78-year-old rancher Ed Butcher has, for 60 years, lived with a nuclear missile as his closest neighbor — an active U.S. government nuclear missile, buried just beneath his cow pasture.

"Do you think they'll ever shoot it up into the sky?" asks his wife Pam, during a visit from the Washington Post.

"I used to say, 'No way,' " Ed said. "Now it's more like, 'Please God, don't let us be here to see it.' " The missile was called a Minuteman III, and the launch site had been on their property since the Cold War, when the Air Force paid $150 for one acre of their land as it installed an arsenal of nuclear weapons across the rural West. About 400 of those missiles remain active and ready to launch at a few seconds notice in Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, Colorado and Nebraska. They are located on bison preserves and Indian reservations. They sit across from a national forest, behind a rodeo grandstand, down the road from a one-room schoolhouse, and on dozens of private farms like the one belonging to the Butchers, who have lived for 60 years with a nuclear missile as their closest neighbor.

It's buried behind a chain-link fence and beneath a 110-ton door of concrete and steel. It's 60 feet long. It weighs 79,432 pounds. It has an explosive power at least 20 times greater than the atomic bomb that killed 140,000 people in Hiroshima. An Air Force team is stationed in an underground bunker a few miles away, ready to fire the missile at any moment if the order comes. It would tear out of the silo in about 3.4 seconds and climb above the ranch at 10,000 feet per second. It was designed to rise 70 miles above Earth, fly across the world in 25 minutes and detonate within a few hundred yards of its target. The ensuing fireball would vaporize every person and every structure within a half-mile. The blast would flatten buildings across a five-mile radius. Secondary fires and fatal doses of radiation would spread over dozens more miles, resulting in what U.S. military experts have referred to as "total nuclear annihilation."

"I bet it would fly right over our living room," Ed said. "I wonder if we'd even see it."

"We'd hear it. We'd feel it," Pam said. "The whole house would be shaking."

"And if we're shooting off missiles, you can bet some are headed back toward us," Ed said... "I guess we'd head for the storage room," Ed said.

"Make a few goodbye calls," Pam said. "Hold hands. Pray."

Ed got up to clear his plate. "Good thing it's all hypothetical. It's really only there for deterrence. It'll never actually explode."

"You're right," Pam said. "It won't happen. Almost definitely not."

"The U.S. is spending millions to explore a surprising source of untapped power," reports Recode, describing a new pilot program from America's Department of Energy" Geothermal energy works on a simple premise: The Earth's core is hot, and by drilling even just a few miles underground, we can tap into that practically unlimited heat source to generate energy for our homes and businesses without creating nearly as many of the greenhouse gas emissions that come from burning fossil fuels. However, drilling doesn't come cheap — it accounts for half the cost of most geothermal energy projects — and requires specialized labor to map the subsurface, drill into the ground, and install the infrastructure needed to bring energy to the surface.

But the US, in the wake of an oil and gas boom, just so happens to have millions of oil and gas wells sitting abandoned across the country. And oil and gas wells, it turns out, happen to share many of the same characteristics as geothermal wells — namely that they are deep holes in the ground, with pipes that can bring fluids up to the surface. So, the DOE asks, why not repurpose them?

That's exactly what the agency's pilot program, called Wells of Opportunity: ReAmplify, aims to do, awarding a total of $8.4 million to four projects across the country that will each try to tap into some of those old wells to extract geothermal energy rather than gas or oil. If they work, they could be the key to not only reducing the country's use of planet-damaging fossil fuels, but also helping answer the question of how to transition many of the more than 125,000 people who work in oil and gas extraction across the country into clean-energy jobs....

[T]he next year or so will be spent on planning and assessing the feasibility of turning oil wells into geothermal resources, after which energy generation will slowly ramp up. The biggest question is just how scalable these ideas are: One megawatt is, after all, a pittance compared to the country's energy needs.
"Some European countries already rely on direct use of geothermal energy on a large scale," the article points out.

Volcanically-active Iceland, for example, "uses its vast reserves of geothermal energy to heat 90 percent of its homes."

Thanks to Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot for submitting the story

Once every 10 years there's a report released by America's National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Released this year, the report recommends prioritizing a mission to the planet Uranus to map its gravitational and magnetic fields and study how the planet's internal heat moves to the surface.

