Software engineer Molly White has been a Wikipedia editor since 2006 (and also served several terms on the site's Arbitration Committee). White is now a Wikipedia administrator and functionary — and just published an Opinion piece opposing the continued acceptance of cryptocurrency donations for the Wikimedia Foundation.

Here's an excerpt from White's remarks in The Signpost, an online newspaper for (English-language) Wikipedia that's been published online since 2005 with contributions from Wikipedia editors:

When the Wikimedia Foundation first began accepting cryptocurrency donations in 2014, it was still fairly nascent technology. Cryptocurrencies resonated with many in free and open-source software communities and in the Wikimedia movement more specifically, and cryptocurrency projects tended to share similar ideals: privacy, anonymity, decentralization, freedom. In more recent history, cryptocurrencies and blockchain-based technologies more generally have morphed into something very different from the ideals of their youth. Some proponents continue to speak about freedom and decentralization, but the space has overwhelmingly become an opportunity for self-enrichment at the expense of others and the environment.

Cryptomining operations set up shop in locations with low energy costs — until late 2021, most bitcoin mining happened in China, where it relied on coal so heavily that the resulting coal mining accidents from increased demand contributed to a crackdown on the practice. Some of those miners moved to Kazakhstan, where they were using the nation's supply of lignite (an extremely harmful form of coal) to produce 18% of the global computing power behind bitcoin in January. Bitcoin mining alone rivals the total energy use of countries like the Netherlands or Finland;456 emissions from other popular cryptocurrencies like ethereum only compound the problem.

Furthermore, in recent years, more and more enthusiasts are being convinced that they too might strike it rich by buying in early to the next bitcoin or the next ethereum. But unfortunately, the playing field more often resembles a landscape with scammers and marks. Many are convinced that purchasing these currencies is an "investment", rather than risky speculation that would be more accurately described as gambling if not outright investment fraud. People are regularly scammed for enormous sums of money, and the anonymous, nominally decentralized, and largely unregulated nature of the space offers them little recourse.

The purported benefits of cryptocurrencies have also been largely unrealized. Rather than empowering the unbanked and distributing wealth to those in need, as once described, money has been hoarded in incredible amounts by a few wealthy individuals — 0.01% of bitcoin holders collectively own 27% of bitcoin in circulation, equivalent to around $232 billion. Furthermore, the underlying technology is enormously slow and difficult to scale when compared to databases used in most modern computing, so many technologies built around blockchains have spawned new, centralized solutions to the problems the blockchains themselves have introduced. As a result, the decentralization of the web that was supposed to result from the adoption of blockchain technologies has only resulted in the centralization of power in a handful of companies and venture capital firms.

The Wikimedia Foundation's acceptance of cryptocurrency donations has had minimal returns, and no longer accepting them is unlikely to have a major impact on the Foundation's ability to fundraise. In 2021, the Wikimedia Foundation only received about $130,000 in donations via cryptocurrency, making it one of their smallest revenue channels at only 0.08% of total donations. The benefits to donors are also minimal: the anonymity that might normally be offered to those who use cryptocurrencies is largely nullified by the WMF's cryptocurrency payment processor, BitPay, which requires prospective donors to disclose their identities.

The most impactful result of the WMF's acceptance of cryptocurrencies has been to normalize their use. As the technology space around blockchains has evolved over the years, so too should we. Cryptocurrencies have been joined by a bubble of predatory, inherently harmful technologies that take advantage of individuals and contribute to the destruction of our environment. It is no longer ethical for the Wikimedia Foundation to tacitly endorse a technology that incentivizes the predatory behavior that has become rampant in the cryptocurrency space in the past few years. I have asked that they stop doing so in an Request for Comments on meta.

Last week a Chinese satellite "was observed grabbing another satellite and pulling it out of its normal geosynchronous orbit," reports the Drive, "and into a 'super-graveyard drift orbit.'"

"The maneuver raises questions about the potential applications of these types of satellites designed to maneuver close to other satellites for inspection or manipulation and adds to growing concerns about China's space program overall." On January 22, China's Shijian-21 satellite, or SJ-21, disappeared from its regular position in orbit during daylight hours when observations were difficult to make with optical telescopes. SJ-21 was then observed executing a "large maneuver" to bring it closely alongside another satellite, a dead BeiDou Navigation System satellite. SJ-21 then pulled the dead satellite out of its normal geosynchronous orbit and placed it a few hundred miles away in what is known as a graveyard orbit. These distant orbits are designated for defunct satellites at the end of their lives and are intended to reduce the risk of collision with operational assets....

According to Chinese state news outlets, SJ-21 was designed to "test and verify space debris mitigation technologies."

