Microsoft today open-sourced a tool that can be used to build lab environments where security teams can simulate attacks and verify the detection effectiveness of Microsoft security products. From a report: Named SimuLand, the tool was specifically built to help security/IT teams that use Microsoft products such as Microsoft 365 Defender, Azure Defender, and Azure Sentinel. Currently, SimuLand comes with only one lab environment, specialized in detecting Golden SAML attacks.

However, Microsoft said it's working on adding new ones. Community contributions are also welcomed, and the reason the project has been open-sourced on GitHub, with Microsoft hoping to get a helping hand from the tens of thousands of security teams that run its software. "If you would like to share a new end-to-end attacker path, let us know by opening an issue in our GitHub repository, and we would be happy to collaborate and provide some resources to make it happen," Microsoft said today in a blog post. But Microsoft doesn't want only lab environments specialized in executing well-known techniques or adversary tradecraft. The OS maker is also encouraging the community to contribute improved detection rules for the attacks they're sharing, so everyone can benefit from the shared knowledge.

System76 today unveiled its newest product -- the "Launch Configurable Keyboard." It is a mechanical keyboard made in the USA with a focus on open source. The Launch has both open source firmware and hardware. Even the configuration software -- which runs on Linux, Windows, and macOS -- is open source. From a report: "With a wide swath of customization options, the Launch is flexible to a variety of needs and use cases. The keyboard's thoughtful design keeps everything within reach, vastly reducing awkward hand contortions. Launch comes with additional keycaps and a convenient keycap puller, meaning one can swap keys based on personal workflow preferences to maximize efficiency. Launch also features a novel split Space Bar, which allows the user to swap out one Space Bar keycap for Shift, Backspace, or Function to reduce hand fatigue while typing. Launch uses only three keycap sizes to vastly expand configuration options," says System76. The keyboard, which has a removable USB-C cable for connectivity, is priced at $285.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: This week, the academic community provided a rather impressive example of the promise of neural implants. Using an implant, a paralyzed individual managed to type out roughly 90 characters per minute simply by imagining that he was writing those characters out by hand. Somewhere in our writing thought process, we form the intention of using a specific character, and using an implant to track this intention could potentially work. Unfortunately, the process is not especially well understood. Downstream of that intention, a decision is transmitted to the motor cortex, where it's translated into actions. Again, there's an intent stage, where the motor cortex determines it will form the letter (by typing or writing, for example), which is then translated into the specific muscle motions required to perform the action. These processes are much better understood, and they're what the research team targeted for their new work. Specifically, the researchers placed two implants in the premotor cortex of a paralyzed person. This area is thought to be involved in forming the intentions to perform movements. Catching these intentions is much more likely to produce a clear signal than catching the movements themselves, which are likely to be complex (any movement involves multiple muscles) and depend on context (where your hand is relative to the page you're writing on, etc.). With the implants in the right place, the researchers asked the participant to imagine writing letters on a page and recorded the neural activity as he did so.

Altogether, there were roughly 200 electrodes in the participant's premotor cortex. Not all of them were informative for letter-writing. But for those that were, the authors performed a principal component analysis, which identified the features of the neural recordings that differed the most when various letters were imagined. Converting these recordings into a two-dimensional plot, it was obvious that the activity seen when writing a single character always clustered together. And physically similar characters -- p and b, for example, or h, n, and r -- formed clusters near each other. (The researchers also asked the participant to do punctuation marks like a comma and question mark and used a > to indicate a space and a tilde for a period.) Overall, the researchers found they could decipher the appropriate character with an accuracy of a bit over 94 percent, but the system required a relatively slow analysis after the neural data was recorded. To get things working in real time, the researchers trained a recurrent neural network to estimate the probability of a signal corresponding to each letter.

Despite working with a relatively small amount of data (only 242 sentences' worth of characters), the system worked remarkably well. The lag between the thought and a character appearing on screen was only about half a second, and the participant was able to produce about 90 characters per minute, easily topping the previous record for implant-driven typing, which was about 25 characters per minute. The raw error rate was only about 5 percent, and applying a system like a typing autocorrect could drop the error rate down to only 1 percent. The tests were all done with prepared sentences. Once the system was validated, however, the researchers asked the participant to type out free-form answers to questions. Here, the speed went down a bit (to 75 characters a minute) and errors went up to 2 percent after autocorrection, but the system still worked. The findings have been published in the journal Nature.