BGR reports: Despite being the seventh planet in our solar system, there's very little we know about Uranus as a whole. In fact, one of the best images we have of the planet was captured in 1986 by the Voyager 2... Additionally, scientists want to learn more about the various moons that surround the planet. We also know very little about the ring system that surrounds the blue planet. A team led by Mark Hofstadter, a planetary scientist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab wrote a white paper on their goals....

We currently already have the tech we need to get a spacecraft there that can orbit the planet. Additionally, scientists have found that launching a mission in 2031 would allow us to capitalize on gravity assistance from Jupiter.
The report also recommends studying Enceladus, an icy moon orbiting Saturn which has shown signs it could sustain microbial life.

Thanks to Slashdot reader alaskana98 for submitting the story.

CNN profiles Bellingcat, a Netherlands-based investigative group specializing in "open-source intelligence". And investigator Christo Grozev tells CNN that authoritarian governments make their work easier, because "they love to gather data, comprehensive data, on ... what they consider to be their subjects, and therefore there's a lot of centralized data."

"And second, there's a lot of petty corruption ... within the law enforcement system, and this data market thrives on that." Billions have been spent on creating sophisticated encrypted communications for the military in Russia. But most of that money has been stolen in corrupt kickbacks, and the result is they didn't have that functioning system... It is shocking how incompetent they are. But it was to be expected, because it's a reflection of 23 years of corrupt government.
Interestingly there's apparently less corruption in China — though more whistleblowers. But Bellingcat's first investigation involved the 2014 downing of a Boeing 777 over eastern Ukraine that killed 283 passengers. (The Dutch Safety Board later concluded it was downed by a surface-to-air missile launched from pro-Russian separatist-controlled territory in Ukraine.) "At that time, a lot of public data was available on Russian soldiers, Russian spies, and so on and so forth — because they still hadn't caught up with the times, so they kept a lot of digital traces, social media, posting selfies in front of weapons that shoot down airliners. That's where we kind of perfected the art of reconstructing a crime based on digital breadcrumbs..."

"By 2016, it was no longer possible to find soldiers leaving status selfies on the internet because a new law had been passed in Russia, for example, banning the use of mobile phones by secret services and by soldiers. So we had to develop a new way to get data on government crime. We found our way into this gray market of data in Russia, which is comprised of many, many gigabytes of leaked databases, car registration databases, passport databases. Most of these are available for free, completely freely downloadable from torrent sites or from forums and the internet." And for some of them, they're more current. You actually can buy the data through a broker, so we decided that in cases when we have a strong enough hypothesis that a government has committed the crime, we should probably drop our ethical boundaries from using such data — as long as it is verifiable, as long as it is not coming from one source only but corroborated by at least two or three other sources of data. That's how we develop it. And the first big use case for this approach was the ... poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in 2018 (in the United Kingdom), when we used this combination of open source and data bought from the gray market in Russia to piece together who exactly the two poisoners were. And that worked tremendously....

It has been what I best describe as a multilevel computer game.... [W]hen we first learned that we can get private data, passport files and residence files on Russian spies who go around killing people, they closed the files on those people. So every spy suddenly had a missing passport file in the central password database. But that opened up a completely new way for us to identify spies, because we were just able to compare older versions of the database to newer versions. So that allowed us to find a bad group of spies that we didn't even know existed before.

The Russian government did realize that that's maybe a bad idea to hide them from us, so they reopened those files but just started poisoning data. They started changing the photographs of some of these people to similar looking, like lookalikes of the people, so that they confused us or embarrass us if we publish a finding but it's for the wrong guy. And then we'll learn how to beat that.
When asked about having dropped some ethical boundaries about data use, Grozev replies "everything changes. Therefore, the rules of journalism should change with the changing times." "And it's not common that journalism was investigating governments conducting government-sanctioned crimes, but now it's happening." With a country's ruler proclaiming perpetual supreme power, "This is not a model that traditional journalism can investigate properly. It's not even a model that traditional law enforcement can investigate properly." I'll give an example. When the British police asked, by international agreement, for cooperation from the Russian government to provide evidence on who exactly these guys were who were hanging around the Skripals' house in 2018, they got completely fraudulent, fake data from the Russian government....

So the only way to counter that as a journalist is to get the data that the Russian government is refusing to hand over. And if this is the only way to get it, and if you can be sure that you can prove that this is valid data and authentic data — I think it is incumbent on journalists to find the truth. And especially when law enforcement refuses to find the truth because of honoring the sovereign system of respecting other governments.
It was Bellingcat that identified the spies who's poisoned Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny. CNN suggests that for more details on their investigation, and "to understand Vladimir Putin's stranglehold on power in Russia, watch the new film Navalny which premieres Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on CNN."

