An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Science: The Biden administration has pledged to create a carbon-free energy sector by 2035, but because renewable resources generate only around 19 percent of US electricity as of 2020, climate experts warn that our transition to a green grid future needs to speed up. A group of researchers at Stanford led by Mark Jacobson, professor of civil and environmental engineering, has set out to prove that a 100 percent renewable energy grid by 2050 is not only feasible but can be done without any blackouts and at a lower cost than the existing grid. Jacobson is the lead author of a new paper, published in Renewable Energy, which argues that a complete transition to renewable energy -- defined as wind, water, and solar energy -- would benefit the US as a whole and individuals by saving costs, creating jobs, and reducing air pollution and carbon emissions.

They modeled how wind turbines, tidal turbines, geothermal and hydroelectric power plants, rooftop and utility photovoltaic panels, and other sources could generate energy in 2050. A host of different sources powered these projections: Jacobson used data from a weather-climate-air pollution model he first built in 1990, which has been used in numerous simulations since. Individual state and sector energy consumption was taken from the Energy Information Administration. Current fossil fuel energy sources were converted to electric devices that are powered by wind, water, and solar. This was then used to create projections for energy use in 2050. Time-dependent energy supply was matched with demand and storage in a grid integration model for every 30 second interval in 2050 and 2051. The study authors analyzed US regions and countrywide demand until the model produced a solution with what the authors called zero-load loss -- meaning, essentially, no blackouts with 100 percent renewable energy and storage. According to Jacobson, no other study is conducting this kind of modeling, which is unique in part because it checks conditions for any simulation every 30 seconds.

As the cost of renewables falls, researchers predict power companies and consumers will migrate to using renewables. Solar and wind are already half the cost of natural gas. Policy may also motivate adoption -- or hinder it. While the current administration has set out goals for a renewable energy grid, new permits for gas and drilling in the Gulf of Mexico counteract those same efforts. [...] The researchers quantified these benefits by looking at private costs, such as those to individuals or corporations, and social ones, which also include health and climate costs. Zero-emissions leads to few air pollution related deaths and illness, and a reduced toll on the healthcare system. [...] The model cannot address emissions from things like long-distance shipping or aviation, though the authors argue that green hydrogen could be a possible alternative to explore. They did not include nuclear energy or carbon capture, which [Anna-Katharina von Krauland, a PhD candidate in the Atmosphere/Energy program at Stanford and a co-author of the paper] views as "distractions from getting to 100 percent renewable energy as quickly as possible" because the technologies are costly, unproven, or lacking in their promises. "The best path forward would be to invest in what we know works as quickly as we can," she says -- such as wind, water, and solar energy.

The UK National Crime Agency has shared a collection of more than 585 million compromised passwords it found during an investigation with Have I Been Pwned, a website that indexes data from security breaches. The Record reports: The NCA now becomes the second law enforcement agency to officially supply HIBP with hacked passwords after the US Federal Bureau of Investigations began a similar collaboration with the service back in May. In a blog post today, Troy Hunt, HIBP creator Troy Hunt said that 225 million of the compromised passwords found by the NCA were new and unique.

These passwords have been added to a section of the HIBP website called Pwned Passwords. This section allows companies and system administrators to check and see if their current passwords have been compromised in hacks and if they are likely to be part of public lists used by threat actors in brute-force and password-spraying attacks. Currently, the HIBP Pwned Passwords collection includes 5.5 billion entries, of which 847 million are unique. All these passwords are also available as a free download, so companies can check their passwords against the data set locally without connecting to Hunt's service.

In a statement shared by Hunt, the NCA said it found the compromised passwords, paired with email accounts, in an account at a UK cloud storage facility. The NCA said they weren't able to determine or attribute the compromised email and password combos to any specific platform or company.

Despite the European Union's highest court twice declaring that the United States does not offer sufficient protection for Europeans' data from American national security agencies, the social media giant's lawyers continue to disagree, according to internal documents seen by POLITICO. Their conclusion that the U.S. is safe for EU data is part of Facebook's legal argument for it to be able to continue shipping data across the Atlantic. From the report: In July 2020, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) struck down a U.S.-EU data transfer instrument called Privacy Shield. The court concluded Washington did not offer adequate protection for EU data shipped overseas because U.S. surveillance law was too intrusive for European standards. In the same landmark ruling, the Luxembourg-based court upheld the legality of another instrument used to export data out of Europe called Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs). But it cast doubt on whether these complex legal instruments could be used to shuttle data to countries where EU standards cannot be met, including the U.S. The CJEU reached a similar conclusion in 2015, striking down the predecessor agreement to Privacy Shield because of U.S. surveillance law and practices. In both rulings, Europe's top judges categorically stated Washington did not have sufficiently high privacy standards. Still, Facebook -- the company at the heart of both cases -- thinks it shouldn't follow the court's reasoning.

The company's lawyers argue in the documents that the EU court ruling "should not be relied on" for the social media company's own assessment of data transfers to the U.S., because the judges' findings relate to Privacy Shield data pact, and not the Standard Contractual Clauses which Facebook uses to transfer data to the U.S. "The assessment of U.S. law (and practice) under Article 45 GDPR is materially different to the assessment of law and practice required under Article 46 GDPR," the document reads. That refers to the two different types of legal data transfer instruments under the EU's General Data Protection Regulation and indicates that assessment under SCCs is different to assessment under Privacy Shield. The company also says that changes to U.S. law and practices since the July 2020 ruling should be taken into account. As an example, it cites the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, a watchdog, "carrying out its role as a data protection agency with unprecedented force and vigour." Those arguments have been central to Washington's pitch during ongoing transatlantic negotiations over a new EU-U.S. data agreement. "Though companies have to take the EU court ruling into account when making their own assessments of third party country regimes, they can, in theory, diverge from the court's findings if they believe it is justified in a particular situation," notes Politico. "This means that companies like Facebook can, in theory, continue to ship data out of Europe if they can prove its sufficiently protected."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Cointelegraph: Less than 1% of the biggest Bitcoin (BTC) hodlers allegedly control more than a quarter of all BTC in circulation, according to a new study. The National Bureau of Economic Research, an American private nonprofit research organization, released a study claiming that 10,000 Bitcoin investors, or 0.01% of all BTC holders, own 5 million BTC, or 27% of all 18.9 million coins in circulation. The amount of BTC held by the "one percent" is equivalent to approximately $232 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

The study, which was conducted by finance professors Antoinette Schoar at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Igor Makarov at the London School of Economics, aims to demonstrate that Bitcoin is not as decentralized as one might think. "Despite having been around for 14 years and the hype it has ratcheted up, it's still the case that it's a very concentrated ecosystem," Schoar said. According to the WSJ report, the top hodlers control a bigger share of BTC than the richest American households control in dollars. Citing data from the United States Federal Reserve, the report notes that the top 1% of U.S. households hold about a third of all wealth. The new report may sound alarming for the crypto community, as major Bitcoin advocates have been promoting decentralization as one of the Bitcoin network's biggest principles.

According to Quantum Economics founder Mati Greenspan, much of the circulating BTC supply is controlled by Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin. "Satoshi's coins alone make up for more than 5%," Greenspan told Cointelegraph, adding: "Over time, the ownership of Bitcoin is designed to get more distributed. For fiat, the opposite tends to happen." It's worth noting that much of BTC's circulating supply is also apparently not controlled by anyone and is likely to be lost forever. According to crypto-insurance firm Coincover, around 4 million BTC is out of circulation due to lost access.

The Environmental Protection Agency issued a new rule today aimed at reducing tailpipe pollution from cars and light-duty trucks -- an effort by President Joe Biden to return to the fuel economy standards put in place by Barack Obama nearly a decade ago. From a report: Under the rule, passenger vehicles would be required to achieve an average of 55 miles of travel per gallon of gasoline (mpg) by 2026 -- slightly over Obama's goal of 54 mpg, but a major increase over the 38-mpg rule put in place by President Donald Trump. The EPA estimates the new standard would prevent the release of 3.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide through 2050 and will save car owners $420 billion in fuel costs. EPA Administrator Michael Regan called it "the most ambitious vehicle pollution standards for greenhouse gases ever established," adding, "The standards are achievable, affordable, and will deliver a significant pollution reduction." The new fuel economy standards are the latest effort by the Biden Administration to reduce air pollution in the broader fight against climate change. Earlier this month, Biden signed an executive order directing the federal government to spend billions of dollars to purchase electric vehicles, upgrade federal buildings, and leverage the power of the government to shift to cleaner forms of electricity.

Glaciers across the Himalayas are melting at an extraordinary rate, with new research showing that the vast ice sheets there shrank 10 times faster in the past 40 years than during the previous seven centuries. From a report: Avalanches, flooding and other effects of the accelerating loss of ice imperil residents in India, Nepal and Bhutan and threaten to disrupt agriculture for hundreds of millions of people across South Asia, according to the researchers. And since water from melting glaciers contributes to sea-level rise, glacial ice loss in the Himalayas also adds to the threat of inundation and related problems faced by coastal communities around the world. "This part of the world is changing faster than perhaps anybody realized," said Jonathan Carrivick, a University of Leeds glaciologist and the co-author of a paper detailing the research published Monday in the journal Scientific Reports. "It's not just that the Himalayas are changing really fast, it's that they're changing ever faster."

