RoccamOccam writes: The developers at Discord have seen success with Rust on their video encoding pipeline for Go Live and on their Elixir NIFs' server. Recently, they penned a post explaining how they have drastically improved the performance of a service by switching its implementation from Go to Rust.

From the post, "Remarkably, we had only put very basic thought into optimization as the Rust version was written. Even with just basic optimization, Rust was able to outperform the hyper hand-tuned Go version. This is a huge testament to how easy it is to write efficient programs with Rust compared to the deep dive we had to do with Go."

In a new essay for Harper's magazine, Martin Scorsese argues the art of cinema is being systematically devalued and demeaned by streaming services and their algorithms, "and reduced to its lowest common denominator, 'content.'" "Content" became a business term for all moving images: a David Lean movie, a cat video, a Super Bowl commercial, a superhero sequel, a series episode. It was linked, of course, not to the theatrical experience but to home viewing, on the streaming platforms that have come to overtake the moviegoing experience, just as Amazon overtook physical stores.

On the one hand, this has been good for filmmakers, myself included. On the other hand, it has created a situation in which everything is presented to the viewer on a level playing field, which sounds democratic but isn't. If further viewing is "suggested" by algorithms based on what you've already seen, and the suggestions are based only on subject matter or genre, then what does that do to the art of cinema...?

[A]t this point, we can't take anything for granted. We can't depend on the movie business, such as it is, to take care of cinema. In the movie business, which is now the mass visual entertainment business, the emphasis is always on the word "business," and value is always determined by the amount of money to be made from any given property — in that sense, everything from Sunrise to La Strada to 2001 is now pretty much wrung dry and ready for the "Art Film" swim lane on a streaming platform.
Is Scorsese right? Slashdot reader entertainme shared some reactions gathered by the BBC's Entertainment reporter. Elinor Carmi, research associate at Liverpool University's communication and media department sees a "battle between the old and new gatekeepers of art and culture." "At its core, curation has always been conducted behind the scenes", with little clarity as to the rationale behind the choices made to produce and distribute art and culture, she says. Take the U.S.'s Motion Picture Association film rating system. The 2006 documentary, This Film Is Not Yet Rated, explored how film ratings affect the distribution of films, and accusations that big studio films get more lenient ratings than independent companies... "[I]t would be a mistake to present the old gatekeepers in romantic colours compared to new technology companies. In both cases, we are talking about powerful institutions that define, control and manage the boundaries of what is art and culture," Carmi says....

So is Scorsese right to suggest that streaming services reduce content to the "lowest common denominator"? Journalist and media lecturer Tufayel Ahmed suggests they are an easy target, and the reality is a little more complex. He says the focus on "pulling in the numbers" can mean some of the best shows don't get the promotion and are therefore cancelled... "Some of the best stuff on streaming seems to get little buzz, while tons of marketing and publicity is thrown behind more generic fare that they know people will watch. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy." Scorsese himself directly benefited from this by relying on Netflix to fund his 2019 gangster film The Irishman after traditional studios baulked at the cost. "There's an argument to be made about streaming services investing in publicity and marketing for these projects to create awareness," says Ahmed.

But if responsibility in part lands on the shoulders of streaming services, the choices of the audience themselves cannot be forgotten. "Algorithms alone can't be blamed for people consuming lowbrow content over series and movies that are deemed worthy, because people have flocked to easy viewing over acclaimed dramas on television, for example, for years."
The BBC ultimately argues that perhaps "the streaming algorithms really aren't to blame after all, but simply made in our image." But in his essay Scorsese remembered how the brave pioneering decisions made in the 1960s by film distributors and exhibitors led to that moment's "shared excitement over the possibilities of cinema" — and seems to want to preserve that special feeling: Those of us who know the cinema and its history have to share our love and our knowledge with as many people as possible. And we have to make it crystal clear to the current legal owners of these films that they amount to much, much more than mere property to be exploited and then locked away. They are among the greatest treasures of our culture, and they must be treated accordingly.

In the year 2000, Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich answered questions from Slashdot's readers.

Late Friday night, the AV Club described Metallica's appearance at the opening ceremonies for the (now online) version of Blizzard Entertainment's annual event BlizzCon: The opening ceremonies were being broadcast online, both through the official BlizzCon page, YouTube, and Twitch. And you know what happens when licensed music gets played on the internet, don't you, folks? That's right: Copyright issues!

