Corin Faife writes via The Verge: On March 24th, EU governing bodies announced that they had reached a deal on the most sweeping legislation to target Big Tech in Europe, known as the Digital Markets Act (DMA). Seen as an ambitious law with far-reaching implications, the most eye-catching measure in the bill would require that every large tech company -- defined as having a market capitalization of more than 75 billion euros or a user base of more than 45 million people in the EU -- create products that are interoperable with smaller platforms. For messaging apps, that would mean letting end-to-end encrypted services like WhatsApp mingle with less secure protocols like SMS -- which security experts worry will undermine hard-won gains in the field of message encryption.

The main focus of the DMA is a class of large tech companies termed "gatekeepers," defined by the size of their audience or revenue and, by extension, the structural power they are able to wield against smaller competitors. Through the new regulations, the government is hoping to "break open" some of the services provided by such companies to allow smaller businesses to compete. That could mean letting users install third-party apps outside of the App Store, letting outside sellers rank higher in Amazon searches, or requiring messaging apps to send texts across multiple protocols. But this could pose a real problem for services promising end-to-end encryption: the consensus among cryptographers is that it will be difficult, if not impossible, to maintain encryption between apps, with potentially enormous implications for users.

Signal is small enough that it wouldn't be affected by the DMA provisions, but WhatsApp -- which uses the Signal protocol and is owned by Meta -- certainly would be. The result could be that some, if not all, of WhatsApp's end-to-end messaging encryption is weakened or removed, robbing a billion users of the protections of private messaging. Given the need for precise implementation of cryptographic standards, experts say that there's no simple fix that can reconcile security and interoperability for encrypted messaging services. Effectively, there would be no way to fuse together different forms of encryption across apps with different design features, said Steven Bellovin, an acclaimed internet security researcher and professor of computer science at Columbia University.

"Geothermal energy has long been the forgotten member of the clean energy family, overshadowed by relatively cheap solar and wind power, despite its proven potential," argues a new article in Fast Company. "But that may soon change — for an unexpected reason.

"Geothermal technologies are on the verge of unlocking vast quantities of lithium from naturally occurring hot brines beneath places like California's Salton Sea, a two-hour drive from San Diego..." As a geologist who works with geothermal brines and an energy policy scholar, we believe this technology can bolster the nation's critical minerals supply chain at a time when concerns about the supply chain's security are rising. Geothermal power plants use heat from the earth to generate a constant supply of steam to run turbines that produce electricity. The plants operate by bringing up a complex saline solution located far underground, where it absorbs heat and is enriched with minerals such as lithium, manganese, zinc, potassium, and boron. Geothermal brines are the concentrated liquid left over after heat and steam are extracted at a geothermal plant. In the Salton Sea plants, these brines contain high concentrations — about 30% — of dissolved solids.

If test projects now underway prove that battery-grade lithium can be extracted from these brines cost effectively, 11 existing geothermal plants along the Salton Sea alone could have the potential to produce enough lithium metal to provide about 10 times the current U.S. demand. Three operators at the Salton Sea geothermal field are in various stages of designing, constructing, and testing pilot plants for direct lithium extraction from the hot brines. At full production capacity, the 11 existing power plants near the Salton Sea, which currently generate about 432 megawatts of electricity, could also produce about 20,000 metric tons of lithium metal per year. At current prices, the annual market value of this metal would be more than $5 billion....

Geothermal power has the ability to complement solar and wind energy as a baseload power source — it is constant, unlike sunshine and wind — and to provide energy and mineral security. It could also offer a professional bridge for oil, gas, and coal employees to transition into the clean energy economy. The industry could benefit from policies like risk mitigation funds to lessen drilling exploration costs, grant programs to demonstrate innovations, long-term power contracts, or tax incentives.

Adding the production of critical metals like lithium, manganese, and zinc from geothermal brines could provide geothermal electrical power operators a new competitive advantage and help get geothermal onto the policy agenda.

In 2021, the European Union imported about 40% of its gas and 25% of its oil from Russia, reports the Associated Press. But now EU officials "are fixated on rapidly reducing the continent's reliance on Russian oil and natural gas — and that means friction between security and climate goals, at least in the short term.