Scientists have long observed ice loss from large glaciers in New Zealand, Greenland, Patagonia and other parts of the world. But ice loss in the Himalayas is especially rapid, the new study found. The researchers didn't pinpoint a reason but noted that regional climate factors, such as shifts in the South Asian monsoon, may play a role. The new finding comes as there is scientific consensus that ice loss from glaciers and polar ice sheets results from rising global temperatures caused by greenhouse-gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. Many peer-reviewed scientific studies have identified human activity as a cause of rising global temperatures. So did a report issued in August by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which said "human influence is very likely the main driver of the global retreat of glaciers since the 1990s." For the new study, Dr. Carrivick and his colleagues scanned satellite photos of almost 15,000 glaciers in the region for signs of the large ridges of rock and debris that glaciers leave behind as they slowly grind their way through the valleys. Using the locations of these ancient glacial tracks, the scientists estimated the span of ice sheet coverage in previous centuries.

More than 20 different times in the last 12 months, at least $10 million was stolen from a cryptocurrency exchange or project, reports NBC News.

"In at least six cases, hackers stole more than $100 million..." By comparison, bank robberies netted perpetrators an average of less than $5,000 per heist last year, according to the FBI's annual crime statistics... "If you hack a Fortune 500 company today, you might steal some usernames and passwords," said Esteban Castaño, the CEO and co-founder of TRM Labs, a company that builds tools for companies to track digital assets. "If you hack a cryptocurrency exchange, you may have millions of dollars in cryptocurrency...."

[W]hile a handful of countries have strict regulations in place, it's relatively easy for tech entrepreneurs to set up an exchange nearly anywhere in the world and run it however they like. Cryptocurrencies generally offer a certain amount of security — taking their name, in part, from "encryption." But the exchanges that manage them, especially new ones building their businesses from scratch, often start with a tiny staff, which means few if any full-time cybersecurity professionals. Their developers may work frantically to make the code work, sometimes accidentally leaving flaws that give hackers a foothold. Combined with the fact that a volatile market often leaves them suddenly holding a fortune, exchanges are a particularly ripe target for criminal hackers....

The problem is exacerbated because many cryptocurrency projects, intent on avoiding government regulations, set up in countries whose law enforcement agencies don't have much power to go after transnational hackers. Or if they are hacked, they tend to be less likely to call for government help on ideological grounds, said Beth Bisbee, head of U.S. investigations at Chainalysis, a company that tracks cryptocurrency transactions for both private companies and government agencies. Some developers "want to be anti-bank and anti-oversight," Bisbee said. "So when something like that happens, they're not necessarily wanting to work with law enforcement, even though they'd be considered to be a victim and it'd be valuable for them to."
Ultimately the article points out that "Most exchange hackers are not caught." (Although in at least one case part of the stolen money was voluntarily returned.)

But what happens after the breach, NBC News asked Dave Jevans, the founder of CipherTrace, a company that tracks theft and fraud in cryptocurrencies. If an exchange is wealthy enough and plans ahead to have an emergency fund, it can compensate its customers if its operation is hacked, Jevans said. If not, they often goes out of business. "Not every exchange is so wealthy or has so much foresight. It just goes, pop, 'We're out of business. Sorry, you're all screwed,'" he said.

"YouTube TV's battle with Disney is over almost as soon as it began," reports Engadget. "The two have struck a deal that restores access to ESPN, FX and other Disney channels on YouTube's streaming service..." As is often the case with disputes like this, each side blamed the other. Disney claimed YouTube TV "declined to reach a fair deal," while YouTube maintained that it was advocating on "behalf" of viewers...

It's not just that channels like ESPN remain a major draw for live TV services â" it's that Disney could easily have siphoned some of those customers to its equivalent Hulu offering. YouTube may have decided that any increased costs (and possible rate hikes) were less painful than losing viewership.
The base subscription rate is returning to $65 per month, but Reuters reports YouTube TV promised that "all impacted members" would still receive a one-off $15 discount.

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.

UPI reports: Melting glaciers may produce thousands of miles of new Pacific salmon habitat, a study published Tuesday by Nature Communications found.

As glaciers in the mountains of western North America melt, or retreat, they could produce around 4,000 miles of new Pacific salmon habitat by the year 2100, the data showed. After modeling glacier retreat under different climate change scenarios, the glaciers could reveal potential new Pacific salmon habitat nearly equal to the length of the Mississippi River under moderate temperature increases, the researchers said.

"We predict that most of the emerging salmon habitat will occur in Alaska and the transboundary region, at the British Columbia-Alaska border, where large coastal glaciers still exist," co-author Kara Pitman said in a press release....

"On the other hand, climate change and other human impacts continue to threaten salmon survival, via warming rivers, changes in stream flows and poor ocean conditions," she said.
Thanks to Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the story...

"Globally, methane is responsible for 30% of global warming. Of that, livestock, such as cattle, account for about one-third of all methane emissions," reports CBS News.

But researchers discovered that feeding seaweed to cattle would reduce greenhouse gases by as much as 40%, they're told by a Canadian farmer named Joe Dorgan who first discovered the connection: Digesting roughage requires extra digestion from cows and causes cows to burp more. Those burps emit methane, a heat-trapping greenhouse gas that's 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide. In a year, a cow emits as much greenhouse gas as a small car. Because animal numbers have skyrocketed to help feed a growing human population, livestock now accounts for 15% of global emissions.

The increase motivated chief scientist at Futurefeed, Rob Kinley, who worked with Dorgan on his organic certification 15 years ago, to find a seaweed species with even more methane-reducing power. "We started testing seaweeds from coastal Australia, and it wasn't long before the Asparagopsis species showed up, and it showed up in a big way. So big that we didn't even believe what we were seeing," Kinley said. "It took multiple runs of testing this before we believed what we were seeing, which was we couldn't find methane anymore." Kinley's research showed Asparagopsis, a common type of red seaweed, has the potential to virtually eliminate methane emissions from livestock.

But there are some obstacles to overcome — it's not easy to harvest from the ocean, so scientists are experimenting with farming it. Kinely's team, along with others like Josh Goldman, project leader at Greener Grazing, are getting much closer to perfecting the techniques.... Still, there's the challenge of encouraging cow owners to use the seaweed supplement. For that, Goldman says there's an incentive: adding seaweed to a cow's diet means they consume less food. And, he says, dairy farmers and cattle ranchers will likely be able to cash in, selling carbon credits for the emissions they reduce.

Eliminating almost all methane from almost all cow's on Earth "would have a tremendous impact, roughly equivalent to eliminating all the emissions from the U.S., or the equivalent of taking every car off the road globally," Goldman said.
"It's clear that methane reduction from seaweed is effective in the short-term," the article concludes, "but there's some fear that its effects may diminish over time as the cow's digestive systems adapt."

The mosquitofish threatens native fish populations in Australia — including two of the most criticially endangered, reports the New York Times. And in various parts of the world, "For decades scientists have been trying to figure out how to control it, without damaging the surrounding ecosystem.

But in a new lab experiment, "the mosquitofish may have finally met its match: A menacing fish-shaped robot." It's "their worst nightmare," said Giovanni Polverino, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Western Australia and the lead author of a paper published Thursday in iScience, in which scientists designed a simulacrum of the fish's natural predator, the largemouth bass, to strike at the mosquitofish, scaring it away from its prey. The robot not only freaked the mosquitofish out, but scarred them with such lasting anxiety that their reproduction rates dropped; evidence that could have long term implications for the species' viability, according to the paper. "You don't need to kill them," Dr. Polverino said. Instead, he said, "we can basically inject fear into the system, and the fear kills them slowly...."

[S]cientists say there is a long way to go before the robot could be released into the wild. "It's an important proof of concept," said Peter Klimley, a marine biologist and a recently retired professor from the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the study. But he questioned the feasibility of introducing the creature into a real-world environment.

"This study won't be a solution to the problem," Dr. Polverino said, adding that the next phase of their project would involve testing the robots in a larger, outdoor, freshwater pool. He said the robot should be thought of as a tool that can reveal a pest's weaknesses. "We've built a sort of vulnerability profile," Dr. Polverino said, that could help biologists and others to reimagine how to control invasive species. "This fear," he added, "has a collateral effect."
Their robot fish uses a built-in camera to differentiate between mosquitofish and the native tadpoles it's trying to protect.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot for the link!

RadioShack.com is now showing visitors a new message: "Bringing cryptocurrency to the mainstream..."

With a 100-year-old brand, "we are going to lead the way for blockchain tech to reach mainstream adoption by other large brands."

