Shutterfly recently moved its photo libraries to Amazon's cloud division — and became one of the companies that stopped using Oracle for it database management, Bloomberg reports: Businesses are opting to align with newer providers such as MongoDB Inc., Databricks Inc. and Snowflake Inc. instead of Oracle, the sector stalwart, as a result of changes across the enterprise technology landscape.

The move to the cloud is challenging the systems of the past. Newer providers are also making it much easier to adopt their technology directly, alleviating the need for corporate purchasers to negotiate large contracts with salespeople and allowing end users to more easily pick their own tools. Offerings from the newer software makers can also be deployed without large teams of database administrators that are typically needed to support Oracle's products, a cost-saver for organizations that would otherwise have to fight against other businesses for these in-demand engineers. The evidence of the shift is widespread. JPMorgan Chase & Co. chose Cockroach Labs Inc. as the database vendor to support its new retail banking application in Europe. Nasdaq Inc. is working with closely held Databricks and Amazon.com Inc.'s Amazon Web Services, among others, in its quest to upgrade from on-premises Oracle data repositories. Alongside AWS, database products from rival cloud vendors Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google Cloud are also growing quickly. And many businesses, like JetBlue Airways Corp. and Automatic Data Processing Inc., are tapping Snowflake to help store and analyze corporate data to power sales dashboards, among other uses....

Collectively, the initiatives are just a small fragment of the estimated $155 billion database market. But it's evidence of a tectonic shift happening within the industry, one that is threatening the leadership status Oracle cultivated over the past 43 years, ever since co-founder Larry Ellison and his team brought to market the first relational database, or one in which information was organized in tables that could be more easily accessed, manipulated and analyzed.... Oracle doesn't disclose financial results specifically for its database business. Much of that revenue comes from providing support and maintenance for existing customers versus new sales. But Oracle's influence is slowly fading. While it owned an estimated 27% of the database market in 2019, that fell to 24% in 2020, per Gartner. In the same time frame, Amazon went from 17% market share to almost 21%.

Oracle declined to comment for this story. Rivals are growing quickly. At MongoDB, for example, sales rose 57% to $285 million in the most recent quarter. Those results, analysts and company executives say, indicate businesses are using MongoDB for increasingly larger projects.... Oracle makes a significant portion of its revenue on existing customers. Every few years, when companies have to renew their contracts, Oracle can raise prices for maintenance and support — a business with margins hovering around 95%, according to Craig Guarente, a 16-year veteran of Oracle who is now CEO and co-founder of consulting firm Palisade Compliance.

"The entire profit of the company comes from Oracle database maintenance," he said. With each contract negotiation, "you go from paying $20 million a year, to $30 million a year, to paying $50 million a year."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Lead researcher Alyssa Blackburn of Baylor and Rice, along with team-mates Christoph Huber, Yossi Eliaz, Muhammad S. Shamim, David Weisz, Goutham Seshadri, Kevin Kim, Shengqi Hang, and Erez Lieberman Aiden, used a technique called "address linking" to study the Bitcoin transactions in the first two years of its existence: January of 2009 to February of 2011. Their key discovery is that, in those first two years, "most Bitcoin was mined by only sixty-four agents [] collectively accounting for B2,676,800 (PV: $84 billion)." They are referring to the process of minting new coins by solving computer challenges. That number -- 64 people in total -- "is 1000-fold smaller than prior estimates of the size of the early Bitcoin community (75,000)," they observe. Those 64 people include some notable figures that have already become legends, such as Ross Ulbricht, known by the handle Dread Pirate Roberts. Ulbricht is the founder of Silk Road, a black-market operation that used Bitcoin for illicit means -- until it was shut down by the FBI.

For Blackburn and team, the point was to study the effects of people participating in game-theoretic situations as anonymous parties. Surprisingly, they found early insiders like Ulbricht could have exploited the relative paucity of participants by undermining Bitcoin to double-spend coins, but they did not. They acted "altruistically" to maintain the integrity of the system. That's intriguing, but a more pressing discovery is that addresses can be traced and identities can be revealed. To find out who was doing those early transactions, Blackburn and team had to reverse-engineer the entire premise of Bitcoin and of all crypto: anonymity.