"To wean itself from Russian energy supplies as quickly as possible, Europe will need to burn more coal and build more pipelines and terminals to import fossil fuels from elsewhere...." [T]he EU plans to reduce Russian gas imports by two-thirds by the end of this year, and to eliminate them altogether before 2030... In the near-term, ending energy ties with Russia puts the focus on securing alternative sources of fossil fuels. But longer term, the geopolitical and price pressures stoked by Russia's war in Ukraine may actually accelerate Europe's transition away from oil, gas and coal. Experts say the war has served as a reminder that renewable energy isn't just good for the climate, but also for national security. That could help speed up the development of wind and solar power, as well as provide a boost to conservation and energy-efficiency initiatives....

The rapid pursuit of energy independence from Russia will likely require "a slight increase" in carbon emissions, said George Zachmann, an energy expert at the Bruegel think tank in Brussels. But "in the long term, the effect will be that we will see more investment in renewables and energy efficiency in Europe," Zachmann said.

Plans that wouldn't have been contemplated just a few months ago are now being actively discussed, such as running coal plants in Germany beyond 2030, which had previously been seen as an end date. Germany's vice chancellor and energy minister, Robert Habeck, said there should be "no taboos." The Czech government has made the same calculation about extending the life of coal power plants. "We will need it until we find alternative sources," Czech energy security commissioner Václav Bartuska, told the news site Seznam Zprávy. "Until that time, even the greenest government will not phase out coal...."

In Britain, which is no longer part of the EU, Prime Minister Boris Johnson says it's "time to take back control of our energy supplies." Britain will phase out the small amount of oil it imports from Russia this year. More significantly, Johnson has signaled plans to approve new oil and gas exploration in the North Sea, to the dismay of environmentalists, who say that is incompatible with Britain's climate targets. Some within the governing Conservative Party and the wider political right want the British government to retreat on its commitment to reach net zero by 2050, a pledge made less than six months ago at a global climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland....

Yet the shock waves from the war cut both ways. Sharply higher gas and electricity prices, and the desire to be less dependent on Russia, are increasing pressure to expand the development of home-grown renewables and to propel conservation. The International Energy Agency recently released a 10-point plan for Europe to reduce its dependence on Russian gas by a third within a year. Simply lowering building thermostats by an average of one degree Celsius during the home-heating season would save 10 billion cubic meters of natural gas a year, or roughly 6% of what Europe imports from Russia.

The U.S. and the European Union reached a preliminary deal to allow data about Europeans to be stored on U.S. soil, heading off a growing threat to thousands of companies' trans-Atlantic operations. From a report: The deal, announced Friday by President Biden and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, could if concluded resolve one of the thorniest outstanding issues between the two economic giants. It also assuages concerns of companies including Meta and Alphabet's Google that were facing mounting legal challenges to data transfers that underpin some of their operations in Europe. An earlier deal regulating trans-Atlantic data flows was deemed illegal by the EU's top court in 2020. That ruling was the second time since 2015 that the EU's Court of Justice had deemed U.S. safeguards on Europeans' data to be insufficient. The court said the U.S. didn't provide EU citizens effective means to challenge U.S. government surveillance of their data. Mr. Biden and Ms. von der Leyen didn't provide details of how the new agreement would work and withstand legal challenges. At issue in the talks has been whether the U.S. could convince the EU -- and its top court -- with new administrative appeals mechanisms for Europeans, but without a change to U.S. law, which would require approval by Congress, people briefed on the talks have said in recent months. Officials and observers on both sides of the Atlantic expect any new agreement to be challenged in court again, raising uncertainty about how long Friday's deal will last.

The European Union agreed on Thursday to one of the world's most far-reaching laws to address the power of the biggest tech companies (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), potentially reshaping app stores, online advertising, e-commerce, messaging services and other everyday digital tools. The New York Times reports: The law, called the Digital Markets Act, is the most sweeping piece of digital policy since the bloc put the world's toughest rules to protect people's online data into effect in 2018. The legislation is aimed at stopping the largest tech platforms from using their interlocking services and considerable resources to box in users and squash emerging rivals, creating room for new entrants and fostering more competition. [...] The Digital Markets Act will apply to so-called gatekeeper platforms, which are defined by factors including a market value of more than 75 billion euros, or about $83 billion. The group includes Alphabet, the owner of Google and YouTube; Amazon; Apple; Microsoft; and Meta. Specifics of the law read like a wish list for rivals of the biggest companies. Apple and Google, which make the operating systems that run on nearly every smartphone, would be required to loosen their grip. Apple will have to allow alternatives to its App Store for downloading apps, a change the company has warned could harm security. The law will also let companies such as Spotify and Epic Games use payment methods other than Apple's in the App Store, which charges a 30 percent commission.