The RadioShack home page says they'll start with a "symbiosis" with Atlas USV, a community-driven project to build a universal, decentralized/widely accessible DeFi base layer. Atlas USV's "Barter" mechanism lets users purchase third-party tokens and transfer them to Atlas USV's treasury in return for discounted USV tokens. "The Atlas USV treasury can accumulate any crypto asset of its choice with this dynamic...

"Once the liquidity pool surpasses other exchanges' liquidity level in any token pair, our swap efficiency will be unbeatable for that pair...

"Other decentralized exchanges margins on swap fees are our opportunity.... "

Or, as they explain on a more detailed web page, "We intend RadioShack to be the first protocol to pass over into mainstream usage in the history of DeFI," promising that RadioShack DeFi "will become the first to market with a 100 year old brand name that's recognized in virtually all 190+ countries in the world..."

"RadioShack has one objective: Distribution and usage by millions of individuals but possibly more important, by hundreds of blue-chip, large corporations as their gateway into becoming blockchain companies."

Currently there's a sign-up form for a notification when "RADIO token" launches (as well as links to their channels on Discord and Telegram).

Their "Fundamentals" page explains that "It is our hypothesis that the best way for crypto to be more mainstream is for an established brand name in the tech space to lead the way."

The RadioShack brand was purchased In November of 2020 by e-commerce rehabilitator REV, now listed as a collaborator on RadioShack's home page. (Ironically, the "Fundamentals" page also includes RadioShack's Super Bowl ad where there store is taken back by the 1980s.)

The official Twitter feed of Radio Shack now also has the same new tagline: "Bringing Cryptocurrency To The Mainstream."

The Log4Shell exploit "exposes how a vulnerability in a seemingly simple bit of infrastructure code can threaten the security of banks, tech companies, governments, and pretty much any other kind of organization," writes VentureBeat. But the incident also raises some questions: Should large deep-pocketed companies besides Google, which always seems to be heavily involved in such matters, be doing more to support the cause with people and resources?
Long-time Slashdot reader frank_adrian314159 shares a related article from a programming author on Dev.To, who'd read hot takes like "Open source needs to grow the hell up." and "Open source' is broken". [T]he log4j developers had this massive security issue dumped in their laps, with the expectation that they were supposed to fix it. How did that happen? How did a group of smart, hard-working people get roped into a thankless, high-pressure situation with absolutely no upside for themselves...?

It is this communal mythology I want to talk about, this great open source brainwashing that makes maintainers feel like they need to go above and beyond publishing source code under an open source license — that they need to manage and grow a community, accept contributions, fix issues, follow vulnerability disclosure best practices, and many other things...

In reality what is happening, is that open source maintainers are effectively unpaid outsourcing teams for giant corporations.
The log4j exploit was first reported by an engineer at Alibaba — a corporation with a market capitalization of $348 billion — so the article wonders what would happen if log4j's team had sent back a bill for the time they'd spend fixing the bug.

Some additional opinions (via the "This Week in Programming" column):

• PuTTY maintainer Andrew Ducker: "The internet (and many large companies) are dependent on software maintained by people in their spare time, for free. This may not be sustainable."

• Filippo Valsorda, a Go team member at Google: "The role of Open Source maintainer has failed to mature from a hobby into a proper profession... The status quo is unsustainable.... GitHub Sponsors and Patreon are a nice way to show gratitude, but they are an extremely unserious compensation structure."

Valsorda hopes to eventually see "a whole career path with an onramp for junior maintainers, including training, like a real profession."

The Wikimedia Foundation banned seven high-level users in September and temporarily demoted a dozen others for abuses "unprecedented in scope and nature." Slashdot reader harrymcc explains: The foundation accused these volunteers of biasing it in favor of the Chinese government's viewpoint. This incident involves beatings, doxxings, and harassment designed to ensure pro-Beijing content.
harrymcc is also technology editor at Fast Company, which got more details from Wikimedia's VP of of Community Resilience & Sustainability, Maggie Dennis: Dennis said a monthlong investigation found that the veteran editors were "coordinating to bias the encyclopedia and bias positions of authority" around a pro-Beijing viewpoint, in part by meddling in administrator elections and threatening, and even physically assaulting, other volunteers...

Wikipedians in China have it especially hard, because the government blocks the site and makes accessing it a crime... But as with the dedicated mainland users of blocked apps like Instagram, Telegram, and Twitter, the prohibition hasn't deterred hundreds of volunteers, who tunnel through the Great Firewall with VPNs, and now make up a small but die-hard part of the Chinese Wikipedia community. Despite China's blockade, the site remains one of the ten most active language versions of Wikipedia, thanks largely to growing numbers of editors based in Taiwan and Hong Kong...

[A]mid acute worries over China's influence in both places, the community's mix of users and viewpoints has grown increasingly combustible. In 2014, when mainland editors were in the majority, there were few references to the Hong Kong protests; more recently, swarms of "pro Beijing" editors and "pro democracy" editors have battled over how exactly to depict those and simliar events. Were the students at a particular rally in Hong Kong protesters or were they rioters? Is a state-backed news outlet a reliable source?

In some cases, the Foundation found, the fights had spread beyond online harassment into real-life threats, and worse... Dennis says there is no evidence the banned editors were backed by the government...

[U]ntil September, the Foundation had only issued 86 bans since 2012, and typically only one at a time. Suddenly, the Foundation's bans and penalties had knocked out a third of the Chinese edition's administrators.
China "is home to the world's largest population of internet users and to the world's most sophisticated apparatus for policing them," the article notes.

It argues that the banned users "liked to defend Beijing's point of view, but they also liked their influence over the Wiki community; and a pro-China stance allowed them to more easily fly under the government's radar. To protect their fiefdom, they sometimes resorted to personal threats, harassment, and assault." Since the ban, they've now launched a "hard fork" of Chinese Wikipedia which already has 400,000 articles, "tailored to appease government censors so that anyone on the mainland can access it."

The article also explores the possibility of having one global version of Wikipedia, rather than separate local editions.

Slashdot reader SoftwareArtist shares an announcement from a Stanford University institute for environmental studies. "For some, visions of a future powered by clean, renewable energy are clouded by fears of blackouts driven by intermittent electricity supplies," the announcement begins.

"Those fears are misplaced, according to a new Stanford University study that analyzes grid stability under multiple scenarios in which wind, water and solar energy resources power 100% of U.S. energy needs for all purposes." "This study is the first to examine grid stability in all U.S. grid regions and many individual states after electrifying all energy and providing the electricity with only energy that is both clean and renewable," said study lead author Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford... Imagine all cars and trucks were powered with electric motors or hydrogen fuel cells, electric heat pumps replaced gas furnaces and water heaters and wind turbines and solar panels replaced coal and natural gas power plants. The study envisions those and many more transitions in place across the electricity, transportation, buildings and industrial sectors in the years 2050 and 2051...

Interconnecting larger and larger geographic regions made power supply smoother and costs lower because it upped the chances of available wind, sun and hydro power availability and reduced the need for extra wind turbines, solar panels and batteries. A significant finding of the study was that long-duration batteries were neither needed nor helpful for keeping the grid stable. Instead, grid stability could be obtained by linking together currently available batteries with storage durations of four hours or less. Linking together short-duration batteries can provide long-term storage when they are used in succession. They can also be discharged simultaneously to meet heavy peaks in demand for short periods. In other words, short-duration batteries can be used for both big peaks in demand for short periods and lower peaks for a long period or anything in-between.
Other findings:

• Cleaner air would spare about 53,200 people from pollution-related deaths every year. It would also spare millions more from pollution-related illnesses. Total estimated health costs saved each year: $700 billion.
• Building and operating a completely renewable grid may create 4.7 million long-term jobs.

• Per capita household energy costs were nearly 63% less.

• New electricity generators would occupy about 0.84% of U.S. land (versus roughly 1.3% occupied today by the fossil fuel industry).

"Ridiculous, seemingly arbitrary price markups are a defining characteristic of the $4-trillion U.S. healthcare system — and a key reason Americans pay more for treatment than anyone else in the world," writes a business columnist for the Los Angeles Times.

"But to see price hikes of as much as 675% being imposed in real time, automatically, by a hospital's computer system still takes your breath away."

Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot quotes their report: I got to view this for myself after a former operating-room nurse at Scripps Memorial Hospital in Encinitas shared with me screenshots of the facility's electronic health record system.... What they show are price hikes ranging from 575% to 675% being automatically generated by the hospital's software. The eye-popping increases are so routine, apparently, the software even displays the formula it uses to convert reasonable medical costs to billed amounts that are much, much higher. For example, one screenshot is for sutures — that is, medical thread, a.k.a. stitches. Scripps' system put the basic "cost per unit" at $19.30. But the system said the "computed charge per unit" was $149.58. This is how much the patient and his or her insurer would be billed.

The system helpfully included a formula for reaching this amount: "$149.58 = $19.30 + ($19.30 x 675%)."

You read that right. Scripps' automated system took the actual cost of sutures, imposed an apparently preset 675% markup and produced a billed amount that was orders of magnitude higher than the true price. This is separate from any additional charges for the doctor, anesthesiologist, X-rays or hospital facilities.

