Under a new initiative, named Bandwagon, SpaceX is expanding its rideshare program to cater to the demand for launches to mid-inclination orbits. TechCrunch reports: Orbital inclination refers to what part of the Earth is visible to a satellite as it rotates around the planet. A satellite in an equatorial orbit is at 0 degrees inclination; a satellite in a sun-synchronous orbit (SSO) is slightly higher than 90 degrees; and a mid-inclination orbit is around 45 degrees. Currently, SpaceX offers rideshare services on the Falcon 9 rocket to SSO through the Transporter program, which is in notoriously high demand. But mid-inclination orbits (MIOs) are appealing to a growing number of customers, especially to remote sensing companies that want to strengthen their coverage over areas like parts of Asia and the Middle East. Right now, companies must often purchase a dedicated launch from Rocket Lab if they want to position a satellite in MIO.

With the new rideshare program, called Bandwagon, SpaceX is going after this slice of the market. According to SpaceX's website, it currently has two Bandwagon missions booked for 2024 and two for 2025. If they become even close to the popularity of the Rideshare program, they could be a major threat to all other small launch providers: According to Jarrod McLachlan, director of rideshare sales at SpaceX, who spoke at the industry conference, SpaceX has delivered 682 spacecraft to orbit to date via rideshare missions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Founded in 2011, AnonFiles.com became known as a popular hosting service that allowed users to share files up to 20GB without download restrictions. As the name suggests, registering an account wasn't required either; both up and downloading files was totally anonymous. The same also applies to BayFiles.com, an affiliated file-hosting service that was launched by The Pirate Bay. Both sites launched around the same time and shared a similar design and identical features. Both sites had millions of visitors but AnonFiles stood out with over 18 million visitors a month. This popularity didn't go unnoticed by rightsholders, who repeatedly flagged AnonFiles as a "notorious" pirate site.

Rightsholders and law enforcement authorities were not the only ones unhappy with the illegal content posted to the site. For AnonFiles' operators, it caused major problems too. The current owners purchased the site two years ago but didn't expect the abuse to be so massive that the only option would be to shut it down. According to a goodbye message posted on the site, they simply can't continue. "After trying endlessly for two years to run a file sharing site with user anonymity, we have been tired of handling the extreme volumes of people abusing it and the headaches it has created for us."

The operators tried to contain the abuse by setting up all sorts of automated filters and filename restrictions, taking thousands of false positives for granted, but that didn't help much. With tens of millions of uploads and petabytes of data, no anti-abuse measure was sufficient. And when the site's proxy service pulled the plug a few days ago, AnonFiles decided to call it quits. "We have auto banned contents of hundreds of thousands files. Banned file names and also banned specific usage patterns connected to abusive material," the AnonFiles team writes. "Even after all this the high volume of abuse will not stop. This is not the kind of work we imagine when acquiring it and recently our proxy provider shut us down. This can not continue." The current owners have invited others to buy the domain name and give it a shot themselves.

Verizon's BlueJeans videoconferencing app will be shutting down just over three years after the company bought it for $400 million. 9to5Google reports: In May 2020, Verizon acquired BlueJeans, a business-focused video app that first launched in 2011. At the beginning of 2022, Google and Verizon partnered to preload the BlueJeans app on (since-discontinued) Glass Enterprise Edition 2 smart glasses sold by Verizon. More recently, BlueJeans gained a free tier this year, opening the app to many more potential customers and competing with the free consumer-ready services of Google Meet and Zoom. Suffice it to say BlueJeans didn't take off in popularity.

Today, members of Verizon's BlueJeans service were sent an email explaining that the app is being "sunset." The first phase of that shutdown process is that the free trial and the free "BlueJeans Basic" tier will no longer be available as of August 31, 2023. While not stated in the email we've received, business customers of BlueJeans will likely be given a longer period to transition off of the platform. In April 2020, CNBC reported that Verizon was going to pay around $400 million for the company.

An anonymous reader shares this report from Dice.com: C++ is enjoying a surge in popularity, according to the latest update to the TIOBE Index, which tracks programming languages' "buzz."