Amazon will be barred from using data collected from outside sellers on its services so that it could offer competing products, a practice that is the subject of a separate E.U. antitrust investigation. The law will result in major changes for messaging apps. WhatsApp, which is owned by Meta, could be required to offer a way for users of rival services like Signal or Telegram to send and receive messages to somebody using WhatsApp. Those rival services would have the option to make their products interoperable with WhatsApp. The largest sellers of online advertising, Meta and Google, will see new limits for offering targeted ads without consent. Such ads -- based on data collected from people as they move between YouTube and Google Search, or Instagram and Facebook -- are immensely lucrative for both companies.

[...] With these actions, Europe is cementing its leadership as the most assertive regulator of tech companies such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft. European standards are often adopted worldwide, and the latest legislation further raises the bar by potentially bringing the companies under new era of oversight -- just like health care, transportation and banking industries. "Faced with big online platforms behaving like they were 'too big to care,' Europe has put its foot down," said Thierry Breton, one of the top digital officials in the European Commission. "We are putting an end to the so-called Wild West dominating our information space. A new framework that can become a reference for democracies worldwide." On Thursday, representatives from the European Parliament and European Council hammered out the last specifics of the law in Brussels. The agreement followed about 16 months of talks -- a speedy pace for the E.U. bureaucracy -- and sets the stage for a final vote in Parliament and among representatives from the 27 countries in the union. That approval is viewed as a formality.

The U.S. Supreme Court's decision this month in FBI v. Fazaga, a case challenging FBI surveillance, will make it significantly harder for people to pursue surveillance cases, and for U.S. and European Union (EU) negotiators to secure a lasting agreement for transatlantic transfers of private data. The Hill reports: The justices gave the U.S. government more latitude to invoke "state secrets" in spying cases. But ironically, that victory undercuts the Biden administration's efforts to show that the United States has sufficiently strong privacy protections to sustain a new Privacy Shield agreement -- unless Congress steps in now. In July 2020, the EU Court of Justice (CJEU) struck down the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield, a legal framework used by thousands of U.S. companies to facilitate data transfers, because the U.S. failed to provide adequate protection for data belonging to people from the EU. Specifically, the court found that U.S. surveillance authorities, including Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and Executive Order 12333, permit unjustifiably broad government surveillance. The court also found that the Privacy Shield failed to provide adequate redress mechanisms for Europeans whose data is transferred to the U.S. -- namely, the ability to be heard by an independent court that can order binding remedies. In striking down Privacy Shield, the CJEU was clear: no EU-U.S. data-transfer agreement will survive the court's scrutiny until the U.S. narrows the scope of its surveillance and ensures that individuals subject to potentially illegal surveillance have a real, meaningful way to pursue accountability.

In a formalization of an earlier Twitter-led push to try to exert influence over fast-forming European digital regulations, the social media firm has used its Twitter Spaces platform to host the official kick off of a policy advocacy lobby group that's being branded the Open Internet Alliance (OIA). From a report: Alongside Twitter, video streaming platform Vimeo; Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce and Tumblr; the Czech and Slovak focused search engine company, Seznam; and Jodel, a Berlin-based (profile-less) social network, are named as founding members. Twitter said the establishment of this formal lobbying alliance has been some two years in the making. Notably Mozilla -- which had joined Twitter, Auttomatic and Vimeo in a earlier call for incoming EU digital regulations to support better user controls to tackle bad speech rather than hone in on content censorship -- is not being named as a founding member so appears to be sitting this one out. At the time of writing it's unclear why Mozilla is missing. But the Alliance is putting out a wider call for other "middle-layer" Internet companies to join the initiative -- so the grouping may grow in size.

Albeit -- very clearly -- big tech need not apply.

Speaking during a Twitter Spaces event today to discuss the formation of the alliance, Sinead McSweeney, Twitter's global policy VP, said the group is making a plea to lawmakers to think about the wider web ecosystem -- rather than see the Internet as "a monolith" comprised of just a handful of tech giants. "Our plea in aid of the open Internet is that [lawmakers] not view the Internet as a monolith, nor indeed view it as fixing the Internet solving all of societies problems," she said, urging policymakers to: "Take a wider focus when they're looking at solutions -- not look at the Internet just through the lens of a handful of companies. And really think about the entire ecosystem -- and get away from this sense 'oh big tech is the problem.' Because -- in actual fact, in their efforts to tackle so called 'big tech -- that is all we may end up with."