Call it institutionalized price gouging. And it's apparently widespread because the same or similar software is used by other hospitals nationwide, including UCLA, and around the world... Healthcare providers routinely ignore the actual cost of treatment when calculating bills and instead cook up nonsensical figures to push reimbursement from insurers higher. For the millions of people without health insurance, those sky-high prices are what they're stuck with (although most hospitals, including Scripps, typically will offer discounts in such circumstances).

The Free Software Foundation's board "has approved and implemented two new measures designed to help make FSF governance more transparent, accountable, ethical, and responsible," according to an FSF announcement.

First a Board Member Agreement "enumerates the responsibilities of board members." And there's also a Code of Ethics "that lays out principles to guide their decision-making and activities." The new measures are the first products of a six-month, consultant-led review. They formalize crucial aspects of the FSF's governance, and will guide board members to understand and embrace their responsibilities to the nonprofit's worldwide mission to promote computer user freedom.

The new Board Member Agreement spells out nineteen duties and responsibilities, including minimum expectations for organizational and financial oversight, participation in board activities, the recruitment of associate members, and annual performance reviews. The Code of Ethics details thirteen specific provisions establishing how the board of directors will conduct the business affairs of the organization in good faith and with honesty, integrity, due diligence, and competence.

All current board members have signed and committed to upholding the new governance standards.
The agreement clarifies that Board members "do not have individual direct authority over FSF staff. Individual board members will not try to give staff instructions about what to do in their FSF work, nor try to pressure them about what to do." Board members also agree not to participate in discussions and votes where they might have a conflict of interest.

"In signing this document, I understand that no quotas are being set, that no rigid standards of measurement or achievement are being formed. I have confidence that other board members will operate in good faith to carry out these agreements to the best of their ability."

"The FSF has always been a steady beacon for freedom and against the widespread mistreatment of computer users," says FSF president Geoffrey Knauth in the announcement. "In the last year, the board realized that we faced a challenge and opportunity to improve our governance practices and recruit new leaders to the FSF board. I'm proud of this important step in that ongoing work."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ProPublica: Across the country, some law enforcement agencies have deployed controversial surveillance technology to track cellphone location and use. Critics say it threatens constitutional rights, and members of Congress have moved to restrain its use. Nonetheless, in 2019 the Boston Police Department bought the device known as a cell site simulator -- and tapped a hidden pot of money that kept the purchase out of the public eye. A WBUR investigation with ProPublica found elected officials and the public were largely kept in the dark when Boston police spent $627,000 on this equipment by dipping into money seized in connection with alleged crimes.

Also known as a "stingray," the cell site simulator purchased by Boston police acts like a commercial cellphone tower, tricking nearby phones into connecting to it. Once the phones connect to the cell site simulator's decoy signal, the equipment secretly obtains location and other potentially identifying information. It can pinpoint someone's location down to a particular room of a hotel or house. While this briefcase-sized device can help locate a suspect or a missing person, it can also scoop up information from other phones in the vicinity, including yours. The Boston police bought its simulator device using money that is typically taken during drug investigations through what's called civil asset forfeiture.

An August investigation by WBUR and ProPublica found that even if no criminal charges are brought, law enforcement almost always keeps the money and has few limitations on how it's spent. Some departments benefit from both state and federal civil asset forfeiture. The police chiefs in Massachusetts have discretion over the money, and the public has virtually no way of knowing how the funds are used. The Boston City Council reviews the BPD annual budget, scrutinizing proposed spending. But the surveillance equipment wasn't part of the budget. Because it was purchased with civil forfeiture funds, BPD was able to circumvent the council. According to an invoice obtained by WBUR, the only city review of the purchase -- which was made with federal forfeiture funds -- came from the Procurement Department, confirming that the funds were available. In fact, it was only after sifting through hundreds of documents received through public records requests that WBUR discovered BPD had bought the device from North Carolina-based Tactical Support Equipment Inc., which specializes in surveillance technology.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Climate change, the rapid growth of "stablecoins" and financial innovations that led to frenzied trading of GameStop shares early this year are threats to the U.S. financial system that merit closer scrutiny, a Treasury Department-led regulatory panel said on Friday. In its annual report, the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) added that while the U.S. economy has improved since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, risks to the financial system are higher than prior to the health crisis, with the outlook for global growth still uncertain.

The report marked the first time the body, which was created in the wake of the 2007-2009 financial crisis to spot looming threats, has flagged climate change as a major risk, reflecting President Joe Biden's push to address rising global temperatures. The FSOC, which comprises the Treasury and other financial regulators, said the physical risks posed by more frequent severe weather events and government policies transitioning away from carbon-heavy industry could dent asset values and weaken institutions, it wrote, echoing an October FSOC paper. "If these changes occur in a disorderly way owing to substantial delays in action or abrupt changes in policy, their impact is likely to be more sudden and disruptive," the FSOC said.

Similarly, the body reiterated concerns flagged in November that stablecoins, a fast-growing type of digital asset pegged to traditional currencies, could become a threat if widely adopted. While that market is currently only worth about $127 billion, its market value has ballooned more than 500% over the past 12 months and may be vulnerable to runs if investors lose confidence in the asset class's reliability, the FSOC said. The body also noted a surge of volatility earlier this year sparked by retail investors, who coordinated on social media and used zero-commission trading apps to fuel sharp rises in a handful of stocks, including videogame maker GameStop. The episode suggested financial innovations and social media are changing market participation, raising the risk of sudden asset price movements unrelated to fundamental news. That "could represent a vulnerability if they lead to cascading impacts by causing asset liquidations or putting stress on financial institutions," the FSOC wrote.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: School districts across the United States are cancelling classes on Friday, December 17th due to reports of threats that are supposedly being made on TikTok. Districts in California, Texas, Minnesota, and Missouri have said they plan to close down Friday in response, according to the districts and local media reports. Elsewhere, districts have said they plan to have heightened police presence or have emailed parents to say they've been investigating the allegations. But so far, there's little evidence that the threats are credible -- or even exist. The districts and local police departments largely say they've heard about a trend referencing the possibility of shootings or bombings on December 17th, but it's not clear how many have seen a specific threat or a threat against their schools in particular.

A number of districts and law enforcement divisions say they've looked into it and don't view the threats as credible or even real. "Law enforcement agencies have investigated this threat and determined that it originated in Arizona and is not credible," Baltimore County Public Schools wrote on Twitter. "Currently, there have been no threats to any of the schools in Mexico, [Missouri]," wrote a Missouri school district. "There have been no local, credible threats," Ohio's Milford Exempted Village School District wrote to parents. In New Jersey, Governor Phil Murphy tweeted, "there are no known specific threats against New Jersey schools."

The reports of threats on TikTok may be self-perpetuating. Videos being posted to TikTok warn others that they should skip school on December 17th due to supposed threats of shootings or bombings, which seem to have prompted others to create similar videos. And now that schools are canceling classes in response to those supposed threats, a new wave of videos have popped up with additional warnings based on both the supposed claims and the actual, factual cancellations of some school classes. TikTok says it has not identified any videos making specific threats. "We have not found evidence of such threats originating or spreading via TikTok," the company wrote in a tweet Thursday afternoon. TikTok said it is working with law enforcement to look into the warnings with "utmost seriousness," nonetheless.

Regulators in Washington may crack down on the industry behind "buy now, pay later," the increasingly popular method for consumers to purchase things online. From a report: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said Thursday that it is looking to "collect information on the risks and benefits of these fast-growing loans" from five leading BNPL companies: Affirm; Australia's Afterpay, which is getting bought by Square owner Block; PayPal; privately held Swedish fintech Klarna; and Zip, another BNPL firm headquartered in Australia. "Buy now, pay later is the new version of the old layaway plan, but with modern, faster twists where the consumer gets the product immediately but gets the debt immediately too," said CFPB Director Rohit Chopra in a statement Thursday. The CFPB said it was specifically worried about how quickly consumers can accumulate debt using BNPL services and also about how the BNPL companies may harvest data about their customers. It added that it is working with international partners in Australia, Sweden, Germany and the United Kingdom on the inquiry.

The first ever millipede with more than 1,000 legs been discovered in Western Australia. From a report: The species, which is the first "true" millipede, has 1,306 legs and was found up to 60 metres underground in a mining area in the Eastern Goldfields region of WA. Researchers have named the new species Eumillipes persephone, in reference to the Greek goddess of the underworld, Persephone. It breaks the previous record set by Illacme plenipes, which is found in central California and has up to 750 legs.

A team of researchers discovered the millipede while conducting a subterranean environmental impact assessment. Dr Bruno Buzatto, a biologist at Bennelongia Environmental Consultants, described the find as "incredibly lucky." "These animals were so unique," Buzatto said. "As soon as I realised how long they were ... I realised they had to be something completely different." The species has a long, thread-like body comprising up to 330 segments, with short legs and a cone-shaped head. Like other animals that live in constant darkness, it is blind and pale.

