"Frank McCourt, the billionaire real estate mogul and former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, is pouring $100 million into an attempt to rebuild the foundations of social media," reports Bloomberg: The effort, which he has loftily named Project Liberty, centers on the construction of a publicly accessible database of people's social connections, allowing users to move records of their relationships between social media services instead of being locked into a few dominant apps.

The undercurrent to Project Liberty is a fear of the power that a few huge companies — and specifically Facebook Inc. — have amassed over the last decade... Project Liberty would use blockchain to construct a new internet infrastructure called the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol. With cryptocurrencies, blockchain stores information about the tokens in everyone's digital wallets; the DSNP would do the same for social connections. Facebook owns the data about the social connections between its users, giving it an enormous advantage over competitors. If all social media companies drew from a common social graph, the theory goes, they'd have to compete by offering better services, and the chance of any single company becoming so dominant would plummet.

Building DSNP falls to Braxton Woodham, the co-founder of the meal delivery service Sun Basket and former chief technology officer of Fandango, the movie ticket website... McCourt hired Woodham to build the protocol, and pledged to put $75 million into an institute at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and Sciences Po in Paris to research technology that serves the common good. The rest of his $100 million will go toward pushing entrepreneurs to build services that utilize the DSNP...

A decentralized approach to social media could actually undermine the power of content moderation, by making it easier for users who are kicked off one platform to simply migrate their audiences to more permissive ones. McCourt and Woodham say blockchain could discourage bad behavior because people would be tied to their posts forever...

Eventually, the group plans to create its own consumer product on top of the DSNP infrastructure, and wrote in a press release that the eventual result will be an "open, inclusive data economy where individuals own, control and derive greater social and economic value from their personal information."

"On January 15, a hacker tried to poison a water treatment plant that served parts of the San Francisco Bay Area," reports NBC News: It didn't seem hard. The hacker had the username and password for a former employee's TeamViewer account, a popular program that lets users remotely control their computers, according to a private report compiled by the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center in February and seen by NBC News. After logging in, the hacker, whose name and motive are unknown and who hasn't been identified by law enforcement, deleted programs that the water plant used to treat drinking water.

The hack wasn't discovered until the following day, and the facility changed its passwords and reinstalled the programs. "No failures were reported as a result of this incident, and no individuals in the city reported illness from water-related failures," the report, which did not specify which water treatment plant had been breached, noted.

The incident, which has not been previously reported, is one of a growing number of cyberattacks on U.S. water infrastructure that have recently come to light. The Bay Area attack was followed by a similar one in Oldsmar, Florida, a few weeks later. In that one, which made headlines around the world, a hacker also gained access to a TeamViewer account and raised the levels of lye in the drinking water to poisonous levels. An employee quickly caught the computer's mouse moving on its own, and undid the hacker's changes... The usernames and passwords for at least 11 Oldsmar employees have been traded on the dark web, said Kent Backman, a researcher at the cybersecurity company Dragos...

[A] number of facilities have been hacked in the past year, though most draw little attention. In Pennsylvania, a state water warning system has reportedly alerted its members to two recent hacks at water plants in the state. In another previously unreported hack, the Camrosa Water District in Southern California was infected with ransomware last summer. Whether hacks on water plants have recently become more common or just more visible is impossible to tell, because there is no comprehensive federal or industry accounting of water treatment plants' security... Unlike the electric grid, which is largely run by a smaller number of for-profit corporations, most of the more than 50,000 drinking water facilities in the U.S. are nonprofit entities.

Some that serve large populations are larger operations with dedicated cybersecurity staff. But rural areas in particular often get their water from small plants, often run by only a handful of employees who aren't dedicated cybersecurity experts, said Bryson Bort, a consultant on industrial cybersecurity systems. "They're even more fragmented at lower levels than anything we're used to talking about, like the electric grid," he said. "If you could imagine a community center run by two old guys who are plumbers, that's your average water plant."
NBC News also a spokesperson for America's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, who shared an internal survey conducted earlier this year. As many as 1 in 10 water and wastewater plants reported they'd recently found a critical cybersecurity vulnerability — and more than 80% of their major vulnerabilities were software flaws discovered before 2017.

Bloomberg Businessweek describes what happened when an anonymous donor started "seeding" the tiny El Salvadoran surfing village of El Zonte (population: 3,000) with Bitcoin, turning it into the world's biggest Bitcoin experiment. Workers now receive their salaries and pay bills in Bitcoin, tourists can buy pupusas with a special Bitcoin payment app, and community projects are financed with Bitcoin donations. According to Jorge Valenzuela, an upbeat 32-year-old surfing aficionado who leads the volunteers, "it has changed my town...." [T]he most striking thing these days is the orange "B" — the international symbol for Bitcoin — splashed on garbage cans, near the entrance of the dirt-floor pizza joint, and hanging on the wall near the surf shack at the beachfront hotel. The town has never had a bank. Now the lone ATM buys and sells Bitcoin... In El Zonte, Bitcoin is a possible solution to an actual problem, as opposed to a solution in search of a problem, which is how critics describe its role in, say, the U.S...

But it was the pandemic that ultimately jump-started the project. When El Salvador's tourism industry and El Zonte's economy collapsed, Michael Peterson started making monthly transfers of about $35 in Bitcoin to 500 families around town [on behalf of an anonymous donor]. He used Wallet of Satoshi, one of the many existing smartphone apps created for small transactions using Bitcoin, which is notoriously impractical — expensive and slow — for everyday purchases. As more stores began asking how they could accept Bitcoin, Peterson decided El Zonte needed its own app. The Bitcoin Beach Wallet, which launched in September, similarly uses technology that allows for small transactions. It shows users how much they hold in Bitcoin and greenbacks and where they can spend it. Shops in town price everything in dollars, whether the underlying transaction is in Bitcoin or not. A cappuccino always costs $3.50, even if Bitcoin's value has just jumped or dropped. In this way, it behaves more like a token than a currency...

He says that 18 months after the project launched, roughly 90% of El Zonte's households are interacting with the currency regularly. "It's crazy how fast Bitcoin has caught on," he says. Businesses are using it on their own to pay bills and accept payments. Residents use transfers to the Strike app, the ATM, and peer-to-peer transactions to move money back and forth between Bitcoin and cash... Many business owners say it makes up just a small fraction of sales. Although some 85% of families have access to smartphones, many still live in cramped houses with dirt floors and tin roofs. But for others, it's clearly been life-altering. A construction crew chief pays his dozen or so employees in Bitcoin. He was sick of losing them for a half-day every month so they could travel to the nearest bank, an hourlong bus ride away, on payday...

El Zonte is among the longest-running experiments of its kind, but it's still largely untested. "I'd be very interested in seeing what happens if we enter a bear market," says McCormack, the British podcaster. "If you're a shop owner and you have $50 a day in Bitcoin sales and all the sudden that goes up to $60, that's cool. But what happens when it starts going down to $40 or $30?"

Earlier this year a new support page appeared at support.Mozilla.org describing sponsored shortcuts (or sponsored tiles), "an experimental feature currently being tested by a small percentage of Firefox users in a limited number of markets." Mozilla works with advertising partners to place sponsored tiles on the Firefox default home page (or New Tab page) that would be useful to Firefox users. Mozilla is paid when users click on sponsored tiles.... [W]e only work with advertising partners that meet our privacy standards for Firefox.

When you click on a sponsored tile, Firefox sends anonymized technical data to our partner through a Mozilla-owned proxy service. The code for this proxy service is available on GitHub for interested technical audiences. This data does not include any personally identifying information and is only shared when you click on a Sponsored shortcut....

You can disable a specific Sponsored tile... You can also disable Sponsored shortcuts altogether.
Describing the as-yet-experimental feature, Engadget wrote a story headlined "Don't freak out: Firefox is testing advertisements in new tabs." These are just the tests, still mainly aimed at fresh installs of the Firefox web browser and always to beta users, before the rollout of sponsored tiles.