As outlined in the original Bitcoin white paper by Satoshi Nakamoto, privacy was to be preserved by two means: anonymous public key use and creating new key pairs for every transaction [...]. Blackburn and team had to trace those key pairs to reveal early Bitcoin's transacting parties. To do so, they developed what they called a novel address-linking scheme. The scheme finds two patterns that point to users: one is the presence of recurring bits of code, and one is duplicate addresses for certain transactions. [...] The consequence of that, they write, is that it is possible to "follow the money" to expose any identity by following a chain of relatedness in a graph of addresses, starting from a known identity [...]. Further, they hypothesize that "many cryptocurrencies may be susceptible to follow-the-money attacks." Blackburn told The New York Times's Siobhan Roberts, "When you are encrypting private data and making it public, you cannot assume that it'll be private forever." As the team concludes in the report, "Drip-by-drip, information leakage erodes the once-impenetrable blocks, carving out a new landscape of socioeconomic data." The new paper, titled "Cooperation among an anonymous group, protected Bitcoin during failures of decentralization," has been posted on the researchers' server (PDF).

Substack stopped fundraising efforts for a round of $75 million to $100 million, the New York Times reported Thursday. Axios reports: The round could have valued the newsletter publication platform between $750 million and $1 billion. But the abandoned plans come amid the market's cooling and layoffs among other tech firms. NYT reported that Substack told investors its 2021 revenue was about $9 million. That means its potential valuation of $1 billion would have been 100x its revenue. Substack touted in November that it has more than 1 million paid subscriptions and that its top 10 writers collectively generate $20 million in annual revenue. But only a fraction of that contributes to Substack's bottom line.

Coordinated industry lobbying is overwhelming the scattered efforts of consumer groups and privacy-minded lawmakers. From a report: In late 2019, Utah state senator Kirk Cullimore got a phone call from one of his constituents, a lawyer who represented technology companies in California. "He said, 'I think the businesses I represent would like to have some bright lines about what they can do in Utah,'" Cullimore told The Markup. At the time, tech companies in California were struggling with how they could comply with a new state law that gave individual Californians control over the data that corporations routinely gather and sell about their online activities. The lawyer, whom Cullimore and his office wouldn't identify, recounted how burdensome his corporate clients found the rules, Cullimore remembered, and suggested that Utah proactively pass its own, business-friendly consumer privacy law.

"He said, 'I want to make this easy so consumers can make use of their rights and the compliance is also easy for companies.' He actually sent me some suggested language [for a bill] that was not very complex," Cullimore told The Markup. "I introduced the bill as that." What followed over the next two years was a multipronged influence campaign straight out of a playbook Big Tech is deploying around the country in response to consumer privacy legislation. It's common for industries to lobby lawmakers on issues affecting their business. But there is a massive disparity in the state-by-state battle over privacy legislation between well-funded, well-organized tech lobbyists and their opposition of relatively scattered consumer advocates and privacy-minded politicians, The Markup has found. During the 2021 and 2022 Utah legislative sessions -- when Cullimore's bill made its way through the legislature -- Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft collectively registered 23 active lobbyists in the state, according to their lobbying disclosures. Thirteen of those lobbyists had never previously registered to work in the state, and some of them were influential in shaping Cullimore's legislation.

This week New York's attorney general announced they're officially "launching investigations into the social media companies that the Buffalo shooter used to plan, promote, and stream his terror attack." Slashdot reader echo123 points out that Discord confirmed that roughly 30 minutes before the attack a "small group" was invited to join the shooter's server. "None of the people he invited to review his writings appeared to have alerted law enforcement," reports the New York Times., "and the massacre played out much as envisioned."

But meanwhile, another Times article tells a tangentially-related story from 2019 about what ultimately happened to "a partial recording of a livestream by a gunman while he murdered 51 people that day at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand." For more than three years, the video has remained undisturbed on Facebook, cropped to a square and slowed down in parts. About three-quarters of the way through the video, text pops up urging the audience to "Share THIS...." Online writings apparently connected to the 18-year-old man accused of killing 10 people at a Buffalo, New York, grocery store Saturday said that he drew inspiration for a livestreamed attack from the Christchurch shooting. The clip on Facebook — one of dozens that are online, even after years of work to remove them — may have been part of the reason that the Christchurch gunman's tactics were so easy to emulate.