Amazon has struck a deal with Barclays to push into the booming "buy now, pay later" market in Britain. From a report: Amazon UK said on Friday it was launching a new product in partnership with the bank called Instalments. The payment method will allow Amazon customers to spread the cost of certain purchases over several instalments between 3 and 48 months after purchase. Amazon and Barclays first launched the product in Germany last year but today's deal represents Amazon's first foray in Britain into the "buy now, pay later" (BNPL) market, which was pioneered by Swedish giant Klarna. BNPL lets customers defer payments until a future date or spread them over instalments. BNPL has become a popular alternative to credit cards for young shoppers online. Over 5 million people have used the payment method in the UK since the start of the pandemic, according to official estimates.

An anonymous reader writes: Burning fossil fuels kills more than 1 million people ever year, according to a new study that examined the worldwide health effects of fine particulate pollution, also known as PM2.5. Coal, which produces sooty, particulate-laden pollution, is responsible for half of those deaths, while natural gas and oil are responsible for the other half. Some 80 percent of premature deaths due to fossil fuel combustion takes place in South Asia or East Asia, the report said. Because fine particulate pollution can be so easily inhaled and swept into the bloodstream, it is responsible for a range of diseases, including heart disease, diabetes, COPD, lung cancer, and stroke. More recently, researchers have found links between PM2.5 and other, less obvious diseases like kidney failure and Parkinson's. People who have experienced long-term exposure to PM2.5 are also at greater risk of hospitalization if they fall ill with COVID.

The researchers gathered monthly pollution and source data from 1970 to 2017 and ran it through a global air-quality model in conjunction with satellite data. The result was a global map of outdoor PM2.5 with a resolution of about 1 km^2. From there, they estimated the average outdoor exposure for people living in various parts of the world. The study was coordinated by the nonprofit Health Effects Institute, and its coauthors were Randall Martin, a professor of energy, environmental and chemical engineering at Washington University, and Michael Brauer, a professor of population and public health at the University of British Columbia. In regions like South Asia and East Asia and some Eastern and Central European countries, coal causes a majority of the premature deaths that result from fossil fuel combustion. That's due in part to those regions' reliance on coal and because their regulations are typically not as stringent as elsewhere. In regions like North America and Western Europe, which are less reliant on coal, oil and natural gas cause the majority of deaths from fossil fuel-related particulate pollution. Even in the US, a country with relatively stringent clean air laws, fine particulate pollution from fossil fuels is responsible for about 20,000 deaths annually, according to the study.

schwit1 shares a report from BloombergQuint: Add ships being dragged along by giant kites to the list of things the industry is exploring in its quest to decarbonize. At the start of next year, the Ville de Bordeaux, a 154-meter-long ship that moves aircraft components for Airbus SE, will unfurl a 500 square meter kite on journeys across the Atlantic Ocean. It will undergo six months of trials and tests before full deployment. The kite is called Seawing. Its developer, Airseas, estimates that an even larger 1,000 square-meter parafoil, flying at an altitude of 300 meters, will cut fuel consumption and emissions from vessels by about 20%. Airseas says its technology is automated and can be installed on any ship -- regardless of size -- in a few days.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Light Reading: Comcast confirmed that it won't activate data caps and usage-based broadband policies in its Northeast division in 2022, effectively extending an earlier delay to keep the policy out of the region through the end of 2021. There's still no telling whether Comcast will revisit the plan for 2023 and beyond. "We don't have plans to implement our data usage plan in our Northeast markets in 2022 at this time," a Comcast official told Light Reading. Word of Comcast's latest decision follows one made in February 2021 to delay the implementation of data usage and capping policies in its Northeast division until 2022.

Comcast had activated usage-based policies in its Northeast division (which includes parts of 13 states and Washington, D.C., and areas where the cable op competes with the cap-free Verizon Fios service) in early 2021. But Comcast put the policy back on ice there after catching heat from lawmakers about introducing the policy during a pandemic that had forced people to work and school from home and vastly increase their broadband data consumption. Comcast's data usage policies are still active in its Central and West divisions. Comcast restored and updated its data usage policies in July 2020, raising the monthly limit to 1.2 terabytes -- 200 gigabytes more than the 1TB limit that was in place prior to the original COVID-19 outbreak. "Under the current plan, residential broadband customers who exceed 1.2TB of data per month are charged $10 for each additional bucket of 50GB, up to a maximum of $100 per month (Comcast's maximum data overage charge prior to the pandemic was $200)," the report notes. "Comcast also sells a standalone unlimited data option that costs an additional $30 per month."

Mozilla has fixed an issue in its Firefox browser where usernames and passwords were being recorded in the Windows Cloud Clipboard feature, in what the organization categorized as a severe security risk that could have exposed credentials to non-owners whenever users copied or cut a password. From a report: The issue was fixed in Firefox 94, released last month, but was detailed in more depth this week by Mozilla developers. At its core, the bug is related to Windows Cloud Clipboard, a feature added to Windows 10 in September 2018 (v1809 release), a feature that allows users to sync their local clipboard history to their Microsoft accounts. The feature is disabled by default, but once enabled, it allows users to access the cloud clipboard section by pressing the Windows+V shortcut. This grants users access to clipboard data from all devices, but the feature is also used for its clipboard history capabilities, allowing users to go through past items they copied or cut and re-paste the same data in new contexts, making it extremely useful for most IT workers. In a blog post on Wednesday, Mozilla said that they have now modified the Firefox browser so that usernames and passwords copied from the browser's password section (about:logins) won't be stored in the Windows Cloud Clipboard feature, but instead will be stored only locally, in a separate clipboard section.

How a blind spot in the Kyoto Protocol helped create the biomass industry. From a report: In essence, Drax [a tiny village in North of England] is a gigantic woodstove. In 2019, Drax emitted more than fifteen million tons of CO2, which is roughly equivalent to the greenhouse-gas emissions produced by three million typical passenger vehicles in one year. Of those emissions, Drax reported that 12.8 million tons were "biologically sequestered carbon" from biomass (wood). In 2020, the numbers increased: 16.5 million tons, 13.2 million from biomass. Meanwhile, the Drax Group calls itself "the biggest decarbonization project in Europe," delivering "a decarbonized economy and healthy forests." The apparent conflict between what Drax does and what it says it does has its origins in the United Nations Conference on Climate Change of 1997. The conference established the Kyoto Protocol, which was intended to reduce emissions and "prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system." The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (I.P.C.C.) classified wind and solar power as renewable-energy sources.

But wood-burning was harder to categorize: It's renewable, technically, because trees grow back. In accounting for greenhouse gases, the I.P.C.C. sorts emissions into different "sectors," which include land-use and energy production. It's hard to imagine now, but at the time, the I.P.C.C. was concerned that if they counted emissions from harvesting trees in the land sector, it would be duplicative to count emissions from the burning of pellets in the energy sector. According to William Moomaw, an emeritus professor of international environmental policy at Tufts University, and lead author of several I.P.C.C. reports, negotiators thought of biomass as only a minor part of energy production -- small-scale enough that forest regrowth could theoretically keep up with the incidental harvesting of trees. "At the time these guidelines were drawn up, the I.P.C.C. did not imagine a situation where millions of tons of wood would be shipped four thousand miles away to be burned in another country," Moomaw said. In the end, negotiators decided only to count land-use emissions. "But these emissions are very difficult to estimate, and the United States and Canada aren't even part of the Kyoto agreement," Moomaw said. The loss of future carbon uptake due to the removal of forests, even the plumes chugging out of a biomass plant's smokestacks -- these did not go on the books.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Even if the wind stops blowing in the next three weeks, wind power will end the year as the leading source of electricity in Spain. This will mean wind overtaking nuclear in the national energy matrix for the first time since 2013, the only year since records began in which wind turbines were the main source of power. That year was particularly good in terms of wind resources while nuclear was affected by the closure of the Garoña plant in Burgos. Since then, however, wind power has continued to grow as a percentage of total energy generated both in absolute and relative terms, a trend that looks to continue in the near future. The milestone, advanced by Spanish news site Nius, is just a taste of things to come. "Wind power is going to dominate the Spanish electricity grid for a long time," says Francisco Valverde, a consultant at the energy company Menta Energia.

According to the National Integrated Energy and Climate Plan (PNIEC), released by the Spanish government last year, the installed capacity of wind turbines will almost double between now and 2030. During this period, the rate of growth of solar photovoltaic will be even greater as installed capacity more than quadruples, making it the second most important electricity source, though it will still lag far behind wind power, even when solar thermal is taken into account. Meanwhile, installed nuclear power will fall to less than half its current level. And both combined-cycle plants, which use natural gas, and hydroelectricity will maintain their weight in a mix in which coal will no longer be included.