It does sound like adverts are in the pipe, but it depends on the reaction to Mozilla's initial tests. Mozilla's Jonathan Nightingale says that, last time around, the reaction wasn't as positive as his company hoped. "It didn't go over well," he states. Further, he insists that Firefox won't become "a mess of logos sold to the highest bidder; without user control, without user benefit."
Long-time Slashdot reader angryargus says they spotted the feature when they noticed an Ebay advertisement, but appreciated the ability to opt out, and suggested the feature is "an annoying tradeoff off using a browser that's not as directly funded by a search engine."

As California approaches the biggest state tax rebate in U.S. history, Bloomberg News co-founder Matthew A. Winkler questions its reputation as a state doomed by over-regulation and high taxes.

In fact, California "has no peers among developed economies for expanding GDP, creating jobs, raising household income, manufacturing growth, investment in innovation, producing clean energy and unprecedented wealth through its stocks and bonds." By adding 1.3 million people to its non-farm payrolls since April last year — equal to the entire workforce of Nevada — California easily surpassed also-rans Texas and New York. At the same time, California household income increased $164 billion, almost as much as Texas, Florida and Pennsylvania combined, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. No wonder California's operating budget surplus, fueled by its surging economy and capital gains taxes, swelled to a record $75 billion...

While pundits have long insisted California policies are bad for business, reality belies them. In a sign of investor demand, the weight of California companies in the benchmark S&P 500 Index increased 3 percentage points since a year ago, the most among all states, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Faith in California credit was similarly superlative, with the weight of corporate bonds sold by companies based in the state rising the most among all states, to 12.5 percentage points from 11.7 percentage points, according to the Bloomberg Barclays U.S. Corporate Bond Index. Translation: Investors had the greatest confidence in California companies during the pandemic. The most trusted measure of economic strength says California is the world-beater among democracies. The state's gross domestic product increased 21% during the past five years, dwarfing No. 2 New York (14%) and No. 3 Texas (12%), according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The gains added $530 billion to the Golden State, 30% more than the increase for New York and Texas combined and equivalent to the entire economy of Sweden.

Among the five largest economies, California outperforms the U.S., Japan and Germany with a growth rate exceeded only by China...

Corporate California also is the undisputed leader in renewable energy, with 26 companies worth $897 billion, or 36% of the U.S. industry, having reported 10% or more of their revenues derived from clean technology. No state comes close to matching the 21% of electricity derived from solar energy. Shares of these firms appreciated 282% during the past 12 months and 1,003%, 1,140% and 9,330% over two, five and 10 years, respectively, with no comparable rivals anywhere in the world, according to BloombergNEF. The same companies also increased their workforce 35% since 2019, almost tripling the rate for the rest U.S. overall and four times the global rate...

California companies invested 16% of their revenues in R&D, or their future, when the rest of the U.S. put aside just 1%...

Much has been made of the state reporting its first yearly loss in population, or 182,000 last year. Had it not been for the Trump administration preventing new visas, depriving as many as 150,000 people from moving to California from other countries annually, the 2020 outcome would have been more favorable.

A data center can easily use up to 1.25 million gallons of water each day — and "More data centers are being built every day by some of America's largest technology companies," reports NBC News, "including Amazon, Microsoft and Google and used by millions of customers." Almost 40 percent of them are in the United States, and Amazon, Google and Microsoft account for more than half of the total. The U.S. also has at least 1,800 "colocation" data centers, warehouses filled with a variety of smaller companies' server hardware that share the same cooling system, electricity and security, according to Data Center Map. They are typically smaller than hyperscale data centers but, research has shown, more resource intensive as they maintain a variety of computer systems operating at different levels of efficiency.

Many data center operators are drawn to water-starved regions in the West, in part due to the availability of solar and wind energy. Researchers at Virginia Tech estimate that one-fifth of data centers draw water from moderately to highly stressed watersheds, mostly in the Western United States, according to a paper published in April...

The growth in the industry shows no signs of slowing. The research company Gartner predicts that spending on global data center infrastructure will reach $200 billion this year, an increase of 6 percent from 2020, followed by 3-4 percent annually over the next three years. This growth comes at a time of record temperatures and drought in the United States, particularly in the West. "The typical data center uses about 3-5 million gallons of water per day — the same amount of water as a city of 30,000-50,000 people," said Venkatesh Uddameri, professor and director of the Water Resources Center at Texas Tech University. Although these data centers have become much more energy and water efficient over the last decade, and don't use as much water as other industries such as agriculture, this level of water use can still create potential competition with local communities over the water supply in areas where water is scarce, he added...

Sergio Loureiro, vice president of core operations for Microsoft, said that the company has pledged to be "water positive" by 2030, which means it plans to replenish more water than it consumes globally. This includes reducing the company's water use and investing in community replenishment and conservation projects near where it builds facilities.

Amazon did not respond to requests for comment.

The U.S. government spent more than $18 billion last year funding drugmakers to make a Covid vaccine, an effort that led to at least five highly effective shots in record time. Now it's pouring more than $3 billion on a neglected area of research: developing pills to fight the virus early in the course of infection, potentially saving many lives in the years to come. From a report: The new program, announced on Thursday by the Department of Health and Human Services, will speed up the clinical trials of a few promising drug candidates. If all goes well, some of those first pills could be ready by the end of the year. The Antiviral Program for Pandemics will also support research on entirely new drugs -- not just for the coronavirus, but for viruses that could cause future pandemics. A number of other viruses, including influenza, H.I.V. and hepatitis C, can be treated with a simple pill. But despite more than a year of research, no such pill exists to treat someone with a coronavirus infection before it wreaks havoc. Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration's program for accelerating Covid-19 research, invested far more money in the development of vaccines than of treatments, a gap that the new program will try to fill.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a key backer of the program, said he looked forward to a time when Covid-19 patients could pick up antiviral pills from a pharmacy as soon as they tested positive for the coronavirus or develop Covid-19 symptoms. "I wake up in the morning, I don't feel very well, my sense of smell and taste go away, I get a sore throat," Dr. Fauci said in an interview. "I call up my doctor and I say, 'I have Covid and I need a prescription.'" Dr. Fauci's support for research on antiviral pills stems from his own experience fighting AIDS three decades ago. In the 1990s, his institute conducted research that led to some of the first antiviral pills for H.I.V., "protease inhibitors" that block an essential virus protein and can keep the virus at bay for a lifetime.

The number of new wildfires in the U.S. so far this year is at a ten-year high, according to federal data, prompting warnings of a long, potentially dangerous summer of fire. From a report: One of the biggest areas of concern right now is the high desert Great Basin region in Utah, Nevada and eastern Oregon. "When you have standing dead grass that's already out there and when we have high heat, that ignition potential raises dramatically," said Paul Peterson, a fire management officer for the Bureau of Land Management. Since January, more than a million acres have burned from more than 28,000 wildfires â" the highest number of fires for this date since 2011. There are currently 33 active large fires across the West. The biggest has scorched more than 175,000 acres in the canyons and valleys east of Phoenix. It is 73% contained. A record-breaking heat wave across the West this week isn't helping ease fire danger. Temperatures have soared into the triple digits in Salt Lake City, Las Vegas and Montana, where new wildfires are sparking weeks earlier than normal.

Oregon is now the third state in the US to allow a deathcare option that's gaining popularity for its environmental benefits: human composting. From a report: Gov. Katie Brown signed House Bill 2574 into law on Tuesday, adding natural organic reduction to the range of approved after-life options in the west coast state. Sponsored and developed by Rep. Pam Marsh (D - Southern Jackson County), the bill met Oregonians' growing interest in sustainable alternatives to traditional deathcare. "This is a hard issue for people to think about; it's not a decision that any of us get to avoid," Marsh told Motherboard over the phone. "It has an appeal, certainly not to all consumers, but to many of us who are really looking for ways to think about how our footprint on the earth continues after life is gone."