"It never occurred to me that a Facebook-appointed panel could avoid a clear decision about Donald Trump's heinous online behavior," writes a New York Times technology reporter. "But that is what it's done..."

They call the board's decision "kind of perfect, actually, since it forces everyone's hand — from the Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg to our limp legislators in Congress..."

The editor of the conservative National Review adds: If Facebook had set out to demonstrate that it has awesome power over speech in the United States, including speech at the core of the nation's political debate, and is wielding that power arbitrarily, indeed has no idea what its own rules truly are or should be, it wouldn't have handled the question any differently... The oversight board underlines the astonishing fact that in reaching its most momentous free-speech decision ever in this country, in determining whether a former president of the United States can use its platform or not, Facebook made it up on the fly. "In applying this penalty," the board writes of the suspension, "Facebook did not follow a clear, published procedure." This is like the U.S. Supreme Court handing down decisions in the absence of a written Constitution, or a home-plate umpire calling balls and strikes without an agreed-upon strike zone...
John Samples, a member of the Oversight Board, has even said explicitly that their decision was not about former president Trump — but about Facebook itself. The Washington Post reports: Samples said the board found that Facebook enforced a rule that didn't exist at the time. Trump was suspended indefinitely, rather than permanently or for a specific period of time, as defined by the company's own rules. "In a sense we were being tough with them," Samples said.

Other members said the board's call should reassure anyone concerned that Facebook wields too much control over online speech. "Anyone who's concerned about Mark Zuckerberg's power and his company's power over our speech online should actually praise this decision," Julie Owono, executive director of Internet Sans Frontières, said at a virtual event hosted by the Stanford Cyber Policy Center. "The board refused to support an arbitrary suspension..."

The flurry of media appearances marked a critical moment in the board's existence, as it tries to prove its legitimacy, define its powers and establish its relationship with Facebook.
NPR notes that former Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, a board co-chair, even called Facebook "a bit lazy" for failing to set a specific penalty in the first place... "What we are telling Facebook is that they can't invent penalties as they go along. They have to stick to their own rules," Thorning-Schmidt said in an interview with Axios. The board's criticism didn't stop at Facebook's imposing what it called a "vague, standardless penalty." It slammed the company for trying to outsource its final verdict on Trump. "Facebook has a responsibility to its users and to its community and to the broader public to make its own decisions," Jamal Greene, another board co-chair and constitutional law professor at Columbia, said Thursday during an Aspen Institute event. "The board's job is to make sure that Facebook is doing its job," he said.

Tensions between the board's view of the scope of its role and Facebook's were also evident in the board's revelation that the company wouldn't answer seven of the 46 questions it asked about the Trump case. The questions Facebook refused to answer included how its own design and algorithms might have amplified the reach of Trump's posts and contributed to the Capitol assault. "The ones that the company refused to answer to are precisely related to what happened before Jan. 6," Julie Owono, an oversight board member and executive director of the digital rights group Internet Sans Frontières, said at the Aspen Institute event.

"Our decision says that you cannot make such an important decision, such a serious decision for freedom of expression, freedom of speech, without the adequate context."

schwit1 shares a report from IEEE Spectrum, written by Evan Ackerman: A few weeks ago, the CTO of Cruise tweeted an example of one of their AVs demonstrating a safety behavior where it moves over to make room for a cyclist. What's interesting about this behavior, though, is that the AV does this for cyclists approaching rapidly from behind the vehicle, something a human is far less likely to notice, much less react to. A neat trick -- but what does it mean, and what's next? In the video [here], as the cyclist approaches from the rear right side at a pretty good clip, you can see the autonomous vehicle pull to the left a little bit, increasing the amount of space that the cyclist can use to pass on the right.

