"To date, nearly 28,000 near-Earth asteroids have been found by survey telescopes that continually scan the night sky, adding new discoveries at a rate of about 3,000 per year..." according to an article from NASA:

"The first version of Sentry was a very capable system that was in operation for almost 20 years," said Javier Roa Vicens, who led the development of Sentry-II while working at JPL as a navigation engineer and recently moved to SpaceX. "It was based on some very smart mathematics: In under an hour, you could reliably get the impact probability for a newly discovered asteroid over the next 100 years — an incredible feat."
But RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477), summarizes some new changes: For nearly 20 years, newly discovered asteroids had orbital predictions processed by a system called "Sentry", resulting in quick estimates on the impact risk they represent with Earth. Generally this has worked well, but several things in the future required updates, and a new system adds a number of useful features too.

The coming wave of big survey telescopes which will check the whole sky every few days is going to greatly increase the number of discoveries. That requires streamlining of the overall system to improve processing speed. The new system can also automatically incorporate factors which previously required manual intervention to calculate, particularly the effect of asteroid rotation creating non-gravitational forces on a new discovery's future orbit. Objects like asteroid Bennu (recently subject of a sampling mission) had significant uncertainty on their future path because of these effects. That doesn't mean that Bennu can possibly hit us in the next few centuries, but it became harder to say over the next few millennia. As NASA puts it:

Popular culture often depicts asteroids as chaotic objects that zoom haphazardly around our solar system, changing course unpredictably and threatening our planet without a moment's notice. This is not the reality. Asteroids are extremely predictable celestial bodies that obey the laws of physics and follow knowable orbital paths around the Sun.

But sometimes, those paths can come very close to Earth's future position and, because of small uncertainties in the asteroids' positions, a future Earth impact cannot be completely ruled out. So, astronomers use sophisticated impact monitoring software to automatically calculate the impact risk....

[T]he researchers have made the impact monitoring system more robust, enabling NASA to confidently assess all potential impacts with odds as low as a few chances in 10 million.


The article includes videos explaining the future uncertainties on the orbits of potentially hazardous asteroids Bennu and Apophis.

"Streamers are not really known for hard partying..." writes the Guardian's videogames editor, after meeting the up-and-coming stars of Twitch.

"I was instead astonished — and, honestly, worried — by how hard they worked." The woman sitting next to me told me that she streams for eight to 10 hours every day, and when she wasn't live she was curating her social media, responding to fans, scouting for brand partnerships or collaborations with other streamers; throughout our conversation she was visibly resisting the impulse to check her phone, where new stats and fan comments and potential opportunities were presumably stacking up. I asked what she does for fun and she seemed genuinely confused by the question.

Playing video games for an audience for a living sounds like fun — and hell, there are many worse jobs out there — but it is also an ultra-competitive profession that attracts millions of aspiring kids with limitless energy and absolutely no concept of work-life balance. It involves extreme hours and intense pressure to be constantly available to the audience of viewers on whom they depend. And according to recently leaked Twitch data, the top 1% of streamers on its platform received more than half of the $889m (£660m) it paid out to creators last year; three quarters of the rest made $120 (£89) or less. Millions made nothing at all.

I was not surprised, over the following years, to read story after story about these energetic young people — with what must have seemed like the best job in the world — burning out. When you are broadcasting yourself so much of the time, when your hobby becomes your job and your job becomes your hobby, and when your personality becomes your brand and your brand becomes your personality, what does life offline look like for you? Who are you when the camera is off? The fact is that, especially for up-and-coming streamers trying to make it in the crowded world of playing video games on the internet, the camera is almost never off. Sticking to a regular schedule is the best way to build an audience on Twitch, and those schedules regularly involve at least eight hours of continuous streaming, five days a week or more... The reasons for these ultra-demanding hours are simple: the more you broadcast, the greater your chances of being featured on Twitch's homepage, the more followers you accrue, and the more money you might eventually make.
The article acknowledges that among Twitch streamers, "tens of thousands of creators make at least a livable wage.

"It is no wonder, then, that many streamers end up obsessed with the numbers and graphs and invisible algorithms that determine their fate."