In a search spanning 24 hours this week, The New York Times identified more than 50 clips and online links with the Christchurch gunman's 2019 footage. They were on at least nine platforms and websites, including Reddit, Twitter, Telegram, 4chan and the video site Rumble, according to the Times' review. Three of the videos had been uploaded to Facebook as far back as the day of the killings, according to the Tech Transparency Project, an industry watchdog group, while others were posted as recently as this week. The clips and links were not difficult to find, even though Facebook, Twitter and other platforms pledged in 2019 to eradicate the footage, pushed partly by public outrage over the incident and by world governments. In the aftermath, tech companies and governments banded together, forming coalitions to crack down on terrorist and violent extremist content online. Yet even as Facebook expunged 4.5 million pieces of content related to the Christchurch attack within six months of the killings, what the Times found this week shows that a mass killer's video has an enduring — and potentially everlasting — afterlife on the internet.

"It is clear some progress has been made since Christchurch, but we also live in a kind of world where these videos will never be scrubbed completely from the internet," said Brian Fishman, a former director of counterterrorism at Facebook who helped lead the effort to identify and remove the Christchurch videos from the site in 2019....

Facebook, which is owned by Meta, said that for every 10,000 views of content on the platform, only an estimated five were of terrorism-related material. Rumble and Reddit said the Christchurch videos violated their rules and they were continuing to remove them. Twitter, 4chan and Telegram did not respond to requests for comment
For what it's worth, this week CNN also republished an email they'd received in 2016 from 4chan's current owner, Hiroyuki Nishimura. The gist of the email? "If I liked censorship, I would have already done that."

But Slashdot reader Bruce66423 also shares an interesting observation from The Guardian's senior tech reporter about the major tech platforms. "According to Hany Farid, a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, there is a tech solution to this uniquely tech problem. Tech companies just aren't financially motivated to invest resources into developing it." Farid's work includes research into robust hashing, a tool that creates a fingerprint for videos that allows platforms to find them and their copies as soon as they are uploaded...

Farid: It's not as hard a problem as the technology sector will have you believe... The core technology to stop redistribution is called "hashing" or "robust hashing" or "perceptual hashing". The basic idea is quite simple: you have a piece of content that is not allowed on your service either because it violated terms of service, it's illegal or for whatever reason, you reach into that content, and extract a digital signature, or a hash as it's called.... That's actually pretty easy to do. We've been able to do this for a long time. The second part is that the signature should be stable even if the content is being modified, when somebody changes say the size or the color or adds text. The last thing is you should be able to extract and compare signatures very quickly.

So if we had a technology that satisfied all of those criteria, Twitch would say, we've identified a terror attack that's being live-streamed. We're going to grab that video. We're going to extract the hash and we are going to share it with the industry. And then every time a video is uploaded with the hash, the signature is compared against this database, which is being updated almost instantaneously. And then you stop the redistribution.

It's a problem of collaboration across the industry and it's a problem of the underlying technology. And if this was the first time it happened, I'd understand. But this is not, this is not the 10th time. It's not the 20th time. I want to emphasize: no technology's going to be perfect. It's battling an inherently adversarial system. But this is not a few things slipping through the cracks.... This is a complete catastrophic failure to contain this material. And in my opinion, as it was with New Zealand and as it was the one before then, it is inexcusable from a technological standpoint.
"These are now trillion-dollar companies we are talking about collectively," Farid points out later. "How is it that their hashing technology is so bad?

Investors are divided about whether technology companies are set for a deep retrenchment or if growth is simply slowing from pandemic highs. From a report: The technology industry, which powered the U.S. economy during the pandemic and grew at tremendous scale during a decade of ultralow interest rates, is confronting one of the most punishing stretches in years. Global powerhouses and fledgling startups are feeling pain from a variety of economic, industry and market factors, spawning postpandemic turbulence in e-commerce, digital advertising, electric vehicles, ride-hailing and other segments. Companies that emerged as job-creating juggernauts in the past two years -- collectively adding hundreds of thousands of workers to their payrolls in engineering, warehouse and delivery jobs -- have begun to freeze hiring or even lay off employees.

Concerned that some of the forces that have propelled tech ever upward have begun to fade, investors have sent share prices for a number of companies, including Lyft and Peloton plunging on disappointing financial results or other news. The stocks of Netflix, Facebook parent Meta Platforms and Amazon.com all are down more than 30% this year, exceeding the more-than-13% drop in the S&P 500. Investors are divided on the question of whether the slowdown is temporary -- as well-positioned companies work through a period of stagnation after expanding ultrafast in recent years -- or if these are the early signs of a deeper retrenchment for the industry and its investors.