The world's second most populous nation uses sterilization, contraceptives to reach fertility milestone. From a report: Back in the 1960s, India faced an exploding population, with a fertility rate of nearly six children per woman. When famine struck, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson initially refused to deliver food aid, citing the country's high birth rate. In response, India's Prime Minister Indira Gandhi dramatically expanded the first national family planning program in a major developing country, offering cash incentives for both men and women to be sterilized. The city of Madras, now called Chennai, paid men $6 a snip. For the next 60 years, India continued to focus on sterilization as well as contraceptives and education for girls. Now, Indian health officials say the task of defusing their population bomb is finally done. Late last month, the National Family Health Survey (NFHS), a periodic investigation of half a million households, announced a milestone: The country's fertility rate had for the first time fallen below the widely accepted "replacement level" of 2.1 children per woman. (The U.S. rate is 1.8.) "Women are seeing the wisdom in having fewer children," says Poonam Muttreja, director of the nonprofit Population Foundation of India.

India's population growth is not over yet, however. Thanks to past high fertility rates, two-thirds of the population is under 35 years old, and a large cohort of people is now entering childbearing age. Even at replacement fertility rates, the children of these young people will continue to push up numbers, and India may exceed China as the world's most populous nation as early as next year. Still, India's population is set to decline in about 3 decades, putting the country on the same track as a growing number of developing nations, such as its neighbor Bangladesh and Indonesia. India remains well behind China in falling fertility. In China, where the population may be at its peak, official figures put the fertility rate at 1.7 children per woman. State-sponsored family planning remains "the single most important driver" of India's drop in fertility, says Srinivas Goli, a demographer at Jawaharlal Nehru University. More than 55% of couples use modern contraceptives, the latest NFHS survey found. Of these, one-fifth use condoms and one-tenth the pill. But sterilization of women, generally in government-run clinics, accounts for two-thirds of all contraception. Sterilization has a checkered past in India. During the mid-1970s, Gandhi allowed states to operate compulsory sterilization camps. An estimated 19 million people were sterilized, three-quarters of them men. The program's unpopularity helped bring down Gandhi's government in 1977, says Monica Das Gupta of the Maryland Population Research Center.

U.S. military commanders in the Pacific have built a software tool to predict how the Chinese government will react to U.S. actions in the region like military sales, U.S.-backed military activity and even congressional visits to hotspots like Taiwan. From a report: Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks was briefed on the new tool during a visit to the United States Indo-Pacific Command in Hawaii on Tuesday. "With the spectrum of conflict and the challenge sets spanning down into the grey zone. What you see is the need to be looking at a far broader set of indicators, weaving that together and then understanding the threat interaction," Hicks said in an interview aboard a military jet en route to California. The tool calculates "strategic friction," a defense official said. It looks at data since early 2020 and evaluates significant activities that had impacted U.S.-Sino relations. The computer-based system will help the Pentagon predict whether certain actions will provoke an outsized Chinese reaction. In October, the Chinese military condemned the United States and Canada for each sending a warship through the Taiwan Strait, saying they were threatening peace and stability in the region. The incident and others like it have fueled demand for the tool, the U.S. official said, to ensure the United States does not inadvertently upset China with its actions.

Major U.S. air carriers warned on Wednesday that plans by AT&T and Verizon to use spectrum for 5G wireless services could be highly disruptive to air travel and cost air passengers $1.6 billion annually in delays. Reuters reports: Trade group Airlines for America (A4A) said if a new Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) directive for addressing potential interference from wireless transmissions had been in effect in 2019 "approximately 345,000 passenger flights, 32 million passengers, and 5,400 cargo flights would have been impacted in the form of delayed flights, diversions, or cancellations." At a hearing Wednesday, senators urged airlines to work to find a resolution. United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby said the 5G wireless issue "is the biggest and most damaging potential issue facing us. We want nothing more than to work to a solution." Southwest Airlines Chief Executive Gary Kelly said the FAA directive "would significantly impact our operations once it is deployed on Jan. 5." The wireless carriers are set to begin using the spectrum in just three weeks. Last week, the FAA issued new airworthiness directives warning interference from 5G wireless spectrum could result in flight diversions.

The aviation industry and FAA have raised significant concerns about potential interference of 5G with sensitive aircraft electronics like radio altimeters. In November, AT&T and Verizon agreed to delay the commercial launch of C-band wireless service until Jan. 5 after the FAA raised concerns. They also adopted precautionary measures for six months to limit interference. The FAA directives order revising airplane and helicopter flight manuals to prohibit some operations requiring radio altimeter data when in the presence of 5G C-Band wireless broadband signals. Aviation industry groups said they were insufficient to address air safety concerns. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, who did not immediately comment on the airlines' analysis, has said she believes the issues can be resolved and spectrum safely used.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: The New York City Council on Wednesday voted to pass legislation banning the use of natural gas in most new construction, a move that will substantially slash climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions from the country's most populous city. The bill now goes to Mayor Bill de Blasio's desk for signature. Once signed, the measure will go into effect at the end of 2023 for some buildings under seven stories, and in 2027 for taller buildings. Hospitals, commercial kitchens and laundromats are exempt from the ban.

Under the law, construction projects submitted for approval after 2027 must use sources like electricity for stoves, space heaters and water boilers instead of gas or oil. Residents who currently have gas stoves and heaters in their homes will not be impacted unless they relocate to a new building. New York state was the sixth largest natural gas consumer in the country in 2019, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. [...] Buildings in New York City account for about 70% of its greenhouse gases. Today's ban will likely push forward a New York state requirement to obtain 70% of its electricity from renewable sources like solar, wind and water power by 2030 and achieve a net-zero emissions electric sector by 2040. According to the think tank RMI, this bill will cut about 2.1 million tons of carbon emissions by 2040 -- equivalent to the annual emissions of 450,000 cars -- and save consumers several hundred million dollars in new gas connections. "The ban will also minimize the risk of gas explosions and reduce exposure to air pollution that poses health risks to residents, particularly low-income communities of color that are disproportionately exposed to pollution," reports CNBC.

Vodeo Games, which was founded this year by Threes designer Asher Vollmer, has successfully unionized with CODE-CWA -- the Communication Workers of America's Campaign to Organize Digital Employees. Engadget reports: Operating out of various locations in the US and Canada, the all-remote team of 13 is an unusual case for a few reasons. Foremost, about half of the bargaining unit are independent contractors -- typically the exact sort of workers left out of, or deemed ineligible for, a union. And while much of the push to unionize digital workspaces in recent years has focused on curbing abuses by management and pay imbalances, Vodeo's does not appear to stem from a need to course-correct away from imminent disaster. Rather, their desire to unionize seems rooted in wanting to maintain an equitable workplace. "They're not organizing because there's some big scary boss, like Bobby Kotick or someone," campaign lead for CODE-CWA Emma Kinema told Polygon. "They're organizing because they care so much about the work they do, and they want more of a say over how it's done -- the conditions in which they work to actually make those games that they care about."

"All workers deserve a union and a say in how their workplace is run, no matter where they work, what their employment status is, or what kind of conditions they work under," Myriame Lachapelle, a producer at Vodeo Games, wrote in a statement to press. "We have been inspired by the growing worker organizing within the gaming industry and hope we can set a new precedent for industry-wide standards that will better our shared working conditions and inspire others to do the same." Vodeo released its first game, the Peggle-like RPG Beast Breaker, in September to largely positive reviews. It's available for PC, Mac and Switch.

schwit1 shares a report from the Financial Times: The US Treasury will put DJI and the other groups on its Chinese military-industrial complex companies blacklist on Thursday (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), according to two people briefed on the move. US investors are barred from taking financial stakes in the 60 Chinese groups already on the blacklist. The measure marks the latest effort by President Biden to punish China for its repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic minorities in the north-western Xinjiang region.

The other Chinese companies that will be blacklisted on Thursday include Megvii, SenseTimes main rival that last year halted plans to list in Hong Kong after it was put on a separate US blacklist, and Dawning Information Industry, a supercomputer manufacturer that operates cloud computing services in Xinjiang. Also to be added are CloudWalk Technology, a facial recognition software company, Xiamen Meiya Pico, a cyber security group that works with law enforcement, Yitu Technology, an artificial intelligence company, Leon Technology, a cloud computing company, and NetPosa Technologies, a producer of cloud-based surveillance systems. DJI and Megvii are not publicly traded, but Dawning Information, which is also known as Sugon, is listed in Shanghai, and Leon, NetPosa and Meiya Pico trade in Shenzhen. All eight companies are already on the commerce department's "entity list," which restricts US companies from exporting technology or products from America to the Chinese groups without obtaining a government license.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Insider: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday rejected the idea of barring members of Congress and their spouses from holding or trading individual stocks while in office. "We are a free-market economy. They should be able to participate in that," Pelosi said when asked by Insider at her weekly press conference. Insider also asked Pelosi about Conflicted Congress, a five-month-long investigation by Insider that found that 49 members of Congress and 182 senior congressional staffers had violated the STOCK Act, a law to prevent Insider trading. The speaker said she hadn't yet seen the project, but added that it's important that members comply with the law. "If people aren't reporting, they should be," she said. Pelosi's position put her at odds with progressives such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, both of whom have called for barring members of Congress from trading stocks while in office. Earlier this year, NPR found that TikTok users have been watching financial disclosures of sitting members of Congress to help them determine which stocks to invest in. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's stock trading disclosures in particular were "a treasure trove," according to some TikTok users.