On Tuesday, D-Wave released its roadmap for upcoming processors and software for its quantum annealers. The company is also announcing that it's going to be developing its own gate-based hardware, which it will offer in parallel with the quantum annealer. Ars Technica's John Timmer talked with company CEO Alan Baratz to understand all the announcements. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: The simplest part of the announcement to understand is what's happening with D-Wave's quantum-annealing processor. The current processor, called Advantage, has 5,000 qubits and 40,000 connections among them. These connections play a major role in the chip's performance as, if a direct connection between two qubits can't be established, others have to be used to act as a bridge, resulting in a lower effective qubit count. Starting this week, users of D-Wave's cloud service will have access to an updated version of Advantage. The qubit and connection stats will remain the same, but the device will be less influenced by noise in the system (in technical terms, its qubits will maintain their coherence longer). [...] Further out in the future is the follow-on system, Advantage 2, which is expected late next year or the year after. This will see another boost to the qubit count, going up to somewhere above 7,000. But the connectivity would go up considerably as well, with D-Wave targeting 20 connections per qubit.

D-Wave provides a set of developer tools it calls Ocean. In previous iterations, Ocean has allowed people to step back from directly controlling the hardware; instead, if a problem could be expressed as a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO), Ocean could produce the commands needed to handle all the hardware configuration and run the problem on the optimizer. D-Wave referred to this as a hybrid problem solver, since Ocean would use classical computing to optimize the QUBO prior to execution. The only problem is that not everyone who might be interested in trying D-Wave hardware knows how to express their problem as a QUBO. So, the new version of Ocean will allow an additional layer of abstraction by allowing problems to be sent to the system in the format typically used by people who tend to solve these sorts of problems. "You will now be able to specify problems in the language that data scientists and data analysts understand," Baratz promised.

The biggest part of today's announcement, however, may be that D-Wave intends to also build gate-based hardware. Baratz explained that he thinks that optimization is likely to remain a valid approach, pointing to a draft publication that shows that structuring some optimization problems for gate-based hardware may be so computationally expensive that it would offset any gains the quantum hardware could provide. But it's also clear that gate-based hardware can solve an array of problems that a quantum annealer can't. He also argued that D-Wave has solved a number of problems that are currently limiting advances in gate-based hardware that uses electronic qubits called transmons. These include the amount and size of the hardware that's needed to send control signals to the qubits and the ability to pack qubits in densely enough so that they're easy to connect but not close enough that they start to interfere with each other. One of the problems D-Wave faces, however, is that the qubits it uses for its annealer aren't useful for gate-based systems. While they're based on the same bit of hardware (the Josephson junction), the annealer's qubits can only be set as up or down. A gate-based qubit needs to allow manipulations in three dimensions. So, the company is going to try building flux qubits, which also rely on Josephson junctions but use them in a different way. So, at least some of the company's engineering expertise should still apply.

China's MingYang Smart Energy has announced an offshore wind turbine even bigger than GE's monstrous Haliade-X. From a report: The MySE 16.0-242 is a 16-megawatt, 242-meter-tall (794-ft) behemoth capable of powering 20,000 homes per unit over a 25-year service life. The stats on these renewable-energy colossi are getting pretty crazy. When MingYang's new turbine first spins up in prototype form next year, its three 118-m (387-ft) blades will sweep a 46,000-sq-m (495,140-sq-ft) area bigger than six soccer fields. Every year, each one expected to generate 80 GWh of electricity. That's 45 percent more than the company's MySE 11.0-203, from just a 19 percent increase in diameter. No wonder these things keep getting bigger; the bigger they get, the better they seem to work, and the fewer expensive installation projects need to be undertaken to develop the same capacity.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from It's FOSS, written by Ankush Das: Mozilla's Firefox is the only popular alternative to Chromium-based browsers. It has been the default choice for Linux users and privacy-conscious users across every platform. However, even with all benefits as one of the best web browsers around, it is losing its grip for the past few years. I came across a Reddit thread by u/nixcraft, which highlighted more details on the decline in the userbase of Firefox since 2018. And surprisingly, the original source for this information is Firefox's Public Data Report.

