The non-profit Wikimedia Foundation (which operates Wikipedia) "announced that it would no longer accept cryptocurrency donations," reports Mashable, saying the decision came after a three-month discussion period: Wikimedia said it would close its account with Bitpay, the crypto payment service provider which Wikimedia used to collect cryptocurrency donations....

The Wikimedia Foundation did say it would continue to monitor the situation, possibly keeping the door open to a future where it did accept crypto donations once again. For now, though, the critics of cryptocurrency and the broader Wiki community are victorious.
Mashable notes Wikipedia own figures showing that for all of 2021, donations in cryptocurrency to Wikipedia barely totalled $130,000 — or just 0.08% of its revenue. And a long-time Wikipedia editor notes on Twitter that in a three-month request for comments "excluding new accounts and unregistered users," the final tally supporting the ban was 232 to 94 opposing it. (That is, 71.17% supported the ban.)

"I'm really happy that the Wikimedia Foundation listened to the community's wishes on this issue," they tell Mashable, "and I'm really proud of my community for taking a principled stand."

MacRumors reports that Apple has begun a staggered rollout of a new firmware update (which will go fully live to everyone on May 13.) Here's how Apple's describes how it will change the lost-device-tracking AirTags: "Currently, iOS users receiving an unwanted tracking alert can play a sound to help them find the unknown AirTag. We will be adjusting the tone sequence to use more of the loudest tones to make an unknown AirTag more easily findable."
That'll make them easier to find — but some people have a different problem. This ZDNet reporter keeps getting notifications on their iPad trying to warn them about their own AirPod earbuds. The warning is totally erroneous. These are my AirPods Pro, which I have had for years now. I was able to verify they are mine by using the iPad to play a sound on the AirPods.

Apple's technology doesn't know these are my own AirPods.

The strange behavior began to appear in February. I am not alone in experiencing this annoying mistaken alert. Apple's AirPods support user forum shows several individuals in recent months with the same frustration... "It still happens several times a day. I'm getting annoyed. I get it on my phone and my iPad everytime I open the case and use my AirPods. I play the sound to be sure its really mine and it is indeed mine."

There are numerous examples of this....

Users have also reported the problem with their AirTags not being recognized. "I get constant notifications that an air tag is near me, but it turns out it's my tags. Shouldn't my phone know the difference?" writes Joe Thomas 3 on February 8th....

It's worth noting that Apple has posted a note that promises "a series of updates that we plan to introduce later this year," which include something such as "precision finding" for AirTags, and "Refining unwanted tracking alert logic."

CNN cites a local source imagining the surprise of the looters of a Ukranian farm equipment dealership who'd transported some heavy machines over 700 miles to Russia. "They realized that they could not even turn them on, because the harvesters were locked remotely."

CNN adds that "The equipment now appears to be languishing at a farm near Grozny." Over the past few weeks there's been a growing number of reports of Russian troops stealing farm equipment, grain and even building materials — beyond widespread looting of residences. But the removal of valuable agricultural equipment from a John Deere dealership in Melitopol speaks to an increasingly organized operation, one that even uses Russian military transport as part of the heist. CNN has learned that the equipment was removed from an Agrotek dealership in Melitopol, which has been occupied by Russian forces since early March. Altogether it's valued at nearly $5 million. The combine harvesters alone are worth $300,000 each....

The contact said the process began with the seizure of two combine harvesters, a tractor and a seeder. Over the next few weeks, everything else was removed: in all 27 pieces of farm machinery. One of the flat-bed trucks used, and caught on camera, had a white "Z" painted on it and appeared to be a military truck. The contact said there were rival groups of Russian troops: some would come in the morning and some in the evening.

Some of the machinery was taken to a nearby village, but some of it embarked on a long overland journey to Chechnya more than 700 miles away. The sophistication of the machinery, which are equipped with GPS, meant that its travel could be tracked....
The end result? "After a journey of more than 700 miles, the thieves were unable to use any of the equipment — because it had been locked remotely."

A Bloomberg opinion columnist calls the RobinHood stock-trading app "a symbol of the 'memestock' boom that galvanized a generation of bored locked-down day traders.

"But judging by the company's latest figures, the mania is over." In the first quarter, Robinhood's monthly active users fell 10% year-on-year to 15.9 million, the lowest since the end of 2020. It's a loose metric, to be sure, covering debit-card swipes and webpage log-ins. Net funded accounts have held steady, but activity is flatlining: Transaction revenues fell by almost half, and average quarterly revenue per user slumped 61% to $53. In a post-lockdown era of rising inflation, consumers have less money and fewer hours to spare. Eyeballs and finger-swipes are not guaranteed.