The movie's tagline? "Poison always leaves a trail."

"Apple may be cracking down on apps that no longer receive updates," reports the Verge: In a screenshotted email sent to affected developers, titled "App Improvement Notice," Apple warns it will remove apps from the App Store that haven't been "updated in a significant amount of time" and gives developers just 30 days to update them....

In 2016, Apple said it would start removing abandoned apps from the App Store. At the time, it also warned developers that they would have 30 days to update their app before it got taken down. That said, it's unclear whether Apple has continuously been enforcing this rule over the years, or if it recently started conducting a wider sweep. Apple also doesn't clearly outline what it considers to be "outdated" — whether it's based on the time that has elapsed since an app was last updated, or if it concerns compatibility with the most recent version of iOS.

Critics of this policy argue that mobile apps should remain available no matter their age, much like old video games remain playable on consoles. Others say the policy is unnecessarily tough on developers, and claim Apple doesn't fully respect the work that goes into indie games.

Earlier this month, the Google Play Store similarly announced it would begin limiting the visibility of apps that "don't target an API level within two years of the latest major Android release version." Android developers have until November 1st, 2022 to update their apps, but also have the option of applying for a six-month extension if they can't make the deadline.

The Associated Press files this report from Chernobyl, where invading tanks in February "churned up highly contaminated soil from the site of the 1986 accident that was the world's worst nuclear disaster..."

"Here in the dirt of one of the world's most radioactive places, Russian soldiers dug trenches. Ukrainian officials worry they were, in effect, digging their own graves." For more than a month, some Russian soldiers bunked in the earth within sight of the massive structure built to contain radiation from the damaged Chernobyl nuclear reactor. A close inspection of their trenches was impossible because even walking on the dirt is discouraged.... Maksym Shevchuck, the deputy head of the state agency managing the exclusion zone, believes hundreds or thousands of soldiers damaged their health, likely with little idea of the consequences, despite plant workers' warnings to their commanders. "Most of the soldiers were around 20 years old," he said....

The full extent of Russia's activities in the Chernobyl exclusion zone is still unknown, especially because the troops scattered mines that the Ukrainian military is still searching for. Some have detonated, further disturbing the radioactive ground. The Russians also set several forest fires, which have been put out.

Ukrainian authorities can't monitor radiation levels across the zone because Russian soldiers stole the main server for the system, severing the connection on March 2. The International Atomic Energy Agency said Saturday it still wasn't receiving remote data from its monitoring systems. The Russians even took Chernobyl staffers' personal radiation monitors....

When the Russians hurriedly departed March 31 as part of a withdrawal from the region that left behind scorched tanks and traumatized communities, they took more than 150 Ukrainian national guard members into Belarus. Shevchuck fears they're now in Russia. In their rush, the Russians gave nuclear plant managers a choice: Sign a document saying the soldiers had protected the site and there were no complaints, or be taken into Belarus. The managers signed.
The article includes more stories from Chernobyl's staff: Even now, weeks after the Russians left, "I need to calm down," the plant's main security engineer, Valerii Semenov, told The Associated Press. He worked 35 days straight, sleeping only three hours a night, rationing cigarettes and staying on even after the Russians allowed a shift change. "I was afraid they would install something and damage the system," he said in an interview....

Another Ukrainian nuclear plant, at Zaporizhzhia in southeastern Ukraine, remains under Russian control. It is the largest in Europe.
Long-time Slashdot reader MattSparkes also notes reports that researchers at Chernobyl "had been looking for bacteria to eat radioactive waste — but they now fear that their work was irreparably lost during the Russian invasion of the facility."

New Scientist reports (in a pay-walled article) that scientist Olena Pareniuk "was attempting to identify bacteria that could consume radioactive waste within Chernobyl's destroyed reactor before the Russian invasion. If her samples are lost it will likely be impossible to replace them."

"Everyone's favorite security focused operating system, OpenBSD 7.1 has been released for a number of architectures," writes long-time Slashdot reader ArchieBunker, "including Apple M1 chips."