Per Uproxx, the audio of James, Lars, and the boys' performance apparently went out as per usual on YouTube and the BlizzCon page — although the whole thing appears to have been excised from the YouTube upload of the event. But on Twitch... On Twitch, things did not go so well. Which is to say that, even though it was being hosted on the company's official twitchgaming channel, the performance was ominously preceded by a chyron noting that "The upcoming musical performance is subject to copyright protection by the applicable copyright holder."

And then this happened....

Can we prove that someone at Twitch intentionally picked the dorkiest, most Zelda forest-ass music imaginable to have Metallica rock their little hearts out to, instead of broadcasting their extremely copyrighted music (and thus having to deal with the possibility of issuing one of their ubiquitous DMCA takedown notices to themselves)? Obviously not.... On the other hand, we can prove that it is extremely funny to watch this happen, especially — as many people have pointed out — since Metallica is at least partially responsible for the restrictive character of many online musical streaming laws that dominate the internet today, after their high-profile campaign against Napster way back at the dawn of the MP3.
In other news, Diablo II is being remastered and re-released later this year.

Massachusetts-based amateur historian Jim Hamilton, who developed the Free Fall Research Page -- an online database of nearly every imaginable human plummet, documents one case of a sky diver who, upon total parachute failure, was saved by bouncing off high-tension wires. Contrary to popular belief, water is an awful choice. Like concrete, liquid doesn't compress. Hitting the ocean is essentially the same as colliding with a sidewalk, Hamilton explains, except that pavement (perhaps unfortunately) won't "open up and swallow your shattered body." Popular Mechanics: With a target in mind, the next consideration is body position. To slow your descent, emulate a sky diver. Spread your arms and legs, present your chest to the ground, and arch your back and head upward. This adds friction and helps you maneuver. But don't relax. This is not your landing pose. The question of how to achieve ground contact remains, regrettably, given your predicament, a subject of debate. A 1942 study in the journal War Medicine noted "distribution and compensation of pressure play large parts in the defeat of injury." Recommendation: wide-body impact. But a 1963 report by the Federal Aviation Agency argued that shifting into the classic sky diver's landing stance -- feet together, heels up, flexed knees and hips -- best increases survivability. The same study noted that training in wrestling and acrobatics would help people survive falls. Martial arts were deemed especially useful for hard-surface impacts: "A 'black belt' expert can reportedly crack solid wood with a single blow," the authors wrote, speculating that such skills might be transferable.

The ultimate learn-by-doing experience might be a lesson from Japanese parachutist Yasuhiro Kubo, who holds the world record in the activity's banzai category. The sky diver tosses his chute from the plane and then jumps out after it, waiting as long as possible to retrieve it, put it on and pull the ripcord. In 2000, Kubo -- starting from 9,842 feet -- fell for 50 seconds before recovering his gear. A safer way to practice your technique would be at one of the wind-tunnel simulators found at about a dozen U.S. theme parks and malls. But neither will help with the toughest part: sticking the landing. For that you might consider -- though it's not exactly advisable -- a leap off the world's highest bridge, France's Millau Viaduct; its platform towers 891 feet over mostly spongy farmland. Water landings -- if you must -- require quick decision-making. Studies of bridge-jump survivors indicate that a feet-first, knife-like entry (aka "the pencil") best optimizes your odds of resurfacing. The famed cliff divers of Acapulco, however, tend to assume a head-down position, with the fingers of each hand locked together, arms outstretched, protecting the head. Whichever you choose, first assume the free-fall position for as long as you can. Then, if a feet-first entry is inevitable, the most important piece of advice, for reasons both unmentionable and easily understood, is to clench your butt.

Facebook said Wednesday that it would no longer allow Australian publishers to share news on Facebook or allow Australian people to view or share international news sources. From a report: The change comes as Australia prepares to pass a law that would require companies like Facebook and Google to pay news publishers to carry their stories. "The proposed law fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between our platform and publishers who use it to share news content. It has left us facing a stark choice: attempt to comply with a law that ignores the realities of this relationship, or stop allowing news content on our services in Australia," Facebook's managing director of Australia and New Zealand, William Easton, wrote in a blog post. "With a heavy heart, we are choosing the latter." Before Facebook's announcement Wednesday, Google and News Corp struck a deal through which Google will pay the company -- which owns The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, MarketWatch and The New York Post -- to feature their stories in Google News Showcase. Facebook addressed the companies' divergent responses in the blog post. "Our platforms have fundamentally different relationships with news. Google Search is inextricably intertwined with news and publishers do not voluntarily provide their content," Easton wrote. "On the other hand, publishers willingly choose to post news on Facebook, as it allows them to sell more subscriptions, grow their audiences and increase advertising revenue." Easton went on to describe the "business gains" of news on Facebook as "minimal," writing that it accounts for 4% of all content on the platform.