As per the official stats, the reported number of active (monthly) users was about 244 million at the end of 2018. And, it seems to have declined to 198 million at the end of Q2 2021. So, that makes it a whopping ~46 million decline in the userbase. Considering 2021 is the year when privacy-focused tools saw a big boost in their userbase, Mozilla's Firefox is looking at a constant decline. Especially when Firefox manages to introduce some industry-first privacy practices. Quite the irony, eh? Just for fun, here's a timeline of our stories reporting on Firefox's download milestones from the mid-2000s:

September 19, 2004: 1 Million Firefoxes in 4 Days
December 12, 2004: Firefox Reaches 10 Million Downloads
February 17, 2005: Firefox Breaks 25 Million Downloads
April 26, 2005: Firefox nears 50 Million Downloads
July 29, 2005: Firefox Downloads Reach 75 Million
October 19, 2005: Firefox Tops 100 Million Downloads
September 11, 2007: Firefox Hits 400 Million Downloads
July 3, 2008: Firefox Breaks 8 Million, Gets Into Guinness

Open source packages downloaded an estimated 30,000 times from the PyPI open source repository contained malicious code that surreptitiously stole credit card data and login credentials and injected malicious code on infected machines, researchers said on Thursday. Ars Technica reports: In a post, researchers Andrey Polkovnichenko, Omer Kaspi, and Shachar Menashe of devops software vendor JFrog said they recently found eight packages in PyPI that carried out a range of malicious activity. Based on searches on https://pepy.tech, a site that provides download stats for Python packages, the researchers estimate the malicious packages were downloaded about 30,000 times. [...] Different packages from Thursday's haul carried out different kinds of nefarious activities. Six of them had three payloads, one for harvesting authentication cookies for Discord accounts, a second for extracting any passwords or payment card data stored by browsers, and the third for gathering information about the infected PC, such as IP addresses, computer name, and user name. The remaining two packages had malware that tries to connect to an attacker-designated IP address on TCP port 9009, and to then execute whatever Python code is available from the socket. It's not now known what the IP address was or if there was malware hosted on it.

Like most novice Python malware, the packages used only a simple obfuscation such as from Base64 encoders. Karas told me that the first six packages had the ability to infect the developer computer but couldn't taint the code developers wrote with malware. "For both the pytagora and pytagora2 packages, which allows code execution on the machine they were installed, this would be possible." he said in a direct message. "After infecting the development machine, they would allow code execution and then a payload could be downloaded by the attacker that would modify the software projects under development. However, we don't have evidence that this was actually done."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A security update will be applied to Drive," Google's weird new email reads. If you visit drive.google.com, you'll also see a message saying, "On September 13, 2021, a security update will be applied to some of your files." You can even see a list of the affected files, which have all gotten an unspecified "security update." So what is this all about? Google is changing the way content sharing works on Drive. Drive files have two sharing options: a single-person allow list (where you share a Google Doc with specific Google accounts) and a "get link" option (where anyone with the link can access the file). The "get link" option works the same way as unlisted YouTube videos -- it's not really private but, theoretically, not quite public, either, since the link needs to be publicized somewhere. The secret sharing links are really just security through obscurity, and it turns out the links are actually guessable.

Google knew about the problem of guessable secret links for a while and changed the way link generation works back in 2017 (presumably for Drive, too?). Of course, that doesn't affect links you've shared in the past, and soon Google is going to require your old links to change, which can break them. Google's new link scheme adds a "resourcekey" to the end of any shared Drive links, making them harder to guess. So a link that used to look like "https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxI1YpjkbX0OZ0prTHYyQ1U2djQ/" will now look like "https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxI1YpjkbX0OZ0prTHYyQ1U2djQ/view?resourcekey=0-OsOHHiQFk1QEw6vIyh8v_w." The resource key makes it harder to guess. If you head to drive.google.com/drive/update-drives in a browser, you should be able to see a list of your impacted files, and if you mouse over them you'll see a button on the right to remove or apply the security update. "Applied" means the resourcekey will be required after September 13, 2021, and will (mostly) break the old link, while "removed" means the resourcekey isn't required and any links out there should keep working. YouTube is also making similar changes. "In 2017, we rolled out an update to the system that generates new YouTube Unlisted links, which included security enhancements that make the links for your Unlisted videos even harder for someone to discover if you haven't shared the link with them," says YouTube in a support page.

YouTube creators can decide to opt out of this change. They also have the option of making Unlisted pre-2017 videos public or re-uploading as a new Unlisted video at the expense of stats.

