 US Treasury Nominee Yellen Wants to Encourage Cryptocurrencies -- 'For Legitimate Activities'
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'
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Are We Slowing Global Warming?
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 t
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GitHub Reverses Takedown of Code for Anime Torrent Site Despite Film Group's DMCA
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 po
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Why AWS Is Forking Elasticsearch and Kibana
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 codeba
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SpaceX Re-Schedules Record-Breaking Launch With 143 Satellites to Sunday
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 mo
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Chrome 88 Released, Removing Adobe Flash -- and FTP
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 promi
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How Law Enforcement Gets Around Your Smartphone's Encryption
Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike shares a recent Wired.com article that purports to reveal "how law enforcement gets around your smartphone's encryption."
Lawmakers and law enforcement agencies around the world, including in the United States, have increasingly called for backdoors in the encryption schemes that protect your data, arguing that national security is at stake. But new research indicates governments already have methods and tools that, for better or worse, let them access loc
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 Instacart to eliminate about 2,000 jobs and GitHub head of HR resigns
Hey y’all. You've just landed on Human Capital, the weekly newsletter that details the latest in labor, and diversity and inclusion in tech. The week kicked off with GitHub making a public apology to the person the company terminated for cautioning his employees about Nazis in D.C. on the day of the insurrection at the […]
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Report Finds Extremists Did Use Facebook to Plan Capitol Attack
NBC News reports:
A number of pro-Trump extremists used Facebook to plan their attack on the U.S. Capitol, a watchdog organization has found, contradicting claims by Facebook's leadership that such planning was largely done on other sites.
Private Facebook groups spent months advising one another about how to "take down" the U.S. government, particularly after Joe Biden was elected president, according to a report from the nonprofit Tech Transparency Project, which tracked several of them
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Are Experts Underselling the Effectiveness of Covid-19 Vaccines?
David Leonhardt won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2011. This week in a New York Times newsletter, he argues that early in the pandemic experts around the world mistakenly discouraged mask use because of "a concern that people would rush to buy high-grade medical masks, leaving too few for doctors and nurses. The experts were also [at the time] unsure how much ordinary masks would help."
But are they now spreading a similarly misguided pessimism about vaccines?
Right now, public discu
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Augmented reality's awkward phase will be long and painful
Howdy friends, this is the web version of my Week in Review newsletter, it’s here to entice you to sign up and get it in your inbox every week. Last week, I showcased how Twitter was looking at the future of the web with a decentralized approach so that they wouldn’t be stuck unilaterally de-platforming […]
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How DNSpooq Attacks Could Poison DNS Cache Records
Earlier this week security experts disclosed details on seven vulnerabilities impacting Dnsmasq, "a popular DNS software package that is commonly deployed in networking equipment, such as routers and access points," reports ZDNet. "The vulnerabilities tracked as DNSpooq, impact Dnsmasq, a DNS forwarding client for *NIX-based operating systems."
Slashdot reader Joe2020 shared Help Net Security's quote from Shlomi Oberman, CEO and researcher at JSOF. "Some of the bigger users of Dnsmasq are An
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Facebook Refers Its Trump Ban To Its 'Supreme Court'
While NBC News reported on Tuesday that Facebook "has no plan in place to lift the indefinite suspension on President Donald Trump's Facebook account," there was a new twist two days later.
"Facebook on Thursday announced that it will refer its decision to indefinitely suspend the account of former President Donald Trump to its newly instituted Oversight Board," reports CNBC:
The independent body, which has been described as Facebook's "Supreme Court," will review the decision to suspend Tr
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Electric Vehicles Close To 'Tipping Point' of Mass Adoption
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Electric vehicles are close to the "tipping point" of rapid mass adoption thanks to the plummeting cost of batteries, experts say. Global sales rose 43% in 2020, but even faster growth is anticipated when continuing falls in battery prices bring the price of electric cars dipping below that of equivalent petrol and diesel models, even without subsidies. The latest analyses forecast that to happen some time between 2023 and 2025.