Volkswagen's CEO Herbert Diess isn't intimidated by Apple, even though the tech company potentially has an electric car on the way. From a report: "The car industry is not a typical tech sector that you could take over at a single stroke," Diess said in an interview with German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. "Apple will not manage that overnight." For years, industry observers have speculated that Apple will release its own electric, self-driving car. That conversation was reignited in December 2020, when Reuters, citing unnamed sources, reported that Apple planned to produce a passenger vehicle by 2024.

In April 2017, Apple received a permit from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to test self-driving vehicles there. "There's just so much going on in [electric and autonomous vehicles] and connected tech," Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a note to investors in December 2020. "It is perhaps a fitting time of the world's most valuable company to play its hand in the $10 trillion global mobility market." Volkswagen is also aiming to be a dominant force in the electric car field. The car company sold 231,600 battery electric vehicles in 2020, according to figures published by the company in January.

Peter Daszak is part of the World Health Organization's 14-member team investigating the origins of the coronavirus. This weekend on Twitter he described "explaining key findings of our exhausting month-long work in China" to journalists — only to see team members "selectively misquoted to fit a narrative that was prescribed before the work began."

Daszak was responding to a New York Times article which painted China as uncooperative for failing to hand over some raw data. But ironically, the next day the Times published a longer interview they'd done with Daszak, which acknowledges that Daszak "said that the visit had provided some new clues..."

The Times had even specifically asked him if China's attitude made their work difficult, to which Daszak had explicitly answered: no. "You've got a task to do. You've volunteered. You know what it's going to be like. You get caught up in the historical importance. I don't know if we were the first foreigners to walk around the Huanan seafood market, which is blocked off even to Chinese citizens. The only people that have been in there have been the Chinese disease investigators. We met with the doctors that treated the first known Covid patients."
The Times also asked if they'd learned anything they didn't know before. Daszak's response: From Day 1, the data we were seeing were new that had never been seen outside China. Who were the vendors in the Huanan seafood market? Where did they get their supply chains? And what were the contacts of the first cases? How real were the first cases? What other clusters were there? When you asked for more, the Chinese scientists would go off, and a couple of days later, they've done the analysis, and we've got new information. It was extremely useful.
The team also learned how extensively China's disease-control center had investigated the Wuhan market: They'd actually done over 900 swabs in the end, a huge amount of work. They had been through the sewage system. They'd been into the air ventilation shaft to look for bats. They'd caught animals around the market. They'd caught cats, stray cats, rats, they even caught one weasel. They'd sampled snakes. People had live snakes at the market, live turtles, live frogs. Rabbits were there, rabbit carcasses... Animals were coming into that market that could have carried the coronavirus. They could have been infected by bats somewhere else in China and brought it in. So that's clue No. 1... Some of these are coming from places where we know the nearest relatives of the virus are found. So there's the real red flag...

There were other markets. And we do know that some of the patients had links to other markets. We need to do some further work, and then the Chinese colleagues need to do some further work...

What is the next step?

For the animals chain, it's straightforward. The suppliers are known. They know the farm name; they know the owner of the farm. You've got to go down to the farm and interview the farmer and the family. You've got to test them. You've got to test the community. You've got to go and look and see if there are any animals left at any farms nearby and see if they've got evidence of infection, and see if there is any cross-border movement.
The Times' interview begins by specifically acknowledging Daszak's statement about new information obtained on the visit, "which all of the scientists, Chinese and international, agreed most likely pointed to an animal origin within China or Southeast Asia.

"The scientists have largely discounted claims that the virus originated in a lab, saying that possibility was so unlikely that it was not worth further investigation."

Friday the New York Times (following up on reports from the Wall Street Journal) wrote that China had "refused to hand over" important raw data to a 14-member World Health Organization team investigating the origins of the coronavirus, reporting that "their Chinese counterparts were frustrated by the team's persistent questioning and demands for data."

But Saturday two of those 14 team members disputed that characterization, posting on Twitter that "This was NOT my experience" — even though the Times had quoted both of them to support its article.

First Peter Daszak, president of the U.S. national science academy's microbial threats forum, weighed in. "As lead of animal/environment working group I found trust and openness with my China counterparts. We DID get access to critical new data throughout. We DID increase our understanding of likely spillover pathways. New data included env. & animal carcass testing, names of suppliers to Huanan Market, analyses of excess mortality in Hubei, range of covid-like symptoms for months prior, sequence data linked to early cases & site visits w/ unvetted live Q&A etc. All in report coming soon!"