Thursday's California's lawmakers approved America's first state-funded guaranteed income program for both qualifying young adults who have recently left foster care and for pregnant women, reports CNBC. The votes — 36-0 in the Senate and 64-0 in the Assembly — showed bipartisan support for an idea that is gaining momentum across the country. Dozens of local programs have sprung up in recent years, including some that have been privately funded, making it easier for elected officials to sell the public on the idea. California's plan is taxpayer-funded, and could spur other states to follow its lead.

"If you look at the stats for our foster youth, they are devastating," Senate Republican Leader Scott Wilk said. "We should be doing all we can to lift these young people up."

Local governments and organizations will apply for the money and run their programs. The state Department of Social Services will decide who gets funding. California lawmakers left it up to local officials to determine the size of the monthly payments, which generally range from $500 to $1,000 in existing programs around the country. The vote came on the same day millions of parents began receiving their first monthly payments under a temporary expansion of the federal child tax credit many view as a form of guaranteed income. "Now there is momentum, things are moving quickly," said Michael Tubbs, an advisor to California governor Gavin Newsom, who was a trailblazer when he instituted a guaranteed income program as mayor of Stockton. "The next stop is the federal government."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: u/SaveVideo was a Reddit video downloader bot that helped users download and save videos from Reddit. The service was used by millions of people but according to its operator has now shut down following an ultimatum from Reddit. "The gods of Reddit have decided and I am obliged to obey or risk a lawsuit," SaveVideo announced yesterday. 'SaveVideo' (which operates from the RedditSave.com domain) is a decently sized operation by any standards. SimilarWeb stats indicate that since the start of the year, RedditSave.com has attracted a steady 10 million visitors per month. But now, however, the show is over. "It has been a great pleasure to serve you all in the past few months. However, as they say, All good things must come to an end," its operator writes. "The gods of reddit have reached out to us. They do not want us to continue this service any longer."

The operator of the bot service says they have complied and as a result, the SaveVideo and RedditSave bots have been shut down. What is more surprising is that this doesn't appear to have been a simple request from Reddit but one that was supported by the threat of legal action. "The gods of reddit have decided and I am obliged to obey or risk a lawsuit," the bots' operator explains. Most Reddit users commenting on the shutdown are taking the stance that it is Reddit's admins who have threatened legal action but the announcement certainly leaves room for other scenarios too, including repeated complaints from copyright holders. [...] Reddit has no official comment at this stage but has informed TorrentFreak that it was "not responsible for whatever notice or litigation threat" received by SaveVideo. Update: SaveVideo's operator says the downloader bot is back. "Reddit has confirmed to me that the notice did not originate from them," they added. "With that being said, I have restored all the bot/website's services back to normal." We'll see how long this lasts...

For some reason, Samsung apps designed to control internet-connected washer and dryers require "bogus," "absurd," "unacceptable," "pesky," and "awful" permissions. Motherboard reports: On Wednesday, a Reddit user complained that their washing machine app, the Samsung Smart Washer, wouldn't work "unless I give it access to my contacts, location and camera." This is a common complaint. "When I launch the app, the damned thing wants all sort of permissions: location, phone calls, media, and ... contacts??? The app won't work without these permissions," another Reddit user grumbled last year, referring to another Samsung app -- called Smart Home -- that requires the same seemingly exaggerated permissions. "Why would the Samsung Smart Home app need access to my contacts?" The reviews for these two apps, both of which have more than a million installs according to their stats on the Google Play store, aren't very positive either. The Smart Washer App has an average of 2.1 stars, thanks to a slew of reviews that mention the unnecessary permissions.

These situations speak to two issues: Apps that demand permissions that they don't need, and "smart" and internet of things devices that make formerly simple tasks very complicated, and open up potential privacy and security concerns. [...] It's unclear why apps that are designed to let you set the type of washing cycle you want, or see how long it's gonna take for the dryer to be done, would need access to your phone's contacts. In an FAQ for another Samsung app, the company says it needs access to contacts "to check if you already have a Samsung account set up in your device. Knowing this information helps mySamsung to make the sign-in process seamless." The report recommends using a newer app called SmartThings App, "which has less invasive permission requirements compared to the older apps." The SmartThings app doesn't list any required permissions, indicating that "you can use the app without optional permissions, but some functions may be limited."