"Amazon has reportedly fired over half a dozen senior managers who were involved in a New York warehouse union," reports the Guardian, noting that the firings happened shortly after the Staten Island warehouse successfully voted to union, and that they occurred "outside the company's employee review cycle."

And while an Amazon spokesman attributed the move to the company's culture of continual improvement, the Guardian also notes that "Most of the managers who were fired were responsible for carrying out Amazon's response to the unionization efforts, the New York Times reported."

This week Amazon did defeat a second warehouse's unionization vote. But Salon reports that "In a potentially far more significant development, a coalition of the nation's largest public pension funds, with billions of dollars in Amazon stock, is urging shareholders to take the battle to Amazon's corporate suite." [T]he coalition of large public pension funds is urging shareholders to confront Amazon's corporate leadership by voting out a pair of board directors who oversee Amazon's workplace and compensation policies at the upcoming May 25 shareholder meeting....

The national effort is being led by New York City Comptroller Brad Lander and New York State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli, a pair of Democratic elected officials who preside over hundreds of billions in public pensions funds. The New York City Retirement System and New York State Common Retirement Fund hold 1.7 million shares of Amazon stock valued at approximately $5.3 billion. At an April 21 conference at the Harvard Club in Manhattan, several other elected state treasurers from around the country committed to joining in the effort....

According to the organizers of the Harvard Club pension fund event, the officials in attendance were collectively responsible for managing $2 trillion in investments.

"Employee monitoring software became the new normal during COVID-19..." writes Australia's public broadcaster ABC, "logging keystrokes and mouse movement, capturing screenshots, tracking location, and even activating webcams and microphones."

And now "It seems workers are stuck with it.... Surveys of employers in white-collar industries show that even returned office workers will be subject to these new tools. What was introduced in the crisis of the pandemic, as a short-term remedy for lockdowns and working from home has quietly become the 'new normal' for many Australian workplaces." (Thousands of employees have apparently even purchased mouse-jiggling software just to fool the surveillance software.)

But is there a larger issue? "The vast majority of people are not paid enough for the productivity that is demanded of them," argues BuzzFeed's former senior culture writer (now publishing a newsletter called "Culture Study.") After looking at technology's escalating demands, Petersen warns that the real problem is that human productivity ultimately has a ceiling.

"We have to collectively reject the engine of endless growth, and the aspiration for infinite productivity, before it breaks us all."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp for sharing the stories!

Chinese researchers show off a swarm of drones collectively navigating a dense forest they've never encountered. TechCrunch reports: Researchers at Zheijang University in Hangzhou have succeeded, however, with a 10-strong drone swarm smart enough to fly autonomously through a dense, unfamiliar forest, but small and light enough that each one can easily fit in the palm of your hand. It's a big step toward using swarms like this for things like aerial surveying and disaster response.

Based on an off-the-shelf ultra-compact drone design, the team built a trajectory planner for the group that relies entirely on data from the onboard sensors of the swarm, which they process locally and share with each other. The drones can balance or be directed to pursue various goals, such as maintaining a certain distance from obstacles or each other, or minimizing the total flight time between two points, and so on.

The drones can also, worryingly, be given a task like "follow this human." We've all seen enough movies to know this is how it starts ... but of course it could be useful in rescue or combat circumstances as well. A part of their navigation involves mapping the world around them, of course, and the paper includes some very cool-looking 3D representations of the environments the swarm was sent through. Zhou et alThe study is published in the most recent issue of the journal Science Robotics, which you can read here, along with several videos showing off the drones in action.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Alibaba Cloud has advanced its work to port Android to the RISC-V architecture. The Chinese cloud giant has spent more than a year working on a port of the Google-spawned OS and in January 2021 showed off a GUI powered by Android 10 running on silicon designed by T-Head Semiconductor -- an Alibaba subsidiary that designs its own RISC-V chip. Alibaba Cloud has now revealed it's working on Android 12, and has integrated third-party vendor modules. The result is Android on RISC-V that's capable of playing audio and video, running Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios, and driving cameras.