The tipp
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SpaceX Plans Record-Breaking Launch With 143 Satellites
SpaceX plans to launch the most satellites ever deployed in a single mission, 143, on Saturday morning 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. Liftoff aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station is planned for at 9:40 a.m. EST, but could come up to 42 minutes later in case of a problem. The Transporter-1 mis
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How VCs and founders see 2021 differently
Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It's broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Click here if you want it in your inbox every Saturday morning. Ready? Let's talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors. We're shaking things up this weekend in […]
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Brad Cox, Creator of Objective-C Programming Language, Dies At 76
We have learned that Brad Cox, computer scientist known mostly for creating the Objective-C programming language with his business partner Tom Love, died on January 2, 2021 at his residence. He was 76. From a Legacy.com post: Brad was born on May 2, 1944 in Fort Benning, Georgia, to the late Nancy Hinson Cox and Dewey McBride Cox of Lake City, South Carolina. Brad grew up on the family's dairy farm in South Carolina but found himself most interested in science. After graduating from Lake City Hi
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 9 great reads from CNET this week - CNET
We contemplate the pros and cons of a rumored return of MagSafe to MacBooks. Plus: the messy hunt for COVID-19's origins, nightmares about Netflix's Night Stalker, and more.
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Work trips are making a $5 billion comeback
Would you bet millions of dollars on a corporate travel comeback? Doesn't matter. Andreessen Horowitz, Addition and Elad Gil are anyways. This week, the trio led a nine-figure financing round in TripActions, a software company that helps other companies book and manage corporate travel. But the news is (always) more than the number. I see […]
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Could giant SPACs be next?
While many deemed 2020 the year of SPAC, short for special purpose acquisition company, 2021 may well make last year look quaint in comparison. It’s probably not premature to be asking: is there any company too big to be SPAC’d? Just today, we saw the trading debut of the most valuable company to date go […]
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Twitter Bots Are a Major Source of Climate Disinformation
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Twitter accounts run by machines are a major source of climate change disinformation that might drain support from policies to address rising temperatures. In the weeks surrounding former President Trump's announcement about withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, accounts suspected of being bots accounted for roughly a quarter of all tweets about climate change, according to new research. "If we are to effectively address the existenti
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US Emissions In 2020 In Biggest Fall Since WWII
US greenhouse gas emissions tumbled below their 1990 level for the first-time last year as a result of the response to the coronavirus pandemic. The BBC reports: A preliminary assessment from research group Rhodium says that overall emissions were down over 10%, the largest fall since World War II. Transport suffered the biggest decline, with emissions down almost 15% over 2019. Energy emissions also fell sharply, due to a decline in the use of coal. With stay-at-home orders in place, economic a
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Honor Launches First Post-Huawei Phone
Honor, the Chinese smartphone brand formerly owned by Huawei, launched the V40, its first device since being sold off. CNBC reports: Huawei sold Honor, its budget smartphone brand, in November to a consortium of buyers in China, as a way to help the unit survive in the face of U.S. sanctions. In 2019, Huawei was put on a U.S. export blacklist called the Entity List which restricted American firms from selling certain components to the Chinese technology giant. This included both semiconductors a
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Cloudflare Introduces Free Digital Waiting Rooms For Any Organizations Distributing COVID-19 Vaccines
Darrell Etherington reports via TechCrunch: Web infrastructure company Cloudflare is releasing a new tool today that aims to provide a way for health agencies and organizations globally tasked with rolling out COVID-19 vaccines to maintain a fair, equitable and transparent digital queue -- completely free of charge. The company's Project Fair Shot initiative will make its new Cloudflare Waiting Room offering free to any organization that qualifies, essentially providing a way for future vaccine
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Intelligence Analysts Use US Smartphone Location Data Without Warrants, Memo Says
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: A military arm of the intelligence community buys commercially available databases containing location data from smartphone apps and searches it for Americans' past movements without a warrant, according to an unclassified memo obtained by The New York Times. Defense Intelligence Agency analysts have searched for the movements of Americans within a commercial database in five investigations over the past two and a half years, agency of
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FTC Fines Three Ticket Scalping Companies For Illegally Using Bots
The Federal Trade Commission issued multimillion-dollar fines against three bot-powered ticket scalping operations. The Verge reports: The FTC says these organizations bought over 150,000 event tickets over the past four years, nabbing them with automated tools that evaded online purchasing limits. After reselling these tickets for an estimated $26.1 million, they've been accused of breaking a 2016 anti-bot law -- the first time this law has been applied.