This will put Robinhood's premium "tech" valuation — around seven times annual revenue, a higher multiple than Meta Platforms Inc.'s — under extra pressure. Shares of the financial-services company have already fallen 71% in six months, a drop that began well before Ukraine.

With fewer reasons to get excited about risky, hyped-up trades such as bitcoin (down 40% since October), the feedback loop of fear is spreading. Trading platform Coinbase Global Inc., which like Robinhood went public last year amid a retail-driven frenzy, is down 62%.

The average Robinhood user is 31 years old with an account balance of $240. It's a band of merry men (women are a minority on the platform) who dabble. While the company's business model differs from that of social-media and streaming apps, the reversal of fortunes looks a lot like the post-Covid "attention recession" that's also battering the likes of Netflix and Spotify Technology.
"The lost merry memestock men already appear disillusioned," the columnist argues. "What happens next, if speculative bets keep deflating, may swear them off trading for good."

But he also sees Robinhood is "talking up its appeal to paid 'Gold' customers and is launching a more diversified, bank-like suite of products. With its recent announcement of a new debit card, Robinhood no doubt aspires to become a super-app like unlisted fintech Revolut, valued at around $33 billion, according to CBInsights."

In 1972, photo prints that developed before your eyes were "downright magical," argues Fast Company — "and still meaningful today."

A new article at Fast Company points out that while Polaroid went bankrupt twice, and stopped making cameras in 2007, "Then an unexpected thing happened: It turned out that even Polaroid couldn't kill Polaroid." Even as instant photography's eulogies were being written, a band of enthusiasts known as The Impossible Project bought the last Polaroid factory that hadn't been hastily dismantled and started producing film packs again. The task required reformulating its own chemistry from scratch, and it was years until the results reached the vicinity of original Polaroid quality. Fans were very patient.

Eventually, the Impossible Project and Polaroid came under the same ownership, adopted Polaroid as the unified brand, and started making instant cameras again. The new models start at $100 and look a lot like that 1977 OneStep, even when they're adorably miniaturized. It's almost as if Polaroid's years in limbo were a bad dream.... Polaroid and several smaller companies refurbish old models, replacing worn parts and otherwise returning them to optimum performance. Repairing an SX-70 generally involves permanently removing its leather, but replacement skins are available in an array of styles, from the traditional to the psychedelic.

Increasingly, yesteryear's Polaroid cameras are springing back to life in surprising ways. Wisconsin-based Retrospekt not only revives old models, but also encases antique innards in new plastic shells, allowing it to sell branding crossovers such as Malibu Barbie and Pepsi-themed Polaroid cameras. Hong Kong's Mint offers a camera called the SLR670 that's really a restored SX-70 accompanied by a gizmo that plugs into the flash port to allow for manual settings. And Open SX-70 is a project to smarten up the SX-70 by replacing its 1970s circuit board with a tiny Arduino computer.
Other things I learned from the article:

• "Each film pack contained its own battery, so the camera would never run out of juice at an inopportune moment."
• Kodak was forced out of the instant photography market in 1986 by a Polaroid patent infringement suit in which Polaroid won $925 million in damages.
• Edwin Land's "final gambit to revolutionize photography" was 1977's wildly unpopular Polavision instant home movies.
• There's a 1974 ad for the cameras narrated by Laurence Olivier.

"Fort Worth, Texas, is now the first city government in the United States to mine bitcoin," reports CNBC.

"[A]nd in an almost poetic devotion to the initiative, Mayor Mattie Parker oversaw the construction of a small mining farm in City Hall." Three Bitmain Antminer S9 mining rigs will run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in the climate-controlled information technology wing of Fort Worth City Hall. The city says the miners will be hosted on a private network to minimize the security risk....

Each of the program's three machines will consume the same amount of energy as a household vacuum cleaner, according to city estimates. While the mayor doesn't expect the three miners to be major money makers, the cost of electricity needed for the program is expected to be offset by the value of bitcoin mined.... To make it happen, the city has teamed up with a few key partners, including the Texas Blockchain Council, which donated the three mining rigs (each valued at roughly $600 apiece), and Luxor Technologies, a mining pool, which lets a single miner combine its hashing power with thousands of other miners all over the world to increase their chances of earning bitcoin....

