"Much of the most widely used free and open source software is developed by only a handful of contributors," warns the Linux Foundation, in the executive summary for its massive new census of free and open source software application libraries. It was prepared in conjunction with Harvard's Laboratory for Innovation Science — and that's just one of its five high-level findings.

The census also notes "the increasing importance of individual developer account security," but also the persistence of legacy software, the need for a standardized naming schema for software components, and "complexities" around package versions. But there's also just a lot of data about package popularity, writes SD Times: The report, Census II, is a follow-up to Census I, which was conducted in 2015 to identify the packages in Debian Linux that were most critical to the operation and security of the kernel. According to the Linux Foundation, Census II allows for a more "complete picture of free and open source (FOSS) adoption."

"Understanding what FOSS packages are the most critical to society allows us to proactively support projects that warrant operations and security support," said Brian Behlendorf, executive director at Linux Foundation's Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF).
The census "aggregates data from over half a million observations of FOSS libraries used in production applications at thousands of companies," according to its executive summary. It argues that preserving FOSS will require this kind of data-sharing (about where and how FOSS packages are being used ) as well as coordination — including standardizing terminology — and of course, investment.

"The motivation behind publishing these findings is to not only inform, but also to inspire action by developers to improve their security practices and by end users to support the FOSS ecosystem and developers who need assistance." (It suggests companies companies could provide not just financial support but also the technical talent and their time.) The results take the form of eight Top 500 lists — four that include version numbers in the analysis and four that are version agnostic. Further, as mentioned above, we present npm and non-npm packages in separate lists... Although these lists provide valuable, important insights into the most widely used FOSS projects, it is important to also consider the level of security related to these projects. Therefore, in each list, we also include the "Tiered %" measure from the OpenSSF Best Practices Badging Program....

Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm quotes IEEE Spectrum: A whiskey connoisseur can take a whiff of a dram and know exactly the brand, region, and style of whiskey in hand. But how do our human noses compare to electronic noses in distinguishing the qualities of a whiskey? A study published 1 February in IEEE Sensors Journal describes a new e-nose that is surprisingly accurate at analyzing whiskies — and can identify the brand of whiskey with more than 95 percent accuracy after just one "whiff."

E-noses have been gaining in popularity over recent years thanks to their range of valuable applications, from sensing when crops are ready for harvest to identifying food products on the cusp of expiring. It is perhaps unsurprising that many e-noses have also been developed to analyze alcoholic beverages, including whiskey, which had an estimated international market worth US $58 billion in 2018 alone. "This lucrative industry has the potential to be a target of fraudulent activities such as mislabeling and adulteration," explains Steven Su, an associate professor at the Faculty of Engineering and IT, University of Technology Sydney....

Su and his colleagues sought to adapt one of their e-noses so that it could analyze some key qualities of whiskey. Their original e-nose was designed to detect illegal animal parts sold on the black market, such as rhino horns, and they have since also adapted their e-nose for breath analysis and assessing food quality. Their newest, whiskey-sniffing e-nose, called Nos.e, contains a little vial where the whiskey sample is added. The scent of the whiskey is injected into a gas sensor chamber, which detects the various odors and sends the data to a computer for analysis. The most important scent features are then extracted and analyzed by machine learning algorithms designed to recognize the brand, region, and style of whiskey.

"Thousands of Texans who have turned to solar power and battery storage, creating so-called microgrids, as a solution to blackouts," reports the Houston Chronicle.

"With a venture creating the same little power plants for apartment buildings, Texas has become a national leader in residential solar power installations." From 2019 to 2020, small-scale solar capacity in Texas grew by 63 percent, to 1,093 megawatts from 670 megawatts, according to the Energy Information Administration. In the first three quarters of 2021, another 250 megawatts of residential solar were installed in the state, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. In last year's third quarter alone, Texas ranked second behind California in the amount of power from new installations during the period, the industry's Washington, D.C. trade group said.

Surging demand for residential solar power in Texas after the February 2021 freeze put pressure on installers to keep up, said Abigail Hopper, president and CEO of the association. The race to buy new rooftop panels has slowed some, she said, but Texas remains among the top three states for new installations. And the shrinking price of solar cells will help support its growing popularity, Hopper said.

"I think as more and more Americans really struggle with the impact of severe weather — everything from fires, the cold, hurricanes, droughts — and see the impacts on power and power outages, you're going to continue to see folks looking for resiliency," Hopper said.

"As of the 1st of May, the Alexa web traffic ranking engine is going to stop its services," the TIOBE Index reminds us. So for the first time, TIOBE has switched to Similarweb this month to choose which search engines' results to use for its ranking of the popularity of programming languages. Fortunately, there are no big changes in the index due to this swap. The only striking difference is that the top 3 languages, Python, C, and Java, all gained more than 1 percent in the rankings.