One important question that we're not really going to tackle here is whether this is even a good idea in the first place, since (as a cyclist) I'd personally prefer that cars be predictable rather than sometimes doing weirdly nice things that I might not be prepared for. But that's one of the things that makes cyclists tricky: we're unpredictable. And for AVs, dealing with unpredictable things is notoriously problematic. Cruise's approach to this, explains Rashed Haq, VP of Robotics at Cruise, is to try to give their autonomous system some idea of how unpredictable cyclists can be, and then plan its actions accordingly. Cruise has collected millions of miles of real-world data from its sensorized vehicles that include cyclists doing all sorts of things. And their system has built up a model of how certain it can be that when it sees a cyclist, it can accurately predict what that cyclist is going to do next.

Essentially, based on its understanding of the unpredictability of cyclists, the Cruise AV determined that the probability of a safe interaction is improved when it gives cyclists more space, so that's what it tries to do whenever possible. This behavior illustrates some of the critical differences between autonomous and human-driven vehicles. Humans drive around with relatively limited situational awareness and deal with things like uncertainty primarily on a subconscious level. AVs, on the other hand, are constantly predicting the future in very explicit ways. Humans tend to have the edge when something unusual happens, because we're able to instantly apply a lifetime's worth of common-sense knowledge about the world to our decision-making process. Meanwhile, AVs are always considering the safest next course of action across the entire space that they're able to predict.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: When humans first set foot in Australia more than 65,000 years ago, they faced the perilous task of navigating a landscape they'd never seen. Now, researchers have used supercomputers to simulate 125 billion possible travel routes and reconstruct the most likely "superhighways" these ancient immigrants used as they spread across the continent. The project offers new insight into how landmarks and water supplies shape human migrations, and provides archaeologists with clues for where to look for undiscovered ancient settlements.

It took weeks to run the complex simulations on a supercomputer operated by the U.S. government. But the number crunching ultimately revealed a network of "optimal superhighways" that had the most attractive combinations of easy walking, water, and landmarks. Optimal road map in hand, the researchers faced a fundamental question, says lead author Stefani Crabtree, an archaeologist at Utah State University, Logan, and the Santa Fe Institute: Was there any evidence that real people had once used these computer-identified corridors? To find out, the researchers compared their routes to the locations of the roughly three dozen archaeological sites in Australia known to be at least 35,000 years old. Many sites sat on or near the superhighways. Some corridors also coincided with ancient trade routes known from indigenous oral histories, or aligned with genetic and linguistic studies used to trace early human migrations. "I think all of us were surprised by the goodness of the fit," says archaeologist Sean Ulm of James Cook University, Cairns.

The map has also highlighted little-studied migration corridors that could yield future archaeological discoveries. For example, some early superhighways sat on coastal lands that are now submerged, giving marine researchers a guide for exploration. Even more intriguing, the authors and others say, are major routes that cut across several arid areas in Australia's center and in the northeastern state of Queensland. Those paths challenge a "long-standing view that the earliest people avoided the deserts," Ulm says. The Queensland highway, in particular, presents "an excellent focus point" for future archaeological surveys, says archaeologist Shimona Kealy of the Australian National University. The study has been published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.

Developer dekuNukem has detailed a methodology for refilling the DRM-protected detergent cassettes for a $486 portable dishwasher called Bob. Gizmodo reports: Bob is basically a small dishwasher that sits on your counter. It holds half a dozen dishes and some silverware, and you add water to the system by hand. It looks like a great alternative to a larger installed dishwasher or something nice for an apartment dweller. But it has a secret bit of DRM built in that keeps you wedded to the company's products. The Bob uses cassettes, called Rock and Pop (LOL!), that contain concentrated detergent and rinse liquids. The cassettes are similar to inkjet cartridges in that they store a small amount of information on a built-in chip -- in this case, a simple I2C EEPROM that can store a small amount of information. This chip stores the number of washes and will "cancel" a cassette when it's technically empty. The machine will then order new cassettes automatically. To Bob's credit, you can use your own detergent, but it isn't easy. And the cassettes aren't cheap.

"With shipping and VAT added, it costs a whopping $60 for 90 washes! That is 48p (67c) per wash. It might not sound like much, but it quickly adds up," wrote dekuNukem. "Over a year of daily washes, it would have cost $242 in Bob cassettes alone! Imagine paying that much recurring cost for a dishwasher!"