Then Thea Kølsen Fischer, a Danish epidemiologist on the team, tweeted that the Times hadn't accurately described her experience either. "We DID build up a good relationship in the Chinese/Int Epi-team! Allowing for heated arguments reflects a deep level of engagement in the room. Our quotes are intendedly twisted casting shadows over important scientific work."

Daszak reappeared to respond to her tweet, writing "Hear! Hear! It's disappointing to spend time with journalists explaining key findings of our exhausting month-long work in China, to see our colleagues selectively misquoted to fit a narrative that was prescribed before the work began. Shame on you @nytimes!"

Ironically, the next day the Times published a longer interview they'd done with Daszak, which acknowledges that Daszak "said that the visit had provided some new clues..."

The Times had even specifically asked him if China's attitude made their work difficult, to which Daszak explicitly had answered: no.

While GameStop's surge has been heralded as a victory for underdogs, "Growing evidence casts doubt on the idea that the episode mostly benefited small-time investors..." reports the Washington Post. (Alternate URLs here and here
"And, in at least some cases, novice investors lost their shirts." Giant mutual funds that own the largest stakes in GameStop saw the biggest gains in value. Hedge funds — some that have started using algorithms to track retail investors on social media sites — appear to have bought and sold millions of shares during the stock's most volatile period of trading, industry experts said... Instead of heralding a new wave of investor populism, the rise and fall of GameStop's stock may end up reinforcing what professional investors have known for a long time: Wall Street is very good at making money, and more often than not, smaller investors lose out to wealthy traders and giant institutions.

The four largest asset managers in the world together own 39 percent of GameStop shares, according to regulatory filings. Those stakes, which are mostly held for years in passive index funds, have collectively gained roughly $1 billion in value since the beginning of this year. One hedge fund, Senvest Management, recently boasted to clients that it made more than $700 million from a bet it placed on GameStop in September, the Wall Street Journal reported last week...

The sheer number of shares that changed hands during the stock's most manic trading period in late January suggests the episode was driven by more than just small, retail investors. Some hedge funds bought shares because they were forced to "cover" their short positions — a financial cost imposed on investors who bet a stock will go down before it goes up. Meanwhile, other hedge fund managers were probably taking calculated, short-term risks buying and selling as the stock price traded up, said Robert J. Shapiro, a policy fellow at Georgetown University and former economic adviser to President Bill Clinton. "You have hundreds of millions of shares being traded at prices of $200 to $300 a share," Shapiro said. "The Reddit crew cannot afford to play in this game in any significant way...."

Hedge funds have started to build algorithms or hire outside firms that specialize in scanning conversations on Reddit and Twitter for clues about what retail traders are thinking... "The most innovative investment firms realized that tracking Reddit was important to portfolio management," said Justin Zhen, co-founder of Thinknum Alternative Data, a New York software firm with more than 300 clients who pay for data scraped from various sources across the Web...

industry experts say the soaring stock price was almost certainly given a boost by the hidden hand of larger investors...

Another possibility regulators are examining is whether employees of large Wall Street firms were actively using the Reddit forum to boost their portfolios.
The Post also got this pithy summation from Andrew Hong, an analyst for a financial software company in Toronto. "There are some really smart people on [WallStreetBets], but for the most part, all this is just poor habitual gambling addicts versus rich habitual gambling addicts."

Cyber-security powerhouse Proofpoint has filed a lawsuit this week against Facebook in relation to the social network's attempt to confiscate domain names the security firm was using for phishing awareness training. From a report: The case is a countersuit to a Facebook filing from November 30, 2020, when the social network used a UDRP (Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution) request to force domain name registrar Namecheap to hand over several domain names that were mimicking Facebook and Instagram brands. Among the listed domain names were the likes of facbook-login.com, facbook-login.net, instagrarn.ai, instagrarn.net, and instagrarn.org.