In a blog post today, Google announced a series of new security enhancements that will make many publicly accessible Google Drive links no longer accessible. The enhancements are being brought to Google Drive on September 23rd, 2021. XDA Developers reports: Once this change goes live, Google says that users will need a "resource key" to access a publicly shared link. However, users won't need an updated link with said resource key appended if they've already accessed that file before in the past. As a result of this change, we can imagine that lots of Google Drive links shared online on forums and other sites will no longer work as their owners neglect to update them, leaving them only accessible to the people that have already clicked the links before.

According to the post made on the Google Workspace blog, this won't affect all files. Users who have shared a file that is affected by this change will get an email from Google informing them of this change and how to opt out of needing those files from being updated. These emails will be sent out to users starting on July 26th. Google shared a copy of a sample email to show end-users what the message they'll get will look like. The company doesn't recommend opting out all files and says that only the files that you want publicly accessible should be opted out. Users have until September 13th to decide if they want the update applied, so if you have no files that are publicly accessible, then you won't need to do anything. YouTube is also making similar changes. "Starting on July 23, Unlisted videos uploaded before the January 1, 2017, system change will be automatically made private," reports 9to5Google. "That said, YouTube creators can decide to opt out of this change. Filling out this form will let you 'keep your Unlisted videos uploaded before 2017 in their current Unlisted state.' Other options include making Unlisted pre-2017 videos public or re-uploading as a new Unlisted video at the expense of stats."

Captain Kirk once said "The trouble with immortality is it's boring." But how many people agree with him?

Long-time Slashdot reader tinkers shares one answer. University of Texas scientists surveyed more than 900 adults living in the U.S. — and discovered that only 33% of them would be willing to take an immortality pill if one existed.

But then they broke down the results into different age groups. From The Independent: One group was younger people, between the ages of 18 and 29, another group of senior citizens whose average age was 72, and a third group made up of individuals whose average age was 88. Each of the groups reached a majority consensus that they would not want to live forever. However, among the youngest group and oldest group there were differences in what age they would prefer to be "frozen" at by a theoretical immortality pill.

The younger group chose the age of 23, while the oldest group picked 42... The youngest group had the largest number of individuals saying they would want to live forever, with 34% saying they would take an immortality pill. Another 40% said they would not take one, and 26% said they were unsure.

The middle group saw slightly fewer people willing to live forever, with 32% saying they would take the pill, and 43% saying they would not. A quarter of the the respondents said they were unsure. The oldest group saw the fewest number of those interested in eternal life, with only 24% saying they would agree to take the pill. More than half — 59% — said they would not take it, with only 17% saying they were unsure....

Differences in responses emerged along gender lines as well, with more men saying they would take the pill than women.

It's been argued that technology (especially automation) will continue weakening the position of workers. But today the senior economics correspondent for The New York Times argues a "profound shift" happening in America is instead something else.

"For the first time in a generation, workers are gaining the upper hand..." Up and down the wage scale, companies are becoming more willing to pay a little more, to train workers, to take chances on people without traditional qualifications, and to show greater flexibility in where and how people work. The erosion of employer power began during the low-unemployment years leading up to the pandemic and, given demographic trends, could persist for years. March had a record number of open positions, according to federal data that goes back to 2000, and workers were voluntarily leaving their jobs at a rate that matches its historical high. Burning Glass Technologies, a firm that analyzes millions of job listings a day, found that the share of postings that say "no experience necessary" is up two-thirds over 2019 levels, while the share of those promising a starting bonus has doubled.

People are demanding more money to take a new job. The "reservation wage," as economists call the minimum compensation workers would require, was 19 percent higher for those without a college degree in March than in November 2019, a jump of nearly $10,000 a year, according to a survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York... [T]he demographic picture is not becoming any more favorable for employers eager to fill positions. Population growth for Americans between ages 20 and 64 turned negative last year for the first time in the nation's history. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the potential labor force will grow a mere 0.3 to 0.4 percent annually for the remainder of the 2020s; the size of the work force rose an average of 0.8 percent a year from 2000 to 2020.
The article describes managers now "being forced to learn how to operate amid labor scarcity... At the high end of the labor market, that can mean workers are more emboldened to leave a job if employers are insufficiently flexible on issues like working from home..."