We are still fine-tuning the integration with Similarweb, which is combined with a shift to HtmlUnit in the back-end. Some websites are not onboarded yet, but will follow soon. Now that HtmlUnit is applied for web crawling, it will become possible to add more sites to the index, such as Stackoverflow and Github. This will hopefully happen in the next few months.
TechRepublic reports: Python continues to sit atop the index, with C and Java directly behind it. In Feb. 2021, those three also occupied the top spot, but with Python in the number three position, C at top, and Java in second place.

Beyond the top three, there hasn't been much movement in the index, with positions four through eight unchanged from the same time last year. Those slots are occupied, respectively, by C++, C#, Visual Basic, JavaScript and PHP. Positions nine and 10 swapped from Feb. 21 to now, with Assembly Language and SQL now occupying each other's positions.

The one big move of note between Feb. 2021 and Feb. 2022 was with the Groovy programming language, an object-oriented language for Java. Over the course of the year, Groovy fell from 12th position all the way to 20th, putting it perilously close to the "other programming languages" list.
Thanks to Amigan (Slashdot reader #25,469) for sharing the story.

With people more wary than ever about clicking on suspicious links in emails and text messages, zero-click hacks are being used more frequently by government agencies to spy on activists, journalists and others, according to more than a dozen surveillance company employees, security researchers and hackers interviewed by Bloomberg News. From a report: Once the preserve of a few intelligence agencies, the technology needed for zero-click hacks is now being sold to governments by a small number of companies, the most prominent of which is Israel's NSO Group. Bloomberg News has learned that at least three other Israeli companies -- Paragon, Candiru and Cognyte Software -- have developed zero-click hacking tools or offered them to clients, according to former employees and partners of those companies, demonstrating that the technology is becoming more widespread in the surveillance industry.

There are certain steps that a potential victim can take that might reduce the chances of a successful zero-click attack, including keeping a device updated. But some of the more effective methods -- including uninstalling certain messaging apps that hackers can use as gateways to breach a device -- aren't practical because people rely on them for communication, said Bill Marczak, a senior research fellow at Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto that focuses on abuses of surveillance technology.

"The OS/2 community is getting close to obtaining a modern browser on their platform," writes Slashdot reader martiniturbide. In an announcement article on Monday, president of the OS/2 Voice community, Roderick Klein, revealed that a public beta of the new Chromium-based Otter Browser will arrive "in the last week of February or the first week of March." XDA Developers reports: OS/2 was the operating system developed jointly by IBM and Microsoft in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with the intended goal of replacing all DOS and Windows-based systems. However, Microsoft decided to focus on Windows after the immense popularity of Windows 3.0 and 3.1, leaving IBM to continue development on its own. IBM eventually stopped working on OS/2 in 2001, but two other companies licensed the operating system to continue where IBM left off -- first eComStation, and more recently, ArcaOS.

BitWise Works GmbH and the Dutch OS/2 Voice foundation started work on Otter Browser in 2017, as it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep an updated version of Firefox available on OS/2 and ArcaOS. Firefox 49 ESR from 2016 is the latest version available, because that's around the time Mozilla started rewriting significant parts of Firefox with Rust code, and there's no Rust compiler for OS/2. Since then, the main focus has been porting Qt 5.0 to OS/2, which includes the QtWebEngine (based on Chromium). This effort also has the side effect of making more cross-platform ports possible in the future.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Briggs [anecdote in the story] is part of a growing movement of artists and designers who produce alternatives to the stock keycaps sold with most mechanical keyboards. The small plastic blocks are easy to detach from their switches using simple pulling tools, and changing them can give a keyboard a radically different look, feel, and sound -- not to mention turn a generic computer accessory into something much more personal. Swapping out keycaps for aftermarket alternatives has become so commonplace that it's not uncommon to see premium keyboards sold without keycaps in the box. But as designer keycaps have become more popular, so have cheaper knockoffs. These keysets use the same color schemes and often even the same names, in an apparent attempt to piggyback off the popularity of original designs. To a casual observer it's rarely obvious that they're produced by an unrelated company, without any input from the designer, and may be capturing sales that could have supported the original creator.

A group of major cryptocurrency firms including Coinbase, Circle, Anchorage Digital and Huobi Global are forming a new coalition aimed at cracking down on market manipulation in an effort to instill trust in the burgeoning digital asset industry. From a report: The Crypto Market Integrity Coalition, which was convened by risk-monitoring software company Solidus Labs, is also urging digital currency companies to sign a market integrity pledge that acknowledges the potential for fraud in the cryptocurrency space and the need for the industry to protect investors. "It really is about recognizing that you need entities that are focused on a fair and orderly system here, and really trying to prevent the abuses that can happen if you're not paying attention," said Kathy Kraninger, vice president of regulatory affairs at Solidus Labs and former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The new alliance and pledge comes as regulators remain concerned the new market is safe for investors, despite its surge in popularity. The Securities and Exchange Commission has cited the potential for market manipulation as one of the primary reasons for rejecting several applications for spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds.