In court documents filed on Tuesday, Proofpoint said the UDRP should not apply to these domains, which it should be allowed to keep and continue using. Proofpoint argues that UDRP requests should only be used for domains registered in bad faith. The security firm instead says its use of the Facebook and Instagram lookalike domains "has been in good faith and for a legitimate purpose." Proofpoint claims its phishing awareness tests are crucial for the security of its customers, but also for the security of Facebook itself, as the phishing awareness tests teach users to recognize Facebook and Instagram lookalike domains and phishing attacks -- something that Facebook also benefits from, although indirectly.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Tesla's $1.5 billion investment in Bitcoin may be good for Elon Musk, but it's definitely risky for the company that made him the world's richest man, according to investors, analysts and money managers at some of the country's largest banks. As a standard bearer for the consumer electric vehicle industry and the broader climate tech movement rallying around it, Tesla's bet to go all in on crypto could damage its climate bona fides and its reputation with customers even as other automakers pour in to the EV market. Given Bitcoin's current environmental footprint, the deal flies in the face of Tesla's purported interest in moving the world to cleaner sources of energy and commerce. Until the energy grid decarbonizes in places like Russia and China, mining bitcoin remains a pretty dirty business (from an energy perspective), according to some energy investors who declined to be identified because they were not authorized to speak about Musk's plans.

"We were talking about people doing this in Russia back in 2018 and how they were tapping coal power to run their mining operations," one investor said. "The cost per transaction from an energy intensity standpoint has only gotten more intense. I don't see how those things coalesce, climate and crypto." The stake makes Tesla one of the largest corporate holders of Bitcoin but represents a massive portion of the company's $19 billion in cash and cash equivalents on hand. "Given the size of their treasury it feels irresponsible, IMO," wrote one investor whose firm backed Tesla from its earliest days. The company's move could be seen as another example of the absurdity of U.S. capital markets in today's investment climate -- and the underlying cynicism of some of its biggest beneficiaries. "The announcement that Tesla has diversified its treasury through the addition of bitcoin is not surprising, nor is the assuredness implied by an 8% allocation of cash-on-hand. Equal to Tesla's R&D expenditure for 2020, this investment is significant to the Company and shows a commitment to maximizing shareholder returns," wrote Stillmark founding partner Alyse Killeen. "Elon Musk has a long history of operating at the precipice of what's possible technically and setting the trend of what's to later become common operationally. I suspect the same will be true here, and that Tesla is the first of a larger cohort of publicly-traded companies that will aim to optimize the returns of their cash via bitcoin."

Qualcomm has unveiled the X65, what it says is the "world's first" 10-gigabit 5G modem. Engadget reports: While that's not hugely faster than the 7.5Gbps of the X60, it promises a speed that was previously reserved for Ethernet and other wired connections. The X65 also boasts some helpful functional improvements, including AI-based antenna tuning that better responds to hand grips. You'll also find better power-saving measures and a newer "Smart Transmit" system that boots upload speeds and overall coverage.

The X65 is currently sampling to customers and should reach shipping devices in 2021, although Qualcomm didn't name customers. Don't count on it reaching many phones, at least not at first. [...] While it will support "premium smartphone experiences," you're more likely to see it used in laptops, fixed 5G broadband or similar areas where a separate modem isn't an issue.

The U.S. agency overseeing elections has "quietly weakened a key element of proposed security standards..." reports the Associated Press, "raising concern among voting-integrity experts that many such systems will remain vulnerable to hacking." The Election Assistance Commission (EAC) is poised to approve its first new security standards in 15 years after an arduous process involving multiple technical and elections community bodies and open hearings. But ahead of a scheduled February 10 ratification vote by commissioners, the EAC leadership tweaked the draft standards to remove language that stakeholders interpreted as banning wireless modems and chips from voting machines as a condition for federal certification. The mere presence of such wireless hardware poses unnecessary risks for tampering that could alter data or programs on election systems, say computer security specialists and activists, some of whom have long complained than the EAC bends too easily to industry pressure.

Agency leaders argue that overall, the revised guidelines represent a major security improvement. They stress that the rules require manufacturers to disable wireless functions present in any machines, although the wireless hardware can remain.

In a February 3 letter to the agency, computer scientists and voting integrity activists say the change "profoundly weakens voting system security and will introduce very real opportunities to remotely attack election systems." They demand the wireless hardware ban be restored...

The ban on wireless hardware in voting machines would force vendors who currently build systems with off-the-shelf components to rely on more expensive custom-built hardware, said EAC Chair Benjamin Hovland, which could hurt competition in an industry already dominated by a trio of companies. He also argued that the guidelines are voluntary, although many state laws are predicated on them... Hovland stressed that the amended guidelines say all wireless capability must be disabled in voting equipment. But computer experts say that if the hardware is present, the software that activates it can be introduced. And the threat is not just from malign actors but also from the vendors and their clients, who could enable the wireless capability for maintenance purposes then forget to turn it off, leaving machines vulnerable...