Regulators reached a proposed settle
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Apple Plans Thinner MacBook Air With Magnetic Charger In Mac Lineup Reboot
According to Bloomberg, Apple is working on a thinner and lighter version of the MacBook Air, the company's mass-market laptop. From the report: The new computer is planned to be released during the second half of this year at the earliest or in 2022. It will include Apple's MagSafe charging technology and a next-generation version of the company's in-house Mac processors. Apple has discussed making the laptop smaller by shrinking the border around the screen, which will remain 13-inches. The cu
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A Home Security Worker Hacked Into Surveillance Systems To Watch People Have Sex
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: A former employee of prominent home security company ADT has admitted that he hacked into the surveillance feeds of dozens of customer homes, doing so primarily to spy on naked women or to leer at unsuspecting couples while they had sex. Telesforo Aviles, 35, pleaded guilty to a count of computer fraud in federal court this week, confessing that he inappropriately accessed the accounts of customers some 9,600 times over the course of several year
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Boston Globe Will Consider People's Requests To Have Articles About Them Anonymized
The Boston Globe is starting a new program by which people who feel an article at the newspaper is harmful to their reputation can ask that it be updated or anonymized. From a report: It's reminiscent of the E.U.'s "right to be forgotten," though potentially less controversial, since it concerns only one editorial outlet and not a content-agnostic search engine. The "Fresh Start" initiative isn't for removing bad restaurant reviews or coverage of serious crimes, but rather for more commonplace c
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As Bitcoin Price Surges, DDoS Extortion Gangs Return in Force
Extortion groups that send emails threatening companies with DDoS attacks unless paid a certain fee are making a comeback, security firm Radware warned today. From a report: In a security alert sent to its customers and shared with ZDNet this week, Radware said that during the last week of 2020 and the first week of 2021, its customers received a new wave of DDoS extortion emails. Extortionists threatened companies with crippling DDoS attacks unless they got paid between 5 and 10 bitcoins ($150,
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EU Lawmakers Want Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google CEOs at Feb. 1 Hearing
EU lawmakers have invited the chief executives of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Alphabet to a Feb. 1 hearing in Brussels as they try to crack down on the powers of U.S. tech giants. From a report: The European Parliament will in the coming months provide input into proposals by the European Commission to force the companies to play fairly with rivals and to do more to tackle online fake news and harmful content or face hefty fines. "The purpose of the planned hearing is to have an exchange with th
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Backed by Vint Cerf, Emortal wants to protect your digital legacy from 'bit-rot'
We are all pumping out data into the cloud. Some of it we’d like to keep forever. Emortal is a startup that wants to help you organize, protect, preserve and pass on your “digital legacy” and protect it from becoming unreadable, otherwise known as “bit-rot.” The project has received backing from the legendary Vint Cerf, one […]
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No Cases? No Chance. The Truth About North Korea and Covid-19
The real impact of Covid-19 on North Korea -- and its citizens -- remains a mystery. Faced with a global health crisis, the country has turned inwards more than ever. From a report: "North Korea, in general, is more difficult to know this year or last year than at almost any point in the last two decades," says Sokeel Park, the director of research at Liberty in North Korea, a group that works with defectors from the country to understand what happens inside its borders. "It seems clear to me th
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Daily Crunch: Alphabet shuts down Loon
Alphabet pulls the plug on its internet balloon company, Apple is reportedly developing a new MacBook Air and Google threatens to pull out of Australia. This is your Daily Crunch for January 22, 2021. The big story: Alphabet shuts down Loon Alphabet announced that it’s shutting down Loon, the project that used balloons to bring […]
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Why Do We Assume Extraterrestrials Might Want To Visit Us?