The move heeds a growing call from environmentalists across the country to clean up the end-of-life industry. The most common methods of body disposal come with hefty environmental impacts: traditional burials, in which a corpse is embalmed with formaldehyde and placed in a casket underground, permanently occupy large swaths of land and have been found to leach toxins into nearby soil and waterways. Cremation -- in which a body is burned into ash -- is an energy suck and emits damaging pollutants and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming. The move follows Washington passing a similar law in 2019 and Colorado last month.

California on Friday started offering residents a digital record of their coronavirus vaccinations that they can use to access businesses or events that require proof they got the shots. From a report: The state's public health and technology departments said the new tool allows Californians access to their COVID-19 vaccination records from the state's immunization registry and includes the same information as the paper cards issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. To access the information, Californians will enter into a state website their name, date of birth and email or phone associated with their vaccine records and they will be asked to create a four-digit PIN. The record will include a QR code that users can save to their mobile phones. With nearly 20 million people fully vaccinated in California and proof of vaccination already required in some circumstances such as travel, state health officials felt there would be demand for the tool, though it remains optional, said Dr. Erica Pan, the state's epidemiologist.

EPA is out with its latest tally of buildings certified through the Energy Star efficiency program it runs with the Energy Department. From a report: Commercial and multifamily buildings are a big source of energy demand and carbon emissions. The chart shows the ranking of large cities, and this page has more about those, and smaller cities, too.

The Earth is trapping nearly twice as much heat as it did in 2005, according to new research, described as an "unprecedented" increase amid the climate crisis. From a report: Scientists from NASA, the US space agency, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), reported in a new study that Earth's "energy imbalance approximately doubled" from 2005 to 2019. The increase was described as "alarming." "Energy imbalance" refers to the difference between how much of the Sun's "radiative energy" is absorbed by Earth's atmosphere and surface, compared to how much "thermal infrared radiationâ bounces back into space.

"A positive energy imbalance means the Earth system is gaining energy, causing the planet to heat up," NASA said in a statement about this study. Scientists determined there was an energy imbalance by comparing data from satellite sensors -- which track how much energy enters and exits Earth's system -- and data from ocean floats. This system of data-gathering floats, which stretches across the globe, allows for "an accurate estimate of the rate at which the world's oceans are heating up." Because about 90% of excess energy from an imbalance winds up in the ocean, the satellite sensors' data should correspond with temperature changes in oceans.

Alphabet unit Google could face its biggest regulatory threat, with EU antitrust regulators set to open a formal investigation into its lucrative digital advertising business before the end of the year, said people familiar with the matter. From a report: It would mark a new front by the EU competition enforcer against Google. It has in the last decade fined the company more than 8 billion euros ($9.8 billion) for blocking rivals in online shopping, Android smartphones and online advertising. An EU probe would focus on Google's position vis-a-vis advertisers, publishers, intermediaries and rivals, one of the people said, indicating deeper scrutiny than the French antitrust agency's case concluded last week. Google made $147 billion in revenue from online ads last year, more than any other company in the world. Ads on its properties, including search, YouTube and Gmail, accounted for the bulk of sales and profits. About 16% of revenue came from its display or network business, in which other media companies use Google technology to sell ads on their website and apps.

Google has open-sourced a collection of C++ libraries for implementing Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) in modern applications. From a report: Fully homomorphic encryption, or simply homomorphic encryption, is a form of data encryption that allows users/applications to perform mathematical computations on encrypted data without decrypting it first, keeping the data's privacy intact. While the concept of homomorphic encryption has been around since 1978, when it was first described at a theoretical level, and 2009, when it was first implemented in practice, it has not been broadly adopted in software due to its complexity, advanced cryptography techniques, and lack of open-source code and public documentation. However, despite this, today, FHE is a hot technology in software design.

FHE allows software vendors to work on encrypted data without sharing the encryption/decryption keys with untrustworthy systems such as client-side apps or publicly-hosted web servers, where the keys could be stolen or intercepted by malware or malicious human operators. FHE allows developers to keep data secure, encrypted, and private, all at the same time, and Google hopes that developers will use its FHE libraries as the first step into adopting this new type of encryption technology within their applications.

The Senate on Thursday confirmed Chris Inglis to be President Joe Biden's national cyber director, installing the former NSA deputy director as Biden's top cyber adviser at a time when many lawmakers are pressing the White House for a muscular response to a series of high-profile hacks. From a report: As head of the new Office of the National Cyber Director inside the White House, Inglis will coordinate federal agencies' disparate work on cyber issues and oversee the development of the U.S.' digital defense strategy. The Senate confirmed Inglis on a voice vote one day after the Homeland Security Committee unanimously approved his nomination.

The recent ransomware attacks on Colonial Pipeline and the meat processing giant JBS, both attributed to Russian cybercrime gangs, as well as the SolarWinds espionage campaign that intelligence agencies linked to Moscow, thrust cybersecurity into the spotlight on Capitol Hill and prompted renewed scrutiny of the challenges facing the federal government, including its limited understanding of attacks on private companies.

The Biden administration Thursday unveiled a new mapping tool that shows much greater gaps in use of high-speed internet service across the U.S. than the government's previous maps reported. From a report: The White House is pushing for big spending to provide more, better broadband service to underserved areas after the pandemic made Americans more dependent than ever on their internet connections. The new, zoomable map draws on a wider pool of data than existing maps by the Federal Communications Commission, which relied exclusively on industry-provided data that overstated broadband penetration.

The map raises questions about the gap between internet availability and actual usage, with usage reports indicating wide swaths of the country are not making a home broadband connection. The new "Indicators of Broadband Need" map, developed by the White House and the telecommunications branch of the Commerce Department, pulls together different data sets from Ookla, M-Lab, Microsoft, the Federal Communications Commission and the Census Bureau. The overlapping data points are meant to paint a picture of the areas that need more, better broadband. The map also includes data on places that reported a lack of connection by computer, smartphone or tablet and information on broadband usage in high-poverty communities.

The U.S. and European Union plan to cooperate more on technology regulation, industrial development and bilateral trade following President Biden's visit, in a bid to help Western allies better compete with China and Russia on developing and protecting critical and emerging technologies. From a report: Central to the increased coordination will be a new high-level Trade and Technology Council the two sides unveiled Tuesday. The aim of the TTC is to boost innovation and investment within and between the two allied economies, strengthen supply chains and avert unnecessary obstacles to trade, among other tasks. "You see the possibility for alignment," said European Commission Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager in an interview.

In a sign of both sides' aspirations for the council, it will be co-chaired on the U.S. side by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai. The EU side will be co-chaired the Ms. Vestager, the bloc's top competition and digital-policy official, and fellow Executive Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis, who handles trade. As the EU's top antitrust enforcer, Ms. Vestager has gained prominence for her cases against U.S. tech giants including Apple, Google parent Alphabet and Facebook. Former presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump both said her policies unfairly targeted American companies. Ms. Vestager has said her work doesn't single out any nationality. The TTC, which is slated to hold its first meeting in the fall and oversee many working groups, will allow the EU and U.S. to focus on cooperation, she said. Both sides stressed they would maintain regulatory autonomy within their respective legal systems.

An anonymous reader shares a report: By late January 2021, some 55 vessels were crowded around the LA and Long Beach ports, reportedly sitting in the ocean for up to two weeks. FreightWaves noted that it took longer for some of these ships just to get unloaded than it was for them to cross the Pacific. Why is there a delay to unload these ships? The boom in demand is, of course, one leading reason. American ports are also seeing a shortage of labor. There's an ongoing shortage of the longshoremen who who undertake the critical task of getting these containers off the ship and onto trucks or trains. Dozens were quarantined due to the coronavirus at varying points last year.

Above all, when something goes astray with ocean shipping, there's a major butterfly effect. A ship that's unloaded two weeks late in Los Angeles is also going to be two weeks late when it arrives back in, say, Chittagong, Bangladesh to load up on IKEA furniture. The ship before that may have been two weeks late, too, so the carrier might just cancel the ship IKEA was expecting space on, Sundboell said. Then IKEA will have to scramble for another way to move your nightstand -- and potentially every order they had after that, which will now be pushed down the road.