Tech giant Microsoft is facing an antitrust complaint filed by three European rivals in the booming cloud computing business, one the plaintiffs said on Thursday. From a report: The complaint, filed with the European Union's competition watchdog months ago, alleges that Microsoft's contractual and business practices make it costly and difficult for users of its cloud computing services to opt for those of a competitor, a source close to the matter said. French cloud computing services provider OVHcloud confirmed in a statement that it had joined the complaint against Microsoft. "Through abusing its dominant position, Microsoft undermines fair competition and limits consumer choice in the cloud computing services market," OVHcloud said.

Right now an asteroid is zooming past earth "at a relatively close distance" reports Newsweek, "and the event can be viewed live." The asteroid, called 2022 ES3, will be traveling at 41,000 miles per hour when it comes between the moon and the Earth at around 2:18 p.m. ET on Sunday, March 13, according to NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS).

The space rock isn't expected to hit Earth. Instead, it will pass by at a distance of about 206,000 miles, which is about 87 percent of the distance between us and the moon.

The event provides a great viewing opportunity. An Italian astronomy organization called the Virtual Telescope Project, which often tracks asteroids and other space objects through the sky, is due to host a livestream of what it calls 2022 ES3's "very close, but safe, encounter with us" on its WebTV page starting at 18:30 UTC on March 13th.

Astronomers don't consider 2022 ES3 to be potentially hazardous, probably due to its size. The asteroid is predicted to be somewhere between 33 and 72 feet in diameter — about as wide as the length of a bowling lane.... [S]cientists track more than 28,000 near-Earth asteroids as they travel through the solar system. Around 900 of these are more than one kilometer, or 3,280 feet, in size.

Slashdot reader nickwinlund77 quotes the New York Times (also quoted here): DuckDuckGo has little control over its search results because they are provided by Microsoft's Bing, which announced that it would follow the European Union's order to restrict access to the Russian state news agencies RT and Sputnik. But the criticism from the far right was directed at DuckDuckGo. The conservative website Breitbart said DuckDuckGo was "adopting the censorship policies" of Big Tech. In social media channels devoted to conspiracy theories, users vowed to switch to alternatives like the Russian search engine Yandex....

In a statement, Kamyl Bazbaz, the vice president of communications for DuckDuckGo, said that the affected sites were engaged in "active disinformation campaigns," meaning they were similar to other low-quality websites already penalized by search algorithms. "This isn't censorship, it's just search rankings," he said....

The company also announced this month that it would pause its relationship with Yandex, the Russian search engine, which was providing certain links for results in Russia and Turkey.

China exported nearly 500,000 electric cars in 2021 -- more than any other country in the world -- thanks to increasing sales in Europe and Southeast Asia by emerging cost-competitive automakers, Nikkei has learned. From the report: According to the General Administration of Customs of China, the number of passenger EVs exported in 2021 increased 2.6 times to 499,573 units. Meanwhile, Germany doubled its exports to about 230,000 units, while the U.S fell 30% to around 110,000 units, and Japan increased 24% to 27,400 units -- according to data compiled by the German Association of the Automotive Industry and the Japan External Trade Organization.

China accounts for 60% of global EV production, and is emerging as the world's factory for EVs having already secured the same position in digital product manufacturing. Exports to the EU grew in the wake of it announcing a policy to ban the sale of new hybrid and gasoline-powered vehicles in 2035. China's EV exports to Europe rose fivefold to 230,000 units, with the region absorbing half of China's total EV exports. Belgium imported 87,000 units and the U.K. 50,000 units. Of the almost 500,000 units exported, more than 100,000 appear to have originated from Tesla's Shanghai plant.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Another European privacy watchdog has sanctioned the controversial facial recognition firm, Clearview AI, which scrapes selfies off the Internet to amass a databased of some 10 billion of faces to power an identity-matching service it sells to law enforcement. Italy's data protection agency today announced a [roughly $22 million] penalty for breaches of EU law -- as well as ordering the controversial company to delete any data on Italians it holds and banning it from any further processing of citizens' facial biometrics. Its investigation was instigated following "complaints and reports," it said, noting that as well as breaches of privacy law it found the company had been tracking Italian citizens and people located in Italy.