Avi Loeb, former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University and who chairs the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies, writing at Scientific American: It is presumptuous to assume that we are worthy of special attention from advanced species in the Milky Way. We may be a phenomenon as uninteresting to them as ants are to us; after all, when we're walking down the sidewalk we rarely if ever examine every ant along our path. Our sun formed at the tail end of the star
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James Bond Film No Time To Die Delayed Again Over Covid
You know it's bad when James Bond still can't get out of the house. "No Time to Die," the 25th film in the Bond franchise, was delayed for a third time late Thursday, the surest sign yet that Hollywood does not believe the masses will be ready to return to movie theaters anytime soon. From a report: Daniel Craig's final outing as 007 will now arrive on 8 October, the official Bond Twitter account announced. It had been set to be released in April following multiple pandemic-enforced delays. No T
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Samsung Considers $10 Billion Texas Chipmaking Plant
Samsung is considering spending more than $10 billion building its most advanced logic chipmaking plant in the U.S., a major investment it hopes will win more American clients and help it catch up with industry leader Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Bloomberg News: The world's largest memory chip and smartphone maker is in discussions to locate a facility in Austin, Texas, capable of fabricating chips as advanced as 3 nanometers in the future, people familiar with the matter said. Plans a
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Microsoft Increases Xbox Live Gold Prices
Microsoft continues sending not-so-subtle signals that it would really, really like you to drop Xbox Live Gold in favor of Game Pass. From a report: The company has raised prices for new Xbox Live Gold memberships across the board, with the changes becoming more noticeable the longer you're ready to commit. The one- and three-month plans aren't much pricier at $11 and $30 respectively (up $1 and $5), but six months now costs you $60 -- well above the $40 you used to pay. And when there's no long
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Alphabet Shuts Down Loon Internet Balloon Company
Google's parent firm, Alphabet, is done exploring the idea of using a fleet of balloons to beam high-speed internet in remote parts of the world. From a report: The firm said on Thursday evening that it was winding down Loon, a nine-year-old project and a two-and-a-half-year-old spin off firm, after failing to find a sustainable business model and partners for one of its most prominent moonshot projects. The demise of Loon, which assumed spotlight after the project helped restore cell services k
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Intel Says Hacker Obtained Financially Sensitive Information
Intel said it was the victim of a hacker who stole financially sensitive information from its corporate website on Thursday, prompting the company to release its earnings statement ahead of schedule.ÂFrom a report: The US computer chipmaker believed an attacker had obtained advanced details about a strong earnings report it was due to publish after the stock market closed, said George Davis, chief financial officer. It published its formal earnings announcement upon discovering the problem,
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Federal Judge Blocks Parler's Bid To Be Restored on Amazon Web Services
A federal judge has denied Parler's request for a court order blocking Amazon from kicking the social media app off its platform, marking yet another setback in Parler's efforts to get back online. From a report: Judge Barbara Rothstein issued a ruling on Thursday saying that Parler had not met the legal requirements for a temporary restraining order or preliminary injunction. That decision does not end the litigation, but it does mean that the court will not force Amazon Web Services to allow P
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Google Threatens To Remove Search in Australia as Spat Escalates
Google has threatened to disable its search engine in Australia if it's forced to pay local publishers for news, a dramatic escalation of a months-long standoff with the government. From a report: The proposed law, intended to compensate publishers for the value their stories generate for the company, is "unworkable," Mel Silva, managing director for Australia and New Zealand, told a parliamentary hearing Friday. She specifically opposed the requirement that Google pay media companies for displa
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DDoS-Guard To Forfeit Internet Space Occupied By Parler
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Krebs On Security: Parler, the beleaguered social network advertised as a "free speech" alternative to Facebook and Twitter, has had a tough month. Apple and Google removed the Parler app from their stores, and Amazon blocked the platform from using its hosting services. Parler has since found a home in DDoS-Guard, a Russian digital infrastructure company. But now it appears DDoS-Guard is about to be relieved of more than two-thirds of the Internet addres
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