Experts are pushing for universal use of hand-marked paper ballots and better audits to bolster confidence in election results.

"The same legalese that can ban Donald Trump from Twitter can bar users from joining class-action lawsuits," warns the official Editorial Board of the New York Times, urging "It's time to fix the fine print." [Alternate URL here] [M]ost people have no idea what is signed away when they click "agree" to binding terms of service contracts — again and again on phones, laptops, tablets, watches, e-readers and televisions. Agreeing often means allowing personal data to be resold or waiving the right to sue or join a class-action lawsuit... Because corporations and their lawyers know most consumers don't have the time or wherewithal to study their new terms, which can stretch to 20,000 words — about the length of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" — they stuff them with opaque provisions and lengthy legalistic explanations meant to confuse or obfuscate. Understanding a typical company's terms, according to one study, requires 14 years of education, which is beyond the level most Americans attain. A 2012 Carnegie Mellon study found that the average American would have to devote 76 work days just to read over tech companies' policies. That number would probably be much higher today.

At its core, the arrangement is unbalanced, putting the burden on consumers to read through voluminous, nonnegotiable documents, written to benefit corporations in exchange for access to their services. It's hard to imagine, by contrast, being asked to sign a 60-page printed contract before entering a bowling alley or a florist shop... Though courts have held terms of service contracts to be binding, there is generally no legal requirement that companies make them comprehensible. It is understandable, then, that companies may feel emboldened to insert terms that advantage them at their customers' expense.

That includes provisions that most consumers wouldn't knowingly agree to: an inability to delete one's own account, granting companies the right to claim credit for or alter their creative work, letting companies retain content even after a user deletes it, letting them gain access to a user's full browsing history and giving them blanket indemnity. More often than not, there is a clause (including for The New York Times's website) that the terms can be updated at any time without prior notice. Some terms approach the absurd. Food and ride-share companies, like DoorDash and Lyft, ask users to agree that the companies are not delivery or transportation businesses, a sleight of hand designed to give the companies license to treat their contract drivers as employees while also sheltering the companies from liability for whatever may happen on a ride or delivery. Handy, an on-demand housecleaning service, once sought in its terms of service to put customers on the hook for future tax liabilities should their contract workers' job classification be changed to employee...

"This is one of the tools used by corporations to assert themselves over their customers and whittle away their rights," said Nancy Kim, a California Western School of Law professor who studies online contracts. "With their constant updates to terms and conditions, it amounts to a massive bait-and-switch...."

"We have become so beaten down by this that we just accept it," said Woodrow Hartzog, a Northeastern University law professor. "The idea that anyone should be expected to read these terms of service is preposterous — they are written to discourage people from reading them...."
The Board urges the U.S. Congress to consider requiring greater transparency about terms and their changes — as well as simpler explanations. "If a company's online service is open to 13-year-olds, as many are, then the terms of use need to be written so an eighth grader can understand them."

The investor who helped direct the world's attention to GameStop, leading a horde of online followers in a bizarre market rally that made and lost fortunes from one day to the next, says he's just a normal guy. From his profile by The Wall Street Journal: "I didn't expect this," said Keith Gill, 34 years old, known as "DeepF-ingValue" by fans on Reddit's WallStreetBets forum and "Dada" by his 2-year-old daughter. He said he didn't set out to draw the attention of Congress, the Federal Reserve, hedge funds, the media, trading platforms and hundreds of thousands of investors. "This story is so much bigger than me," Mr. Gill told The Wall Street Journal in his first interview since the unboxing this week of a volatile new stock market game. "I support these retail investors, their ability to make a statement." To many of them, Mr. Gill -- who until recently worked in marketing for Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance -- is the force behind the triple-digit gains in shares of the videogame retailer GameStop, up more than 900% this year through Thursday. On Wednesday, the stock jumped 135% to $347.51, a record, before plunging to $194 a share Thursday as online brokerages clamped down. At the start of the year, GameStop shares went for around $18. Many online investors say his advocacy helped turn them into a force powerful enough to cause big losses for established hedge funds and, for the moment, turn the investing world upside down.