SJ-21's recent maneuver raises questions and concerns about these types of satellites and their potential for military use. Todd Harrison, director of CSIS's Aerospace Project, told Breaking Defense that SJ-21's actions present "more questions than answers," adding that while we can observe the satellite's actions, "the intent behind it and what China plans to do with this technology is a more subjective assessment."

This isn't the first time SJ-21 has made headlines with its questionable behavior. In November 2021, just a month after its launch, an unknown object was seen orbiting alongside SJ-21. At the time, Space Force designated the unidentified object as a spent apogee kick motor, but it was also reported that it might have been an experimental payload designed to test SJ-21's ability to perform remote operations and manipulate other satellites....

Analyzing the potential applications of these dual-use satellites is difficult.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for submitting the story!

Wikipedia defines youtube-dl as "a free and open source download manager for video and audio from YouTube and over 1,000 other video hosting websites." It was created in 2006, and "According to libraries.io, 308 other packages and 1.43k repositories depend on it." The project now has over 106,000 stars on GitHub, and by one calculation it's their fourth-most starred project that's written in Python.

A new issue today describes the project as "Under new management."

I hope that we'll be able to make a new release soon and subsequently keep the program more up-to-date than has been the case for the last few months.

The project has a fork https://github.com/yt-dlp that offers a lot of extra functions but demands an up-to-date Python version. This project will continue to target Python version 2.6, 2.7, or 3.2+, at least until no-one complains about 2.6 compatibility.

Pull Requests are very welcome, although there is a significant back-log to be handled. Back-ports of yt-dlp features are also welcome.

Finally, I'd encourage anyone else who is interested in sharing maintenance duties to establish a track record and make themselves known. We want to keep this popular project alive with a community of future maintainers.

In 1992 John Conway raised a question about the patterns in his famous mathematical Game of Life: "Is there a Godlike still-life, one that can only have existed for all time (apart from things that don't interfere with it)?"

Conway closed his note by adding "Well, I'm going out to get a hot dog now..." And then, nearly 30 years later, a mathematical blog reports: Ilkka Törmä and Ville Salo, a pair of researchers at the University of Turku in Finland, have found a finite configuration in Conway's Game of Life such that, if it occurs within a universe at time T, it must have existed in that same position at time T-1 (and therefore, by induction, at time 0)...

The configuration was discovered by experimenting with finite patches of repeating 'agar' and using a SAT solver to check whether any of them possess this property.
The blogger also shares some other Game of Life-related news:

• David Raucci discovered the first oscillator of period 38. The remaining unsolved periods are 19, 34, and 41.
• Darren Li has connected Charity Engine to Catagolue, providing approximately 2000 CPU cores of continuous effort and searching slightly more than 10^12 random initial configurations per day.
• Nathaniel Johnston and Dave Greene have published a book on Conway's Game of Life, featuring both the theoretical aspects and engineering that's been accomplished in the half-century since its conception. Unfortunately it was released slightly too early to include the Törmä-Salo result or Raucci's period-38 oscillator.

Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the story.

The Washington Post reports that three of the world's most prominent live-streaming stars "received notifications of copyright infringement after broadcasting TV shows to their millions-strong fanbases on Twitch."

"The days that followed produced copious amounts of Twitch's most common byproduct, online drama, but also focused attention on the murky and legally complicated question of what constitutes fair use of copyright materials such as TV shows and movies...." In 2007 Viacom sued YouTube for copyright infringement. Though the court ultimately ruled in favor of YouTube, the suit paved the way for the "Content ID" system, which automatically identifies copyright content and aggressively polices the platform. While software that can scan Twitch already exists, Twitch has yet to create its own automated system, and it does not appear to be in the process of doing so, according to industry figures with knowledge of Twitch's operations who weren't authorized to speak publicly.

Such an outcome becomes more likely, however, if advertisers start withdrawing from the platform for fear of being associated with risky content, something that's already beginning to happen on Twitch according to Devin Nash, chief marketing officer of content creator-focused talent agency Novo...

The "react content" trend often hinges on broadcasting copyright material, like popular movies or TV shows, a practice which skirts the outer edges of platform rules. Earlier this month, Viacom and the History Channel/A&E (which is owned by Hearst and Disney) issued copyright claims — also known as Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests — to specific streamers.... The DMCA-centric discourse left streamers and viewers on Twitch with ample drama but no clear answer as to whether one of the platform's go-to trends merely faces a few bumps in the road or an asteroid-sized extinction event. "Nothing could happen, or everything could happen," Cassell added. "And it rests on the decisions of a handful of media rights holders...."