The New York Times says it has purchased the viral word-guessing game Wordle for "an undisclosed price in the low seven figures." The newspaper says it'll remain "free to play for new and existing players, and no changes will be made to its gameplay." From the report: Josh Wardle, a software engineer in Brooklyn, created the game as a gift for his partner. It was released to the public in October, and it exploded in popularity in a matter of months. Ninety people played the game on Nov. 1, Mr. Wardle said. Nearly two months later, 300,000 people played it. To play the game, people are required to guess a predetermined five-letter word in six tries. The yellow and green squares indicate that the Wordle player has guessed a correct letter, or a combined correct letter and placement. The buzz around the game can be attributed to the spoiler-free scoring grid that allows players to share their Wordle wins across social media, group chats and more. The game's creator, Josh Wardle, announced the sale in a tweet, writing: "If you've followed along with the story of Wordle, you'll know that NYT games play a big part in its origins and so this step feels very natural to me."

He adds: "I've long admired the NYT's approach to their games and the respect with which they treat their players. Their values are aligned with mine on these matters and I'm thrilled that they will be stewards of the game moving forward."

This new political breed accepts paychecks in Bitcoin. The mayors also want to use buzzy new tech like NFTs to raise money for public projects. From a report: The ballooning popularity of Bitcoin and other digital currencies has given rise to a strange new political breed: the crypto mayor. Eric Adams, New York's new mayor, accepted his first paycheck in Bitcoin and another cryptocurrency, Ether. Francis Suarez, Miami's mayor, headlines crypto conferences. Now even mayors of smaller towns are trying to incorporate crypto into municipal government, courting start-ups and experimenting with buzzy new technologies like nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, to raise money for public projects. Their growing ranks reflect the increasing mainstream acceptance of digital currencies, which are highly volatile and have fallen in value in recent days. The mayors' embrace of crypto is also a recognition that its underlying blockchain technology -- essentially a distributed ledger system -- may create new revenue streams for cities and reshape some basic functions of local government.

"Mayors rationally want to attract high-income citizens who pay their taxes and impose few costs on the municipality," said Joseph Grundfest, a business professor at Stanford. "Crypto geeks fit this bill perfectly." But as with many ambitious crypto projects, it's unclear whether these local initiatives will ultimately amount to much. So far, most are either largely symbolic or largely theoretical. And the mayors' aims are partly political: Crypto boosterism has a useful bipartisan appeal, garnering popularity among both antigovernment conservatives and socially liberal tech moguls. "You can do these things because you want to be associated with dudes with AR-15s, or you want to be associated with Meta," said Finn Brunton, a technology studies professor at the University of California, Davis, who wrote a 2019 book about the history of crypto. "A lot of it is hype and hot air."

"GIF folders were used by ancient civilisations as a way to store and catalogue animated pictures that were once employed to convey emotion," Vice writes: Okay, you probably know what a GIF folder is — but the concept of a special folder needed to store and save GIFs is increasingly alien in an era where every messaging app has its own in-built GIF library you can access with a single tap. And to many youngsters, GIFs themselves are increasingly alien too — or at least, okay, increasingly uncool. "Who uses gifs in 2020 grandma," one Twitter user speedily responded to Taylor Swift in August that year when the singer-songwriter opted for an image of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson mouthing the words "oh my god" to convey her excitement at reaching yet another career milestone.

You don't have to look far to find other tweets or TikToks mocking GIFs as the preserve of old people — which, yes, now means millennials. How exactly did GIFs become so embarrassing? Will they soon disappear forever, like Homer Simpson backing up into a hedge...?

Gen Z might think GIFs are beloved by millennials, but at the same time, many millennials are starting to see GIFs as a boomer plaything. And this is the first and easiest explanation as to why GIFs are losing their cultural cachet. Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor of communication at Syracuse University and author of multiple books on internet culture, says that early adopters have always grumbled when new (read: old) people start to encroach on their digital space. Memes, for example, were once subcultural and niche. When Facebook came along and made them more widespread, Redditors and 4Chan users were genuinely annoyed that people capitalised on the fruits of their posting without putting in the cultural work. "That democratisation creates a sense of disgust with people who consider themselves insiders," Phillips explains. "That's been central to the process of cultural production online for decades at this point...."