But it also notes a ride-sharing driver who switched to an IBM apprenticeship for becoming a cloud storage engineer, and former Florida nightclub bouncer Alex Lorick, who became an IBM mainframe technician, "part of a deliberate effort by IBM to rethink how it hires and what counts as a qualification for a given job." [IBM] executives concluded that the qualifications for many jobs were unnecessarily demanding. Postings might require applicants to have a bachelor's degree, for example, in jobs that a six-month training course would adequately prepare a person for.

"By creating your own dumb barriers, you're actually making your job in the search for talent harder," said Obed Louissaint, IBM's senior vice president for transformation and culture. In working with managers across the company on training initiatives like the one under which Mr. Lorick was hired, "it's about making managers more accountable for mentoring, developing and building talent versus buying talent."

"I think something fundamental is changing, and it's been happening for a while, but now it's accelerating," Mr. Louissaint said.

An anonymous reader writes: This week the GitHub Yearbook went live, with 6794 "graduates" featured on a special web page showcasing "any student who has graduated, or plans to graduate, in 2021... This includes bootcamps, code camps, high school graduates, Master's graduates, Ph. D. Graduates, etc." (Students were added by submitting a pull request — as long as they'd also signed up for the GitHub Student Developer Pack.) The first 5,000 graduates received "swag," including a custom holographic card with their GitHub stats.

But Saturday sees a special ceremony where these students will "walk" the stage at GitHub Graduation (starting at 9 a.m. PST). "We'll be hearing from special guests, giving out exclusive swag, and highlighting student stories and projects from around the world," explains the event's web page.

Calling it "a day to celebrate our craft, our community, and how technology moves the world forward," a post on GitHub's blog invites viewers "to welcome them to a global community of innovative thinkers and impactful builders." It acknowledges the special challenges of 2021, saying "This year, thousands of students from around the world came together and redefined the world we live in, how we learn, and how we move forward," adding "We are honored to be part of the experience and eager to celebrate this milestone...."

"During a devastating year, these graduates shined a light on what is possible. We saw project after project showcasing not only their skills, but also their passion and perseverance. This class is unstoppable!"

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: Documents filed by Florida's health department now "confirm two of the core aspects" of a whistleblower complaint filed by fired data manager Rebekah Jones, the Miami Herald reported Friday. "Sworn affidavits from Department of Health leaders acknowledge Jones' often-denied claim that she was told to remove data from public access after questions from the Miami Herald."

And they also report a position statement from the department (filed August 17th) acknowledging something even morning damning. While a team of epidemiologists at the Department of Health had developed data for the state's plan to re-open — their findings were never actually incorporated into that plan.

Reached for comment, a spokesperson for governor Ron DeSantis still insisted to the Herald that "every action taken by Governor DeSantis was data-driven and deliberate."
From the article: But when the Herald requested the data, data analysis, or data model related to reopening under Florida's open records law, the governor's office responded that there were no responsive records... Secrecy was a policy. Staffers were told not to put anything about the pandemic response into writing, according to four Department of Health employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity... Emails and texts reviewed by the Herald show the governor's office worked in coordination with Department of Health "executive leadership" to micromanage everything about the department's public response to the pandemic, from information requests from the press to specific wording and color choice on the Department of Health website and data dashboard. They slow-walked responses to questions on important data points and public records, initially withholding information and data on deaths and infections at nursing homes, state prisons and schools, forcing media organizations to file or threaten lawsuits. Important information that had previously been made public was redacted from medical examiner accounts of COVID-19 fatalities.

At one point the state mischaracterized the extent of Florida's testing backlog by over 50 percent — skewing the information about how many people were getting sick each day — by excluding data from private labs, a fact that was only disclosed in response to questions from the press. Emails show that amid questions about early community spread, data on Florida's earliest potential cases — which dated back to late December 2019 — were hidden from the public by changing "date range of data that was available on the dashboard."

Department of Health staffers interviewed by the Herald described a "hyper-politicized" communications department that often seemed to be trying to match the narrative coming from Washington.
The Herald's article also "delved into the details of the department's operation," writes DevNull127 : For example, the whistleblower complaint of Rebekah Jones quotes the state's deputy health secretary as telling her pointedly that "I once had a data person who said to me, 'you tell me what you want the numbers to be, and I'll make it happen.'"