Phoronix calls it "the newest version of this popular, security-minded BSD operating system." With OpenBSD 7.1, the Apple Silicon support is now considered "ready for general use" with keypad/touchpad support for M1 laptops, a power management controller driver added, I2C and SPI controller drivers, and a variety of other driver additions for supporting the Apple Silicon hardware.

OpenBSD 7.1 also has a number of other improvements benefiting the 64-bit ARM (ARM64) and RISC-V architectures. OpenBSD 7.1 also brings SMP kernel improvements, support for futexes with shared anonymous memory, and more. On the graphics front there is updating the Linux DRM code against the state found in Linux 5.15.26 as well as now enabling Intel Elkhart Lake / Jasper Lake / Rocket Lake support.
The Register notes OpenBSD now "supports a surprisingly wide range of hardware: x86-32, x86-64, ARM7, Arm64, DEC Alpha, HP PA-RISC, Hitachi SH4, Motorola 88000, MIPS64, SPARC64, RISC-V 64, and both Apple PowerPC and IBM POWER." The Register's FOSS desk ran up a copy in VirtualBox, and we were honestly surprised how quick and easy it was. By saying "yes" to everything, it automatically partitioned the VM's disk into a rather complex array of nine slices, installed the OS, a boot loader, an X server and display manager, plus the FVWM window manager. After a reboot, we got a graphical login screen and then a rather late-1980s Motif-style desktop with an xterm.

It was easy to install XFCE, which let us set the screen resolution and other modern niceties, and there are also KDE, GNOME, and other pretty front-ends, plus plenty of familiar tools such as Mozilla apps, LibreOffice and so on....

We were expecting to have to do a lot more work. Yes, OpenBSD is a niche OS, but the project gave the world OpenSSH, LibreSSL, the PF firewall as used in macOS, much of Android's Bionic C library, and more besides.... In a world of multi-gigabyte OSes, it's quite refreshing. It felt like stepping back into the early 1990s, the era of Real Unix, when you had to put in some real effort and learn stuff in order to bend the OS to your will — but in return, you got something relatively bulletproof.

On April 15th Americans filed their taxes with the Internal Revenue Service (or IRS). But on the same day ProPublica was reporting a difference between "the rich and the rest of us" — that their wealth just isn't easily defined: For one, wages make up only a small part of their earnings. And they have broad latitude in how they account for their businesses and investments. Their incomes aren't defined by a tax form. Instead, they represent the triumph of careful planning by skilled professionals who strive to deliver the most-advantageous-yet-still-plausible answers to their clients. For them, a tax return is an opening bid to the IRS. It's a kind of theory....

We counted at least 16 other billionaires (along with hundreds of other ultrawealthy people, including hedge fund managers and former CEOs) among the stimulus check recipients. This is just how our system works. It's why, in 2011, Jeff Bezos, then worth $18 billion, qualified for $4,000 in refundable child tax credits. (Bezos didn't respond to our questions.) A recent study by the Brookings Institution set out with a simple aim: to compare what owners of privately held businesses say they earn with the income that appears on the owners' tax returns. The findings were stark: "More than half of economic income generated by closely held businesses does not appear on tax returns and that ratio has declined significantly over the past 25 years."

That doesn't mean business owners are illegally hiding income from the IRS, though it's certainly a possible contributor. There are plenty of ways to make income vanish legally. Tax perks like depreciation allow owners to create tax losses even as they expand their businesses... "Losses" from one business can also be used to wipe out income from another. Sometimes spilling red ink can be lots of fun: For billionaires, owning sports teams and thoroughbred racehorses are exciting loss-makers. Congress larded the tax code with these sorts of provisions on the logic that what's good for businesses is good for the economy. Often, the evidence for this broader effect is thin or nonexistent, but you can be sure all this is great for business owners. The Brookings study found that households worth $10 million or more benefited the most from being able to make income disappear....

In the tax system we have, billionaires who'd really rather not pay income taxes can usually find a way not to. They can bank their accumulating gains tax-free and deploy tax losses to wipe out whatever taxable income they might have. They can even look forward to a few thousand dollars here and there from the government to help them raise their kids or get through a national emergency.
This system also means it's much harder to catch underreported income on the tax returns of the wealthy, the article points out. And with so many legal deducations, it's also hard to prove the low incomes really exceed what the law allows. Even then, the wealthy can still hire an army of the best tax lawyers to make their case in court.

And now thousands of auditors have left the agency — and have not been replaced. The end result? "Audits of the wealthy have plummeted.

"Business owners have still more reason to be bold...."