Halfway into 2021, the situation has not improved. There's another shortage giving rise to our shortages: A lack of shipping containers. Or rather, a lack of containers where they need to be.

U.S. President Joe Biden told Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday that certain critical infrastructure should be "off-limits" to cyber-attacks, while the two leaders agreed in their summit to start cybersecurity talks. From a report: Biden said the list of organizations that should not be attacked includes the 16 sectors designated by the United States as critical infrastructure. The sectors, based on a description published by the U.S. Homeland Security Department, include telecommunications, healthcare, food and energy. "We agreed to task experts in both our countries to work on specific understandings about what is off-limits," Biden said. "We'll find out whether we have a cybersecurity arrangement that begins to bring some order." In a separate press conference, Putin said he agreed to "begin consultations" on cybersecurity issues. He also said that while the United States had requested information from Russia about recent cyber-attacks, Moscow had similarly asked for information about attacks he said were coming from the U.S. side and had not received a response.

The US has warned the EU against pursuing "protectionist" technology policies that exclusively target American companies, ahead of Joe Biden's first presidential visit to Brussels. From a report: The National Security Council, an arm of the White House, wrote last week to complain about the tone of recent comments about the EU's flagship tech regulation, as debates are about to begin in the European parliament. "We are particularly concerned about recent comments by the European Parliament rapporteur for the Digital Markets Act, Andreas Schwab, who suggested the DMA should unquestionably target only the five biggest US firms," said the email, seen by the Financial Times and dated June 9. It added: "Comments and approaches such as this make regulatory co-operation between the US and Europe extremely difficult and send a message that the [European] Commission is not interested in engaging with the United States in good faith to address these common challenges in a way that serves our shared interests. Protectionist measures could disadvantage European citizens and hold back innovation in member-state economies. Such policies will also hinder our ability to work together to harmonize our regulatory systems," it said. The note was sent by the NSC to staff at the EU's delegation in the US capital, according to several people familiar with it, as part of routine communications between Washington and Brussels. It comes at a time when both the US and EU are keen to rebuild a relationship that was marred by acrimony during Donald Trump's presidency. On Tuesday Biden will attend an EU-US summit in Brussels to discuss trade, tech, and China.

The Senate confirmed President Joe Biden's nominee to the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, the young progressive who helped launch a reckoning amongst antitrust scholars and enforcers, in a 69-28 vote. From a report: At 32, Khan will become the youngest commissioner ever confirmed to the agency. Her confirmation also signals a bipartisan desire to impose more regulations on Big Tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, Alphabet and Apple. Khan received the support of several Republicans, including Commerce Committee Ranking Member Roger Wicker, R-Miss., who participated in her confirmation hearing. Still, others like Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust, opposed her confirmation. Lee has tended to be cautious about certain types of regulation despite concerns about tech companies' influence and previously expressed apprehension about Khan's experience.

Khan became a well-known figure in antitrust circles after writing "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox" for the Yale Law Review in 2017, while a student at the university. The paper made the case for using a different framework for evaluating competitive harm than the popular consumer welfare standard. That standard essentially says that antitrust law violations can be determined based on harm to consumers, which is often measured based on prices. But Khan argued that standard could miss significant competitive harm in the modern economy, such as predatory pricing that lowers consumer prices in the short term but allows a company that can afford it to quickly gain market share. She also argued that both owning and selling on a marketplace, like Amazon does, could allow a business to exploit information across their ecosystem to undercut the competition. Update: Biden Names Lina Khan, a Big-Tech Critic, as F.T.C. Chair.

Google and Apple face a sweeping probe into the "duopoly" power of their mobile ecosystems, in the U.K. antitrust watchdog's latest attack on Silicon Valley. From a report: The increasingly tech-focused Competition and Markets Authority opened a 12-month market study into broad aspects of the iOS and Android systems, saying it feared the companies' dominance is stifling competition. The investigation adds to the regulator's separate investigations into both tech giants. "Our ongoing work into big tech has already uncovered some worrying trends and we know consumers and businesses could be harmed if they go unchecked," CMA Chief Executive Officer Andrea Coscelli said in a statement.

The CMA uses market studies to gather information before upgrading investigations. The mobile review comes as the U.K. watchdog seeks to move to the forefront of tech regulation after emerging from the shadow of European Union regulators at the end of the Brexit transition. The authority is preparing to set up a tech-focused unit and has warned that the largest companies will face extra scrutiny of everything from mergers to monopoly behavior.

The tipping point for irreversible global warming may have already been triggered, the scientist who led the biggest expedition to the Arctic warned Tuesday. AFP: "The disappearance of summer sea ice in the Arctic is one of the first landmines in this minefield, one of the tipping points that we set off first when we push warming too far," said Dr Markus Rex. "And one can essentially ask if we haven't already stepped on this mine and already set off the beginning of the explosion." Dr Rex led the world's biggest mission to the North Pole, an expedition involving 300 scientists from 20 countries. The expedition returned to Germany in October after 389 days drifting through the North Pole, bringing home devastating proof of a dying Arctic Ocean and warnings of ice-free summers in just decades. The $170 million expedition also brought back 150 terabytes of data and more than 1,000 ice samples.

Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith criticized secret data subpoenas sent by the government to cloud providers like his company and Apple, saying gag orders on requests for personal information undermine freedoms and are hurting U.S. technology companies in Europe. From a report: Last week the New York Times reported that during the administration of former President Donald Trump, the U.S. Department of Justice demanded records from Apple relating to two Democrats on the U.S. House Intelligence Committee. CNBC reported Microsoft received a confidential request for the personal emails of a Congressional staffer. Both companies were under nondisclosure orders that prevented them from talking about or alerting the subjects of the data seizures.

The U.S. government should change the rules so that people whose data is being demanded can be informed and choose whether to file a legal challenge to the subpoenas, Smith said Monday in an interview with Bloomberg Television. Microsoft in 2016 filed a case against the DOJ related to the gag orders, and a year later the department issued new guidelines it said would scale back the practice of these kinds of confidential requests. "If we fail to do so, we undermine longstanding fundamental freedoms in the country and, frankly, for those of us in the tech sector, we're put in the middle," Smith said. "This should be an issue where the government has to go most of the time to the individuals whose information they are seeking."

Reality Winner, a former NSA intelligence contractor who leaked a classified hacking report to the press in 2017, was released on Monday from prison for good behavior, her attorney said. From a report: Winner is not yet at large. She has been transferred from prison to a Residential Reentry Management facility in San Antonio, Texas, where she will remain until November 2021, when she will be fully released under supervised release, her lawyer said. Winner, who worked for NSA contractor Pluribus International Corporation, was initially arrested in June 2017 on charges that a month earlier, she leaked a classified NSA report to online news outlet The Intercept.

In the report, the NSA detailed a hacking campaign linked to Russia's military intelligence service, the General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), which compromised the email accounts of multiple employees of election software maker VR Systems ahead of the 2016 US Presidential Election. The hack, which took place in August 2016, was used by the GRU hackers as a springboard to send spear-phishing emails with malware-laced documents to US government employees. Winner's leak, although not extensive, served as the base material for an article titled "Top-Secret NSA Report Details Russian Hacking Effort Days Before 2016 Election."

Winter through spring, the French Alps are wrapped in austere white snow. But as spring turns to summer, the stoic slopes start to blush. Parts of the snow take on bright colors: deep red, rusty orange, lemonade pink. Locals call this "sang de glacier," or "glacier blood." Visitors sometimes go with "watermelon snow." From a report: In reality, these blushes come from an embarrassment of algae. In recent years, alpine habitats all over the world have experienced an uptick in snow algae blooms -- dramatic, strangely hued aggregations of these normally invisible creatures. While snow algae blooms are poorly understood, that they are happening is probably not a good sign. Researchers have begun surveying the algae of the Alps to better grasp what species live there, how they survive and what might be pushing them over the bleeding edge. Some of their initial findings were published this week in Frontiers in Plant Science.