After six months, Fort Worth will re-assess and decide whether to sink real cash into building out a mine .
Luxor's VP of business development argues that Fort Worth's move "is setting an example and effectively de-risking both bitcoin mining and bitcoin treasury strategies for every other mayor in the country."

Slashdot reader XXongo brings word of a new three-part documentary — streaming free now — that tries to understand America's early inaction on climate change. Looking back over the last few decades, The Power of Big Oil explores how the fuel industry "successfully set up a campaign to discredit climate science and targetting individual politicians to vote against measures to curb climate change."

The Guardian notes that the series includes an interview with a U.S. senator who they say "blames the oil industry for malignly claiming the science of climate change was not proved when companies such as Exxon and Shell already knew otherwise from their own research."

As far back as 25 years ago, the senator says, "they had evidence in their own institutions that countered what they were saying publicly. I mean — they lied." The documentary's makers have dug out a parade of former oil company scientists, lobbyists and public relations strategists who lay bare how the US's biggest petroleum firm, Exxon, and then the broader petroleum industry, moved from attempting to understand the causes of a global heating to a concerted campaign to hide the making of an environmental catastrophe. Over three episodes — called Denial, Doubt, Delay — the series charts corporate manipulation of science, public opinion and politicians that mirrors conduct by other industries, from big tobacco to the pharmaceutical companies responsible for America's opioid epidemic.

Some of those interviewed shamefacedly admit their part in the decades-long campaign to hide the evidence of climate change, discredit scientists and delay action that threatened big oil's profits.

Others almost boast about how easy it was to dupe the American public and politicians, with consequences not just for the US but every country on the planet.
In one video clip an aide to a climate-conscious senator remembers that "You had reams of material coming out of the government. They were at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, at NASA — this expanding network of people, working on this day in and day out, saying that this was a legitimate issue, and that we needed to do something about it. And on the other hand, you had two or three guys who went around to conferences and said, 'Oh, I'm not sure. Oh, maybe there's clouds....' It quickly became apparent that these were private interests who had a stake in the status quo." He refers to it as "emerging industry of nay-sayers."

There's also a discouraged assessment from climate activist looking back over a lack of progress in the early decades. "You want to make an assumption that it's a meritocracy — a good argument will prevail, and it will displace a bad argument. But, what the geniuses at the PR firms who work for these big fossil-fuel companies know is that truth has nothing to do with who wins the argument. If you say something enough times, people will begin to believe it."

Investor Warren Buffett addressed the annual shareholder meeting today for his multinational holding company Berkshire Hathaway — and said he still wouldn't buy bitcoin. But this time he gave a detailed explanation why. CNBC reports: "Whether it goes up or down in the next year, or five or 10 years, I don't know. But the one thing I'm pretty sure of is that it doesn't produce anything," Buffett said.... "If you said... for a 1% interest in all the farmland in the United States, pay our group $25 billion, I'll write you a check this afternoon," Buffett said. "[For] $25 billion I now own 1% of the farmland... Now if you told me you own all of the bitcoin in the world and you offered it to me for $25 I wouldn't take it because what would I do with it? I'd have to sell it back to you one way or another. It isn't going to do anything... The farms are going to produce food...."

"Assets, to have value, have to deliver something to somebody. And there's only one currency that's accepted. You can come up with all kinds of things — we can put up Berkshire coins... but in the end, this is money," he said, holding up a $20 bill. "And there's no reason in the world why the United States government... is going to let Berkshire money replace theirs."
Later Saturday Berkshire Hathaway's vice chairman Charlie Munger had an even harsher appraisal of bitcoin. "In my life, I try and avoid things that are stupid and evil and make me look bad in comparison to somebody else — and bitcoin does all three," Munger said.

"In the first place, it's stupid because it's still likely to go to zero. It's evil because it undermines the Federal Reserve System... and third, it makes us look foolish compared to the Communist leader in China. He was smart enough to ban bitcoin in China."

The San Francisco Chronicle reports: San Francisco's office occupancy rate continued its spring recovery, rising above New York and San Jose last week, according to a review by a building security firm. After four months of increases, 33.4% of San Francisco workers were back at their desks last week, higher than New York's 32.9% and San Jose's 31%, but still behind seven major cities in security firm Kastle's Back to Work Barometer.... The city of Austin has consistently had the highest office occupancy tracked by Kastle and was at 58% last week, followed by fellow Texas cities Houston and Dallas. [And Los Angeles charts at around 40%]

Both San Francisco Mayor London Breed and New York Mayor Eric Adams have urged firms to bring back workers to the office to help revitalize urban streets and the broader economy. "You can't stay home in your pajamas all day," Adams said at an event in February. "That is not who we are as a city. You need to be out, cross-pollinating ideas, interacting with humans. It is crucial. We're social creatures, and we must socialize to get the energy that we need as a city...."