The New York Times reports: Images such as Ukrainian tractors towing away a disabled Russian tank and helicopter, although unverified, have not only helped fight Russian disinformation, but also helped support Ukrainian charities and even the Ukrainian military. The merchandise sales they have generated in the United States and elsewhere are surprising given that many people buying the T-shirts, stickers, coffee mugs and chocolate bars would never have thought about the Eastern European country before the conflict.
One example? Toronto-based Christian Borys, who decided to launch a site selling stickers of the Virgin Mary hoisting an antitank missile (adapted from a painting by the American artist Chris Shaw.) In eight weeks Borys' "Saint Javelin" site "has raised so far almost $1.5 million to assist the Ukrainian charity Help Us Help, which has branched into multiple services, and to provide protective equipment for journalists covering the war, he said." Mr. Borys, who had worked for the e-commerce platform Shopify before turning to journalism, said he created a website in half an hour, hoping to raise money to send to a charity for Ukrainian orphans. That night, he made 88 Canadian dollars in sales. By the time he added T-shirts at the end of February, the threat of war had turned into a full-scale invasion, and he said sales grew to 170,000 Canadian dollars a day — most coming from the United States. "The internet speaks in memes and it just became this crazy, viral sensation," he said. "I think it's because people were looking for a symbol of support, a way to support Ukraine, because they saw the whole injustice of everything...."

Three weeks ago, Mr. Borys, a Canadian of Ukrainian Polish origin, turned Saint Javelin from an all-volunteer effort to a full-time staff of four to keep up with demand. His website has branched out from the Virgin Mary to other saints: Saint Carl Gustaf wears a gas mask, while "Saint Olha, the Warrior Queen of Kyiv" wears a crown and hoists a bazooka over her camouflaged shoulders. "People on Instagram demand we make things basically," Mr. Borys said. "We get messages from people in Spain who say, 'Hey, we just shipped the C-90,' a shoulder-fired rocket propelled grenade launcher," he said. "And they'll say, 'Hey we want a saint for Spain' or a saint specific to that type of system."

"As more and more workers have fallen under the gaze of algorithms, a growing chorus of experts have noted how platform companies have paralleled the practices of colonial empires," writes MIT Technology review, "in using management tools to surveil and exploit a broad base of cheap labor." But resistance rose in Jakarta from an informal "base camp" for gig-worker drivers with Indonesia's largest ride-hailing company Gojek. And their experience "could reveal a new playbook for resistance: a way for workers to build collective power, achieve a measure of security, and take care of one another when seemingly no one else will."

"If one person shares a tip or a concern, it quickly travels through a loose network of WhatsApp and Telegram groups and across social media," the article points out — also noting that drivers eventually learned that by repeatedly rejecting certain gigs, they can train the app's algorithm to offer them different kinds of work. But that's just the beginning... Other drivers who are skilled in deciphering the mysteries of the algorithm offer paid "therapy services" to those who are struggling. A therapist will take over a client's phone for a week and slowly coax the account back to health before returning it to its owner.

Then there are more sophisticated hacks. The more tech-savvy in the driver communities have developed an entire ecosystem of unauthorized apps that help drivers tweak and tune their accounts, Qadri says. Some are relatively trivial, built simply to eliminate a reliance on Gojek's engineering team: they enlarge the text on the app's user interface to improve its readability, or help drivers accept jobs automatically, a feature Gojek has by now incorporated. But the most popular, with more than half a million downloads, spoof a phone's GPS. They can give the illusion that a driver who is resting is still working. This can avoid penalties for sick time or help quickly graduate an account to higher levels with more earning potential. Such apps can also give drivers access to places with high customer demand without requiring them to muscle into crowded spaces....

As driver networks have grown and accumulated political capital, they've also sought to agitate for broader reforms. They use social media to protest undesirable app updates or push for feature requests. Gojek now sends representatives to base camps to seek feedback and buy-in from drivers about forthcoming changes.
"This sense of community is now at the heart of what distinguishes Jakarta's drivers from other gig workers around the world," the article argues. "While such workers everywhere have felt increasingly squeezed and exploited by unforgiving algorithms, most have struggled to organize and effect concrete changes in the platforms that control their work or the government policies that enable their mistreatment."

Or, as one California law professor tells the site, "You don't get the kind of regulations you want without worker power, and you don't have worker power without worker community."