Mr. Gill posted a screenshot of his brokerage account Wednesday, showing a roughly $20 million daily gain on GameStop shares and options. "Your steady hand convinced many of us to not only buy, but hold. Your example has literally changed the lives of thousands of ordinary normal people. Seriously thank you. You deserve every penny," replied one Reddit user, reality_czech. The next day, Mr. Gill posted another screenshot -- showing about a $15 million loss. After Thursday's market close, his E*Trade brokerage account, viewed by the Journal, held around $33 million, including GameStop stock, options and millions in cash. "He always liked money," said Elaine Gill, his mother. As a child, she said, "he would get money from those scratch tickets that people didn't know they'd won. People would throw them on the ground... A lot of times there was still money on them." Mr. Gill's online persona -- he goes by "Roaring Kitty" on YouTube -- has drawn tens of thousands of fans and copycats who share screenshots of their own brokerage accounts. Mr. Gill said he wasn't a rabble-rouser out to take on the establishment, just someone who believes investors can find value in unloved stocks. He never expected to have a legion of fans debating his identity online, or millions of dollars in his trading account, he said. He was just a dad with an online hobby and a plastic kiddie slide on the front lawn of a Boston suburb.

Photographer and scientist Nathan Myhrvold has developed a camera that captures snowflakes at a microscopic level never seen before. Smithsonian Magazine reports: Myhrvold, who holds a PhD in theoretical mathematics and physics from Princeton University and served as the Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft for 14 years, leaned on his background as a scientist to create the camera. He also tapped into his experience as a photographer, most notably as the founder of Modernist Cuisine, a food innovation lab known for its high-resolution photographs of various food stuffs published into a five-volume book of photography of the same name that focuses on the art and science of cooking. Myhrvold first got the idea to photograph snowflakes 15 years ago after meeting Kenneth Libbrecht, a California Institute of Technology professor who happened to be studying the physics of snowflakes.

In simple terms, the system Myhrvold developed is comprised of one part microscope and one part camera, but with a number of parts that work in tandem to complete the arduous task of capturing an image of a snowflake, a subject that's not only miniscule (most snowflakes measure less than a half-inch in diameter) but also quick to melt. In fact, a snowflake's tendency to disintegrate was one of the biggest challenges Myhrvold had to overcome with this project. His solution: equipping his 50-pound camera system with a thermoelectric cooling system, a carbon fiber frame and LED lights, which give off less heat than standard lights. Every single part of his Frankenstein-esque device, which stands at about five feet in height off the ground when placed on a table, was built using materials that are less likely to cause melting or sublimation of the subject matter.

Myhrvold also had to figure out how to physically capture a snowflake. (It's not quite as simple as hoping that the perfect snowflake just so happens to fall into your mittened hand.) He quickly learned that catching them on a glass microscope slide wouldn't work; glass is a known insulator. But an artificial sapphire slide, made of the same crystal material as one would find in a high-end watch, had a lower thermal conductivity ratio than glass, making it the perfect material to gather specimens. [...] Once safely on the slide, he focuses his microscope to take the photograph, changing the exposure one micron at a time. (For reference, the width of a human hair measures approximately 70 microns.) On average, Myhrvold photographs each snowflake more than 100 times, or as many times as he can before the snowflake starts to melt. Using specialized computer software, Myhrvold combines multiple photographs of a single specimen to create the final photograph. "That photo [is usually the result of] 100 photographs put together using computer software," he says. "You have to take many photos in order to get a high enough resolution, because many photos put together allows you to have enough depth of field to see an entire snowflake very sharply."

Renewable energy became the biggest source of electricity in the European Union in 2020, beating fossil fuels for the first time. Germany and Spain also hit that milestone individually last year -- so did the UK, which officially left the EU in January 2020. From a report: Renewables powered 38 percent of electricity in the EU last year, according to a report released today by energy think tanks Ember and Agora Energiewende. That gives renewable energy a narrow lead over fossil fuel-fired generation, which accounted for 37 percent of Europe's electricity. The remaining quarter comes from nuclear energy.

The rise of renewables is good news for the health of the planet. Still, renewable energy will need to grow at an even faster rate to stave off a future with more climate change-induced disasters. "Renewables overtaking fossils is an important milestone in Europe's clean energy transition. However, let's not be complacent," Patrick Graichen, director of Agora Energiewende, said in a statement. "Post-pandemic recovery [programs] need to go hand-in-hand with accelerated climate action."

Last week the Democratic party took control of all three branches of the U.S. government — and the BBC's North America technology reporter notes they dislike Facebook even more now than during the Cambridge Analytica scandal: Since then, Democrats — Joe Biden included — have been appalled by what Facebook has allowed on its platform. Talking to a CNN anchor in late 2019 Joe Biden said, "You can't do what they can do on Facebook, and say anything at all, and not acknowledge when you know something is fundamentally not true. I just think it's all out of hand." When you're a billionaire, perhaps it doesn't matter that the president doesn't like you much. But what President Biden has a chance to do now is restructure Big Tech and reformulate the relationship that social media companies have with their users.