Some streamers, such as Piker and Felix "xQc" Lengyel, both of whom started reacting to clips from sites like YouTube long before the current react meta began, argue reaction content should be permitted since Twitch is essentially built on copyright infringement. Streaming a video game is technically a DMCA-able offense. The video game industry, however, has decided to allow the practice because the free publicity and resulting sales tend to outweigh any potential downsides. But television is a different beast, with its economics rooted in broadcast rights rather than individual unit sales....

This awkward and unceasing dance around the topic has been fueled in part by the fact that Twitch is incentivized to maintain its ignorance of copyright infractions taking place on their platform.... But the silence has added stress to streamers whose livelihoods could be impacted by decisions around the current DMCA practices....
The Post also spoke to game/esports/entertainment lawyer David Philip Graham, who believes copyright law itself is due for an overhaul. "Much of our current copyright regime isn't really about authors' rights or promoting the progress of science and useful arts, but about big businesses looking for easier routes to profitability," Graham said.

He proposes shortening copyright term lengths — and also expanding permissions for derivative works.

New submitter Ol Olsoc writes: "When the Mozilla Foundation took to Twitter on New Year's Eve to announce it was going to begin accepting cryptocurrency donations, it likely didn't think about potential blowback from one of its founders, but that's what it got," reports TechRepublic. "In response, Mozilla has said it's pausing cryptocurrency donations." Wikipedia is now discussing whether it should stop accepting Cryptocurrency as well.

Mozilla co-founder Jamie Zawinski has some strong feelings about the matter, [telling TechRepublic]: "Anyone involved in cryptocurrencies in any way is either a grifter or a mark. It is 100% a con. There is no legitimacy." I cannot disagree with him. Zawinksi tweeted scathing criticism of a Mozilla tweet late last month promoting cryptocurrency donations. They first started accepting bitcoin for donations in 2014.

Here's where Wikipedia comes in: "Shortly after Zawinski's tweet and Mozilla's change of heart, Wikipedia editor GorillaWarfare opened a request for comment on Wikimedia's meta-wiki calling for the organization to stop accepting cryptocurrency donations, citing Zawinski's tweet and Mozilla's reaction," reports TechRepublic. "Zawinski has read the Wikipedia talk page about the discussion and says he hopes it indicates the beginning of a trend."

He added: "I'm actually a bit surprised (and pleased) to see that the conversation seemed to be going in an anti-cryptocurrency direction. Good for them."

Further reading: Wikipedia Faces Pressure to Stop Accepting Crypto Donations on Environmental Grounds (CoinDesk)

1.77 million people live in South Australia, speading across 984,321 square kilometres (or 380,048 square miles), according to Wikipedia. Today the Sydney Morning Herald announced that South Australia "sourced an average of just over 100 per cent of the electricity it needed from renewable power for 6 and a half days leading up to December 29 last year."

They're calling it "a record for the state and perhaps for comparable energy grids around the world." The state's previous record was just over three days, says Geoff Eldridge, an energy analyst who runs the website NEMlog.com.au, which tracks the operations of the National Energy Market covering Australia's east-coast states and South Australia.

His analysis shows that for the six days identified, the state produced on average 101 per cent of the energy it needed from wind, rooftop solar and solar farms, with just a fraction of the energy the state used being drawn from gas, in order to keep the grid stable. At times during the period, slightly less renewable energy was available and at other times renewable capacity was higher than needed, he says.

Bruce Mountain, director of the Victoria Energy Policy Centre, said he believed that aside from some small island grids such as those in Hawaii and Tasmania, it was likely that South Australia's six-day run on renewables was a record for a grid supporting an advanced economy.

During the unprecedented 156-hour renewable run, the share of wind in total energy supplied averaged 64.4 per cent, while rooftop solar averaged 29.5 per cent and utility-scale solar averaged 6.2 per cent, clean energy website RenewEconomy.com.au reported, using Mr Eldridge's data.
(Thanks to Slashdot reader betsuin for sharing the article)

Intel removed the security feature SGX from processors of the 11th and newer generations. Problem is, the feature is one of the requirements to play Ultra HD Blu-Ray discs on computer systems. From a report: The Ultra HD Blu-Ray format, often referred to as 4K Ultra HD or 4K Blu-Ray, supports 4K UHD playback with a pixel resolution of 3840x2160. One of the requirements for playback of Ultra HD Blu-Ray discs on PCs is that SGX is supported by the installed processor and by the motherboard firmware. The Blu-Ray Disc Association defined DRM requirements for Ultra HD Blu-Ray disc playback. Besides SGX, playback is protected by HDCP 2.2 and AACS 2.0, with some discs using AACS 2.1. Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) "allow user-level as well as operating system code to define private regions of memory, called enclaves, whose contents are protected and unable to be either read or saved by any process outside the enclave itself, including processes running at higher privilege levels" according to Wikipedia.