In 2016, Twitter launched its GIF search function, as did WhatsApp and iMessage. A year later, Facebook introduced its own GIF button in the comment section on the site. GIFs became not only centralised but highly commercialised, culminating in Facebook buying GIPHY for $400 million in 2020. "The more GIFs there are, maybe the less they're regarded as being special treasures or gifts that you're giving people," Phillips says. "Rather than looking far and wide to find a GIF to send you, it's clicking the search button and typing a word. The gift economy around GIFs has shifted...."

Linda Kaye, a cyberpsychology professor at Edge Hill University, hasn't done direct research in this area but theorises that the ever-growing popularity of video-sharing on TikTok means younger generations are more used to "personalised content creation", and GIFs can seem comparatively lazy.
The GIF was invented in 1987 "and it's important to note the format has already fallen out of favour and had a comeback multiple times before," the article points out. It cites Jason Eppink, an independent artist and curator who curated an exhibition on GIFs for the Museum of the Moving Image in New York in 2014, who highlighted how GIFs were popular with GeoCities users in the 90s, "so when Facebook launched, they didn't support GIFs.... They were like, 'We don't want this ugly symbol of amateur web to clutter our neat and uniform cool new website." But then GIFs had a resurgence on Tumblr.

Vice concludes that while even Eppink no longer uses GIFs any more, "Perhaps the waxing and waning popularity of the GIF is an ironic mirror of the format itself — destined to repeat endlessly, looping over and over again."

"In recent months, at least half a dozen game studios have revealed plans to add NFTs to their games or said they were considering doing so," reports the New York Times.

Then they were confronted by gamers like 18-year-old Christian Lantz, who for years has played GSC Game World's first-person shooter game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Mr. Lantz was incensed. He joined thousands of fans on Twitter and Reddit who raged against NFTs in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s sequel. The game maker, they said, was simply looking to squeeze more money out of its players. The backlash was so intense that GSC quickly reversed itself and abandoned its NFT plan.

"The studio was abusing its popularity," Mr. Lantz, who lives in Ontario, said. "It's so obviously being done for profit instead of just creating a beautiful game...."

[C]lashes over crypto have increasingly erupted between users and major game studios like Ubisoft, Square Enix and Zynga. In many of the encounters, the gamers have prevailed — at least for now.... Players said they see the moves as a blatant cash grab. "I just hate that they keep finding ways to nickel-and-dime us in whatever way they can," said Matt Kee, 22, a gamer who took to Twitter in anger this month after Square Enix, which produces one of his favorite games, Kingdom Hearts, said it was pushing into NFTs. "I don't see anywhere mentioning how that benefits the gamer, how that improves gameplay. It's always about, 'How can I make money off this?'"

Much of their resentment is rooted in the encroachment of micro transactions in video games. Over the years, game makers have found more ways to profit from users by making them pay to upgrade characters or enhance their level of play inside the games. Even if people had already paid $60 or more for a game upfront, they were asked to fork over more money for digital items like clothing or weapons for characters.... Merritt K, a game streamer and editor at Fanbyte, a games industry site, said gamers' antagonism toward the companies has built up over the last decade partly because of the growing number of micro transactions. So when game makers introduced NFTs as an additional element to buy and sell, she said, players were "primed to call this stuff out. We've been here before."

That has led to bursts of gamer outrage, which have rattled the game companies. In December, Sega Sammy, the maker of the Sonic the Hedgehog game, expressed reservations about its NFT and crypto plans after "negative reactions" from users. Ubisoft, which makes titles like Assassin's Creed, said that it had misjudged how unhappy its customers would be after announcing an NFT program last month. A YouTube video about the move was disliked by more than 90 percent of viewers. "Maybe we under-evaluated how strong the backlash could have been," said Nicolas Pouard, a Ubisoft vice president who heads the French company's new blockchain initiative.

Game companies said their NFT plans were not motivated by profit. Instead, they said, NFTs give fans something fun to collect and a new way for them to make money by selling the assets. "It really is all about community," said Matt Wolf, an executive at the mobile game maker Zynga, who is leading a foray into blockchain games. "We believe in giving people the opportunity to play to earn."
The article also rounds up examples of game companies it says have "come out against crypto."

• "Phil Spencer, the head of Microsoft's Xbox, told Axios in November that some games centered on earning money through NFTs appeared 'exploitative' and he would avoid putting them in the Xbox store."

• "Valve, which owns the online game store Steam, also updated its rules last fall to prohibit blockchain games that allow cryptocurrencies or NFTs to be exchanged...."

• "Tim Sweeney, the chief executive of Epic Games, the maker of the game Fortnite, said his company would steer clear of NFTs in its own games because the industry is riddled with 'an intractable mix of scams.' (Epic will still allow developers to sell blockchain games in its online store.)"