C++ currently sits right behind C and Python on TIOBE's list. "A few months ago, the programming C++ language claimed position 3 of the TIOBE index (at the expense of Java). But C++ has not finished its rise. C seems to be its next victim," added the note accompanying the data... ["At the moment, the gap between the two is only 0.76%."]

Matlab, Scratch and Rust also match their all time high records at respectively positions #10, #12 and #17.
So here, according to TIOBE, are the 10 most popular programmings languages:

1. Python
2. C
3. C++
4. Java
5. C#
6. JavaScript
7. Visual Basic
8. SQL
9. PHP
10. MATLAB

The site I Programmer digs deeper: C++ was the only one of the top four languages to see a positive year-on-year change in its percentage rating — adding 0.79% to stand at 10.8%. Python had the smallest loss of the entire Top 20, -0.01% leaving it with a share of 13,42% while Visual Basic had the greatest loss at -2.07%. This, combined with JavaScript gaining 1.34%, led to JavaScript overtaking it to occupy #6, its highest ever ranking in the TIOBE Index.
They also note that COBOL "had a 3-month rise going from a share of 0.41% in April to 0.86% in July which moved it into #20 on the index."

Top AI companies including OpenAI, Alphabet and Meta Platforms have made voluntary commitments to the White House to implement measures such as watermarking AI-generated content to help make the technology safer, the Biden administration said on Friday. From a report: The companies -- which also include Anthropic, Inflection, Amazon.com and OpenAI partner Microsoft -- pledged to thoroughly test systems before releasing them and share information about how to reduce risks and invest in cybersecurity.

The move is seen as a win for the Biden administration's effort to regulate the technology which has experienced a boom in investment and consumer popularity. Since generative AI, which uses data to create new content like ChatGPT's human-sounding prose, became wildly popular this year, lawmakers around the world began considering how to mitigate the dangers of the emerging technology to national security and the economy.

Virtual pet website Neopets, which was popular in the 2000s but declined in recent years, is planning a comeback with $4 million in funding and a promise to bring back 50 classic games on July 25th. The BBC reports: Launched in 1999 by British developers, the site let users care for cartoon pets, chat and play games. But after Viacom bought it, for $160 million in 2005, the site failed to keep up with the times and many elements stopped working. At its peak, in the mid-2000s, Neopets had 25 million users, rivaling the popularity of Tamagotchis and other virtual pets. But by 2017, that had collapsed to just 100,000 daily users, according to then chief executive David Lord.

But will the promise of new funding and functionality tempt people to return to their neglected pets? [...] Neopets said a management buyout deal meant the website was now an independent business without a large corporate owner. "Free from the corporate baggage that existed in the past, the newly united [Neopets Team] has now been entrusted with the decision-making and overall brand strategy of Neopets, enabling them to work solely on the betterment of the entire Neopets game and community," it said in a blog post. "The Neopets Team is, for the first time in over a decade, equipped to make meaningful changes in pursuit of a Neopian renaissance." It plans to begin the "new era" with a refreshed homepage, on Thursday, 20 July. Five days later, it will bring back 50 of the website's classic games amid plans to fix "many of the most beloved games" in the future.

BlackRock's move into crypto fits into the asset management giant's broader mission of creating products that are easy to use and cheap for investors, CEO Larry Fink said Friday. From a report: "We believe we have a responsibility to democratize investing. We've done a great job, and the role of ETFs in the world is transforming investing. And we're only at the beginning of that," Fink said. BlackRock applied for a spot bitcoin ETF on June 15, which appeared to spur a rally in cryptocurrencies and a flurry of similar filings from other asset managers. The initial filing for the iShares Bitcoin Trust did not include a management fee.

[...] Fink had previously been critical of crypto, saying in 2017 that the popularity of digital currencies was do in large part to money laundering. However, interest from clients and the high cost of transactions motivated BlackRock to take a closer look at entering the space, Fink said. He also added that crypto can serve a diversification role in investor portfolios. "It has a differentiating value versus other asset classes, but more importantly, because it's so international it's going to transcend any one currency," Fink said.