Wikimedia, the non-profit foundation that runs Wikipedia, is facing internal opposition to its policy of accepting cryptocurrency as a form of donation, primarily for environmental reasons. From a report: A proposal to the foundation from contributor Molly White, who goes by the user name GorillaWarfare, argues that accepting donations in cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, bitcoin cash and ether signals endorsement of digital coins, which are "inherently predatory" as investments and don't align with the foundation's commitment to environmental sustainability. The contributor argues that Wikipedia risks damaging its reputation by accepting crypto donations, citing the recent decision by non-profit peer, Mozilla, to pause accepting donations in crypto. Wikimedia currently accepts bitcoin, bitcoin cash, and ether via BitPay. White singled out bitcoin and ether's need for enormous amounts of energy, while noting that there are other "eco-friendlier" cryptocurrencies, although they are less widely-used.

"Alexa, when are we arriving at the moon?" quips GeekWire.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: This week brought news that Amazon is teaming up with Lockheed Martin and Cisco to put its Alexa voice assistant on NASA's Orion spacecraft for the (uncrewed) Artemis 1 round-the-moon mission....

On the heels of that announcement came news that Amazon Future Engineer (AFE) has partnered with Mobile CSP and the National Science Teaching Association (NSTA) on the Alexa for Astronauts program, which will provide students in grades 4-and-up with live WebEx by Cisco tours from NASA's Johnson Space Center. This program will also provide curriculum — NSTA's Using AI to Monitor Health and Mobile CSP's Alexa in Space — aimed at teaching high school Science and AP Computer Science Principles students "how to program their own Alexa skills that could help astronauts [and 'inexperienced space travelers, such as tourists'] solve problems in space and communities at home" using MIT's App Inventor.

App Inventor, some may recall, was developed at Google to bring programming to the masses only to be suddenly abandoned. App Inventor was later picked up by MIT and — with support from Google and millions in NSF funding — eventually found its way into curriculum developed for the new AP CSP course aimed at mainstreaming AP Computer Science.

Mike Melanson's "This Week in Programming" column looks at what happened after Mozilla founder Jamie "jwz" Zawinski slammed the group for accepting donations in cryptocurrency (which Zawinski called partnering "with planet-incinerating Ponzi grifters.") Peter Linss, one of the creators of the Gecko browser engine on which Mozilla Firefox is based, also stepped in to back up Zawinski, saying that he was 100% with him and that Mozilla was "meant to be better than this."

When Mozilla first announced it would accept Bitcoin donations in 2014, it cited Khan Academy, Electronic Frontier Foundation, United Way, Greenpeace, and Wikimedia Foundation among its moral and upstanding cryptocurrency-accepting compatriots. Of that list, just Greenpeace has since stopped accepting cryptocurrency donations, telling the Financial Times earlier this year that "as the amount of energy needed to run bitcoin became clearer, this policy [of accepting cryptocurrency donations] became no longer tenable."
Thursday the Mozilla Foundation announced it was pausing cryptocurrency donations to review whether the idea "fits with our climate goals" — a fact the column also addresses: Mike Shaver, another Mozilla project founder, also tweeted his support, writing that he was "glad to see this reflection happening."

In a follow-up blog post to the ordeal, Zawinski doubled down on his condemnation of Mozilla's cryptocurrency acceptance, writing that "cryptocurrencies are not only an apocalyptic ecological disaster, and a greater-fool pyramid scheme, but are also incredibly toxic to the open web, another ideal that Mozilla used to support" — an idea also espoused in many of the comments on the initial Twitter thread.

Meanwhile, although Mozilla says that it is pausing the ability to donate cryptocurrencies during its review, the donations page still lists BitPay among its payment methods.

The programming language of the year has been announced by the TIOBE Index: Python!

But noting that the TIOBE index is based on the number of search results for a programming language across popular search engines, a headline at The Next Web asks: "What does this title even mean?" [TIOBE] takes services such as Google, QQ, Sohu, Amazon, and Wikipedia to calculate the results. TIOBE uses "+" programming" query and a special formula to devise these ratings that change every month. You can read more about the whole process here. The programming language of the year title is decided by the jump in ratings year-on-year. Python overtook C# by a margin of 0.13% — almost a photo finish.

The index doesn't indicate the best or most efficient programming language, nor does it measure the amount of code written in a language across the internet. It simply gives us a high-level understanding of resources and pages available on the web related to them.

There's a huge amount of criticism towards the TIOBE index, especially as it uses one query and doesn't consider non-English languages. The organization said that it's trying to introduce more parameters to calculate the ratings.
TIOBE's annual award is being called "prestigious" — by the announcement at TIOBE.com: The award is given to the programming language that has gained the highest increase in ratings in one year. C# was on its way to get the title for the first time in history, but Python surpassed C# in the last month.