"The findings revealed that the personal data held by the company, including biometric and geolocation data, are processed illegally, without an adequate legal basis, which certainly cannot be the legitimate interest of the American company," the Garante said in a press release. Other General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) breaches it identified included transparency obligations (on account of Clearview not having adequately informed users of what it was doing with their selfies); violations of purpose limitation and having used user data for purposes other than those for which they were published online; and also breaches of data retention rules with no limit on storage. "Clearview AI's activity therefore violates the freedoms of the data subjects, including the protection of confidentiality and the right not to be discriminated against," the authority also said. CEO Hoan Ton-That said in a statement: "Clearview AI does not have a place of business in Italy or the EU, it does not have any customers in Italy or the EU, and does not undertake any activities that would otherwise mean it is subject to the GDPR."

Ton-That added: "We only collect public data from the open internet and comply with all standards of privacy and law. I am heartbroken by the misinterpretation by some in Italy, where we do no business, of Clearview AI's technology to society. My intentions and those of my company have always been to help communities and their people to live better, safer lives."

Banned from swaths of the world's skies, denied access to vital spare parts, stripped of insurance and battling to keep hold of planes, Russia's aviation industry has in the space of a week been plunged into its gravest crisis in decades [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. From a report: Western governments have unleashed waves of sanctions since Vladimir Putin sent troops into Ukraine late last month, but few have delivered such a visible punch as those targeted at an industry that accounted for 6 per cent of the world's airline capacity last year. Flag carrier Aeroflot, which took delivery of its first western aircraft from Airbus when Boris Yeltsin was in the Kremlin, on Saturday announced it would stop all international flights other than to Belarus. S7, Russia's second-largest airline, has also scrapped flights outside domestic airspace. The industry's mushrooming crisis is "unprecedented, unpredictable and unforecastable," said Max Kingsley-Jones of Ascend by Cirium, the aviation consultancy. With no clarity on how long the sanctions from US and EU authorities will remain in place, experts warned that in a worst-case scenario Russian domestic carriers' schedules would shrink to levels not seen in three decades.

Cogent Communications, one of the world's largest internet intercontinental backbone providers, has cut ties with Russian customers over its invasion of Ukraine. The Verge reports: In a letter to Russian customers obtained by The Washington Post, Cogent cited "economic sanctions" and "the increasingly uncertain security situation" as the motives behind its total shutdown in the country. Cogent similarly told The Verge that it "terminated its contracts" with Russian customers in compliance with the European Union's move to ban Russian state-backed media outlets.

As Doug Madory, an internet analyst at network tracking company Kentik points out... unplugging Russia from Cogent's global network will likely result in slower connectivity, but won't completely disconnect Russians from the internet... Traffic from Cogent's former customers will instead fall back on other backbone providers in the country, potentially resulting in network congestion. There isn't any indication as to whether other internet backbone providers will also suspend services in Russia.

Digital rights activists have criticized Cogent's decision to disconnect itself from Russia, arguing that it could prevent Russian civilians from accessing credible information about the invasion. "Cutting Russians off from internet access cuts them off from sources of independent news and the ability to organize anti-war protests," Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity at the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, said on Twitter....

Cogent's goal is to prevent the Russian government from using the company's networks for cyberattacks and propaganda, The Post reports.
The Post argues that on a larger scale,"these moves bring Russia closer to the day when its online networks face largely inward, their global connections weakened, if not cut off entirely." "I am very afraid of this," said Mikhail Klimarev, executive director of the Internet Protection Society, which advocates for digital freedoms in Russia. "I would like to convey to people all over the world that if you turn off the Internet in Russia, then this means cutting off 140 million people from at least some truthful information. As long as the Internet exists, people can find out the truth. There will be no Internet — all people in Russia will only listen to propaganda...."

[E]ven two weeks ago, Russia's Internet was comparatively free and integrated into the larger online world, allowing civil society to organize, opposition figures to deliver their messages and ordinary Russians to gain ready access to alternative sources of news in an era when Putin was strangling his nation's free newspapers and broadcast stations.... Patrick Boehler, head of digital strategy at Radio Free Europe, said CrowdTangle data showed that independent news stories in the Russian language worldwide were getting shared many more times on social media than stories from state-run media. He said that once the Kremlin lost control of the narrative, it would have been hard to regain.