The company has also "enabled more system enhancement features such as core tool sets, third-party libraries and SoC board support package on RISC-V," which collectively make RISC-V a better target for Android. Another advance is successful trials of TensorFlow Lite models on RISC-V. That effort means Android on RISC-V should be capable running workloads like image and audio classification and Optical Character Recognition. Alibaba Cloud hasn't detailed whether its porting efforts are directed to any particular processor, but is keen to point out that its homegrown Xuantie C906 processor recently aced the MLPerf Tiny v0.7 benchmark -- a test applied to Internet of Things devices. The company has also pointed out that its home-grown RISC-V kit has already been employed in smart home appliances, automotive applications, and edge computing. [...] The Xuantie C906 uses Alibaba-designed cores that are -- as required for RISC-V users -- available on GitHub. When the firm has a complete version of Android on RISC-V, it "will be an important step towards China's goal of reducing its reliance on technology that other nations can control with restrictions such as trade bans," notes The Register. "As RISC-V is open source, preventing its flow to China is all but impossible."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: [R]esearchers are now finding vulnerabilities in newer hospital technologies that weren't as ubiquitous a decade ago. Enter autonomous hospital robots, the supposed-to-be-friendly self-controlled digital workhorses that can transport medications, bed linens, food, medications and laboratory specimens across a hospital campus. These robots, such as the ones built by robot maker Aethon, are equipped with the space to transport critical goods and security access to enter restricted parts of the hospital and ride elevators, all while cutting labor costs. But researchers at Cynerio, a cybersecurity startup focused on securing hospital and healthcare systems, discovered a set of five never-before-seen vulnerabilities in Aethon robots, which they say allowed malicious hackers to remotely hijack and control these autonomous robots -- and in some cases over the internet.

The five vulnerabilities, which Cynerio collectively call JekyllBot:5, aren't with the robots themselves but with the base servers that are used to communicate with and control the robots that traverse the hallways of the hospitals and hotels. The bugs range from allowing hackers to create new users with high-level access in order to then log in and remotely control the robots and access restricted areas, snoop on patients or guests using the robot's in-built cameras, or otherwise cause mayhem. Asher Brass, the lead researcher on the Aethon vulnerabilities, warned that the flaws required a "very low skill set for exploitation."

Cynerio said the base servers have a web interface that could be accessed from inside the hospital's network, allowing "guest" users to view real-time robot camera feeds and their upcoming schedules and tasks for the day without needing a password. But although the robots' functionality were protected by an "admin" account, the researchers said the vulnerabilities in the web interface could have allowed a hacker to interact with the robots without needing an admin password to log in. One of the five bugs, the researchers said, exposed robots to remote control using a joystick-style controller in the web interface, while exploiting another one of the bugs to interact with door locks, call and ride elevators, and open and close medication drawers. "The bugs were fixed in a batch of software and firmware updates released by Aethon, after Cynerio alerted the company to the issues," notes TechCrunch. "Aethon is said to have restricted internet-exposed servers to isolate the robots from potential remote attacks, and fixed other web-related vulnerabilities that affected the base station."

An anonymous reader shares an opinion piece: Protest is an important element of free speech that should be protected. Openness and inclusivity are cornerstones of the culture of open source, and the tools of open source communities are designed for global access and participation. Collectively, the very culture and tooling of open source -- issue tracking, messaging systems, repositories -- offer a unique signaling channel that may route around censorship imposed by tyrants to hold their power.

Instead of malware, a better approach to free expression would be to use messages in commit logs to send anti-propaganda messages and to issue trackers to share accurate news inside Russia of what is really happening in Ukraine at the hands of the Russian military, to cite two obvious possibilities. There are so many outlets for open source communities to be creative without harming everyone who happens to load the update.

We encourage community members to use both the freedoms and tools of open source innovatively and wisely to inform Russian citizens about the reality of the harm imposed on Ukrainian citizens and to support humanitarian and relief efforts in and supportive of Ukraine. Longer term, it's likely these weaponizations are like spitting into the wind: The downsides of vandalizing open source projects far outweigh any possible benefit, and the blowback will ultimately damage the projects and contributors responsible. By extension, all of open source is harmed. Use your power, yes -- but use it wisely.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: About a tenth of the global oil and gas industry's methane emissions have been found to come from a group of "ultra-emitter" sites located mostly in Turkmenistan, Russia and the US. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that governments recently agreed to slash by 2030. While huge plumes of methane leaking from gas pipelines have been detected by satellites at individual sites, such as a gas well in Ohio and several pipelines in central Turkmenistan, little has been know about their extent globally.