• The blowback has affected more than just game studios. Discord, the messaging platform popular with gamers, backtracked in November after users threatened to cancel their paid subscriptions over a crypto initiative."

Google took to Twitter this weekend to complain that iMessage is just too darn influential with today's kids. Ron Amadeo writes via Ars Technica: The company was responding to a Wall Street Journal report detailing the lock-in and social pressure Apple's walled garden is creating among US teens. iMessage brands texts from iPhone users with a blue background and gives them additional features, while texts from Android phones are shown in green and only have the base SMS feature set. According to the article, "Teens and college students said they dread the ostracism that comes with a green text. The social pressure is palpable, with some reporting being ostracized or singled out after switching away from iPhones." Google feels this is a problem.

"iMessage should not benefit from bullying," the official Android Twitter account wrote. "Texting should bring us together, and the solution exists. Let's fix this as one industry." Google SVP Hiroshi Lockheimer chimed in, too, saying, "Apple's iMessage lock-in is a documented strategy. Using peer pressure and bullying as a way to sell products is disingenuous for a company that has humanity and equity as a core part of its marketing. The standards exist today to fix this."

The "solution" Google is pushing here is RCS, or Rich Communication Services, a GSMA standard from 2008 that has slowly gained traction as an upgrade to SMS. RCS adds typing indicators, user presence, and better image sharing to carrier messaging. It is a 14-year-old carrier standard, though, so it lacks many of the features you would want from a modern messaging service, like end-to-end encryption and support for non-phone devices. Google tries to band-aid over the aging standard with its "Google Messaging" client, but the result is a lot of clunky solutions that don't add up to a good modern messaging service. Since RCS replaces SMS, Google has been on a campaign to get the industry to make the upgrade. After years of protesting, the US carriers are all onboard, and there is some uptake among the international carriers, too. The biggest holdout is Apple, which only supports SMS through iMessage. "Google clearly views iMessage's popularity as a problem, and the company is hoping this public-shaming campaign will get Apple to change its mind on RCS," writes Amadeo in closing. "But Google giving other companies advice on a messaging strategy is a laughable idea since Google probably has the least credibility of any tech company when it comes to messaging services. If the company really wants to do something about iMessage, it should try competing with it."

Further reading:
Eddy Cue Wanted To Bring iMessage To Android In 2013
Apple Says iMessage On Android 'Will Hurt Us More Than Help Us'

The programming language of the year has been announced by the TIOBE Index: Python!

But noting that the TIOBE index is based on the number of search results for a programming language across popular search engines, a headline at The Next Web asks: "What does this title even mean?" [TIOBE] takes services such as Google, QQ, Sohu, Amazon, and Wikipedia to calculate the results. TIOBE uses "+" programming" query and a special formula to devise these ratings that change every month. You can read more about the whole process here. The programming language of the year title is decided by the jump in ratings year-on-year. Python overtook C# by a margin of 0.13% — almost a photo finish.

The index doesn't indicate the best or most efficient programming language, nor does it measure the amount of code written in a language across the internet. It simply gives us a high-level understanding of resources and pages available on the web related to them.

There's a huge amount of criticism towards the TIOBE index, especially as it uses one query and doesn't consider non-English languages. The organization said that it's trying to introduce more parameters to calculate the ratings.
TIOBE's annual award is being called "prestigious" — by the announcement at TIOBE.com: The award is given to the programming language that has gained the highest increase in ratings in one year. C# was on its way to get the title for the first time in history, but Python surpassed C# in the last month.

Python started at position #3 of the TIOBE index at the beginning of 2021 and left both Java and C behind to become the number one of the TIOBE index. But Python's popularity didn't stop there. It is currently more than 1 percent ahead of the rest [with a "rating" of 13.58%]. Java's all time record of 26.49% ratings in 2001 is still far away, but Python has it all to become the de facto standard programming language for many domains. There are no signs that Python's triumphal march will stop soon.
In fact, this makes the second year in a row Python has won TIOBE's annual award.

But it's as good a conversation-starter as any. ZDNet reminds us that Microsoft hired Python creator Guido van Rossum in 2020 to work on improving Python's efficiency, while the second most popular language on TIOBE's annual list, C#, "is a language designed by Microsoft technical fellow Anders Hejlsberg for the .NET Framework and Microsoft's developer editing tool Visual Studio."

And ZDNet also spottted a few other patterns in TIOBE's year-end look at programming language popularity: There were several movers and shakers this year. Rust, a systems programming language that deals with memory safety flaws, is now in 26th position, ahead of MIT's Julia, and Kotlin, a language endorsed by Google for Android app development. Rust was a stand out language in 2021, gaining backing from Facebook, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

Apple's Swift for iOS and macOS app development jumped from 13th to 10th place, while Google's Go inched up from 14 to 13, according to Tiobe. Kotlin moved from 40th to 29th. Google's Dart dropped from 25th to 37th position, Julia fell from 23rd to 28th position, while Microsoft TypeScript dropped from from 42 to 49.