Tiny yet powerful, the plantlike bacteria we call algae are "the basis of all ecosystems," said Adeline Stewart, an author of the study who worked on it as a doctoral student at Grenoble Alpes University in France. Thanks to their photosynthetic prowess, algae produce a large amount of the world's oxygen, and form the foundation of most food webs. But they sometimes overdo it, multiplying until they throw things out of balance. This can cause toxic red tides, scummy freshwater blooms -- or unsettling glacier blood. While it's unclear exactly what spurs the blooms, the color -- often red, but sometimes green, gray or yellow -- comes from pigments and other molecules that the snow algae use to protect themselves from ultraviolet light. These hues absorb more sunlight, causing the underlying snow to melt more quickly. This can change ecosystem dynamics and hasten the shrinking of glaciers.

"Within a decade, quantum computers could be powerful enough to break the cryptographic security that protects cell phones, bank accounts, email addresses and — yes — bitcoin wallets," writes CNBC.

But fortunately, that would happen only if we do nothing in the meantime, they're told by Thorsten Groetker, former Utimaco CTO "and one of the top experts in the field of quantum computing." Crypto experts told CNBC they aren't all that worried about quantum hacking of bitcoin wallets for a couple of different reasons. Castle Island Ventures founding partner Nic Carter pointed out that quantum breaks would be gradual rather than sudden. "We would have plenty of forewarning if quantum computing was reaching the stage of maturity and sophistication at which it started to threaten our core cryptographic primitives," he said. "It wouldn't be something that happens overnight."

There is also the fact that the community knows that it is coming, and researchers are already in the process of building quantum-safe cryptography. "The National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) has been working on a new standard for encryption for the future that's quantum-proof," said Fred Thiel, CEO of cryptocurrency mining specialist Marathon Digital Holdings. NIST is running that selection process now, picking the best candidates and standardizing them.

"It's a technical problem, and there's a technical solution for it," said Groetker. "There are new and secure algorithms for digital signatures. ... You will have years of time to migrate your funds from one account to another." Groetker said he expects the first standard quantum-safe crypto algorithm by 2024, which is still, as he put it, well before we'd see a quantum computer capable of breaking bitcoin's cryptography. Once a newly standardized post-quantum secure cryptography is built, Groetker said, the process of mass migration will begin. "Everyone who owns bitcoin or ethereum will transfer [their] funds from the digital identity that is secured with the old type of key, to a new wallet, or new account, that's secured with a new type of key, which is going to be secure," he said.
There will still be the problem of users who forget their password or died without sharing their key.

But in those scenarios, CNBC suggests, "an organization could lock down all accounts still using the old type of cryptography and give owners some way to access it."

Slashdot reader Charlotte Web writes: The "Group of Seven" (or G7) nations are some of the world's largest economies — the U.S. and Canada, the U.K., France, Germany, and Italy, and Japan. On Sunday they pledged $2 billion to help developing countries pivot away from fossil fuels and pledged an "overwhelmingly decarbonized" electricity sector by 2030. The New York Times calls these "major steps in what leaders hope will be a global transition to wind, solar and other energy that does not produce planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions."

Politico's Ryan Heath argues "The language on a 'green revolution' is quite strong — there's plenty of detail missing, but it gives climate campaigners a lot to hit leaders with if they fail to deliver. And it's a big deal for the G-7 to agree to 'to conserve or protect at least 30 percent of our land and oceans by 2030.'"
Other reports from Politico's writers:

• "Boris Johnson admitted that the world's richest economies had not managed to secure a widely advertised 1 billion vaccine doses to send to developing countries. The final communique says the group will deliver 870 million doses over the next year."

• "The G-7 nations called for a 'timely, transparent, expert-led, and science-based WHO-convened' investigation into the origins of Covid-19, including in China. WHO's first crack at an investigation — released in March — called a lab leak 'extremely unlikely,' but China didn't grant access to key documents and Secretary of State Antony Blinken called that investigation 'highly deficient' this morning. The U.S. government remains split between two origin theories."

Bloomberg Businessweek reports on "renewed interest in cables that can power consumers in one country with electricity generated hundreds, even thousands, of miles away in another" and possibly even transcontinental, submarine electricity superhighways: Coal, gas and even nuclear plants can be built close to the markets they serve, but the utility-scale solar and wind farms many believe essential to meet climate targets often can't. They need to be put wherever the wind and sun are strongest, which can be hundreds or thousands of miles from urban centers. Long cables can also connect peak afternoon solar power in one time zone to peak evening demand in another, reducing the price volatility caused by mismatches in supply and demand as well as the need for fossil-fueled back up capacity when the sun or wind fade. As countries phase out carbon to meet climate goals, they'll have to spend at least $14 trillion to strengthen grids by 2050, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. That's only a little shy of projected spending on new renewable generation capacity and it's increasingly clear that high- and ultra-high-voltage direct current lines will play a part in the transition.

The question is how international will they be...?
The article points out that in theory, Mongolia's Gobi desert "has potential to deliver 2.6 terawatts of wind and solar power — more than double the U.S.'s entire installed power generation capacity — to a group of Asian powerhouse economies that together produce well over a third of global carbon emissions..." The same goes for the U.S., where with the right infrastructure, New York could tap into sun- and wind-rich resources from the South and Midwest. An even more ambitious vision would access power from as far afield as Canada or Chile's Atacama Desert, which has the world's highest known levels of solar power potential per square meter. Jeremy Rifkin, a U.S. economist who has become the go-to figure for countries looking to remake their infrastructure for the digital and renewable future, sees potential for a single, 1.1 billion-person electricity market in the Americas that would be almost as big as China's. Rifkin has advised Germany and the EU, as well as China...

Persuading countries to rely on each other to keep the lights on is tough, but the universal, yet intermittent nature of solar and wind energy also makes it inevitable, according to Rifkin. "This isn't the geopolitics of fossil fuels," owned by some and bought by others, he says. "It is biosphere politics, based on geography. Wind and sun force sharing...."

If these supergrids don't get built, it will be because their time has both come and gone. Not only are they expensive, politically difficult, and unpopular — they have to cross a lot of backyards — their focus on mega-power installations seems outdated to some. Distributed microgeneration as close to home as your rooftop, battery storage, and transportable hydrogen all offer competing solutions to the delivery problems supergrids aim to solve.

Freenode's Linux support channel has an official web page at freenode.linux.community, which now bears this announcement:

22+ year old ##linux on freenode has been seized by freenode staff

The community's (multi-platform) site reminds visitors of the alternative channels #linux on Libera and Linux.Chat on Discord.

But they're not the only ones making changes. "[T]he FSF and GNU have decided to relocate our IRC channels to Libera.Chat," reads an official announcement on the FSF blog. "Effective immediately, Libera is the official home of our channels, which include but are not limited to all those in the #fsf, #gnu, and #libreplanet namespaces." As we have had nearly twenty years of positive experiences with the Freenode staff, most of whom now comprise the staff of the Libera network, we are confident in their technical and interpersonal expertise, as well as their ability to make the network as long-lasting and integral to the free software community as they made Freenode. We look forward to joining the large number of free software and free culture projects who have already made Libera.Chat their home, and hope to stay there for many years to come.
Also making a move: freenode's #Python channel. Software developer Ned Batchelder, one of the channel's operators (and also an architect at edX), shared a recent experience in a new blog post this morning. When they'd decided to move #python to the new Libera.chat network (run by former Freenode staffers), they also stayed in Freenode's channel "to let people know where everyone had gone." Yesterday, after a heated debate in the Freenode channel where I was accused of splitting the community, I got k-lined (banned entirely from Freenode). The reason given was "spamming", because of my recurring message about the move to Libera. Then the entire Freenode #python channel was closed... Was it malice or was it mistake? Does it matter? It's not a good way to run a network. After the channel was closed, people asking staff about what happened were banned from asking. That wasn't a mistake... [T]he new staff seems to be using force to silence people asking questions. It's clear that transparency is not a strong value for them.

