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Comment Counter Point (Score 4, Interesting) 327

by ink (#63602156) Attached to: Hotel Owners Start To Write Off San Francisco as Business Nosedives

We just spent a week in San Francisco, and our hotel cost was actually reasonable. We were just a block away from the Presido, and had an amazing time all over the bay area. I'm not going to cry because "boutique" hotels can no longer charge $700/night for a studio room with Ikea furniture next to the ferry building.

Submission + - Biden wants 30% tax on electricity used for crypto mining (engadget.com)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: The Biden administration wants to impose a 30 percent tax on the electricity used by cryptocurrency mining operations, and it has included the proposal in its budget for the fiscal year of 2024. In a blog post on the White House website, the administration has formally introduced the Digital Asset Mining Energy or DAME excise tax. It explained that it wants to tax cryptomining firms, because they aren't paying for the "full cost they impose on others," which include environmental pollution and high energy prices.

Critics believe that the government made this proposal to go after and harm an industry it doesn't support. A Forbes report also suggested that DAME may not be the best solution for the issue, and that taxing the industry's greenhouse gas emissions might be a better alternative. That could encourage mining firms not just to minimize energy use, but also to find cleaner sources of power. It might be difficult to convince the administration to go down that route, though: In its blog post, it said that the "environmental impacts of cryptomining exist even when miners use existing clean power." Apparently, mining operations in communities with hydropower have been observed to reduce the amount of clean power available for use by others. That leads to higher prices and to even higher consumption of electricity from non-clean sources.

If the proposal ever becomes a law, the government would impose the excise tax in phases. It would start by adding a 10 percent tax on miners' electricity use in the first year, 20 percent in the second and then 30 percent from the third year onwards.

Submission + - Journalist Writes About Discovering She'd Been Surveilled By TikTok (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: One evening in late December last year, I received a cryptic phone call from a PR director at TikTok, the popular social media app. I’d written extensively about the company for the Financial Times, so we’d spoken before. But it was puzzling to hear from her just before the holidays, especially since I wasn’t working on anything related to the company at the time. The call lasted less than a minute. She wanted me to know, “as a courtesy,” that The New York Times had just published a story I ought to read. Confused by this unusual bespoke news alert, I asked why. But all she said was that it concerned an inquiry at ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, and that I should call her back once I’d read it.

The story claimed ByteDance employees accessed two reporters’ data through their TikTok accounts. Personal information, including their physical locations, had been used as part of an attempt to find the writers’ sources, after a series of damaging stories about ByteDance. According to the report, two employees in China and two in the US left the company following an internal investigation. In a staff memo, ByteDance’s chief executive lamented the incident as the “misconduct of a few individuals.” When I phoned the PR director back, she confirmed I was one of the journalists who had been surveilled. I put down my phone and wondered what it meant that a company I reported on had gone to such lengths to restrict my ability to do so. Over the following months, the episode became just one in a long series of scandals and crises that call into question what TikTok really is and whether the company has the world-dominating future that once seemed inevitable.

Comment Re:Your Bitcoins are numbers and your NTFs are JPE (Score 2) 111

So much this. When you listen to crypto maxis and they invariable make an argument to the tune of "with NFTs, you actually OWN the asset and it cannot be taken away from you". And they just gloss over the fact that the entire infrastructure (website, database, CDN, hosting, etc.) is just as vulnerable as if you had bought it from a "web 2.0" site.

Comment Re:So many levels of failure. (Score 1) 40

by ink (#62396945) Attached to: Microsoft Security Chief Issues Call To Arms To Protect Metaverse

Regarding your second point, I have my doubts about what this "metaverse" or "web 3.0" endeavor (which so many are yammering on about) even is -- but baking security into a New Thing from the start is a no-duh strategy. Just look at DNS, and the decades of pain because of its lack of security. It's kind of amusing that its even news that Microsoft's security chief thinks the New Thing should have security in it.

Comment Re:Predictable (Score 1) 43

by ink (#62316625) Attached to: Amazon Opens First Whole Foods Equipped With Cashierless Technology

And who repairs the robot?

My office in Seattle has an Amazon Market across the street. It's true that there are no cashiers, but there are two people at the entrance to make sure everyone follows the rules; that they don't move a sandwich item from one bin to another; that must stock everything strictly so that The Machine can recognize it, and so on. This is in addition to whatever engineering resources are needed to solve problems; fix electronics when something happens (hey, the soda exploded!).

So, yeah, no cashiers. Good job.

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