"This story is part three of MIT Technology Review's series on AI colonialism, the idea that artificial intelligence is creating a new colonial world order. It was supported by the MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellowship Program and the Pulitzer Center. Read the full series here."

If you ranked all U.S. companies by annual revenue, Occidental Petroleum comes in at #183.

But Wednesday this massive "hydrocarbon exploration" company "outlined plans to advance its clean energy transition business," reports Reuters, "including spending between $800 million and $1 billion on a facility to remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air." The proposed facility, the world's largest direct air capture (DAC) project, is set to begin construction in the second half of this year in the Permian basin, the largest U.S. oilfield, with a start in 2024. The U.S. oil and gas producer is aiming to build a profitable business from providing services and technologies that pull CO2 out of the air and burying it underground to advance government and business climate mitigation goals. This year's investments in the low carbon business will total $275 million, and the company plans to develop over time three carbon sequestration hubs that will be online by 2025 and another 69 smaller DAC facilities by 2035, it told investors....

Occidental's first DAC facility has a goal of removing 1 million tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere per year — 100 times bigger than all 19 DAC plants currently operating worldwide combined, according to the International Energy Agency.

"There's just not going to be enough other alternatives for CO2 offsets," said Occidental Chief Executive Vicki Hollub. "So this is a sure opportunity." Executives did not say when they expect the business to turn a profit. DAC is currently not commercial on a large scale. "We expect that to play out over the next five to 10 years as we develop plants," Richard Jackson, Occidental's head of U.S. onshore resources and carbon management operations, told Reuters by phone. "The commerciality of those plants will be determined by mainly the market".
Last month Occidental announced that Airbus had already pre-purchased "400,000 tonnes of carbon removal credits from [Occidental's] planned first Direct Air Capture facility," specifically, "the capture and permanent sequestration of 100,000 tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere each year for four years — with an option to secure more volume in the future."

Occidental called the deal "indicative of the availability of a feasible, affordable, and scalable decarbonization solution for aviation and other hard-to-abate industries."

After startup Axiom Space brokered the first visit to the Space Station by an all-private crew, the AX-1 mission turned into a "longer-than-expected" stay, reports CNN. It launched on April 8 and "was originally billed as a 10-day mission," CNN notes, "but delays have extended the mission by about a week." The four crew members — Michael López-Alegría, a former NASA astronaut-turned-Axiom employee who is commanding the mission; Israeli businessman Eytan Stibbe; Canadian investor Mark Pathy; and Ohio-based real estate magnate Larry Connor — are slated to leave the space station aboard their SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule on Sunday at 8:55 pm ET. That's another 24-hour delay from what NASA and Axiom were targeting on Saturday. They now plan to spend a day free flying through orbit before plummeting back into the atmosphere and parachuting to a splashdown landing off the coast of Florida at about 1 pm ET Monday, according to a tweet from Kathy Lueders, the head of NASA's human spaceflight program...

During their first 12 days on the space station, the group stuck to a regimented schedule, which included about 14 hours per day of activities, including scientific research that was designed by various research hospitals, universities, tech companies and more. They also spent time doing outreach events by video conferencing with children and students. The weather delays then afforded to them "a bit more time to absorb the remarkable views of the blue planet and review the vast amount of work that was successfully completed during the mission," according to Axiom....

It's not the first time paying customers or otherwise non-astronauts have visited the ISS, as Russia has sold seats on its Soyuz spacecraft to various wealthy thrill seekers in years past. But AX-1 is the first mission with a crew entirely comprised of private citizens with no active members of a government astronaut corps accompanying them in the capsule during the trip to and from the ISS. It's also the first time private citizens have traveled to the ISS on a US-made spacecraft.

Dirk Hohndel gets frequently mentioned on Slashdot. He was a very early contributor to Linux (and for the last five years the chief open source officer and vice president at VMware). But he's also the guy who interviews Linus Torvalds in the keynote sessions of Open Source Summits.

Hohndel "has a well known track record with Linux going back to the 1990's," reports Phoronix, and was even a member of the Linux Foundation Board of Directors.

But they add that now Hohndel has "somewhat surprisingly has moved on to promoting a blockchain effort."

Dirk Hohndel was CTO at SUSE going back to the mid-90's before joining Intel for a fifteen year run that ended in 2016 where he was Intel's Chief Linux and Open-Source Technologist...