The top 10 languages in Tiobe's list for January 2022 were Python, C, Java, C++,C#, Visual Basic, JavaScript, Assembly Language, SQL, and Swift.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard, written by Maxwell Strachan: A new tech startup plans to become "the stock market of litigation financing" by allowing everyday Americans to bet on civil lawsuits through the purchase (and trade) of associated crypto tokens. In doing so, the company hopes to provide funding to individuals who would otherwise not be able to pursue claims. "Ryval's goal is to make access to justice more affordable," said Kyle Roche, a trial lawyer and one of the startup's founders. "What I want to do is make the federal court system more accessible for all." [...] The way it works is a little like a crypto-infused and lawsuit-focused GoFundMe, if the crowd stood to profit from their investment. The company takes advantage of a rule created through former President Barack Obama's JOBS Act, which allowed a private company to crowdfund up to $5 million from Americans, regardless of their wealth. Using the Avalanche blockchain, Ryval will allow "all investors regardless of accreditation status" to purchase tokens associated with a specific case and then hold or trade them on the open market. Whoever owns the token at the time of a settlement or verdict then cashes in. The team has dubbed the sale of tokens an "initial litigation offering," and Roche has compared Ryval to Robinhood, but for the law. (A caveat: While wealthy and sophisticated "accredited investors" will be able to trade lawsuit tokens immediately, the non-rich will be legally required to agree to a year-long lockup period, according to Insider.)

The concept of litigation funding isn't unique. An industry built around the concept has been growing in popularity in recent years. Between June 2019 and June 2020, investors plowed $2.5 billion into the litigation funding sector, according to the finance advisory firm Westfleet Advisors. But up until now, only so-called "accredited" wealthy investors could put their money into the sector. Through the use of crypto tokens, Ryval claims, it can legally open up access to the industry to all. The tokenization of U.S. law will benefit users in a few other ways, including by providing the market with liquidity that previously wasn't available in litigation funding, Roche claims. If someone with a token needs money or believes a case is heading south, they can sell their token to the highest bidder and cash out. Such tradeability will also allow the value of a token to rise or fall as the case develops. "Let's say, the plaintiff gets a big ruling from the court -- not a win, but a big ruling. The price may go up," he said. Roche's law firm, Roche Freedman, has been working with the financial technology company Republic and smart contacts platform Ava Labs, which created the Avalanche blockchain and whose tagline is "Digitize All The World's Assets," to develop the Ryval. While still in the early going, Roche expects a full team will be announced in the first quarter of the year. [...]

Roche understands that messaging will be "very important" in the early going, which is why for the first few years, Ryval will be "focused on access to justice and taking on claims that we believe are good claims," he said. "But at the end of the day, I don't think anybody should be the gatekeeper to who has access to the courts. I think access to the court system, access to the legal justice system should be something that is given to as many people as the justice system can handle." Roche believes Ryval lawsuits will "run the full gamut" and include antitrust, securities claims, and wrongful termination. Asked if there were any types of cases Ryval would avoid, Roche replied, "I don't see anything that I wouldn't categorically not go near." To help novices navigate such a complex industry and decide where to place their bets, Ryval will provide users with the basic facts of the case and the procedural elements necessary in order to win, as well as other relevant information like how often a particular type of case is successful. "One of the real responsibilities we have in building this platform is to educate the market," Roche said. But Roche said retail investors stand to gain more than they stand to lose by entering the legal market. "These investments have been very lucrative over the course of the last five to 10 years," Roche said, adding that some top law firms average an "astronomical" annual percentage rate of 30-to-40 percent. He expects interest will be especially high in the event of a downturn, since litigation outcomes are largely "market agnostic," providing people with an alternative form of investment.

Cryptocurrency enthusiasts who piled into meme coins such as Dogecoin and Shiba Inu amid the long-time industry rallying call of "to the moon" are finding this year's journey back to earth pretty painful. From a report: Dogecoin, Shiba Inu and other tokens associated more with online jokes rather than actual software products have been hit harder than sector originals Bitcoin or Ethereum during the recent retreat from the record price levels reached late last year. Doge is off nearly 80% from its all-time high of 74 cents in May, and Shiba has declined more than 65% since hitting its peak of fractions of a penny in late October, according to data compiled by Messari.