Around a fifth of San Francisco office space remains vacant and rents have been flat.
That's better than during the omicron surge, when occupancy in New York and San Francisco was around 10%. (According to the article, citing figures from Kastle.) But there's also other metrics.

The newspaper notes that the number of people exiting the stations for the San Francisco's public rail system "were up in the first three months of the year but still only around a quarter of pre-pandemic levels."

Fedora project leader Matthew Miller spoke to TechRepublic's Jack Wallen this week, sharing some thoughts on the future of Linux — and on open source in general: Matthew Miller: I think it's a lost cause to try to "sell" our quirky technology interest to people who don't see it already. We need to take a different approach.... I think our message, at its root, has to be around open source.... [W]ith Linux, when you install an open-source distro, you're not just part of a fan community. You're part of a colossal, global effort that makes software more available to everyone, makes that software better and better, and makes the whole world better through sharing... Just by using it you're sharing in this amazing undertaking, part of a move away from scarcity to an economy based on abundance....

Jack Wallen: What's the biggest difference in Linux today vs. Linux of 10 years ago?

Matthew Miller: I think first we have to start with just the amazing ubiquity of it. Ten years ago, it was cute to find a TV that ran Linux. Now, not only is it definitely powering your TV, you've probably got Linux running on your lightbulbs! It's everywhere. And while Linux had pushed proprietary Unix from the server room, ten years ago Windows-based servers were pushing back. The cloud changed that — now, the cloud is Linux, almost completely. (Anything that isn't is a legacy app that it was too much trouble to port!) From tiny devices to the most powerful mainframes and supercomputers: Linux, Linux, Linux....

Jack Wallen: If Linux has an Achilles' heel, what is it?

Matthew Miller: Linux and the whole free and open-source software movement grew up with the rise of the internet as an open communication platform. We absolutely need that to continue in order to realize our vision, and I don't think we can take it for granted.

That's more general than an Achilles' heel, though, so right now let me highlight one thing that I think is troubling: Chrome becoming the dominant browser to the point where it's often the only way to make sites work. Chromium (the associated upstream project) is open source, but isn't really run as a community project, and, pointedly, very very few people run Chromium itself. I'd love to see that change, but I'd also like to see Firefox regain a meaningful presence.
Miller also said Fedora's next release is focused on simplicity. ("When the OS gets in the way, it drops from the conversation I want to have about big ideas to ... well, the boring technical details that people never want to deal with")

And he also shared his thoughts on what Linux needs most. "What I'd really like to see more of are more non-technical contributors. I mean, yes, we can always benefit from more packagers and coders and engineers, but I think what we really need desperately are writers, designers, artists, videographers, communicators, organizers and planners. I don't think big companies are likely to provide those things, at least, not for the parts of the Linux world which aren't their products."

"We need people who think the whole grand project I've been talking about is important, and who have the skills and interests to help make it real."

In 1972 — half a century ago — Charles Moss Duke walked on the moon.

Now 86 years old, he's ready for America to get back to exploring the moon, reports the Associated Press: Duke said he does not begrudge NASA for ending the Apollo program to focus on space shuttles, the international space station and other missions in more remote parts of space. But he looks forward to future missions that build off of what he and others have learned from their time on the moon, which called "a great platform for science."

Duke also noted that he's encouraged by the commercial partnerships that have developed around space exploration, like Space X and Blue Origin [and the companies he describes in their video as "the others"]. Those options, he said, "make space available for more people and more science and engineering and unmanned stuff."

"That compliment is going to be really important in the future," Duke went on.
The article notes the first of NASA's huge Space Launch System rockets is scheduled to blast off later this year, "with crewed flights planned subsequently." In the video interview, Duke adds that "With Artemis, NASA is going to be focused on deep space, to the moon and beyond, and I'm excited about that..."

"The more people we get into space, and can see the beauty of the earth — and the incredible emotion that you [feel] when you see the earth hung in the blackness of space — it's going to affect a lot of people."

"As a response to recent coverage of software being purged from the App Store, Apple is sharing its criteria for how it chooses to remove abandoned apps," reports 9to5Mac.

Apple's announcement say it's only flagging apps for possible removal "that
Developers will also have more time to comply after being notified." (90 days instead of 30 days). And 9to5Mac adds that Apple "is also reiterating that the practice is not new but instead part of an initiative that started six years ago.