Or, as Jones later described that interaction to her mother, "They want me to put misleading data up to support that dumb f***'s plan to reopen. And more people are gonna die because [of] this and that's not what I agreed to."

Last Friday the health department's Office of the Inspector General announced they'd found "reasonable cause" to open an investigation into decisions and actions by Department of Health leadership that could "represent an immediate injury to public health."
Meanwhile, Florida officials confirmed Friday night that their health department "will no longer update its Covid-19 dashboard and will suspend daily case and vaccine reports," according to the New York Times. "Officials will instead post weekly updates, becoming the first U.S. state to move to such an infrequent publishing schedule."

Jones had been using that data to continue running her own online dashboard, and posted Friday in lieu of data that the dashboard's operation would now be interrupted "as I work to reformat the website to adjust for these changes...." But she promised to keep trying to help the people of Florida "in whatever capacity I can with the limitations the Department of Health is now putting on public access to this vital health information."

Zoom is announcing an expanded live events product today that's launching this summer. From a report: Zoom Events builds on Zoom's previous paid event marketplace, OnZoom, by layering in features that can support larger multiday events and non-video activities like chat. Zoom says it's still building out Zoom Events in the lead up to its launch, but as it stands, it's both a rebranding of the more small-business focused OnZoom, with new features that serve Zoom's original pre-pandemic customers -- enterprise companies. Like OnZoom, with a paid Zoom Meetings or Zoom Webinar license you'll be able to host live events, organize them in a hub, sell tickets, and track stats like ticket sales or attendance.

This week ZDNet dedicated an article to "the most popular Fedora Linux in years." Red Hat's community Linux distribution Fedora has always been popular with open-source and Linux developers, but this latest release, Fedora 34 seems to be something special. As Matthew Miller, Fedora Project Leader, tweeted, "The beta for F34 was one of the most popular ever, with twice as many systems showing up in my stats as typical."

Why? Nick Gerace, a Rancher software engineer, thinks it's because "I've never seen the project in a better state, and I think GNOME 40 is a large motivator as well. Probably a combination of each, from anecdotal evidence." He's onto something. When Canonical released Ubuntu 21.04 a few days earlier, their developers opted to stay with the tried and true GNOME 39 desktop. Fedora's people decided to go with GNOME 40 for their default desktop even though it's a radical update to the GNOME interface. Besides boasting a new look, GNOME 40 is based on the new GTK 4.0 graphical toolkit. Under the pretty new exterior, this update also fixed numerous issues and smoothed out many rough spots.

If you'd rather have another desktop, you can also get Fedora 34 with the newest KDE Plasma Desktop, Xfce 4.16, Cinnamon, etc. You name your favorite Linux desktop interface, Fedora will almost certainly deliver it to you... Another feature I like is that, since Fedora 33, the default file system is Btrfs. I find it faster and more responsive than ext4, perhaps the most popular Linux desktop file system. What's different this time around is that it now defaults to using Btrfs transparent compression. Besides saving significant storage space — typically from 20 to 40% — Red Hat also claims this increases the lifespan of SSDs and other flash media.
Although the article does point out that most users will never reach the end of that SSD lifespan (approximately ten years of normal use), it suggests that "developers, who might for example compile Linux kernels every day, might reach that point before a PC's usual end of useful life."

In a possibly related note, Linus Torvalds said this week in a new interview that "I use Fedora on all my machines, not because it's necessarily 'preferred', but because it's what I'm used to. I don't care deeply about the distribution — to me it's mainly a way to get Linux installed on a machine and get all my tools set up, so that I can then replace the kernel and work on just that."

Earlier this week, The Verge reported that Microsoft now has 145 million people using its Microsoft Teams communications app, an increase of 26 percent over last year's reported 115 million daily active users. From the report: To put the 145 million figure in perspective, at the beginning of the pandemic, Microsoft had around 32 million daily active users of Microsoft Teams. That jumped to 75 million in a matter of weeks, and these numbers have more than doubled since even the early days of the pandemic. It's an impressive amount of growth, just as Microsoft has been aggressively pushing businesses to move to the cloud and adopt Teams over the past year.