When Dirk left VMware unexpectedly at the beginning of the year, he wrote on LinkedIn that he felt he completed his job at the company in driving open-source transformation. He was leaving to go "look for the next opportunity, the next step in my career" and now it apparently is with blockchain. The surprising news today is that he's joined the Cardano Foundation. The Cardano Foundation is a Swiss-based foundation built around the Cardano public blockchain platform. Cardano is open-source and is the most notable proof-of-stake blockchain that was started by Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson. Cardano has its own cryptocurrency, ADA....

Dirk will be serving as the Cardano Foundation's Chief Open-Source Officer.
Interestingly, Linus Torvalds appears to be less enthralled with blockchain technologies. Last year ZDNet reported on the reaction when Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin suggested Torvalds sell an NFT of the 1991 email that first announced Linux to the world.

"An amused and appalled Torvalds replied, "I'm staying out of the whole craziness with crypto and NFTs. Those people are cuckoo!"

Writing for the New Yorker, Ronan Farrow reports on Pegasus, "a spyware technology designed by NSO Group, an Israeli firm, which can extract the contents of a phone, giving access to its texts and photographs, or activate its camera and microphone to provide real-time surveillance — exposing, say, confidential meetings." Pegasus is useful for law enforcement seeking criminals, or for authoritarians looking to quash dissent.... In Catalonia, more than sixty phones — owned by Catalan politicians, lawyers, and activists in Spain and across Europe — have been targeted using Pegasus. This is the largest forensically documented cluster of such attacks and infections on record. Among the victims are three members of the European Parliament... Catalan politicians believe that the likely perpetrators of the hacking campaign are Spanish officials, and the Citizen Lab's analysis suggests that the Spanish government has used Pegasus....

In recent years, investigations by the Citizen Lab and Amnesty International have revealed the presence of Pegasus on the phones of politicians, activists, and dissidents under repressive regimes. An analysis by Forensic Architecture, a research group at the University of London, has linked Pegasus to three hundred acts of physical violence. It has been used to target members of Rwanda's opposition party and journalists exposing corruption in El Salvador. In Mexico, it appeared on the phones of several people close to the reporter Javier Valdez Cárdenas, who was murdered after investigating drug cartels. Around the time that Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia approved the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a longtime critic, Pegasus was allegedly used to monitor phones belonging to Khashoggi's associates, possibly facilitating the killing, in 2018. (Bin Salman has denied involvement, and NSO said, in a statement, "Our technology was not associated in any way with the heinous murder.") Further reporting through a collaboration of news outlets known as the Pegasus Project has reinforced the links between NSO Group and anti-democratic states.

But there is evidence that Pegasus is being used in at least forty-five countries, and it and similar tools have been purchased by law-enforcement agencies in the United States and across Europe. Cristin Flynn Goodwin, a Microsoft executive who has led the company's efforts to fight spyware, told me, "The big, dirty secret is that governments are buying this stuff — not just authoritarian governments but all types of governments...." "Almost all governments in Europe are using our tools," Shalev Hulio, NSO Group's C.E.O., told me. A former senior Israeli intelligence official added, "NSO has a monopoly in Europe." German, Polish, and Hungarian authorities have admitted to using Pegasus. Belgian law enforcement uses it, too, though it won't admit it.
Calling the spyware industry "largely unregulated and increasingly controversial," the article notes how it's now impacting major western democracies. "The Citizen Lab's researchers concluded that, on July 26 and 27, 2020, Pegasus was used to infect a device connected to the network at 10 Downing Street, the office of Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.... The United States has been both a consumer and a victim of this techÂnology. Although the National Security Agency and the C.I.A. have their own surveillance technology, other government offices, including in the military and in the Department of Justice, have bought spyware from private companies, according to people involved in those transactions."

But are the company's fortunes faltering? The company has been valued at more than a billion dollars. But now it is contending with debt, battling an array of corporate backers, and, according to industry observers, faltering in its long-standing efforts to sell its products to U.S. law enforcement, in part through an American branch, Westbridge Technologies. It also faces numerous lawsuits in many countries, brought by Meta (formerly Facebook), by Apple, and by individuals who have been hacked by NSO....

In November, the [U.S.] Commerce Department added NSO Group, along with several other spyware makers, to a list of entities blocked from purchasing technology from American companies without a license. I was with Hulio in New York the next day. NSO could no longer legally buy Windows operating systems, iPhones, Amazon cloud servers — the kinds of products it uses to run its business and build its spyware.