Setting aside network drama, the big picture here is that the Freenode #python community isn't split: it's alive and well. It's just not on Freenode anymore, it's on Libera.

Freenode was a good thing. But the domain name of the server was the least important part of it, just a piece of technical trivia. There's no reason to stick with Freenode just because it is called Freenode. As with any way of bringing people together, the important part is the people. If all of the people go someplace else, follow them there, and continue.

See you on Libera.

Slashdot reader SysEngineer shares this report from the BBC: Scientists are reporting what they say is the longest sediment avalanche yet measured in action. It occurred underwater off West Africa, in a deep canyon leading away from the mouth of the Congo River. Something in excess of a cubic kilometre of sand and mud descended into the deep. This colossal flow kept moving for two whole days and ran out for more than 1,100km across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.

The event would have gone unrecorded were it not for the fact that the slide broke two submarine telecommunications cables, slowing the internet and other data traffic between Nigeria and South Africa in the process. And also because of the prescient action of researchers who had lined the length of the Congo Canyon with instruments capable of measuring current and sediment velocities.

The New York Times argues that this week changed Bitcoin's reputation as "secure, decentralized and anonymous" (adding "Criminals, often operating in hidden reaches of the internet, flocked to Bitcoin to do illicit business without revealing their names or locations. The digital currency quickly became as popular with drug dealers and tax evaders as it was with contrarian libertarians.")

"But this week's revelation that federal officials had recovered most of the Bitcoin ransom paid in the recent Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack exposed a fundamental misconception about cryptocurrencies: They are not as hard to track as cybercriminals think..." [F]or the growing community of cryptocurrency enthusiasts and investors, the fact that federal investigators had tracked the ransom as it moved through at least 23 different electronic accounts belonging to DarkSide, the hacking collective, before accessing one account showed that law enforcement was growing along with the industry... The Bitcoin ledger can be viewed by anyone who is plugged into the blockchain. "It is digital bread crumbs," said Kathryn Haun, a former federal prosecutor and investor at venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. "There's a trail law enforcement can follow rather nicely." Haun added that the speed with which the Justice Department seized most of the ransom was "groundbreaking" precisely because of the hackers' use of cryptocurrency. In contrast, she said, getting records from banks often requires months or years of navigating paperwork and bureaucracy, especially when those banks are overseas...

Tracking down a user's transaction history was a matter of figuring out which public key they controlled, authorities said. Seizing the assets then required obtaining the private key, which is more difficult. It's unclear how federal agents were able to get DarkSide's private key. Justice Department spokesman Marc Raimondi declined to say more about how the F.B.I. seized DarkSide's private key. According to court documents, investigators accessed the password for one of the hackers' Bitcoin wallets, though they did not detail how. The F.B.I. did not appear to rely on any underlying vulnerability in blockchain technology, cryptocurrency experts said. The likelier culprit was good old-fashioned police work. Federal agents could have seized DarkSide's private keys by planting a human spy inside DarkSide's network, hacking the computers where their private keys and passwords were stored, or compelling the service that holds their private wallet to turn them over via search warrant or other means. "If they can get their hands on the keys, it's seizable," said Jesse Proudman, founder of Makara, a cryptocurrency investment site. "Just putting it on a blockchain doesn't absolve that fact...."

The F.B.I. has partnered with several companies that specialize in tracking cryptocurrencies across digital accounts, according to officials, court documents and the companies. Start-ups with names like TRM Labs, Elliptic and Chainalysis that trace cryptocurrency payments and flag possible criminal activity have blossomed as law enforcement agencies and banks try to get ahead of financial crime. Their technology traces blockchains looking for patterns that suggest illegal activity... "Cryptocurrency allows us to use these tools to trace funds and financial flows along the blockchain in ways that we could never do with cash," said Ari Redbord, the head of legal affairs at TRM Labs, a blockchain intelligence company that sells its analytic software to law enforcement and banks. He was previously a senior adviser on financial intelligence and terrorism at the Treasury Department.
The story includes three intriguing quotes:

• Justice Department spokesman Marc Raimondi said the Colonial Pipeline ransom seizure was only the latest of "many seizures, in the hundreds of millions of dollars, from unhosted cryptocurrency wallets" used for criminal activity.
• Hunter Horsley, chief executive of cryptocurrency investment company Bitwise Asset Management, said "The public is slowly being shown, in case after case, that Bitcoin is good for law enforcement and bad for crime — the opposite of what many historically believed."
• A spokesperson for Chainalysis, a start-up that traces cryptocurrency payments, tells the Times that in the end, "cryptocurrencies are actually more transparent than most other forms of value transfer. Certainly more transparent than cash."

Dartmouth's Geisel medical school is dropping its investigation into alleged online cheating, the New York Times reports: In March, Dartmouth charged 17 students with cheating based on a review of certain online-activity data on Canvas — a popular learning-management system where professors post assignments and students submit their work — during remote exams. The school quickly dropped seven of the cases after at least two students argued that administrators had mistaken automated Canvas activity for human cheating. Now Dartmouth is also dropping allegations against the remaining 10 students, some of whom faced expulsion, suspension, course failures and misconduct marks on their academic records that could have derailed their medical careers.

"I have decided to dismiss all the honor code charges," Duane Compton, dean of the medical school, said in an email to the Geisel community Wednesday evening, adding that the students' academic records would not be affected. "I have apologized to the students for what they have been through."

Dartmouth's decision to dismiss the charges followed a software review by The New York Times, which found that students' devices could automatically generate Canvas activity data even when no one was using them. Dartmouth's practices were condemned by some alumni along with some faculty at other medical schools.

A Dartmouth spokesman said the school could not comment further on the dropping of the charges for privacy reasons.
"The moral of the current story is clear," argued the Times reporter on Twitter.

"Colleges that use surveillance tech can end up erroneously accusing some of their best students."

Back in 2009, then-governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger requested $4.7 billion in federal stimulus money to help build an 800-mile bullet train system from San Diego to San Francisco. "We're traveling on our trains at the same speed as 100 years ago," the governor said. "That is inexcusable. America must catch up."

Nearly 12 years later, "a $929-million federal grant for the California bullet train project was restored Thursday," reports the Los Angeles Times, "reversing a decision by the Trump administration to terminate the funding." But their story (shared by Slashdot reader schwit1) notes this grant has a very long history: The grant was originally made in 2010 after other states backed out of high-speed rail projects and declined to take the federal support. The California project already had won another $2.5-billion grant from the Obama administration's stimulus program, known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The Trump action to take back the money was highly controversial, and federal grant experts said such terminations were rare in cases that did not involve fraud but were merely behind schedule.

Ronald Batory, then chief of the Federal Railroad Administration, cited California's multiple failures to forecast accurate schedules, among other problems, in taking the action. Along with House Republicans from California, Trump officials were highly critical of the California project, with former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao calling it a "bait and switch" on promises made to taxpayers. Chao and Trump had issued an even bigger threat, to claw back the much larger $2.5-billion grant that had already been spent. Despite such rhetoric, the Trump administration never made an attempt to get back the funds.

The $929 million is part of a planned $22.8-billion effort aimed at building a 171-mile partial operating system between Bakersfield and Merced [part of the route between San Francisco and Los Angeles], as well as completing environmental planning and making some high-speed rail investments in Southern California and the Bay Area.
In a statement, America's Federal Rail Agency said the settlement "reflects the federal government's ongoing partnership in the development of high-speed rail." And they called their restoration of funding "an important step in advancing an economically transformational project in California."

The Times adds that "Some bullet train advocates believe $10 billion or more from the state and federal government could be added to the project, allowing an expansion of the current construction. But even that much money would not close a roughly $80-billion shortfall needed to connect Los Angeles to San Francisco."