Now the last independent journalistic outposts are gone, and the Internet options are increasingly constricted through a combination of forces — all spurred by war in Ukraine but coming from both within and outside Russia.... Government censors also blocked access to the BBC, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Deutsche Welle, as well as major Ukrainian websites. The BBC, CNN and other international news organizations said they were suspending reporting in Russia because of a new law that could result in 15 years of prison for publishing what government officials deem false news on the war.
Meanwhile, Politico reminds us that even Oracle has shut down its Russian cloud service operations. Laura Manley, the executive director of Harvard University's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, said Russia is creating a perfect situation to control its narrative and limit outside coverage of its Ukrainian invasion by Western social media sources. "You have the lack of eyewitness information because you have critical infrastructure being shut off," she said. "So it's sort of a worst case scenario in terms of getting real-time accurate information."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: Facebook and Twitter on Friday were blocked in Russia, amid President Vladimir Putin's ongoing military invasion of Ukraine. In a statement issued on Friday, Roskomnadzor, the country's communications regulator, explained the decision was made to "block access to the Facebook network" after at least 26 cases of "discrimination against Russian media and information resources" since October 2020. The agency highlighted Facebook's recent restriction of Kremlin-tied media sources RT News and Sputnik News across the EU. Hours later, Russian news agency Interfax reported that Roskomnadzor had also begun blocking Twitter. "Soon millions of ordinary Russians will find themselves cut off from reliable information, deprived of their everyday ways of connecting with family and friends and silenced from speaking out," Nick Clegg, president of global affairs for Facebook parent Meta, wrote on Twitter in response. "We will continue to do everything we can to restore our services so they remain available to people to safely and securely express themselves and organize for action."

Yesterday, Russian state-controlled news network RT announced it would be "ceasing production" and laying off most of its staff after YouTube blocked its channels.

Microsoft is "suspending" all new sales of products and services in Russia, and is halting "many aspects" of its business in the country to honor US, UK and EU sanctions. The move comes days after Microsoft restricted Russian state media across its platforms, and after Ukraine's Vice Prime Minister called on the company to block Russian Xbox accounts. From a report: Microsoft saw the withdrawal as virtually necessary. "Concrete steps" like this would have the most impact, according to company president Brad Smith, and there will be "additional steps" as the Ukraine situation develops.

"With so many coming together on the side of Ukraine (even those who traditionally stay neutral in international affairs), asking ICANN to take action against Russia seems like it could be a reasonable proposition under the circumstances," writes new Slashdot submitter unimind. "As a bonus, the likely decrease in spam would be a welcome reprieve..." The Register reports: In response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine last week, Mykhailo Fedorov, First Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine, on Monday asked the head of DNS overlord ICANN to disable country code top-level domains associated with Russia. In an email [PDF], Fedorov asked Goran Marby, CEO of ICANN, to impose sanctions on Russia, arguing that the Putin regime has used internet infrastructure to propagandize its war effort. Specifically, he has asked for the revocation of domains ".ru", ".", ".su", and others used by the Russian Federation, shutting down DNS root servers serving the Russian Federation, and contributing to the revocation of associated TLS/SSL certificates for those domains.

"All of these measures will help users seek for reliable information in alternative domain zones, preventing propaganda and disinformation," Fedorov's email says. "Leaders, governments and organizations all over the world are in favor of introducing sanctions towards the Russian Federation since they aim at putting the aggression towards Ukraine and other countries to an end. I ask you kindly to seriously consider such measures and implement them as quickly as possible. Help to save the lives of people in our country." Doing so would block about five million domains from the global internet, and would significantly affect Russia's ability to communicate online. In response to Prykhodko, Erich Schweighofer, a professor at the University of Vienna and ICANN community participant, wrote: "We know and we are aware of the very difficult and dangerous situation. [The] EU will support you. However, removing Russia from the internet does not help supporting the civil society in this country for a democratic change. ICANN is a neutral platform, not taking a position in this conflict but allowing States to act accordingly, e.g. blocking all traffic from a particular state."

Antony Van Couvering, CEO of Top Level Domain Holdings, expressed support for the idea: "Neutrality as a response to murder is not neutral. What is the use of 'civil society' organizations if they won't even speak up in support [to] protect civil society, much less do anything about it? Even politicians have woken up. Even the German government has woken up. Even the Swiss government has woken up! Meanwhile some people at ICANN are content to repeat empty phrases about not getting involved because it doesn't help civil society in their country. So much for 'one world, one internet.'"