Python started at position #3 of the TIOBE index at the beginning of 2021 and left both Java and C behind to become the number one of the TIOBE index. But Python's popularity didn't stop there. It is currently more than 1 percent ahead of the rest [with a "rating" of 13.58%]. Java's all time record of 26.49% ratings in 2001 is still far away, but Python has it all to become the de facto standard programming language for many domains. There are no signs that Python's triumphal march will stop soon.
In fact, this makes the second year in a row Python has won TIOBE's annual award.

But it's as good a conversation-starter as any. ZDNet reminds us that Microsoft hired Python creator Guido van Rossum in 2020 to work on improving Python's efficiency, while the second most popular language on TIOBE's annual list, C#, "is a language designed by Microsoft technical fellow Anders Hejlsberg for the .NET Framework and Microsoft's developer editing tool Visual Studio."

And ZDNet also spottted a few other patterns in TIOBE's year-end look at programming language popularity: There were several movers and shakers this year. Rust, a systems programming language that deals with memory safety flaws, is now in 26th position, ahead of MIT's Julia, and Kotlin, a language endorsed by Google for Android app development. Rust was a stand out language in 2021, gaining backing from Facebook, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

Apple's Swift for iOS and macOS app development jumped from 13th to 10th place, while Google's Go inched up from 14 to 13, according to Tiobe. Kotlin moved from 40th to 29th. Google's Dart dropped from 25th to 37th position, Julia fell from 23rd to 28th position, while Microsoft TypeScript dropped from from 42 to 49.

The top 10 languages in Tiobe's list for January 2022 were Python, C, Java, C++,C#, Visual Basic, JavaScript, Assembly Language, SQL, and Swift.

Thousands of people — included hundreds of men — were accused of witchcraft in Scotland, the Guardian reports, "from allegations of cursing the king's ships, to shape-shifting into animals and birds, or dancing with the devil."

Many were executed. Now, three centuries after the Witchcraft Act was repealed, campaigners are on course to win pardons and official apologies for the estimated 3,837 people — 84% of whom were women — tried as witches, of which two-thirds were executed and burned...

[W]ell-known cases include Lilias Adie, from Torryburn, Fife, who was accused of casting a spell to cause a neighbour's hangover; while Issobell Young, executed at Edinburgh Castle in 1629, was said by a stable boy to have shape-shifted into an owl and accused of having a coven....

The [pro-pardon advocacy site] Witches of Scotland notes that signs associated with witchcraft — broomsticks, cauldrons, black cats and black pointed hats — were also associated with "alewives", the name for women who brewed weak beer to combat poor water quality. The broomstick sign was to let people know beer was on sale, the cauldron to brew it, the cat to keep mice down, and the hat to distinguish them at market. Women were ousted from brewing and replaced by men once it became a profitable industry.
Wikipedia has a page with a list of people executed for witchcraft. Citing modern scholars, it places the total number of people executed for witchcraft in Europe and America between 40,000 and 50,000.

But the Guardian also notes a recent statement from the head of the pro-pardon advocacy group Witches of Scotland. "Per capita, during the period between the 16th and 18th century, we [Scotland] executed five times as many people as elsewhere in Europe, the vast majority of them women."

A sugar additive used in several foods could have helped spread a seriously dangerous superbug around the US, according to a 2018 study. ScienceAlert reports: The finger of blame is pointed squarely at the sugar trehalose, found in foods such as nutrition bars and chewing gum. If the findings are confirmed, it's a stark warning that even apparently harmless additives have the potential to cause health issues when introduced to our food supply. In this case, trehalose is being linked with the rise of two strains of the bacterium Clostridium difficile, capable of causing diarrhea, colitis, organ failure, and even death. The swift rise of the antibiotic-resistant bug has become a huge problem for hospitals in recent years, and the timing matches up with the arrival of trehalose.

"In 2000, trehalose was approved as a food additive in the United States for a number of foods from sushi and vegetables to ice cream," said one of the researchers, Robert Britton from the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, back in January 2018. "About three years later the reports of outbreaks with these lineages started to increase. Other factors may also contribute, but we think that trehalose is a key trigger."

The C. difficile lineages Britton is referring to are RT027 and RT078. When the researchers analysed the genomes of these two strains, they found DNA sequences that enabled them to feed off low doses of trehalose sugar very efficiently. In fact, these particular bacteria need about 1,000 times less trehalose to live off than other varieties of C. difficile, thanks to their genetic make-up. [...] It's still not certain that trehalose has contributed to the rise of C. difficile, but the study results and the timing of its approval as an additive are pretty compelling. More research will now be needed to confirm the link. According to figures from the CDC, "C. difficile was responsible for half a million infections across the year and 29,000 deaths within the first 30 days of diagnosis," adds ScienceAlert.

