tagged only with a string of characters associated with the Parler video in which it appeared," reports WIRED, saying the site raises clear privacy concerns:The site's creator tells WIRED that he used simple, open source machine-learning and facial recognition software to detect, extract, and deduplicate every face from the 827 videos that were posted to Parler from inside and outside the Capitol building on January 6, the day when radicalized Trump supporters stormed the building in a riot that resulted in five people's deaths. The creator of Faces of the Riot says his goal is to allow anyone to easily sort through the faces pulled from those videos to identify someone they may know, or recognize who took part in the mob, or even to reference the collected faces against FBI wanted posters and send a tip to law enforcement if they spot someone... "It's entirely possible that a lot of people who were on this website now will face real-life consequences for their actions...." A recent upgrade to the site adds hyperlinks from faces to the video source, so that visitors can click on any face and see what the person was filmed doing on Parler. The Faces of the Riot creator, who says he's a college student in the "greater DC area," intends that added feature to help contextualize every face's inclusion on the site and differentiate between bystanders, peaceful protesters, and violent insurrectionists. He concedes that he and a co-creator are still working to scrub "non-rioter" faces, including those of police and press who were present. A message at the top of the site also warns against vigilante investigations, instead suggesting users report those they recognize to the FBI, with a link to an FBI tip page.... McDonald has previously both criticized the power of facial recognition technology and himself implemented facial recognition projects like ICEspy, a tool he launched in 2018 for identifying agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency... He sees Faces of the Riot as "playing it really safe" compared even to his own facial recognition experiments, given that it doesn't seek to link faces with named identities. "And I think it's a good call because I don't think that we need to legitimize this technology any more than it already is and has been falsely legitimized," McDonald says. But McDonald also points out that Faces of the Riot demonstrates just how accessible facial recognition technologies have become. "It shows how this tool that has been restricted only to people who have the most education, the most power, the most privilege is now in this more democratized state," McDonald says.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Business Insider reports:The bitcoin price was set for its biggest one-week fall since September on Saturday morning, having slipped around 10% since Monday... Bitcoin came under selling pressure this week after Janet Yellen, Joe Biden's pick for Treasury secretary, suggested the use of cryptocurrencies should be "curtailed" because they were used mainly for "illicit financing". Writing at Nasdaq.com on Thursday, CoinDesk shared a link to U.S. Treasury Secretary nominee Janet Yellen's later written responses to the same questions, where Yellen states that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies also offer potential benefits to the U.S. and its allies. "At the same time, it also presents opportunities for states and non-state actors looking to circumvent the current financial system and undermine American interests. For example, the Central Bank of China just issued its first digital currency."I think it important we consider the benefits of cryptocurrencies and other digital assets, and the potential they have to improve the efficiency of the financial system. At the same time, we know they can be used to finance terrorism, facilitate money laundering, and support malign activities that threaten U.S. national security interests and the integrity of the U.S. and international financial systems. I think we need to look closely at how to encourage their use for legitimate activities while curtailing their use for malign and illegal activities. If confirmed, I intend to work closely with the Federal Reserve Board and the other federal banking and securities regulators on how to implement an effective regulatory framework for these and other fintech innovations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week New York Magazine featured a new article by journalist David Wallace-Wells about the state of the fight against global warming. He warns that "Already, the planet is warmer, at just 1.2 degrees, than it has ever been..." But there's also some good news:Just a half-decade ago, it was widely believed that a "business as usual" emissions path would bring the planet four or five degrees of warming — enough to make large parts of Earth effectively uninhabitable. Now, thanks to the rapid death of coal, the revolution in the price of renewable energy, and a global climate politics forged by a generational awakening, the expectation is for about three degrees. Recent pledges could bring us closer to two. All of these projections sketch a hazardous and unequal future, and all are clouded with uncertainties — about the climate system, about technology, about the dexterity and intensity of human response, about how inequitably the most punishing impacts will be distributed. Yet if each half-degree of warming marks an entirely different level of suffering, we appear to have shaved a few of them off our likeliest end stage in not much time at all. The next half-degrees will be harder to shave off, and the most crucial increment — getting from two degrees to 1.5 — perhaps impossible, dashing the dream of avoiding what was long described as "catastrophic" change. But for a climate alarmist like me, seeing clearly the state of the planet's future now requires a conspicuous kind of double vision, in which a guarded optimism seems perhaps as reasonable as panic. Given how long we've waited to move, what counts now as a best-case outcome remains grim. It also appears, miraculously, within reach.... The price of solar energy has fallen ninefold over the past decade, as has the price of lithium batteries, critical to the growth of electric cars. The costs of utility-scale batteries, which could solve the "intermittency" (i.e., cloudy day) problem of renewables and help power whole cities in relatively short order, have fallen 70 percent since just 2015. Wind power is 40 percent cheaper than it was a decade ago, with offshore wind experiencing an even steeper decline. Overall, renewable energy is less expensive than dirty energy almost everywhere on the planet, and in many places it is simply cheaper to build new renewable capacity than to continue running the old fossil-fuel infrastructure. Oil demand and carbon emissions may both have peaked this year. Eighty percent of coal plants planned in Asia's developing countries have been shelved... [I]n the fall, the U.K. pledged to ban nonelectrics by 2030 — a once-unthinkable law coming both too slow and much more quickly than seemed possible not very long ago. Similar plans are now in place in 16 other countries, plus Massachusetts and California. Canada recently raised its tax on carbon sixfold. Italy cut its power-sector emissions 65 percent between 2012 and 2019, and Denmark is now aiming to reduce its overall emissions 70 percent by 2030... [F]or all their momentum, renewables still only make up 10 percent of global electricity production. But alarmists have to take the good news where they find it.... The author also spoke to Pulitzer Prize-winner environmentalist author Elizabeth Kolbert about her new book Under a White Sky:In her book, Kolbert sketches a spectrum of interventions, from electrifying rivers to using CRISPR to save endangered species to solar geoengineering, often called "solar-radiation management," by which aerosol particles are suspended in the stratosphere to deflect some sunlight back into outer space and artificially cool the planet. "There is a slippery slope here, you know?" she says. "And where does that end? "But there are not a lot of great choices. We're not returning to a preindustrial climate — not in my lifetime, not in your lifetime."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Inside.com's developer newsletter spotted this code repository story:GitHub posted a DMCA notice it received from the Motion Picture Association (MPA) last week asking the platform to take down a repository associated with NYAA.si, a popular torrent site specializing in anime content. The DMCA captured attention as the code doesn't belong to the MPA. Rather, the MPA argues the code is used for the development of the site, which allows for copyright infringement, while the repo also makes it possible to create NYAA clones. The news comes a few months after GitHub restored the youtube-dl repository and created a $1m legal defense fund to help open source developers fight unwarranted DMCA Section 1201 takedown claims. At the same time, the platform also announced it will be improving its Section 1201 claim review process to make it harder to take down repos. But the next day, the newsletter reported GitHub had reversed the takedown:The company explains the notice didn't meet its DMCA Takedown Policy requirements as it failed to "establish that the code is preconfigured to infringe." GitHub adds that it also restored any content that was disabled because of the notice. Some context from TorrentFreak:This isn't the first time the MPA has gone after the anime torrent site. Last November we reported that the anti-piracy group sent cease and desist letters to several people who are allegedly connected to the site, describing it as an "Anime Cartel". TorrentFreak's latest update:A few weeks ago, the Motion Picture Association tried to shut the project down by going after several people who are allegedly linked to the site. Framing NYAA as an "Anime Cartel", the movie group demanded a total shutdown and tens of thousands of dollars in settlements... This takedown request initially succeeded as GitHub disabled the repository earlier this week. Before doing so, the platform reached out to the developers and gave them the option to respond or make changes, but that request went unanswered. Without a response from the developers, this is usually where things end. In this case, however, GitHub decided to carry out another review after the project was taken down, perhaps in part motivated by the news coverage. "While we didn't hear back from the maintainers, we chose to do another review ourselves to proactively see how we could resolve the issue," a GitHub spokesperson informs TorrentFreak... [A]t the time of writing the NYAA repository is up and running again. The MPA still has the option to provide additional information about the allegedly-infringing nature of the code, which would then trigger another review. GitHub stresses that it's their purpose to make sure that developers can host code within the boundaries of the law. Unless the entire repository is infringing, it's standard policy to allow developers to respond to DMCA claims before any content is removed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes at ZDNet:When Elastic, makers of the open-source search