The report adds that domain registrar Namecheap has "advised customers in Russia to take their business elsewhere, citing war crimes." However, Namecheap's CEO, Richard Kirkendall, later clarified that they haven't blocked the domains. Instead, they're just "asking people to move."

A Twitter bot created by a college student is tracking the movements of 46 jets owned or leased by more than 20 Russian oligarchs and sending updates to ADS-B Exchange, "a sit that collects data from aviation enthusiasts who run their own equipment to monitor airplane movements," reports Ars Technica. "Many of the oligarchs have been hit with sanctions and travel bans." From the report: This isn't the first time that a bot created by Jack Sweeney, the 19-year-old University of Central Florida student, has made the news. Sweeney also runs @ElonJet, which tracks the movements of Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's private jet. Musk grew annoyed with the attention and sent Sweeney a DM on Twitter, offering him $5,000 to shut the account down. Sweeney countered by asking for a Model 3, then $50,000, then an internship. He even explained to Musk where his bot sourced its data, which is all publicly available. So far, Musk hasn't taken him up on any of the counter-offers.

Sweeney's bot is made possible by the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast system, which is required for many aircraft flying in the US and the EU. With ADS-B, aircraft use GPS and their onboard sensors to calculate and periodically transmit their position, altitude, and velocity, and anyone with the appropriate receiver can listen for the broadcasts. The system has revolutionized air traffic control, providing accurate position and velocity data every second, far more frequently than the typical five seconds that ground-based radar offers. [...] It's possible that Sweeney's @RUOligarchJets bot could serve as a form of open source intelligence in Russia's war in Ukraine. Just as investors and Musk fans use @ElonJet to hypothesize about what the billionaire is doing, oligarch jet movements may reveal real-time details about what's happening inside Russia.

Jolla, a Finnish startup that develops a mobile Linux-based alternative to Google's Android which has had some take-up by the Russian government in the past, is looking to restructure its business to jettison links to the Russian state. TechCrunch reports: We reached out to the startup earlier this week to ask if it was concerned about the impact of looming EU sanctions on Russia -- given how, since 2018, it has counted Russian telecom company, Rostelecom, as a strategic investor. "We have actually ramped down business and exports to Russia already in 2021," CEO and co-founder Sami Pienimaki told TechCrunch. "Thus, the potential tech sanctions would not impact Jolla's business anymore. In parallel, Jolla is growing in particular rapidly in the automotive sector, and it formed already significant part of our 2021 revenues. In regards the ownership, that is correct, and something we're looking to re-structure during this year," he also confirmed. Sailfish has been certified in Russia for government and corporate use since 2016.

Countries imposing sanctions on Russia also depend on it for oil and natural gas, notes Slate's web editor.

"Noah J. Gordon, an adviser at the Berlin-based, climate-focused think tank Adelphi, thinks there's an opening here for Europe to take a different route — to pursue more energy self-sufficiency not by building out gas reserves, but by expanding its renewable energy sources at a faster pace." Noah Gordon: [O]nly about 15 percent of Germany's huge gas consumption — almost all imports — is used in power production, and only 15 percent of German power is generated from gas. Most of that gas from Russia or elsewhere is used for heating buildings and in industry.... I think this crisis has really changed the terms of debate. There's a lot of talk today on massive European mobilization to build heat pumps so that Germany and the rest of Europe could heat their buildings with electricity instead of gas, and to renovate buildings for energy efficiency. This is a thing called the EU Renovation Wave, which is a buzzword that can now really get going....

[T]he answer is to reduce fossil fuel use as much as we can. There might not be a wartime mobilization to build weapons for this conflict, but there could be to build heat pumps and to renovate buildings. That's really the way out of this, and to get the clean energy to back it up.... Building a heat pump today isn't going to cut emissions on its own, and you need clean electricity to power the heat pumps, or you haven't made that much progress. But at least with heat pumps and efficiency, you're not locking in future fossil fuel use....

[Y]ou could get a paradigm shift after this, like we did after 1973 and the Arab oil embargo with a greater focus on alternative energy, such as nuclear, and an energy efficiency drive back then in the EU and Japan and even the U.S. in terms of car fuel economy standards.