An anonymous reader shares a report: When top anime streaming platform Crunchyroll was first gaining popularity as a pirated-video site in the mid-2000s, Japanese animation was considered a niche form of entertainment, appealing mainly to enthusiasts known as otaku. Today, it's a $20 billion industry spanning streaming, games and merchandise, and the company's hit series, such as One Piece and Demon Slayer, have drawn millions of US and European subscribers. Crunchyroll, now owned by Sony Group, is setting its sights on India as a major growth market -- one that could help the industry further expand from a made-in-Japan subculture into a mainstream and global phenomenon.

The company, founded in 2006 by graduates of the University of California at Berkeley, started off as an anime-sharing site. It eventually began streaming only legitimate content, helped by investment from venture capitalists including former News Corp. President Peter Chernin and ownership by AT&T's WarnerMedia. Now the largest anime-dedicated streaming platform in the world, it was bought by Sony in a $1.2 billion deal announced in 2020. Crunchyroll has more than 100 million registered members, including 11 million paid users, after rapid subscriber growth during the pandemic when people binge-watched exotic content. With growth in Western markets moderating, the anime giant is looking to India for its next breakthrough, according to President Rahul Purini.

The former chief executive officer of bankrupt crypto lender Celsius Network was arrested following a probe into the company's collapse, Bloomberg reported Thursday. From the report: The arrest took place Thursday morning, according to the person, who asked not to be identified because the criminal case isn't public. The Securities and Exchange Commission also filed a lawsuit against Mashinsky and the company Thursday, according to court records. Celsius was one of several high-profile crypto firms that imploded last year. The company gained popularity paying high interest rates on digital-asset deposits. But following the collapse of the TerraUSD stablecoin and a downturn in the digital-asset markets the company was left with a giant hole in its balance sheet and unable to meet an influx of customer withdrawals.

Mark Zuckerberg has used Meta's might to push Threads to a fast start -- but that may only work up to a point. Mike Isaac, writing at The New York Times: A big tech company with billions of users introduces a new social network. Leveraging the popularity and scale of its existing products, the company intends to make the new social platform a success. In doing so, it also plans to squash a leading competitor's app. If this sounds like Instagram's new Threads app and its push against its rival Twitter, think again. The year was 2011 and Google had just rolled out a social network called Google+, which was aimed as its "Facebook killer." Google thrust the new site in front of many of its users who relied on its search and other products, expanding Google+ to more than 90 million users within the first year.

But by 2018, Google+ was relegated to the ash heap of history. Despite the internet search giant's enormous audience, its social network failed to catch on as people continued flocking to Facebook -- and later to Instagram and other social apps. In the history of Silicon Valley, big tech companies have often become even bigger tech companies by using their scale as a built-in advantage. But as Google+ shows, bigness alone is no guarantee of winning the fickle and faddish social media market.

This is the challenge that Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, now faces as he tries to dislodge Twitter and make Threads the prime app for real-time, public conversations. If tech history is any guide, size and scale are solid footholds -- but ultimately can only go so far. What comes next is much harder. Mr. Zuckerberg needs people to be able to find friends and influencers on Threads in the serendipitous and sometimes weird ways that Twitter managed to accomplish. He needs to make sure Threads isn't filled with spam and grifters. He needs people to be patient about app updates that are in the works.

The number of coins circulating in Japan has fallen by an unprecedented amount, suggesting the nation's households are coming to the end of their long love affair with the piggy bank. From a report: The national stock of coins rose steadily since 1970, but has fallen sharply on a year-on-year basis for 18 straight months, according to Bank of Japan data. The turnround has been sparked by a combination of the Covid pandemic, banking fees, inflation and the rise of cashless payment technology.