"Shout out to Nancy Pelosi, the stock market's biggest whale," said user 'ceowatchlist.' Another said, "I've come to the conclusion that Nancy Pelosi is a psychic," while adding that she is the "queen of investing." "She knew," declared Chris Josephs, analyzing a particular trade in Pelosi's financial disclosures. "And you would have known if you had followed her portfolio." The report notes that the trades Josephs noticed were actually made by Pelosi's investor husband.

gollum123 shares a report from the BBC: More than 800,000 Americans have now died from the coronavirus, the highest recorded national death toll from the global pandemic. It comes as the US reached 50 million confirmed cases of Covid-19 on Monday. Most deaths have been recorded among the unvaccinated and the elderly, and more Americans died in 2021 than in 2020. The 800,000 total exceeds the populations of cities such as Boston or Washington DC. The milestone means nearly twice as many Americans have died during the pandemic as in World War 2. The last 100,000 deaths came in just the past 11 weeks, a quicker pace than any at other point aside from last winter's surge.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said Wednesday that he doesn't view cryptocurrencies as a "financial stability concern." From a report: Cryptocurrencies "are really speculative assets," Powell said in a press conference Wednesday after the Fed said it would accelerate the pace of its tapering of bond purchases and penciled in three hikes of its benchmark interest rate next year. However, "I don't see them [cryptocurrencies] as a financial stability concern at the moment," Powell said. "I do think they are risky, they're not backed by anything. And I think there's a big consumer issue for consumers who may or may not understand what they're getting."

Powell also highlighted the role of stablecoins, and said he supported the views expressed in the President's Working Group's report, which called on Congress to quickly pass new legislation that would require stablecoins to be issued by insured banks. "Stablecoins can certainly be a useful, efficient consumer serving part of the financial system if they're properly regulated," Powell said. "And right now they aren't. And they have the potential to scale particularly if they were to be associated with one of the very large tech networks that exist," Powell added.

The U.K. reported a record number of new daily Covid-19 cases on Wednesday, with 78,610 in the last 24 hours. From a report: The figure was an increase from 59,610 the day before, and it surpasses the previous high of 68,053 cases reported on Jan. 8. It underlines the dramatic surge in infections that the country is seeing ahead of the Christmas holiday period with the omicron variant expected to quickly become the dominant strain. One senior British health chief has warned that there could be "staggering" numbers in the next few days. Long queues have been seen outside vaccination centers in many U.K. cities and towns with the government putting its booster program on overdrive to try to get a third vaccine shot to as many people as possible. There were 165 new Covid deaths in the U.K. on Wednesday, according to government data. While deaths remain low currently and initial reports suggest that the omicron variant might not be any more severe than other Covid strains, health experts have repeatedly warned that the sheer number of infections could lead to mounting fatalities and an overwhelmed health-care system.

Thelasko shares a report from the BBC: Considering a career in brain surgery or rocket science? It might well be within reach. Members of both professions aren't necessarily more clever than the general public, according to a study. Researchers asked 329 aerospace engineers and 72 neurosurgeons to complete a series of tasks to test their cognition. The results, published in the British Medical Journal, show few differences with members of the British public.

Professionals from both groups were assessed online in six cognitive domains, using a 'Great British Intelligence Test' originally devised at Imperial College, London. The test looked at areas like working memory, attention and emotion processing, and respondents were asked about their age, sex and industry experience. The results were then compared between both groups, and data previously gathered from 18,000 members of the British public. It found that neurosurgeons scored significantly higher than rocket scientists in semantic problem solving, like defining rare words. Aerospace engineers, meanwhile, performed better than their rivals when it came to attention, and to mental manipulation tasks like rotating images of objects in one's head. When compared with public scores, however, rocket scientists didn't show significant differences in any domains.

Neuroscientists, on the other hand, scored differently in only two areas: their problem solving speed was quicker, but their memory recall was slower. Researchers suggested this may be due to the "fast-paced nature of neurosurgery... or it could be, albeit less likely, a product of training for rapid decision-making in time-critical situations." "It is possible that both neurosurgeons and aerospace engineers are unnecessarily placed on a pedestal," the study reflected. "Other specialties might deserve to be on that pedestal, and future work should aim to determine the most deserving profession."

The Bank of England has said that bitcoin could be "worthless" and people investing in the digital currency should be prepared to lose everything. The Guardian reports: In a warning over the potential risks for investors, the central bank questioned whether there was any inherent worth in the most prominent digital currency, which has soared in value this year to close to $50,000 a piece. The deputy governor, Sir Jon Cunliffe, said the Bank had to be ready for risks linked to the rise of the crypto asset following rapid growth in its popularity. "Their price can vary quite considerably and [bitcoins] could theoretically or practically drop to zero," he told the BBC.

The Bank's financial policy committee, set up in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to monitor risks, said on Monday there was little direct threat to the stability of the UK financial system from crypto assets. However, it warned that, at the current rapid pace of growth, such assets could become more interconnected with traditional financial services and were likely to pose a number of risks. Publishing its regular health check on the financial system, the Bank said major institutions should take a cautious approach to adopting crypto assets and that it would pay close attention to developments in the market. "Enhanced regulatory and law enforcement frameworks, both domestically and at a global level, are needed to influence developments in these fast-growing markets in order to manage risks, encourage sustainable innovation and maintain broader trust and integrity in the financial system," it said. In a separate blogpost published on its website on Tuesday, a member of the Bank's staff said bitcoin failed to fulfill many of the features required of a currency and that it risked being inherently volatile.

Thomas Belsham, who works in the Bank's stakeholder and media engagement division, wrote: "The problem is that, unlike traditional forms of money, Bitcoin isn't used to price things other than itself. As Bitcoiners themselves are fond of saying, 'one Bitcoin = one Bitcoin'. But a tautology does not a currency make." He said scarcity of the crypto asset -- which is limited to 21m bitcoin -- is among the key reasons for its attraction for investors, but this feature embedded into its design "may even, ultimately, render Bitcoin worthless." About 19m bitcoin is currently in circulation, with new coins added when "miners" validate changes to the blockchain ledger underpinning the cryptocurrency. While the ultimate number of bitcoin in circulation is not expected to be reached until February 2140, it would become harder to sustain this system over time, Belsham said. "Simple game theory tells us that a process of backward induction should, really, at some point, induce the smart money to get out. And were that to happen, investors really should be prepared to lose everything. Eventually."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Washington Post: The U.S. Postal Service pursued a project to build and secretly test a blockchain-based mobile phone voting system before the 2020 election (Warning: may be paywalled; alternative source), experimenting with a technology that the government's own cybersecurity agency says can't be trusted to securely handle ballots. The system was never deployed in a live election and was abandoned in 2019, Postal Service spokesman David Partenheimer said. That was after cybersecurity researchers at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs conducted a test of the system during a mock election and found numerous ways that it was vulnerable to hacking.

The project appears to have been conducted without the involvement of federal agencies more closely focused on elections, which were then scrambling to make voting more secure in the wake of Russian interference in the 2016 contest. Those efforts focused primarily on using paper ballot so the voter could verify their vote was recorded accurately and there would be a paper trail for auditors -- something missing from any mobile phone or Internet-based system. The project appears to have been conducted without the involvement of federal agencies more closely focused on elections, which were then scrambling to make voting more secure in the wake of Russian interference in the 2016 contest. Those efforts focused primarily on using paper ballot so the voter could verify their vote was recorded accurately and there would be a paper trail for auditors -- something missing from any mobile phone or Internet-based system.

The Postal Service system allowed people to cast votes on an Internet-connected mobile app similar to how they might add items to an online shopping cart or fill out an online survey. The votes were designed to be anonymous and to be recorded in multiple digital locations simultaneously. The idea is that each of those digital records would act as a check to verify the accuracy of the other records. This is essentially the same method that cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin use to ensure transactions are accurately recorded. But the system didn't protect against the numerous ways hackers might fake or corrupt votes, the University of Colorado researchers said. Those include impersonating voters, attacking the blockchain system itself so votes can't be trusted, flooding the system with information so it becomes too overwhelmed to function, and using techniques that undermine voters' privacy and the secrecy of the ballot. The researchers were able to successfully perform all those hacks during a mock election held on campus. "The Postal Service was awarded a public patent for the concept in August 2020, but had not previously revealed that it built a prototype system or tested it," the report notes.

YouTube TV yesterday warned that it could lose all Disney-owned channels after Friday because of a contract dispute and said it will temporarily reduce its price by $15 a month if that happens. Ars Technica reports: "We're now in negotiations with Disney to continue distributing their content on YouTube TV so you can continue watching everything from your favorite teams on ESPN to The Bachelor to Good Morning America. Our deal expires on Friday, December 17, and we haven't been able to reach an equitable agreement yet, so we wanted to give you an early heads up so that you can understand your choices," the Google-owned YouTube wrote in a blog post.