Using an EEPROM reader, they were able to pull the data from the cassette and even modify it, resulting in a simple system to reset the cartridges back to their original wash counts or, in one case, forcing the cassette to run about 70 more washes than originally advertised. Once dekuNukem figured out the coding mechanism, they had to figure out a way to refill the cassettes. They searched the internet for concentrated detergent offerings and found one that matched the website description exactly. "Refilling it yourself is more than 60 times cheaper, resulting in a massive 98% cost saving compared to buying new!" they wrote. The plans are available on dekuNukem's Github. You can also purchase the Cassette Rewinder, a pre-soldered board that will automatically reset the cassette EEPROM, for $29.99.

It's taken 17 years, with many setbacks and some deaths, and still Richard Branson's space mission is yet to launch. From a report: Richard Branson was running almost 15 years late. But as we rode into the Mojave desert on the morning of 12 December 2018, he was feeling upbeat and untroubled by the past. He wore jeans, a leather jacket and the easy smile of someone used to being behind schedule. Branson hadn't exactly squandered the past 15 years. He'd become a grandfather, moved to a private island in the Caribbean and expanded Virgin's business empire into banking, hotels, gyms, wedding dresses and more. But he was staking his legacy on Virgin Galactic, the space tourism company he formed in 2004. The idea was to build a rocketship with seats for eight -- two pilots, six passengers -- that would be carried aloft by a mothership, released about 45,000ft in the air and then zoom just beyond the lower limit of space, float around for a few minutes, before returning to Earth. He was charging $200,000 a seat. It did not initially seem like such a crazy idea. That year, a boutique aviation firm in Mojave, California, two hours north of Los Angeles, had built a prototype mothership and rocketship that a pair of test pilots flew to space three times, becoming the first privately built space craft. Branson hired the firm to design, build and test him a bigger version of the craft.

But the undertaking was proving far more difficult than Branson anticipated. An accidental explosion in 2007 killed three engineers. A mid-air accident in 2014 destroyed the ship and killed a test pilot, forcing Virgin Galactic to more or less start over. I approached the company shortly after the accident to ask if I could embed with them and write a story about their space programme for the New Yorker. I worked on the story for four years. After it came out, in August 2018, I spent another two years reporting and writing a book about the test pilots who fly Branson's spaceship. Amid the tragedies and setbacks, Branson remained optimistic of the prospect of imminent success. In 2004: "It is envisaged that Virgin Galactic will open for business by the beginning of 2005 and, subject to the necessary safety and regulatory approvals, begin operating flights from 2007." Then, in 2009: "I'm very confident that we should be able to meet 2011." Later, in 2017: "We are hopefully about three months before we are in space, maybe six months before I'm in space." Meanwhile, other private space companies, such as Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin, were making progress. Branson confessed that had he known in 2004 what he knew now, "I wouldn't have gone ahead with the project... We simply couldn't afford it."

His record on delivering promises has made him a polarising figure. Branson has appeared on lists of both hucksters and heroes. One poll ranked him second among people whom British children should emulate; Jesus Christ came third. His biographer describes him as "a card player with a weak hand who plays to strength," but also a "self-made and self-deprecating man whose flamboyance endears him to aspiring tycoons, who snap up his books and flock to his lectures to glean the secrets of fortune-hunting." But all of that was in the past; the turmoil and hardship would hopefully make the triumph all that much sweeter. For he and I knew as we headed into the desert that tomorrow could finally be the day that Virgin Galactic went to space.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Scientists from Stony Brook University and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior have pieced together a timeline of how brain and body size evolved in mammals over the last 150 million years. The findings, published in Science Advances, show that brain size relative to body size -- long considered an indicator of animal intelligence -- has not followed a stable scale over evolutionary time. The international team of 22 scientists, including biologists, evolutionary statisticians, and anthropologists, compared the brain mass of 1400 living and extinct mammals. For the 107 fossils examined -- among them ancient whales and the most ancient Old World monkey skull ever found -- they used endocranial volume data from skulls instead of brain mass data. The brain measurements were then analyzed along with body size to compare the scale of brain size to body size over deep evolutionary time.