Trading volumes have fallen off, now measured in millions instead of billions. And the jokes that once swayed a legion of mostly retail day traders to buy up coins on a whim come with a hint of sadness. The frenzy started with Doge. A digital token created in 2013 by a pair of software engineers took off as interest in crypto trading spiked and a new crop of retail traders took to social media platforms, using jokes, sarcasm and trolling to gin up their popularity. Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Elon Musk's embrace of the token helped to send it soaring. Doge's popularity inspired the creation of new tokens based on the breed of dog, including Shiba Inu, Baby Shiba Inu and Floki, which is named after Musk's pet.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University developed a mathematical model to understand why popular baby names keep on changing, and it "points to a tug-of-war between the need to stand out in the crowd and the need to fit in with the pack," reports Phys.Org. "The motives to conform and to be unique interact to produce complex dynamics when people observe each other in a social network." The research has been published in the journal Psychological Review. From the report: Mathematically speaking, the desire to fit in would drive behavior toward the mean, or average, in the group while the desire to stand out would drive behavior away from the mode, or most common occurrence, in the group. "Put them together and they still lead to equilibrium," [said Russell Golman, associate professor in the Social and Decision Sciences Department at CMU]. To break out of the equilibrium conundrum, Golman and his team added social networks to the mix. According to Golman, that means communities, neighbors, colleagues, clubs, or other social groups, not necessarily social media. "It was surprising that social networks could make such a big difference," said Golman. "We modeled the dynamics with a lot of different networks, and not converging to equilibrium is actually pretty typical."

To test their new model, CMU Ph.D. student Erin Bugbee turned to the large database of baby names managed by the Social Security Administration for the last century. If baby names settled into an equilibrium, the most popular name would always be the most popular. That is not what happened.

As the popularity of one name, say Emily, peaks, parents may decide to forgo that name and pick a similar one, like Emma. By following this strategy, they are instilling in their new daughter a name that is socially acceptable by its similarity to the popular name but will allow her to stand out in the crowd by putting a unique twist on her identity. Many parents may be thinking the same thing and the number of little girls named Emily will decline while those named Emma will increase. The study concludes that understanding social psychology and social network structure are both critical to explain the emergence of complex, unpredictable cultural trends.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: As new year approaches, crowds around the world may be expecting whizzes and bangs to light up the sky. But the appeal of fireworks could fizzle out with the growing use of drones for light shows. One notable example was the opening ceremony of this year's Tokyo Olympics, while the Over the Top NYE event at Reunion Tower in Dallas is among those planning to combine fireworks and drones to welcome 2022. They are also being embraced at a local level: more than 1,000 people watched a drone display at Mercia Marina in Derbyshire to celebrate Bonfire Night this year.

Ollie Howitt, the creative coordinator at SkyMagic, which used a fleet of 300 drones to create a display for the mayor of London's new year celebration last year, said demand had increased substantially, something the pandemic has helped accelerate. She added that drones were increasingly able to fly in greater density and for longer. "We do think it's going to be something that's ever evolving, as opposed to it being a short-lived sort of fad that people have suddenly got interested in," she said.

Robert Neff, a partner and general manager at Mercia Marina, also believes drone displays will become more common. "There's a big movement against fireworks," he said. Neff said the decision to use a drone display at the marina was down to a number of factors, including the impact of fireworks on animals -- from wildlife and waterfowl to the cats and dogs of boat owners. "They've often commented on how much distress is caused to their pets by the fireworks," he said. Howitt said there were benefits to drones: "They're no emission, they're reusable, there's no fallout or any debris or that kind of thing. So in that sense they are a very good, sustainable option." "Suggestions are that drones have less of an impact on the environment, but we have grave concerns about electrical demand and use of lithium batteries which are known not to be all that 'green,'" said a spokesperson from the British Fireworks Association. "Firework use impact on the environment has been shown to be minor and very short-lived and recent studies have suggested that there is likely to be more pollution from a couple of cars driving to an event than caused by fireworks at an event."

Others suggest the use of fireworks and drones are not mutually exclusive. "We find fireworks work really well in tandem with drones. But we don't really see it as a one replacing the other at all. We sort of feel as if it's just another tool in the chest for how you sort of animate the sky and what you want to do with the show that you're putting on," said Howitt, noting that while fireworks give a loud, emotive, big performance, drones offer the chance to tell stories in the sky by using a series of images.