Now, images captured by an instrument aboard a satellite have been run through an algorithm to automatically detect the biggest plumes of methane streaming from oil and gas facilities worldwide. These ultra-emitters were spotted pumping out more than 25 tons of methane an hour. That's "a heck of a lot," says Steve Hamburg at Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), a US non-profit organization. Collectively, these contribute about 8 million tons of methane a year, about a tenth of the oil and gas industry's total annual emissions for 2019-20. Turkmenistan was the biggest ultra-emitter, releasing more than a million tons of methane between 2019 and 2020. Russia was second at just under a million tons, followed by the US, Iran, Algeria and Kazakhstan. The US count is probably low because it excluded a major oil and gas region, the Permian basin, due to monitoring difficulties. By contrast to these countries, other major oil producing countries, including Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, had very few ultra-emitters. "The study also found that ultra-emitting sites are releasing so much methane, which could be sold, that it should be cost effective to solve," reports New Scientist. "For the six worst countries, tackling those plumes should cost up to $300 less per ton than it would typically cost to reduce methane from oil and gas facilities in those nations."

The report also notes that these findings "are based on a snapshot and some ultraemitters may have gone undetected."

The findings have been published in the journal Science.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Plenty of apps that you install on your computer have a setting that tells them to launch when you initially log in to save you the trouble of launching your most commonly used apps yourself. Leaving this setting on can also allow apps to check for updates or launch more quickly when you start them for the first time. The difference for some of the preinstalled Microsoft apps in Windows 10 and 11 is that they use some of these resources by default, whether you actually use the apps or not. Developer and IT admin Michael Niehaus drew attention to some of these apps in recent blog posts examining the resource usage of Windows 11's widgets, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Edge in a fresh install of Windows 11 (the Edge observations apply to Windows 10, too).

Both Widgets and Teams spawn a number of Microsoft Edge WebView2 processes in order to work—WebView2 is a way to use Edge and its rendering engine without launching Edge or using its user interface. Collectively, these processes use a few hundred megabytes of memory to work. The widget-related processes don't start unless you actually click the widgets button, though they remain in the background afterward, even if you're not actively viewing your widgets. But the Teams processes all launch automatically, whether you actually use Teams or not. Uninstalling Teams will prevent this from happening, but Niehaus points out that simply removing the Teams icon from Windows 11's Taskbar in the Taskbar settings is enough to keep these WebView2 processes from launching when you log in. Ars Technica's Andrew Cunningham also recommends disabling System Boost in the Edge settings if you don't use it as your default browser. Otherwise, it too will use a couple hundred megabytes of memory.

Software engineer Molly White has been a Wikipedia editor since 2006 (and also served several terms on the site's Arbitration Committee). White is now a Wikipedia administrator and functionary — and just published an Opinion piece opposing the continued acceptance of cryptocurrency donations for the Wikimedia Foundation.

Here's an excerpt from White's remarks in The Signpost, an online newspaper for (English-language) Wikipedia that's been published online since 2005 with contributions from Wikipedia editors:

When the Wikimedia Foundation first began accepting cryptocurrency donations in 2014, it was still fairly nascent technology. Cryptocurrencies resonated with many in free and open-source software communities and in the Wikimedia movement more specifically, and cryptocurrency projects tended to share similar ideals: privacy, anonymity, decentralization, freedom. In more recent history, cryptocurrencies and blockchain-based technologies more generally have morphed into something very different from the ideals of their youth. Some proponents continue to speak about freedom and decentralization, but the space has overwhelmingly become an opportunity for self-enrichment at the expense of others and the environment.

Cryptomining operations set up shop in locations with low energy costs — until late 2021, most bitcoin mining happened in China, where it relied on coal so heavily that the resulting coal mining accidents from increased demand contributed to a crackdown on the practice. Some of those miners moved to Kazakhstan, where they were using the nation's supply of lignite (an extremely harmful form of coal) to produce 18% of the global computing power behind bitcoin in January. Bitcoin mining alone rivals the total energy use of countries like the Netherlands or Finland;456 emissions from other popular cryptocurrencies like ethereum only compound the problem.