That could be devastating for Facebook.

Its most obvious problem is the potential repealing of Section 230... Joe Biden has said he wants it removed. In fact, in that same New York Times interview from a year ago he said he wanted it "revoked immediately". That could spell disaster for Zuckerberg. Suddenly all the things people post, all of the defamatory and fraudulent things people say — would be the responsibility of Facebook. It's hard to see how Facebook functions in its current form without Section 230.

And that's before we get into Facebook's anti-trust problems. It's currently being sued by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and 46 states for "illegally maintaining its monopoly position" by buying up the competition. The FTC has also said it's looking at "unwinding Facebook's prior acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp" — i.e. breaking the firm up. Facebook will, of course, fight that. But Biden seems a pretty willing ally to those who want to split up Big Tech. In 2019, he said that breaking up companies such as Facebook was "something we should take a really hard look at".

Jameel Jaffer, a media legal expert at Columbia University, told me: "I would expect the Biden administration to be pretty aggressive in enforcing the anti-trust laws. And to have the whole spectrum of harms in mind, not just the democratic harms, but harms relating to user privacy and consumer welfare."

President Biden is even reportedly thinking of creating an anti-trust tsar, designed specifically to restore competition in areas like Big Tech.

Google released Chrome 88 this week — and besides improving its dark mode support, they removed support for both Adobe Flash and FTP.

PC World calls it "the end of two eras." The most noteworthy change in this update is what's not included. Chrome 88 lays Adobe Flash and the FTP protocol to rest. RIP circa-2000 Internet.

Neither comes as a surprise, though it's poetic that they're being buried together. Adobe halted Flash Player downloads at the end of 2020, making good on a promise made years before, and began blocking Flash content altogether a couple weeks later. Removing Flash from Chrome 88 is just Google's way of flushing the toilet.

On the other hand, FTP isn't dead, but it is now for Chrome users. The File Transport Protocol has helped users send files across the Internet for decades, but in an era of prolific cloud storage services and other sharing methods, its use has waned. Google started slowly disabling FTP support in Chrome 86, per ZDNet, and now you'll no longer be able to access FTP links in the browser. Look for standalone FTP software instead if you need it, such as FileZilla.

That's not all. Mac users should be aware that Chrome 88 drops support for OS X 10.10 (OS X Yosemite). Yosemite released in 2014 and received its last update in 2017...

But Google killing Flash and FTP might be the footnotes that hit old-school web users in the feels.
Chrome 88 will also block non-encrypted downloads originating from an encrypted page, the article reports. And the Verge notes Chrome also offers less intrusive website permission requests (as an experimental feature enabled from chrome://flags/#permission-chip ), while Bleeping Computer describes Chrome 88's new experimental feature for searching through all your open tabs.

And Chrome's blog points out some additional features under the hood: Chrome 88 will heavily throttle chained JavaScript timers for hidden pages in particular conditions. This will reduce CPU usage, which will also reduce battery usage. There are some edge cases where this will change behavior, but timers are often used where a different API would be more efficient, and more reliable.

We're following the state of play with Intel's new CEO, Pat Gelsinger, very closely. Even as an Intel employee for 30 years, rising to the rank of CTO, then taking 12 years away from the company, his arrival has been met with praise across the spectrum given his background and previous successes. He isn't even set to take his new role until February 15th, however his return is already causing a stir with Intel's current R&D teams. From a report: News in the last 24 hours, based on public statements, states that former Intel Senior Fellow Glenn Hinton, who lists being the lead architect of Intel's Nehalem CPU core in his list of achievements, is coming out of retirement to re-join the company. (The other lead architect of Nehalem are Ronak Singhal and Per Hammerlund - Ronak is still at Intel, working on next-gen processors, while Per has been at Apple for five years.)

Hinton is an old Intel hand, with 35 years of experience, leading microarchitecture development of Pentium 4, one of three senior architects of Intel's P6 processor design (which led to Pentium Pro, P2, P3), and ultimately one of the drivers to Intel's Core architecture which is still at the forefront of Intel's portfolio today. He also a lead microarchitect for Intel's i960 CA, the world's first super-scalar microprocessor. Hinton holds more than 90+ patents from 8 CPU designs from his endeavors. Hinton spent another 10+ years at Intel after Nehalem, but Nehalem is listed in many places as his primary public achievement at Intel. [...]