The findings were published in the journal Nature.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Velcro is an ingenious hook-and-loop fastener inspired by nature -- specifically, cockleburs. Now scientists at the Italian Institute of Technology are returning the favor. They have created the first biodegradable Velcro -- inspired by climbing plants -- and used it to build small devices to help monitor the health of crop plants and deliver pesticides and medicines as needed, according to a November paper published in the journal Communications Materials. [...] Co-author Isabella Fiorello and her colleagues were interested in developing innovative new technologies for monitoring plants in situ to detect disease, as well as delivering various substances to plants. However, few such devices can be attached directly to plant leaves without damaging them. The best current options are sensors attached with chemical glues, or with clips. There are also micro-needle-based patches under development able to penetrate leaves for disease detection. Fiorello et al. found inspiration in the common catchweed plant (Galium aparine). It can form dense, tangled mats on the ground, and while the plants can grow up to six feet, they can't stand on their own and instead must use other plants for support. For this purpose, catchweed plants rely on a "unique parasitic ratchet-like anchoring mechanism to climb over host plants, using microscopic hooks for mechanical interlocking to leaves," the authors wrote.

The Italian team closely studied that micro-hook structure and then used a high-resolution 3D printer to create artificial versions, using various materials -- including photosensitive and biodegradable materials made from a sugar-like substance known as isomalt. Their artificial reproductions proved quite capable of attaching to many different plant species, just like their natural counterparts. As an initial application, the team designed a device that could penetrate a plant cuticle with minimal invasiveness, thereby enabling the plant to be monitored and treated, if necessary. The isomalt microhooks attach to the vascular system of leaves and then dissolve inside, because isomalt is soluble. Fiorello et al.'s experiments demonstrated that their artificial micro hooks can be used as a plaster for targeted, controlled release of pesticides, bactericides, or pharmaceuticals onto the leaves. This would greatly reduce the need for broad application of pesticides. And since the plaster dissolves once it's applied, there is no additional waste.

The team also printed hooks made out of a photosensitive resin and assembled them together with sensors for light, temperature, and humidity to make intelligent clips to enable wireless monitoring of the plant's heath. The clips attach to individual leaves, transmitting data wirelessly thanks to customized computer software. The prototype proved resistant to windy conditions and was capable of making real-time measurements for up to 50 days. The devices could be used for small-scale botanical applications, or they could be scaled up. For instance, farmers could distribute many such devices to better map and monitor wide cultivation areas, according to the authors. Finally, Fiorello et al. developed a micro-robotic system capable of moving over the surface of leaves using micro steps, copying the ratchet-like motion of the catchweed plant. Similar actuation mechanisms have previously been demonstrated in Stanford University's SpinyBot -- capable of scaling hard, flat surfaces thanks to arrays of miniature spines on its feet -- and the University of California, Berkeley's CLASH robots, which are capable of climbing up loose suspended cloth surfaces, like curtains.

U.S. President Abraham Lincoln pardoned a soldier in the Civil War, and in 1998 that document was re-discovered. But "It was the date that made the document significant," writes Ars Technica: April 14, 1865, "meaning the pardon was likely one of the last official acts of President Lincoln, since he was assassinated later that same day at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C. The pardon was broadly interpreted as evidence for a historical narrative about the president's compassionate nature: i.e., his last act was one of mercy."

But now scientists at America's National Archives have conducted a new analysis (published in the journal Forensic Science International: Synergy), and "confirmed that the date was indeed forged (although the pardon is genuine)." An archivist named Trevor Plante became suspicious of the document, noting that the ink on the "5" in "1865" was noticeably darker. It also seemed as if another number was written underneath it. Then Plante consulted a seminal collection of Lincoln's writings from the 1950s. The pardon was there, but it was dated April 14, 1864 — a full year before Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. Clearly the document had been altered sometime between the 1950s and 1998 to make the pardon more historically significant..

Investigators naturally turned to the man who made the discovery for further information. They began corresponding with Thomas Lowry [a retired psychiatrist turned amateur historian] in 2010. Initially, Lowry seemed cooperative, but when he learned about the nature of the investigation, he stopped communicating with the Office of the Inspector General, thereby arousing suspicion. So the investigators knocked on the historian's door one January morning in 2011 for an interview. Shortly thereafter, the National Archives released a statement that Lowry had confessed to altering the date on the pardon. Lowry confessed to bringing a fountain pen into the research room, along with fade proof, pigment-based ink, and changing the "4" in "1864" to a "5." Lowry couldn't be charged with any crime because the statute of limitations for tampering with government property had run out, but he was barred from the National Archives for life.