Furthermore, in recent years, more and more enthusiasts are being convinced that they too might strike it rich by buying in early to the next bitcoin or the next ethereum. But unfortunately, the playing field more often resembles a landscape with scammers and marks. Many are convinced that purchasing these currencies is an "investment", rather than risky speculation that would be more accurately described as gambling if not outright investment fraud. People are regularly scammed for enormous sums of money, and the anonymous, nominally decentralized, and largely unregulated nature of the space offers them little recourse.

The purported benefits of cryptocurrencies have also been largely unrealized. Rather than empowering the unbanked and distributing wealth to those in need, as once described, money has been hoarded in incredible amounts by a few wealthy individuals — 0.01% of bitcoin holders collectively own 27% of bitcoin in circulation, equivalent to around $232 billion. Furthermore, the underlying technology is enormously slow and difficult to scale when compared to databases used in most modern computing, so many technologies built around blockchains have spawned new, centralized solutions to the problems the blockchains themselves have introduced. As a result, the decentralization of the web that was supposed to result from the adoption of blockchain technologies has only resulted in the centralization of power in a handful of companies and venture capital firms.

The Wikimedia Foundation's acceptance of cryptocurrency donations has had minimal returns, and no longer accepting them is unlikely to have a major impact on the Foundation's ability to fundraise. In 2021, the Wikimedia Foundation only received about $130,000 in donations via cryptocurrency, making it one of their smallest revenue channels at only 0.08% of total donations. The benefits to donors are also minimal: the anonymity that might normally be offered to those who use cryptocurrencies is largely nullified by the WMF's cryptocurrency payment processor, BitPay, which requires prospective donors to disclose their identities.

The most impactful result of the WMF's acceptance of cryptocurrencies has been to normalize their use. As the technology space around blockchains has evolved over the years, so too should we. Cryptocurrencies have been joined by a bubble of predatory, inherently harmful technologies that take advantage of individuals and contribute to the destruction of our environment. It is no longer ethical for the Wikimedia Foundation to tacitly endorse a technology that incentivizes the predatory behavior that has become rampant in the cryptocurrency space in the past few years. I have asked that they stop doing so in an Request for Comments on meta.

At least 26 public corporations are holding bitcoin on their balance sheets, according to data compiled by cryptocurrency analytics firm CoinGecko. Since the price of cryptocurrencies began to plummet in November, they've collectively lost nearly $7 billion. Quartz reports: The price of Bitcoin peaked above $67,000 on Nov. 8, but has since fallen 46%. Corporate crypto holdings for the largest 26 totaled at least $14.7 billion at the height of the rally. As of Jan. 26, they're worth $8 billion. The companies -- which include electric carmaker Tesla, financial services startup Square, and South Korean video game developer Nexon, along with a slew of crypto miners, exchanges, and investment firms -- hold 217,240 bitcoin. That's a little more than 1% of all the bitcoin in the world.

Facebook says it's helping millions of the world's poorest people get online through apps and services that allow them to use internet data free. Internal company documents show that many of these people end up being charged in amounts that collectively add up to an estimated millions of dollars a month. WSJ: To attract new users, Facebook made deals with cellular carriers in countries including Pakistan, Indonesia and the Philippines to let low-income people use a limited version of Facebook and browse some other websites without data charges. Many of the users have inexpensive cellphone plans that cost just a few dollars a month, often prepaid, for phone service and a small amount of internet data. Because of software problems at Facebook, which it has known about and failed to correct for months, people using the apps in free mode are getting unexpectedly charged by local cellular carriers for using data. In many cases they only discover this when their prepaid plans are drained of funds.

In internal documents, employees of Facebook parent Meta Platforms acknowledge this is a problem. Charging people for services Facebook says are free "breaches our transparency principle," an employee wrote in an October memo. In the year ended July 2021, charges made by the cellular carriers to users of Facebook's free-data products grew to an estimated total of $7.8 million a month, when purchasing power adjustments were made, from about $1.3 million a year earlier, according to a Facebook document. Facebook calls the problem "leakage," since paid services are leaking into the free apps and services. It defines leakage in internal documents as, "When users are in Free Mode and believe that the data they are using is being covered by their carrier networks, even though these users are actually paying for the data themselves."

Remember that developer who intentionally corrupted his two libraries which collectively had over 20 million weekly downloads and thousands of dependent projects? In the immediate aftermath he'd complained on Twitter that NPM "has reverted to a previous version of the faker.js package and Github has suspended my access to all public and private projects. I have 100s of projects. #AaronSwartz."