According to the study, "big-brained" humans, dolphins, and elephants, for example, attained their proportions in different ways. Elephants increased in body size, but surprisingly, even more in brain size. Dolphins, on the other hand, generally decreased their body size while increasing brain size. Great apes showed a wide variety of body sizes, with a general trend towards increases in brain and body size. In comparison, ancestral hominins, which represent the human line, showed a relative decrease in body size and increase in brain size compared to great apes. The authors say that these complex patterns urge a re-evaluation of the deeply rooted paradigm that comparing brain size to body size for any species provides a measure of the species' intelligence. The study has been published in the journal Science Advances.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PC Gamer: The Oculus Quest 2 is a hell of a lot of hardware for $299. In fact, we're convinced that Facebook is making a loss on each unit sold. Even so, that pricing is one of the main reasons it's the most popular headset on Steam and our pick as the best VR headset. Well, that and the ease of use. [...] The thing is, that price seems too good to be true, with no other manufacturer's VR headset close to the specs list of the Quest 2 -- in either tethered or standalone form -- hitting the same low, low price. That money gets you a robust virtual reality headset with 6GB of RAM, a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 CPU, 64GB of storage, 1832x1920 per eye display and a pair of controllers. [...]

But there's one factor that could potentially offset that price -- Facebook has access to a whole lot of your data. This is something the Oculus Quest 2 is upfront about: You absolutely need a Facebook account in order to use the device and it does have its data collection policies in black and white. Although what isn't quite so obvious is how much your data is worth to Facebook. At least it isn't without a tiny bit of digging.

There is another version of the Quest 2 that isn't as discounted as the consumer version, and that's the one aimed at businesses. The actual hardware is identical, but the difference is you don't need to login in with a Facebook account in order to use it. The price for this model? $799. There's also an annual fee of $180 that kicks in a year after purchase, which covers Oculus' business services and support, but that just muddies the waters a little. The point being, the Quest 2 for business, the headset from which Facebook can't access your data directly, costs $500 more. So that's looking essentially like the value the social media giant attributes to your data, which either seems like a lot or barely anything at all, depending on your stance. The Supplemental Oculus Data Policy outlines what sort of data is actually being collected when you use the Quest 2. Such things as your physical dimension, including your hand size, how big your play area is using the Oculus Guardian system, data on any content you create using the Quest 2, as well as more obvious stuff like your device ID and IP address.

Maya Wei-Haas writes via National Geographic: Standing among patches of muddy snow on the outskirts of Baltimore, Maryland, I bent down to pick up a piece of the planet that should have been hidden miles below my feet. On that chilly February day, I was out with a pair of geologists to see an exposed section of Earth's mantle. While this layer of rock is usually found between the planet's crust and core, a segment peeks out of the scrubby Maryland forest, offering scientists a rare chance to study Earth's innards up close. Even more intriguing, the rock's unusual chemical makeup suggests that this piece of mantle, along with chunks of lower crust scattered around Baltimore, was once part of the seafloor of a now-vanished ocean.

Over the roughly 490 million years since their formation, these hunks of Earth were smashed by shifting tectonic plates and broiled by searing hot fluids rushing through cracks, altering both their composition and sheen. Mantle rock is generally full of sparkly green crystals of the mineral olivine, but the rock in my hand was surprisingly unremarkable to look at: mottled yellow-brown stone occasionally flecked with black. Because of this geologic clobbering, scientists have struggled for more than a century to determine the precise origins of this series of rocks. Now, Guice and his colleagues have applied a fresh eye and state-of-the-art chemical analyses to the set of rocky exposures in Baltimore. Their work shows that the seemingly bland series of stones once lurked underneath the ancient Iapetus Ocean.

More than half a billion years ago, this ocean spanned some 3,000 to 5,000 miles, cutting through what is now the United States' eastern seaboard. Much of the land where the Appalachian mountains now stand was on one side of the ocean, and parts of the modern East Coast were on the other. "It's a huge ocean between them, and we've got a little bit of that ocean smooshed in Baltimore," says Guice, lead author of a recent study describing the find in the journal Geosphere.