But there's a twist: Lowry soon recanted, claiming he had signed the confession under duress from the National Archives investigators...
Long-time Slashdot reader waspleg writes that Ars Technica "goes through the analysis of how it was verified to be a forgery using several techniques," including ultraviolet light and X-ray fluorescence analysis to study chemicals in the ink. From the article: An examination under magnification and reflective fiber optic lighting showed the ink used to write the "5" was indeed different in overall color compared to the other numbers in the date. Furthermore, "Vestiges of ink from a scratched away number can be seen below and beside the darker '5,' as well as smeared across the paper," the authors wrote. Additional analysis under raking light — a technique that accentuates hills and valleys in the paper texture — revealed abrasions to the paper under and around the "5" that were not observed anywhere else on the document. The team also determined that the paper around the "5" is thinner than everywhere else, and that ink residue of the scratched-away "4" were caught in the abraded paper fibers, clearly visible using transmitted light microscopy...
"The authors also concluded that there is no way to restore the document to its original state without causing further damage."

71-year-old Jon "maddog" Hall has been involved with Linux from the very beginning, and for Christmas shared two of the earliest recordings ever made of young Linus Torvalds speaking about Linux — recordings long thought to be lost.

Hall shares the story at Archive.org. In February of 1994 the chair of a user group for the Digital Equipment Computer Users' Society "started sending emails (and copying me for some reason) about wanting to bring this person I had never heard about from Finland (of all places) to talk about a project that did not even run on Ultrix or DEC/OSF1.... After many emails and no luck in raising money for this trip I took mercy...and asked my management to fund the trip. I sat down to use it, and was amazed. It was good. It was very, very good."

24-year-old Torvalds was giving his first talks ever at a major conference — this one attended by 19,000 people — and he was nervous. In the end only 40 people showed up for "An Introduction to Linux" and "Implementation Issues in Linux", but Hall remembers that "there was great applause." Unfortunately the talks that Linus gave were lost.

Until now.

As I was cleaning my office I found some audio tapes made of Linus' talk, and which I purchased with my own money. Now, to make your present, I had to buy a good audio tape playback machine and capture the audio in Audacity, then produce a digital copy of those tapes, which are listed here...

Here is your Christmas present, from close to three decades ago. Happy Linuxing" to all, no matter what your religion or creed.

When The Matrix Resurrections premiered in San Francisco, the city's mayor "celebrated the appearance of her fair city in the film and cheered the film's economic contributions to the region," reports SFGate. "But there's a problem of aesthetics at play here... It is undeniably a dystopian hellscape where police rule the city and technology looms over all..." In the first section of the movie, the metaphor of the Matrix mirrors that of the tech industry depicted in the film. Tech is stereotypical here — lots of T-shirt-wearing men playing ping-pong and talking about how to design the next great video game. The most annoying character in the film, Jude (Andrew Caldwell), is a proxy for all annoying tech bros...
Meanwhile Politico writes that the original 1999 film The Matrix actually "changed politics, almost entirely by mistake," and calls the new Matrix Resurections "a sophisticated self-critique of the culture that swallowed it." In the past two decades, the idea of a "red pill" has taken on a life of its own in American culture, most prominently at first in an infamous misogynist subreddit, and then more broadly as a symbol of any kind of political awakening, almost always on the right. The idea has proliferated wildly throughout politics, and especially the darkest ideological corners of the internet, in which to be "red-pilled" means to realize that American society has been hopelessly debased by liberals, requiring a total rethink of its premises... Hugo Weaving, who memorably portrayed the original films' villain, lamented in a 2020 interview how people "will take something that they think is cool and they will repurpose it to fit themselves when the original intention or meaning of that thing was quite the opposite...." [T]he Wachowskis have been largely silent about the "meaning" of their creation — a movie franchise that not only became a ubiquitous cultural phenomenon, but predicted the cultural tenor of politics in the digital age with an eerie, oracular accuracy. We know they got it right, but what did they think about it?

Wednesday saw the release of "The Matrix Resurrections," a long-delayed sequel from one of the original writer/directors (Lana directed; Lilly sat it out) — and also an answer to that question. As a movie, it's everything its predecessors was, an impressive feat of visual-effects artistry, action choreography and original sci-fi worldbuilding. But even more, it's a two hour and 27-minute-long piece of cultural criticism. The film interrogates, to a jarringly specific degree, not just its own iconography, but how American culture has evolved around and bastardized it over the past two decades. "The Matrix Resurrections" is both wildly successful popcorn entertainment and a window into a long-misunderstood creative mind. But in refitting its entire premise to the social media age, it illustrates just how much the contours of American society have changed in the intervening decades....