That was January 6th, and within about a week GitHub had restored his access, while one of his two libraries (faker-js) was forked by its community to create a community-driven project. But Thursday the developer announced on his Twitter account: What's up @Github? Ten days since you removed my ability to publish to NPM and fix the Infinity Zalgo bug in colors.js

Never responded to my support emails.

I have 100s of packages I need to maintain.

Everyone makes programming mistakes from time to time. Nobody is perfect.
It hasn't been confirmed that NPM has actually blocked his ability to publish — but the tweet already appears to be attracting reactions from other developers on social media.

This week the Free Software Foundation's board announced that for the first time in the organization's 37-year-history, its 5,000-plus associate members will now be able to nominate and evaluate candidates for its board of directors. Under new procedures adopted by the FSF board on January 17 and summarized here, the organization will proactively engage associate members with a sufficient history of association with the FSF in the recruiting process by inviting them to suggest board nominees and then research collectively those nominees' suitability for a position on the board, including most importantly their record of commitment to free software ideals.... Following the new procedures, voting members (which include all current directors and are listed here) can start a process to recruit new directors, or a modified process to reconsider existing directors...

The FSF intends to first add several new directors in 2022, utilizing these new procedures, and then begin a review of existing directors. The FSF staff and board have made this expanded engagement process a high priority and are working together to put in place the necessary infrastructure to support it, with a target to activate it within the first quarter of 2022... Voting members will review the community's nominations.

A nominee may be removed from consideration if at least two voting members vote to do so without opposition from other voting members. The voting members will discuss the candidates and decide which should move forward in the process next. The FSF's associate members will then review each nominee's application, then evaluate and comment on those nominees in a private, staff-moderated discussion forum. Voting members will review this input and privately interview the finalists to assess their candidacy, ideals, and commitment to free software, then vote on their appointment....

The process is designed such that new iterations for both recruiting new directors and reviewing existing directors can be run whenever the need arises in the future.
"Opening the director recruitment process to our associate members is a historic and welcome milestone for the FSF," said FSF president Geoffrey Knauth. "We are pleased to engage the free software community in attracting new talent to our leadership who will keep the freedoms.... We have worked hard to strengthen governance standards at the FSF and to create a transparent leadership recruitment process. We look forward to tackling new challenges and opportunities this year."

The FSF's announcement calls the new "community engagement process" a "key result of a six-month consultant-led review designed to help make FSF governance and recruitment practices more transparent and participatory, while more systematically ensuring their commitment to the FSF's values and principles."

To say that Big Tech controls the internet might seem like an exaggeration. Increasingly, in at least one sense, it's literally true. From a report: The internet can seem intangible, a post-physical environment where things like viral posts, virtual goods and metaverse concerts just sort of happen. But creating that illusion requires a truly gargantuan -- and quickly-growing -- web of physical connections. Fiber-optic cable, which carries 95% of the world's international internet traffic, links up pretty much all of the world's data centers, those vast server warehouses where the computing happens that transforms all those 1s and 0s into our experience of the internet. Where those fiber-optic connections link up countries across the oceans, they consist almost entirely of cables running underwater -- some 1.3 million kilometers (or more than 800,000 miles) of bundled glass threads that make up the actual, physical international internet. And until recently, the overwhelming majority of the undersea fiber-optic cable being installed was controlled and used by telecommunications companies and governments. Today, that's no longer the case.

In less than a decade, four tech giants -- Microsoft, Google parent Alphabet, Meta (formerly Facebook ) and Amazon -- have become by far the dominant users of undersea-cable capacity. Before 2012, the share of the world's undersea fiber-optic capacity being used by those companies was less than 10%. Today, that figure is about 66%. And these four are just getting started, say analysts, submarine cable engineers and the companies themselves. In the next three years, they are on track to become primary financiers and owners of the web of undersea internet cables connecting the richest and most bandwidth-hungry countries on the shores of both the Atlantic and the Pacific, according to subsea cable analysis firm TeleGeography. By 2024, the four are projected to collectively have an ownership stake in more than 30 long-distance undersea cables, each up to thousands of miles long, connecting every continent on the globe save Antarctica. In 2010, these companies had an ownership stake in only one such cable -- the Unity cable partly owned by Google, connecting Japan and the U.S.