Millions of Americans are not getting the second doses of their Covid-19 vaccines, and their ranks are growing. From a report: More than five million people, or nearly 8 percent of those who got a first shot of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, have missed their second doses, according to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That is more than double the rate among people who got inoculated in the first several weeks of the nationwide vaccine campaign. Even as the country wrestles with the problem of millions of people who are wary about getting vaccinated at all, local health authorities are confronting an emerging challenge of ensuring that those who do get inoculated are doing so fully. The reasons vary for why people are missing their second shots. In interviews, some said they feared the side effects, which can include flulike symptoms. Others said they felt that they were sufficiently protected with a single shot.

Those attitudes were expected, but another hurdle has been surprisingly prevalent. A number of vaccine providers have canceled second-dose appointments because they ran out of supply or didn't have the right brand in stock. Walgreens, one of the biggest vaccine providers, sent some people who got a first shot of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine to get their second doses at pharmacies that only had the other vaccine on hand. Several Walgreens customers said in interviews that they scrambled, in some cases with help from pharmacy staff, to find somewhere to get the correct second dose. Others, presumably, simply gave up. From the outset, public health experts worried that it would be difficult to get everyone to return for a second shot three or four weeks after the first dose. It is no surprise that, as vaccines are rolled out more broadly, the numbers of those skipping their second dose have gone up.

For TSMC, being the world's largest foundry with nearly 500 customers has its peculiarities. On the one hand, the company can serve almost any client with almost any requirements. On the other hand, it has to stay ahead of everyone else both in terms of capacity and in terms of technology. As far as capacity is concerned, TSMC is unchallenged and is not going to be for years to come. From a report: As for fabrication technologies, TSMC has recently reiterated that it's confident that its N2, N3, and N4 processes will be available on time and will be more advanced than competing nodes. Early this year TSMC significantly boosted its 2021 CapEx budget to a $25-$28 billion range, further increasing it to around $30 billion as a part of its three-year plan to spend $100 billion on manufacturing capacities and R&D. [...] TSMC's N5 family of technologies also includes evolutionary N4 process that will enter risk production later this year and will be used for mass production in 2022. [...] In 2022, the world's largest contract maker of chips will roll out its brand-new N3 manufacturing process, which will keep using FinFET transistors, but is expected to offer the whole package of PPA improvements.

Friday on Richard Stallman's personal web site, he posed the question: Am I Doctor Stallman?

He's received 15 doctorates honoris causa — doctorates "for honor" — in the company of others whose achievements impressed him... So I was shocked to read an article which describes this as a sleazy marketing scheme, and claims that recipients of these degrees are not supposed to call themselves "Doctor."

The article says that universities hand out "honorary doctorates" readily to donors who have essentially bought them, and to performing artists so that they will entertain the students at graduation...

But my experience is totally different. I am not an entertainer, except for a few minutes when I don the robe and halo of Saint iGNUcius, and that is comic relief for a long, serious talk. I never donated money to the universities that gave me doctorates, nor could they expect me to. What's more, I never saw such people receive degrees along with me. The other recipients, when there were others, were likewise being honored for their work, not as a quid-pro-quo.

Why this difference? My doctorates come from universities in other countries, not in the US. I conjecture that buy-a-doctorate and sing-for-your-doctorate are found in the US only. (How sad for the US...!)

[O]n reading that Florida Atlantic University explicitly says that recipients of doctorates honoris causa are not permitted the title of Doctor, I began to wonder about the policies of the universities which had given me degrees, so I asked people at some of those universities about their policies.

The replies were quite disparate. One said, like Florida Atlantic, that it was not permitted. Another said I should write "Dr.(h.c.)." Another said it had no objection. So it seems that I am entitled to call myself Dr. Stallman.

Why do I do that? The personal reason is that these doctorates recognize decades of work for an important cause, and I am proud of them.

The reason that is beyond personal is so that people who know little or nothing of my career may decide, based on the title of "Doctor", to pay a little attention to that work and that cause, which is the free software movement. That may help us defeat the totalitarian control that today's digital technology is designed to impose.

Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and CEO of Twitter, tweeted Wednesday that bitcoin "incentivises renewable energy." And Elon Musk responded "True."

The BBC adds that the tweets came "despite experts warning otherwise." The cyrptocurrency's carbon footprint is as large as some of the world's biggest cities, studies suggest. But Mr Dorsey claims that could change if bitcoin miners worked hand-in-hand with renewable energy firms.

One expert said it was a "cynical attempt to greenwash" bitcoin. China, where more than two-thirds of power is from coal, accounts for more than 75% of bitcoin mining around the world...

The tweet comes soon after the release of a White Paper from Mr Dorsey's digital payment services firm Square, and global asset management business ARK Invest. Entitled "Bitcoin as key to an abundant, clean energy future", the paper argues that "bitcoin miners are unique energy buyers", because they offer flexibility, pay in a cryptocurrency, and can be based anywhere with an internet connection. "By combining miners with renewables and storage projects, we believe it could improve the returns for project investors and developers, moving more solar and wind projects into profitable territory," it said.

Author and bitcoin critic David Gerard described the paper as a "cynical exercise in bitcoin greenwashing".

"The reality is: bitcoin runs on coal," he told the BBC.... "Bitcoin mining is so ghastly and egregious that the number one job of bitcoin promoters is to make excuses for it — any excuse at all."

Earlier this week, Apple unveiled the refreshed 11 and 12.9-inch iPad Pro models with a notable change: The new iPad Pro models are powered by the M1 chip, the company's in-house chipset that also powers the current-generation MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and Mac mini. Is the company planning to put macOS on the iPad in the future or merge iPads and Macbooks? No remains the answer. Apple marketing chief Greg Joswiak, in an interview: "There's two conflicting stories people like to tell about the iPad and Mac. On the one hand, people say that they are in conflict with each other. That somebody has to decide whether they want a Mac, or they want an iPad. Or people say that we're merging them into one: that there's really this grand conspiracy we have, to eliminate the two categories and make them one. And the reality is neither is true. We're quite proud of the fact that we work really, really hard to create the best products in their respective category." Hardware chief John Ternus, in the same interview: "We're pushing to make the best Mac we can make; we're pushing to make the best iPad we can make."

The Internet of Secure Things Alliance, an IoT security certification body (a.k.a. ioXt), has launched a new security certification for mobile apps and VPNs. From a report: The new ioXt compliance program includes a 'mobile application profile' -- a set of security-related criteria against which apps can be certified. The profile or mobile app assessment includes additional requirements for virtual private network (VPN) applications. Google and Amazon had a hand in shaping the criteria, along with number of certified labs such as NCC Group and Dekra, and mobile app security testing vendors such as NowSecure. Google's VPN within the Google One service is one of the first to be certified against the criteria. Mobile app makers can get their apps certified against a set of security and privacy requirements. The ioXt Alliance has a broad cross-section of members from the tech industry, with its board comprising execs from Amazon, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Legrand, Resideo, Schneider Electric, T-Mobile, the Zigbee Alliance, and the Z-Wave Alliance. About 20 industry figures helped write the requirements for the mobile app profile, including Amit Agrawal, a principal security architect at Amazon, and Brooke Davis from the Strategic Partnerships team at Google Play. Both are vice-chairs of the mobile app profile group.

This week Bloomberg profiled "one of the most spectacular failures in modern financial history: No individual has lost so much money so quickly."

Meet Bill Hwang, founder of Archegos Capital Management: Starting in 2013, he parlayed more than $200 million left over from his shuttered hedge fund into a mind-boggling fortune by betting on stocks. Had he folded his hand in early March and cashed in, Hwang, 57, would have stood out among the world's billionaires... At its peak, Hwang's wealth briefly eclipsed $30 billion...

Hwang used swaps, a type of derivative that gives an investor exposure to the gains or losses in an underlying asset without owning it directly. This concealed both his identity and the size of his positions. Even the firms that financed his investments couldn't see the big picture. That's why on Friday, March 26, when investors around the world learned that a company called Archegos had defaulted on loans used to build a staggering $100 billion portfolio, the first question was, "Who on earth is Bill Hwang?"