The original "Matrix" was deeply of its time. Reeves' Neo a was a quintessential late 1990s corporate drone, captive to the professional ennui also depicted in films of the era like "Fight Club" and "Office Space." Its modern incarnation is a cry of protest against something else: society's willingness to trade individual agency for the neurological reward pellets of the Online. Visual metaphors abound, with Reeves disoriented by a procession of mirrors that serve as gateways to another world, another possible truth. "Your brain is hooked on this shit the Matrix has been feeding you for years," one character tells him. "They don't know you like I do.

"I know exactly what you need...."
The movie is streaming now on HBOMax for subscribers in their $15 ad-free tier — but, like, Dune, only during its 31-day theatrical run.

"While the lack of funding in open source is certainly a problem, could funding have prevented the Log4j vulnerabilities?" asks Mike Melanson's "This Week in Programming" column. "Would funding actually prevent similar vulnerabilities in the future...?"

Or is that an oversimplification? In a blog post for the Linux Foundation's Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), Brian Behlendorf argued that open source foundations must work together to prevent the next Log4Shell scramble, outlining seven points that OSS foundations could do to mitigate security risks. Among those seven points — which include security scanning, outside audits, dependency tracking, test frameworks, organization-wide security teams, and requiring projects to remove old, vulnerable code — not once was funding mentioned. Rather, Behlendorf precedes these points by saying that "Too many organizations have failed to apply raised funds or set process standards to improve their security practices, and have unwisely tilted in favor of quantity over quality of code."

Behlendorf continues after his list of seven suggested acts with a section that boils everything down perfectly:

"None of the above practices is about paying developers more, or channeling funds directly from users of software to developers. Don't get me wrong, open source developers and the people who support them should be paid more and appreciated more in general. However, it would be an insult to most maintainers to suggest that if you'd just slipped more money into their pockets they would have written more secure code. At the same time, it's fair to say a tragedy-of-the-commons hits when every downstream user assumes that these practices are in place, being done and paid for by someone else."

Behlendorf does go on to make some points about funds and fundraising, but his point is less on the lack of funding than the allocation of those funds and how they need to be focused on things like paid audits and "providing resources to move critical projects or segments of code to memory-safe languages, or fund bounties for more tests."

Behlendorf says that, in the new year, the OpenSSF will be working to "raise the floor" for security in open source.

"The only way we do this effectively is to develop tools, guidance, and standards that make adoption by the open source community encouraged and practical rather than burdensome or bureaucratic," he wrote. "We will be working with and making grants to other open source projects and foundations to help them improve their security game."
Behlendorf was a founding member of the Apache Group, which later became the Apache Software Foundation.

So as a long-time member of the Open Source community, he calls the Log4j vulnerabilities "a humbling reminder of just how far we still have to go."

The World Science Fiction Society has selected this year's winners for their prestigious Hugo award.

The best novel award went to Network Effect, the fifth book in the Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells, which also won this year's Hugo award for best series. (And Network Effect also won 2021's Nebula award for best novel, given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.) Here's how publisher Tor.com begins their description: You know that feeling when you're at work, and you've had enough of people, and then the boss walks in with yet another job that needs to be done right this second or the world will end, but all you want to do is go home and binge your favorite shows? And you're a sentient murder machine programmed for destruction? Congratulations, you're Murderbot.

Come for the pew-pew space battles, stay for the most relatable A.I. you'll read this century.
The best novelette award went to Two Truths and a Lie by Sarah Pinsker — available now for free reading online (which also won a Nebula award). The best novella award went to The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo. (Both were also published by Tor.com.) Also available for free reading online is the Hugo winner for best short story, "Metal Like Blood in the Dark" by T. Kingfisher. (And Kingfisher won a second Hugo this year — the Lodestar award for best young adult book for A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking — which also won a Nebula award.)

A special award for "Best Related Work" went to Beowulf: A New Translation. ("Maria Dahvana Headley's decision to make Beoulf a bro puts his macho bluster in a whole new light," wrote the New York Times.) And the Best Graphic Story award went to Parable of the Sower: A Graphic Novel Adaptation, written by Octavia Butler and adapted by Damian Duffy...

Netflix won a Hugo award for The Old Guard ("Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form"), while the final 53-minute episode of NBC's TV show The Good Place won the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Shortform. (The episode also won this year's "Ray Bradbury Nebula Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation".)

And there were also awards for best fan podcast, best fan writer, and best fanzine, as well as special one-off Hugo award for best video game, which went to the game Hades.