Today is Record Store Day, an annual event celebrating the culture of independently-owned record stores. And music industry players have said they actually got more money from the sale of vinyl records than they do from YouTube.

But is that changing? The New York Times reports those figures are from a time when YouTube was only selling ads on (or beside) music videos and then sharing that cash with the record labels and performs: Fast forward to last week, when YouTube disclosed that it paid music companies, musicians and songwriters more than $4 billion in the prior year. That came from advertising money and something that the industry has wanted forever and is now getting — a cut of YouTube's surprisingly large subscription business. (YouTube subscriptions include an ad-free version of the site and a Spotify-like service to watch music videos without any ads.) The significance of YouTube's dollar figure is that it's not far from the $5 billion that the streaming king Spotify pays to music industry participants from a portion of its subscriptions. (A reminder: The industry mostly loves Spotify's money, but some musicians ïsay that they're shortchanged by the payouts.)

Subscriptions will always be a hobby for YouTube, but the numbers show that even a side gig for the company can be huge. And it has bought peace by raining some of those riches on those behind the music. Record labels and other industry powers "still don't looooove YouTube," Lucas Shaw, a Bloomberg News reporter, wrote this week. "But they don't hate it anymore."

The YouTube turnabout may also show that complaining works. The music industry has a fairly successful track record of picking a public enemy No. 1 — Pandora for awhile, Spotify, YouTube, and more recently apps like TikTok and Twitch — and publicly browbeating it or playing one rich company against another to get more money or something else they wanted.
While the article cites concerns that YouTube is still paying too little (and failing to stop piracy), "just maybe, YouTube has shown that it's possible for digital companies to both upend an industry and make it stronger."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: The Biden administration launched an initiative Thursday aiming to make more government data available to artificial intelligence researchers, part of a broader push to keep the U.S. on the cutting edge of the crucial new technology. The National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Task Force, a group of 12 members from academia, government, and industry led by officials from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Science Foundation, will draft a strategy for potentially giving researchers access to stores of data about Americans, from demographics to health and driving habits. They would also look to make available computing power to analyze the data, with the goal of allowing access to researchers across the country. The task force, which Congress mandated in the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Act of 2020, is part of an effort across the government to ensure the U.S. remains at the vanguard of technological advancements.

Many researchers, particularly in academia, simply don't have access to these computational resources and data, and this is hampering innovation. One example: The Transportation Department has access to a set of data gathered from vehicle sensors about how people drive, said Erwin Gianchandani, senior adviser at the National Science Foundation and co-chairman of the new AI task force. "Because you have very sensitive data about individuals, there are challenges in being able to make that data available to the broader research community," he said. On the other hand, if researchers could get access, they could develop innovations designed to make driving safer. Census data, medical records, and other data sets could also potentially be made available for research by both private companies and academic institutions, officials said. They said the task force will evaluate how to make such data available while protecting Americans' privacy and addressing other ethical concerns.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VICE News: California has unleashed an army of goats to munch away at overgrown brush and grass throughout the state in hopes of reducing the risk of wildfires this summer. State agencies have deployed the animals to roam, eat, and wipe out highly flammable vegetation. Recently, in an area near Lake Oroville in Northern California, between 350 and 400 goats cleared nearly five acres of land. And on Sunday, 1,500 goats are scheduled to begin clearing 34 more acres in the area -- by eating everything from invasive species to poison oak to thistle. The animals have also been contracted out to different cities around the state concerned about wildfires, including Anaheim, Oakland, and Los Angeles.

The initiative is part of the state's "Fuel Load Management Plan," started in 2012, which is aimed at reducing large patches of overgrowth throughout the state -- a major source of fuel to wildfire spread. Originally, the state used boots-on-the-ground crews of people armed with chainsaws and wood chippers to clear brush. But California has decided that in some areas, it's goats, not humans, that can help the most. "They eat everything," Kryssy Mache, an environmental scientist at the California Department of Water Resources, told VICE News. And they can also reach up to five feet in the air to nibble tree branches. "It's just another cool concept that we're using. It's not just humans going out and making the difference -- we can also use goats." But the goats are usually just Phase One. In the fall, human crews will come in and trim up area that goats cleared to ensure it remains less vulnerable to fire, according to the DWR.

A total of 15 potential sites are in the running to host the UK's first prototype fusion power plant. The BBC reports: Fusion is seen as a potential source of almost limitless clean energy but is currently only used in experiments. An open call for sites was made last year and nominations closed at the end of March this year. Following checks for compliance with key entry criteria the UK Atomic Energy Agency (UKAEA) has published a long list of possible locations. The sites, from north to south, with nominating body, are: Dounreay, East Airdrie, Poneil, Ardeer, Chapelcross, Moorside, Bay Fusion, Goole, West Burton, Ratcliffe on Soar, Pembroke, Severn Edge, Aberthaw, Bridgwater Bay, and Bradwell (Essex).

The UKAEA said that acceptance of the sites did not indicate that they were "preferred or desired" or that it believed they were "in all cases, possible." It stressed it was simply that the procedural entry criteria had been met and assessment had now begun. It said a shortlisting process would take place in the autumn with a final site decision likely by the end of next year. UKAEA is hoping to have such a plant operating in the early 2040s, with an initial concept design ready by 2024."

A federal judge granted a preliminary order blocking New York state from enforcing a law that requires internet service providers to offer high-speed broadband service to low-income customers at a discount. From a report: U.S. District Judge Denis Hurley in Central Islip, New York, sided with telecom industry groups representing AT&T and Verizon, which sued to block the law. The legislation was enacted in April as part of the state's 2022 budget.

A third member of a panel of outside advisers to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has resigned in protest over the agency's decision to approve Biogen's Alzheimer's disease treatment despite the committee's recommendation against doing so. Reuters reports: Aaron Kesselheim, a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School who had served on the FDA's advisory committee for nervous system drugs since 2015, told Reuters on Thursday he was stepping down from the panel. "My rationale was that the FDA needs to re-evaluate how it solicits and uses the advisory committees ... because I didn't think that the firm recommendations from the committee in this case ... were appropriately integrated into the decision-making process," Kesselheim said in an email. He cited FDA's decision to approve Sarepta Therapeutic's drug, eteplirsen, for Duchenne muscular dystrophy in 2016 as another example of the regulator approving a drug against the recommendations of its advisory committee.

On Tuesday, a member of the advisory group who voted against the approval, Washington University neurologist Dr. Joel Perlmutter, resigned from the committee, citing the FDA's approval of Aduhelm. Mayo Clinic neurologist Dr. David Knopman said he resigned on Wednesday. The 11-member committee voted nearly unanimously in November that Biogen's drug should not be approved, citing inconclusive evidence that the drug was effective.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Global regulators have said cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin should come with the toughest bank capital rules to avoid putting the wider financial system at risk should their value collapse suddenly. The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, which consists of regulators from the world's leading financial centers, is proposing a "new conservative prudential treatment" for crypto-assets that would force banks to put aside enough capital to cover 100% of potential losses. That would be the highest capital requirement of any asset, illustrating that cryptocurrencies and related investments are seen as far more risky and volatile than conventional stocks or bonds.

The world's most powerful banking standards setter warned on Thursday that certain crypto-assets had proved to be highly volatile, meaning they could "present risks for banks as exposures increase, including liquidity risk; credit risk; market risk; operational risk (including fraud and cyber risks); money laundering/terrorist financing risk; and legal and reputation risks." However, it said looser rules could apply to stablecoins -- a new form of digital asset usually pegged to the value of a traditional currency -- that may require only a level of capital rules applied to traditional assets such as bonds, loans, deposits, equities or commodities. The committee's proposals, which will now go out for consultation, are meant to help protect the global financial system in case cryptocurrency prices plummet.