and analytic engine Elasticsearch, went after Amazon Web Services (AWS) by changing its license from the open-source Apache 2.0-license ALv2) to the non-open-source friendly Server Side Public License, I predicted "we'd soon see AWS-sponsored Elasticsearch and Kibana forks." The next day, AWS tweeted it "will launch new forks of both Elasticsearch and Kibana based on the latest Apache 2.0 licensed codebases." Well, that didn't take long! In a blog post, AWS explained that since Elastic is no longer making its search and analytic engine Elasticsearch and its companion data visualization dashboard Kibana available as open source, AWS is taking action. "In order to ensure open source versions of both packages remain available and well supported, including in our own offerings, we are announcing today that AWS will step up to create and maintain an ALv2-licensed fork of open-source Elasticsearch and Kibana.... AWS brings years of experience working with these codebases, as well as making upstream code contributions to both Elasticsearch and Apache Lucene, the core search library that Elasticsearch is built on — with more than 230 Lucene contributions in 2020 alone... We're in this for the long haul, and will work in a way that fosters healthy and sustainable open source practices — including implementing shared project governance with a community of contributors..." Yet another company, Logz.io, a cloud-monitoring company, and some partners have announced that it will launch a "true" open source distribution for Elasticsearch and Kibana.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ars Technica reported Saturday that "The Falcon 9 rocket was ready. Its payload of 143 satellites were ready. But Mother Nature was not ready." Although SpaceX pressed ahead with fueling of the Falcon 9 booster on Saturday morning, the company scrubbed the launch attempt of the Transporter-1 mission a few minutes before the window opened due to weather. Conditions at Cape Canaveral violated the electrical field rule for a safe launch. The company now plans to try to launch again on Sunday morning, with the launch window opening at 10am ET (15:00 UTC). Slashdot noted earlier that SpaceX plans to launch the most satellites ever deployed in a single mission, 143, from Florida for more than a dozen customers. UPI reports: A 2017 mission by the India Space Research Organization launched 104 spacecraft, which would be the previous record if the SpaceX launch is a success... The Transporter-1 mission is the first in a series of regularly scheduled SpaceX rideshare projects for multiple customers. SpaceX also plans to carry 10 of its Starlink communications satellites on this mission. "The Starlink satellites aboard this mission will be the first in the constellation to deploy to a polar orbit," according to the SpaceX mission description. Polar orbits circle the globe by passing over the North Pole and South Pole, while many satellites circle above equatorial regions. Houston-based space firm Nanoracks is acting as a broker to arrange some customers for the launch, said Tristan Prejean, a mission manager at Nanoracks. Nanoracks' two customers for Transporter-1 are two satellite companies, California-based Spire Global and Montreal-based GHGSat. Spire launches fleets of small satellites that monitor weather and patterns for shipping for aviation interests. GHGSat monitors industrial emissions of gasses from space -- especially greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google released Chrome 88 this week — and besides improving its dark mode support, they removed support for both Adobe Flash and FTP. PC World calls it "the end of two eras."The most noteworthy change in this update is what's not included. Chrome 88 lays Adobe Flash and the FTP protocol to rest. RIP circa-2000 Internet. Neither comes as a surprise, though it's poetic that they're being buried together. Adobe halted Flash Player downloads at the end of 2020, making good on a promise made years before, and began blocking Flash content altogether a couple weeks later. Removing Flash from Chrome 88 is just Google's way of flushing the toilet. On the other hand, FTP isn't dead, but it is now for Chrome users. The File Transport Protocol has helped users send files across the Internet for decades, but in an era of prolific cloud storage services and other sharing methods, its use has waned. Google started slowly disabling FTP support in Chrome 86, per ZDNet, and now you'll no longer be able to access FTP links in the browser. Look for standalone FTP software instead if you need it, such as FileZilla. That's not all. Mac users should be aware that Chrome 88 drops support for OS X 10.10 (OS X Yosemite). Yosemite released in 2014 and received its last update in 2017... But Google killing Flash and FTP might be the footnotes that hit old-school web users in the feels. Chrome 88 will also block non-encrypted downloads originating from an encrypted page, the article reports. And the Verge notes Chrome also offers less intrusive website permission requests (as an experimental feature enabled from chrome://flags/#permission-chip ), while Bleeping Computer describes Chrome 88's new experimental feature for searching through all your open tabs. And Chrome's blog points out some additional features under the hood:Chrome 88 will heavily throttle chained JavaScript timers for hidden pages in particular conditions. This will reduce CPU usage, which will also reduce battery usage. There are some edge cases where this will change behavior, but timers are often used where a different API would be more efficient, and more reliable.Read more of this story at Slashdot.