"[I]f we are unable to reach a deal by Friday, the Disney-owned channels will no longer be available on YouTube TV and we will decrease our monthly price by $15, from $64.99 to $49.99 (while this content remains off our platform)," the blog post said. YouTube noted that users can pause or cancel their YouTube TV subscriptions at any time and subscribe to the Disney Bundle for $13.99 a month.

YouTube's statement that it wants "equitable" terms indicates that it is seeking a most-favored-nation (MFN) clause from Disney. "Our ask to Disney, as with all our partners, is to treat YouTube TV like any other TV provider -- by offering us the same rates that services of a similar size pay, across Disney's channels for as long as we carry them. If Disney offers us equitable terms, we'll renew our agreement with them," YouTube wrote. When contacted by Ars, Disney said that the contract is scheduled to expire on Friday at 11:59 pm ET and covers "the ABC Owned Television Stations, the ESPN networks, the Disney channels, Freeform, the FX networks, and the National Geographic channels." In an email to Ars, Disney expressed confidence that the companies can get a deal done: "Disney Media and Entertainment Distribution has a highly successful track record of negotiating such agreements with providers of all types and sizes across the country and is committed to working with Google to reach a fair, market-based agreement. We are optimistic that we can reach a deal and continue to provide their YouTube TV customers with our live sporting events and news coverage, plus kids, family, and general entertainment programming."

Open source is no place for secrets. From a report: This is a critical time for the Good Chip Intel. After the vessel driftied through the Straits of Lateness towards the Rocks of Irrelevance, Captain Pat parachuted into the bridge to grab the helm and bark "Full steam ahead!" Its first berth at Alder Lake is generally seen as a return to competitive form, but that design started well before Gelsinger's return and there's still zero room for navigational errors in the expeditions ahead. At least one of the course corrections looks a bit rum. Intel has long realised the importance of supporting open source to keep its chips dancing with Linux. Unlike the halcyon days of Wintel dominance, though, this means being somewhat more open about the down-and-dirty details of exactly how its chips do their thing. You can't sign an NDA with the Linux kernel.

Chipmakers are notoriously paranoid: Silicon Valley was born in intrigue and suspicion. Despite Intel's iconic CEO Andy Grove making paranoia a corporate mantra, Intel became relatively relaxed. Qualcomm and Apple would throw you into their piranha pools merely for asking questions if they could, while Intel has learned to give as well as take. But it may be going back to bad habits. One of the new things not open to discussion is something called Software Defined Silicon (SDSi), about which Intel has nothing to say. Which is odd because it has just submitted supporting code for it to the Linux kernel. The code itself doesn't say anything about SDSi, instead adding a mechanism to control whatever it is via some authorised secure token. It basically unlocks hardware features when the right licence is applied. That's not new. Higher performance or extra features in electronic test equipment often comes present but disabled on the base models, and the punter can pay to play later. But what might it mean in SDSi and the Intel architecture?

It is expensive for Intel and OEMs alike to have multiple physical variants of anything; much better if you make one thing that does everything and charge for unlocking it. It's a variant of a trick discovered by hackish school kids in the late 1970s, where cheaper Casio scientific calculators used exactly the same hardware as the more expensive model. Casio just didn't print all the functions on the keyboards of the pleb kit. Future Intel chips will doubtless have cores and cache disabled until magic numbers appear, and with the SoC future beckoning that can extend to all manner of IO, acceleration, and co-processing features. It might even be there already. From engineering, marketing, and revenue perspectives, this is great. Intel could make an M1-like SoC that can be configured on the fly for different platforms, getting the design, performance, and fab efficiencies that Apple enjoys while making sense for multiple OEMs. There could be further revenue from software upgrades, or even subscription models.

Microbes in oceans and soils across the globe are evolving to eat plastic, according to a study. The research scanned more than 200m genes found in DNA samples taken from the environment and found 30,000 different enzymes that could degrade 10 different types of plastic. From a report: The study is the first large-scale global assessment of the plastic-degrading potential of bacteria and found that one in four of the organisms analysed carried a suitable enzyme. The researchers found that the number and type of enzymes they discovered matched the amount and type of plastic pollution in different locations. The results "provide evidence of a measurable effect of plastic pollution on the global microbial ecology," the scientists said.

Millions of tonnes of plastic are dumped in the environment every year, and the pollution now pervades the planet, from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans. Reducing the amount of plastic used is vital, as is the proper collection and treatment of waste. But many plastics are currently hard to degrade and recycle. Using enzymes to rapidly break down plastics into their building blocks would enable new products to be made from old ones, cutting the need for virgin plastic production. The new research provides many new enzymes to be investigated and adapted for industrial use.

The U.K.'s antitrust watchdog has given the clearest signal yet that interventions under an upcoming reform of the country's competition rules will target tech giants Apple and Google -- including their duopolistic command of the mobile market, via iOS and Android; their respective app stores; and the browsers and services bundled with mobile devices running their OSes. From a report: So it could mean good news for third-party developers trying to get oxygen for alternatives to dominant Apple and Google apps and services down the line. Publishing the first part of a wide-ranging mobile ecosystem market study -- which was announced this summer -- the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said today that it has "provisionally" found Apple and Google have been able to leverage their market power to create "largely self-contained ecosystems"; and that the degree of lock-in they wield is damaging competition by making it "extremely difficult for any other firm to enter and compete meaningfully with a new system." "The CMA is concerned that this is leading to less competition and meaningful choice for customers," the watchdog writes in a press release. "People also appear to be missing out on the full benefit of innovative new products and services -- such as so-called 'web apps' and new ways to play games through cloud services on iOS devices."

The U.S. workplace safety watchdog is investigating the circumstances around the collapse during Friday night's storm of an Amazon.com building in Illinois in which six workers died, an official at the U.S. Department of Labor said on Monday. From a report: The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has six months to complete its investigation, issue citations, and propose monetary penalties if violations of workplace safety and/or health regulations are found, Scott Allen, a U.S. Department of Labor regional director for public affairs, said via email. He added that compliance officers have been on site since Saturday. Six workers were killed when the Amazon warehouse in Edwardsville, Illinois, buckled under the force of a devastating storm, police said. A barrage of tornadoes ripped through six U.S. states, leaving a trail of death and destruction at homes and businesses stretching more than 200 miles (322 km).

Around the frozen continent, a vast current circles the world. New science is revealing the power it holds over the future. Ice shelves are in retreat, and researchers are alarmed at what they're learning. From a report: The immense and forbidding Southern Ocean is famous for howling gales and devilish swells that have tested mariners for centuries. But its true strength lies beneath the waves. The ocean's dominant feature, extending up to two miles deep and as much as 1,200 miles wide, is the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, by far the largest current in the world. It is the world's climate engine, and it has kept the world from warming even more by drawing deep water from the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans, much of which has been submerged for hundreds of years, and pulling it to the surface. There, it exchanges heat and carbon dioxide with the atmosphere before being dispatched again on its eternal round trip. Without this action, which scientists call upwelling, the world would be even hotter than it has become as a result of human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases. "From no perspective is there any place more important than the Southern Ocean," said Joellen L. Russell, an oceanographer at the University of Arizona. "There's nothing like it on Planet Earth."

For centuries this ocean was largely unknown, its conditions so extreme that only a relative handful of sailors plied its iceberg-infested waters. What fragmentary scientific knowledge was available came from measurements taken by explorers, naval ships, the occasional research expeditions or whaling vessels. But more recently, a new generation of floating, autonomous probes that can collect temperature, density and other data for years -- diving deep underwater, and even exploring beneath the Antarctic sea ice, before rising to the surface to phone home -- has enabled scientists to learn much more. They have discovered that global warming is affecting the Antarctic current in complex ways, and these shifts could complicate the ability to fight climate change in the future. As the world warms, Dr. Russell and others say, the unceasing winds that drive the upwelling are getting stronger. That could have the effect of releasing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, by bringing to the surface more of the deep water that has held this carbon locked away for centuries.

Thelasko shares a report from the BBC: At least one person in the UK has died with the Omicron coronavirus variant, the prime minister has said. Boris Johnson said the new variant was also resulting in hospital admissions, and the "best thing" people could do was get their booster jab. Health Secretary Sajid Javid told MPs Omicron now represented 20% of cases in England. The PM has set a new target for all adults in England to be offered a booster by the end of the month. Mr Johnson said on Monday that people needed to recognize "the sheer pace at which [Omicron] accelerates through the population" and that they should set aside the idea that Omicron was a milder variant.

The UK recorded 54,661 new coronavirus cases on Monday, as well as 38 deaths within 28 days of a positive test. There are 4,713 confirmed cases of the Omicron variant but Mr Javid said the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) estimated the current number of daily infections was around 200,000. Omicron has risen to more than 44% of cases in London and is expected to become the dominant variant in the city in the next 48 hours, he said.