As always, it's difficult to compare to rival services. Google and Zoom don't reveal daily active users and opt for a more vague daily active participants. This means a single user could be counted multiple times if they participate in different meetings during a day. Zoom revealed it had 300 million daily active participants last year, and Google said last year it had 100 million daily active participants. Slack revealed it had 12.5 million concurrent users during the beginning of the pandemic last year, but the company has shied away from daily active user counts ever since.

CBS News reports: The number of U.S. suicides fell nearly 6% last year amid the coronavirus pandemic — the largest annual decline in at least four decades, according to preliminary government data. Death certificates are still coming in and the count could rise. But officials expect a substantial decline will endure, despite worries that COVID-19 could lead to more suicides.

It is hard to say exactly why suicide deaths dropped so much, but one factor may be a phenomenon seen in the early stages of wars and national disasters, some experts suggested. "There's a heroism phase in every disaster period, where we're banding together and expressing lots of messages of support that we're in this together," said Dr. Christine Moutier, chief medical officer of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. "You saw that, at least in the early months of the pandemic." An increase in the availability of telehealth services and other efforts to turn around the nation's suicide problem may have also contributed, she said.

U.S. suicides steadily rose from the early 2000s until 2018, when the national suicide rate hit its highest level since 1941. The rate finally fell slightly in 2019. Experts credited increased mental health screenings and other suicide prevention efforts. The number fell further last year, to below 45,000, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a recent report. It was the lowest number of U.S. suicide deaths since 2015.
MarketWatch also points out that in the U.S. in 2020, "Total deaths increased by 17.7% year over year, the provisional estimates showed.

"COVID-19 became the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer, while suicide dropped from the country's 10th leading cause of death to the 11th.

NBA Top Shot is a new use of NFTs, letting users trade virtual clips of their favorite players. "Top Shot is the best chance so far that NFTs -- which are mostly the domain of cryptocurrency enthusiasts -- could go mainstream," writes Elizabeth Lopatto via The Verge. "More than 800,000 Top Shot accounts are registered, leading to $500 million in sales." From the report: There are three big things going for Top Shot: it's easy to use (and designed with people who are unfamiliar with cryptocurrency in mind), the NBA is the second-most-popular sport in America, and purchasable Moments have a familiar real-life parallel: trading cards. Each Moment, a video clip of a specific play, comes with stats about the game it's from and the player featured, as well as the history of sale prices. And like trading cards, you can buy them in packs. The investing community has taken notice. Today, the company that runs Top Shot, Dapper Labs, announced it had a new funding round of $305 million, led by Coatue. Other investors include NBA players such as Kevin Durant, JaVale McGee, and Klay Thompson, as well as a smattering of MLB players, NFL players, Ashton Kutcher, and Shawn Mendes. This round means that the company has raised more than $357 million, Dapper Labs says.

The process of "minting" an NBA Top Shot Moment starts with the basketball game. In any game, there is a handful of notable plays. This means deciding which Moments to mint is a time-consuming process, one that hasn't yet been standardized, says Adrienne O'Keeffe, who leads consumer products and gaming partnerships at the NBA. Right now, it's a stream of emails, Slack channels, and biweekly calls, she says. Once Dapper Labs and the NBA agree on a play, it goes through a review process that includes the National Basketball Players Association. Once it has signed off, the NBA and the Players Association send the Moment-to-be to Dapper Labs to go through the process of minting. In the future, O'Keeffe says, fans might help decide, too. After that, Top Shot mints the NFT -- which creates the beginning of the record. Price, ownership, and transfers will be recorded on the blockchain permanently. This is what makes each Moment unique; even if 100 Moments are made from the same play, no two will be identical. "It's hard not to view Top Shot as an inadvertent social experiment," writes Lopatto in closing. "Fans often feel a sense of ownership over the things they love, even if they don't actually own the intellectual property. Top Shot essentially monetizes this, letting hardcore fans buy a sense of ownership in their favorite plays..."

"Top Shot is a better system than the art NFTs for observing this because the community means there's consensus around price," adds Lopatto. "By contrast, Beeple's NFT famously sold for $69 million -- but there's no real way to know if that valuation is accurate. Whether there's a resale market for that Beeple NFT is an open question, one that might not be answered for some time."