But the Verge took a different message from "Apple to developers: if we deleted your old app, it deserved it." [T]he company has responded — by issuing a press release effectively saying that nobody was downloading the apps anyways....

Apple's explanation does clear up why it, as some developers noted, seemed to apply the rules inconsistently. For example, one developer noted that Pocket God, a popular game from the iPhone's early days, hasn't been updated for seven years but is still on the App Store. Apple is basically saying it's still up because it's still popular.

From one angle, this reasoning doesn't necessarily gel with the first half of Apple's post, where it says it removes old apps to ensure "user trust in quality apps," and to improve discoverability, security and privacy, and user experience. After all — if an app is problematic because it's outdated, more downloads would make a bad app a bigger issue. Who's being harmed if there's an outdated app almost no one is downloading?

But Apple says it doesn't want the App Store cluttered up with apps that both developers and users have forgotten about. It has enough problems making it easy for users to find good apps as it is, and it's easy to imagine Apple seeing deleting old, seemingly irrelevant apps as a good solution.

Slashdot reader schwit1 shares this report from an automotive blog called The Truth About Cars: A group of German automakers, chemical concerns, and battery producers have announced the joint development of a "battery passport" designed to help government regulators trace the history of the cells. The consortium is funded by the German government and is supposed to work in tandem with new battery regulations that are being prepared by the European Union.

According to the German economic ministry, officially the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, the overarching plan is for the EU to mandate traceable hardware be installed in all batteries used in the continent by 2026. Those intended for use in electric vehicles are up first, with the passport scheme also serving to chronicle everything from the vehicle's repair history to where the power cell's raw materials were sourced.
Reuters reports that batteries "could carry a QR code linking to an online database where EV owners, businesses or regulators could access information on the battery's composition." This digital tool should also make it easier to recycle raw materials inside batteries, the government statement said, which would cut dependence on foreign suppliers which control the vast majority of resources, like lithium and nickel, essential for battery production.

"The Biden administration has a plan to rob Vladimir Putin of some of his best innovators," reports Bloomberg, "by waiving some visa requirements for highly educated Russians who want to come to the U.S., according to people familiar with the strategy." One proposal, which the White House included in its latest supplemental request to Congress, is to drop the rule that Russian professionals applying for an employment-based visa must have a current employer. It would apply to Russian citizens who have earned master's or doctoral degrees in science, technology, engineering or mathematics in the U.S. or abroad, the proposal states.

A spokesman for the National Security Council confirmed that the effort is meant to weaken Putin's high-tech resources in the near term and undercut Russia's innovation base over the long run — as well as benefit the U.S. economy and national security. Specifically, the Biden administration wants to make it easier for top-tier Russians with experience with semiconductors, space technology, cybersecurity, advanced manufacturing, advanced computing, nuclear engineering, artificial intelligence, missile propulsion technologies and other specialized scientific areas to move to the U.S.

Biden administration officials have said they've seen significant numbers of high-skilled technology workers flee Russia because of limited financial opportunities from the sanctions the U.S. and allies have imposed after Putin's invasion on Ukraine.

The provision would expire in four years.

Dr. Craig Hunter is a mechanical/aerospace engineer with over 25 years of experience in software development. And now Dixie_Flatline (Slashdot reader #5,077) describes Hunter's latest experiment: Craig Hunter has been running Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) benchmarks on Macs for years--he has results going back to 2010 with an Intel Xeon 5650, with the most recent being a 28-core Xeon W from 2019. He has this to say about why he thinks CFD benchmarks are a good test: "As shown above, we see a pretty typical trend where machines get less and less efficient as more and more cores join the computation. This happens because the computational work begins to saturate communications on the system as data and MPI instructions pass between the cores and memory, creating overhead. It's what makes parallel CFD computations such a great real world benchmark. Unlike simpler benchmarks that tend to make CPUs look good, the CFD benchmark stresses the entire system and shows us how things hold up as conditions become more and more challenging."

With just 6 cores, the Mac Studio's M1 Ultra surpasses the 2019 Xeon before literally going off the original chart. He had to double the x-axis just to fit the M1's performance in. Unsurprisingly, he seems impressed:

"We know from Apple's specs and marketing materials that the M1 Ultra has an extremely high 800 GB/sec memory bandwidth and an even faster 2.5 TB/sec interface between the two M1 Max chips that make up the M1 Ultra, and it shows in the CFD benchmark. This leads to a level of CPU performance scaling that I don't even see on supercomputers."