Because he was using borrowed money and levering up his bets fivefold, Hwang's collapse left a trail of destruction. Banks dumped his holdings, savaging stock prices. Credit Suisse Group AG, one of Hwang's lenders, lost $4.7 billion; several top executives, including the head of investment banking, have been forced out. Nomura Holdings Inc. faces a loss of about $2 billion... On March 25, when Hwang's financiers were finally able to compare notes, it became clear that his trading strategy was strikingly simple. Archegos appears to have plowed most of the money it borrowed into a handful of stocks — ViacomCBS, GSX Techedu, and Shopify among them. This was no arbitrage on collateralized bundles of obscure financial contracts. Hwang invested the Tiger way, using deep fundamental analysis to find promising stocks, and he built a highly concentrated portfolio. The denizens of Reddit's WallStreetBets day trading on Robinhood can do almost the same thing, riding such popular themes as cord cutting, virtual education, and online shopping. Only no brokerage will extend them anywhere near the amount of leverage billionaires get...

People familiar with Archegos say the firm steadily ramped up its leverage. Initially that meant about "2x," or $1 million borrowed for every $1 million of capital. By late March the leverage was 5x or more. Raising money to invest in streaming made sense. Or so it seemed in the ViacomCBS C-suite. Instead, the stock tanked 9% on Tuesday and 23% on Wednesday. Hwang's bets suddenly went haywire, jeopardizing his swap agreements...

Hwang, say people with swaps experience, likely had borrowed roughly $85 million for every $20 million, investing $100 and setting aside $5 to post margin as needed. But the massive portfolio had cratered so quickly that its losses blew through that small buffer as well as his capital.
"The best thing anyone can say about the Archegos collapse is that it didn't spark a market meltdown," the article concludes. "The worst thing is that it was an entirely preventable disaster made possible by Hwang's lenders..."

"Regulators are to blame, too. As Congress was told at hearings following the GameStop Corp. debacle in January, there's not enough transparency in the stock market."

A British company is suing Microsoft for $370m in damages [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source] in the English High Court, alleging that the US company is trying to crush a multibillion-dollar market in second-hand versions of its software. From a report: ValueLicensing buys pre-owned Microsoft software licences from companies that upgrade their IT or become insolvent, and then resells them across the UK and Europe. It claims on its website that its customers can save up to 70 per cent by buying used software, and points to one NHS Trust that allegedly saved $1.37 m by using Microsoft Office 2019, rather than the latest version of the office tools suite. Jonathan Horley, ValueLicensing's founder, accused Microsoft of harming competition in the used software market by persuading companies to relinquish their perpetual licences, often in exchange for discounts on Microsoft's cloud-based software, such as Office 365. "Microsoft has an incentive to move to its new cloud-based model and remove the old licences from the market so customers have no choice but to move to its subscription model," said Mr Horley, in an interview with the Financial Times.

Sky TV, one of the largest broadcasters in the UK, has won a court injunction to prevent links to its TV shows from being illegally shared online. The interim order targets a man who moderated several TV-focused communities on Reddit while raising funds through Patreon and PayPal. TorrentFreak reports: According to an action filed by Sky in a Scottish court, Cherzo1 was the moderator of three sub-Reddits -- r/UKTVLAND, r/notapanelshow, and r/UKPanelShowsOnly -- which together had more than 51,000 subscribers. Cherzo also had a YouTube channel with more than 95,000 subscribers. According to Sky, all of these platforms were used to infringe the company's copyrights. In evidence to support its action, Sky states that Cherzo1 was motivated by money, receiving payments from fans and followers via Patreon and directly into his PayPal account. [...]

In order to curtail Cherzo1's activities, Sky asked the court to hand down an "interdict ad interim," a term used in Scotland to describe an interim injunction. The broadcaster asked the court to order Cherzo1 to stop uploading copies of broadcasts, stop posting hyperlinks to shows on Reddit and anywhere else on the Internet, and forbid him from assisting any third party to do the same. A court will grant an interim interdict if it believes there is a prima facie case against the defendant. [...] Anyone found breaching such an order could be subjected to a fine or even imprisonment.