"If you've visited a crypto company's website recently, you've probably visited a URL ending in .xyz instead of its cheugier counterpart, .com," writes Anita Ramaswamy via TechCrunch. "From fintech Block, formerly known as Square, to venture firm Paradigm, to blockchain startups like Mirror, .xyz has become the go-to URL ending for many web3 companies. But what does it mean, and why has it caught on in the web3 space?" An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: .xyz, released to the public in 2014, first surged in popularity one year later when Google parent Alphabet decided to use it for their rebranded website. The internet behemoth had run into an increasingly widespread problem -- the .com URLs for their brand were already taken, with BMW's fleet management division using alphabet.com and American Broadcasting Corporation at abc.com. So Alphabet decided to open up shop at abc.xyz, which presented an "unlimited branding opportunity" for its "futuristic company," Daniel Negari, .xyz's 36-year-old founder and CEO, told TechCrunch in an email. Now, .xyz may be one of the top five top-level domains (TLDs) in the world by traffic, according to the company's own DNS data.

.xyz was created to "provide users around the world competition and choice when it comes to their domain name," and is "the first truly generic domain extension with no inherent meaning," according to Negari. While .com was meant for commercial use, .net for networks and .org for organizations, Negari envisioned .xyz as the TLD choice for users who felt they did not fit neatly into one of these categories or wanted to stand out. "I firmly believe the market has adopted our mantra of 'for every website everywhere,'" Negari said. "Our mantra of openness and inclusion for everyone and everything has bled through into a community of creative thinkers that has embraced .xyz as their domain." Negari is an active crypto investor with "numerous" investments in the space, including Gemini, MoonPay and BlockFi, he said. Because of his interest in crypto, he reached out to Ethereum Name Service (ENS) creator Nick Johnson to pitch him a collaboration. "That historic collaboration allowed early adopters to use a .xyz domain as their wallet address," Negari said.

ENS allows users to create a universal nickname for all their crypto addresses, providing a searchable database to make crypto wallets and transactions, which otherwise reside on a variety of different platforms, more easily accessible. Users can now create profiles to share their social media handles or other personal information in ENS using its native .eth domain or on a .xyz domain. .xyz has continued to find ways to collaborate with ENS and work with the crypto community. It announced this week that it launched its "eth.xyz" service, allowing users to search individual ENS profiles simply by adding ".xyz" to the end of their .eth name rather than having to go to the ENS database to look them up, Negari said. By allowing cryptocurrency holders to buy domains in their preferred names using Ethereum, ENS has creatively monetized users' desire to leverage the internet as an identity-building tool. Although .xyz domains are managed by ICANN, "several parties are now working to develop a decentralized alternative to this system to underpin web3," the report adds. ".xyz's strategy to align itself proactively with web3 companies could present a host of new monetization opportunities based on identity and ownership in a decentralized web as this generation of internet users stakes new claims on domains."

It's also worth noting that these .xyz domains "tend to be more affordable compared to their alternatives."

The Bank of England has said that bitcoin could be "worthless" and people investing in the digital currency should be prepared to lose everything. The Guardian reports: In a warning over the potential risks for investors, the central bank questioned whether there was any inherent worth in the most prominent digital currency, which has soared in value this year to close to $50,000 a piece. The deputy governor, Sir Jon Cunliffe, said the Bank had to be ready for risks linked to the rise of the crypto asset following rapid growth in its popularity. "Their price can vary quite considerably and [bitcoins] could theoretically or practically drop to zero," he told the BBC.

The Bank's financial policy committee, set up in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to monitor risks, said on Monday there was little direct threat to the stability of the UK financial system from crypto assets. However, it warned that, at the current rapid pace of growth, such assets could become more interconnected with traditional financial services and were likely to pose a number of risks. Publishing its regular health check on the financial system, the Bank said major institutions should take a cautious approach to adopting crypto assets and that it would pay close attention to developments in the market. "Enhanced regulatory and law enforcement frameworks, both domestically and at a global level, are needed to influence developments in these fast-growing markets in order to manage risks, encourage sustainable innovation and maintain broader trust and integrity in the financial system," it said. In a separate blogpost published on its website on Tuesday, a member of the Bank's staff said bitcoin failed to fulfill many of the features required of a currency and that it risked being inherently volatile.

Thomas Belsham, who works in the Bank's stakeholder and media engagement division, wrote: "The problem is that, unlike traditional forms of money, Bitcoin isn't used to price things other than itself. As Bitcoiners themselves are fond of saying, 'one Bitcoin = one Bitcoin'. But a tautology does not a currency make." He said scarcity of the crypto asset -- which is limited to 21m bitcoin -- is among the key reasons for its attraction for investors, but this feature embedded into its design "may even, ultimately, render Bitcoin worthless." About 19m bitcoin is currently in circulation, with new coins added when "miners" validate changes to the blockchain ledger underpinning the cryptocurrency. While the ultimate number of bitcoin in circulation is not expected to be reached until February 2140, it would become harder to sustain this system over time, Belsham said. "Simple game theory tells us that a process of backward induction should, really, at some point, induce the smart money to get out. And were that to happen, investors really should be prepared to lose everything. Eventually."