A cross-party group of 24 British members of Parliament wrote to President Joe Biden on Friday asking him to drop all charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. CNET News adds: Dropping the charges would be "an act that would be a clarion call for freedom that would echo around the globe," they said. Together, the lawmakers pointed out that while Biden was vice president, he played an important role in choosing not to prosecute Assange over WikiLeaks' publication of classified documents relating to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the conditions in Guantanamo Bay. In spite of this, they added, Biden -- who is in the UK attending the G7 summit -- has not chosen to drop the charges brought against Assange during Donald Trump's presidency.

Prosecutors in the Trump administration Justice Department subpoenaed Apple for data from the accounts of House Intelligence Committee Democrats -- including Chairman Adam Schiff -- along with their staff and family members as part of a leak investigation, an Intelligence Committee official and a source familiar with the matter confirmed to CNN. From a report: Rep. Eric Swalwell of California, another Democrat on the committee, told CNN's Don Lemon on Thursday evening that he was notified that his data had been seized as part of the probe as well. The prosecutors, the New York Times first reported, were looking for the sources behind news stories about contacts between Russia and Trump associates. The leak hunt began with the FBI sending a subpoena to Apple in February 2018, which included a gag order, seeking metadata on more than 100 accounts as part of an investigation into the disclosure of classified information, the person familiar with the matter said.

The gag order was renewed three times before it expired this year and Apple notified the customers. The House Intelligence Committee determined that along with members of the panel and staff, the dragnet collected the records of family members, including at least one minor, the person said. Records seized included those from staff members who had nothing to do with issues related to Russia or former FBI Director James Comey, including Schiff's personal office staff, a House Intelligence Committee source told CNN. Democratic committee leadership is relying on self-reporting to know who has been impacted at this point -- both members and staff, the source said. Swalwell confirmed to CNN that records of family members and a minor had been obtained.

Amazon will pay almost $62 million to settle allegations by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission that it avoided handing over the full pay and tips it promised to delivery drivers, according to the agency. From a report: The company is giving back the amount it kept, according to a complaint released earlier this year by the agency, after it told Amazon Flex drivers and customers in 2015 it would pay $18 to $25 hourly plus tips. Instead, beginning the following year, it used tips to supplement lower base pay rates, and tried to hide the changes, according to the FTC.

Undergraduate college enrollment fell again this spring, down nearly 5% from a year ago. That means 727,000 fewer students, according to new data from the National Student Clearinghouse. NPR reports: "That's really dramatic," says Doug Shapiro, who leads the clearinghouse's research center. Fall enrollment numbers had indicated things were bad, with a 3.6% undergraduate decline compared with a year earlier, but experts were waiting to see if those students who held off in the fall would enroll in the spring. That didn't appear to happen. "Despite all kinds of hopes and expectations that things would get better, they've only gotten worse in the spring," Shapiro says. "It's really the end of a truly frightening year for higher education. There will be no easy fixes or quick bounce backs."

Overall enrollment in undergraduate and graduate programs has been trending downward since around 2012, and that was true again this spring, which saw a 3.5% decline -- seven times worse than the drop from spring 2019 to spring 2020. The National Student Clearinghouse attributed that decline entirely to undergraduates across all sectors, including for-profit colleges. Community colleges, which often enroll more low-income students and students of color, remained hardest hit by far, making up more than 65% of the total undergraduate enrollment losses this spring. On average, U.S. community colleges saw an enrollment drop of 9.5%, which translates to 476,000 fewer students. [...] Based on her conversations with students, [Heidi Aldes, dean of enrollment management at Minneapolis College, a community college in Minnesota] attributes the enrollment decline to a number of factors, including being online, the "pandemic paralysis" community members felt when COVID-19 first hit, and the financial situations families found themselves in.

The International Monetary Fund said on Thursday it has a number of economic and legal concerns regarding the move from El Salvador to make bitcoin a parallel legal tender. Reuters reports: El Salvador has become the first country in the world to adopt bitcoin as legal tender, with President Nayib Bukele touting its use for its potential to help Salvadorans living abroad to send remittances back home. "Adoption of bitcoin as legal tender raises a number of macroeconomic, financial and legal issues that require very careful analysis," said Gerry Rice, an IMF spokesman, during a scheduled press briefing. "We are following developments closely, and we'll continue our consultations with the authorities." Rice said the Fund will later on Thursday meet with Bukele to discuss the bitcoin law. El Salvador is in discussions with the IMF seeking a near $1 billion program. Hours after his announcement, Bukele instructed the state-owned geothermal electric company "to put up a plan to offer facilities for Bitcoin mining with very cheap, 100% clean, 100% renewable, 0 emissions energy from our volcanos."

phalse phace writes: A non-fungible token of a digital artwork called a "CryptoPunk" was sold for $11.8 million on Thursday, according to a tweet by auction house Sotheby's. The NFT was sold as part of the Sotheby's online auction "Natively Digital: A Curated NFT Sale," which runs from June 3-10 and features work by 27 digital artists. CryptoPunks are a series of 10,000 unique pixel-art characters made by Larva Labs in 2017. The individual one sold by Sotheby's -- "CryptoPunk #7523" -- is of the sought-after Alien variety with blue-green skin, and wearing a medical mask. Two other Alien CryptoPunk NFTs have sold for more than $7 million each in previous sales. According to Reuters, it was bought by Israeli entrepreneur Shalom Meckenzie, who is the largest shareholder of digital sports company DraftKings.

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Thursday said he is initiating a review of recent high-profile cyber attacks on governments and businesses to find out whether a legislative response is needed. From a report: "Today I am asking Chairman Gary Peters of our Homeland Security Committee and our other relevant committee chairs to begin a government-wide review of these attacks and determine what legislation may be needed to counter the threat of cyber crime and bring the fight to the cyber criminals." Schumer noted that the New York City subway system was the victim of a computer hack in early June. This came on the heels of Colonial Pipeline having to shut down some operations, resulting in disrupted fuel supplies in the U.S. Southeast, as a result of a cyber attack.

House Democrats are set to introduce a package of five bills as soon as this week that would prohibit tech giants like Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google from discriminating against rivals or buying potential competitors, two individuals familiar with the discussions told POLITICO -- the most serious effort yet to rein in Silicon Valley's power after years of complaints from Congress. From a report: The most controversial bill would let prosecutors sue to break up major tech companies by forcing the platforms to sell off lines of business if they represent a conflict of interest. POLITICO obtained drafts of all five bills. The legislation aims to enact the recommendations from a blockbuster House Judiciary Committee report last fall on competition in digital markets, which found that the four tech giants have monopolized various aspects of the online economy. It also represents a major test for Congress: Can the lawmakers of both parties who have condemned the tech companies as abusive monopolists come together to do something about it? Democrats on the House Judiciary antitrust panel circulated the draft bills to potential co-sponsors this week. They hope to lure at least some GOP members into supporting the bills, particularly Colorado Rep. Ken Buck, a critic of the large tech companies and the top Republican on the panel.

Amid an intensifying drought, Lake Mead in Nevada, the nation's largest reservoir by volume, reached its lowest level since the 1930s late Wednesday. From a report: The record low is due to a combination of years of punishing drought that's worsening across the Southwest, as well as challenges in managing water resources for a burgeoning population. The record-low reading, as well as expected subsequent drops in the lake, are almost certain to trigger a federal "water shortage" declaration later this summer, which would set off cuts in water allocations to several states. Lake Mead, which sits along the border between Nevada and Arizona, is part of the vast Colorado River basin that provides water for agriculture and human consumption to seven states, and also generates electricity at the massive Hoover Dam.

Cuts in water supplies, to be determined in August, would affect the region's farmers, residents of sprawling cities such as Las Vegas, and others. Already, the Hoover Dam is operating below its maximum capacity, and it could see a further reduction in power generation as the summer goes on. Years of unusually dry conditions along with a growing population and water resource decisions have helped lead to the situation. As of Thursday morning, the Bureau of Reclamation showed Lake Mead's hourly water levels dipped to 1,071.48 feet Thursday, and remained below the previous record set on July 1, 2016.