The popularity of cashless payments -- which some have linked with the idea that coins were perceived as "dirty" and a vector for Covid -- accelerated sharply in 2022. Cashless transactions accounted for 36 per cent of all consumer payments, compared with 15 per cent a decade earlier. Analysts said the public's shift away from coins may also signal a wider change in Japanese attitudes towards saving. The sharpest drop has been in circulation of the largest denomination 500 Yen ($3.5) coin. This is the most common coin given to children to keep in their piggy banks, a tradition that seeks to establish solid patterns of saving and deferred gratification at an early age.

President Emmanuel Macron is partially blaming video games for the spread of violence in France following the shooting death of a teenager during a police traffic stop in a Paris suburb last week. NPR reports: "It sometimes feels like some of them are experiencing, on the streets, the video games that have intoxicated them," Macron said in a press conference on July 1. He added that protesters are using Snapchat and TikTok to organize themselves and spread "a mimicking of violence, which for the youngest leads to a kind of disconnect from reality." Concerns that video games promote shootings, massacres or rioting are now about half a century old; it has been traced back to the 1976 release of Death Race, an arcade video game which put players behind the wheel of a car to mow down humanoid figures for points. The argument gained renewed traction in the 1990s with the release of much more realistic first-person shooter games. It is an old bogeyman that politicians have latched onto in the wake of horrific tragedies. But it has become less common as troves of studies have largely concluded there is no causal link between video games and violent behavior.

Christopher Ferguson, a professor at Stetson University in Florida who has studied the impact of such games on the public, said he is surprised at Macron's comments. The president is 45 years old and belongs to a generation raised with video games, so "seeing him mention this is almost anachronistic," Ferguson said, sounding perplexed. "The evidence is very clear. Whatever may be going on in France, whatever violence is occurring, it certainly is not due to violence in video games." Decades of research, especially long-term experiments spanning decades, have consistently found "that playing violent video games, do not cause even prank-level aggressive behaviors, let alone violent crimes," Ferguson said. He also noted that the overall violent crime in the U.S. dropped significantly between 1993 and 2020, the same period during which violent video games soared in popularity.

And it's not just in the United States. A 2019 study out of Oxford University determined that early violent video game playing among British teenagers does not predict serious or violent criminal behavior later in life. According to Ferguson, if video games were the cause of rampant violence, then countries like Japan, South Korea and the Netherlands, which consume more violent video games per capita, would be rife with bloodshed. "Instead, they're three of the most peaceful countries on the planet in terms of violent crime," he said. "You could wave a magic wand and take all these people's video games away, and that's not going to have any effect in any way going to help their lives and reduce their aggression," Ferguson said. So why do politicians turn to the familiar refrain? Ferguson said it is a way for elected leaders to shift the blame away from failing government policies. "It gets people talking about the wrong thing. They're thinking about video games. They're not thinking about gun control or whatever inequalities are happening in France," Ferguson said.

The June Steam Survey results show that AMD CPUs have gained significant popularity among Linux gamers, with a market share of 67% -- a remarkable 7% increase from the previous month. Phoronix reports: In part that's due to the Steam Deck being powered by an AMD SoC but it's been a trend building for some time of AMD's increasing Ryzen CPU popularity among Linux users to their open-source driver work and continuing to build more good will with the community.

In comparison, last June the AMD CPU Linux gaming marketshare came in at 45% while Intel was at 54%. Or at the start of 2023, AMD CPUs were at a 55% marketshare among Linux gamers. Or if going back six years, AMD CPU use among Linux gamers was a mere 18% during the early Ryzen days. It's also the direct opposite on the Windows side. When looking at the Steam Survey results for June limited to Windows, there Intel has a 68% marketshare to AMD at 32%.

Beyond the Steam Deck, it's looking like AMD's efforts around open-source drivers, AMD expanding their Linux client (Ryzen) development efforts over the past two years, promises around OpenSIL, and other efforts commonly covered on Phoronix are paying off for AMD in wooing over their Linux gaming customer base.

CNBC has created a 15-minute video titled "The Rise and Fall of Skype," telling the story of how Skype was developed in just nine months in 2003 by a six-person group of childhood friends in Estonia. "We were smart engineers," says Skype's former chief technical architect Ahti Heinla. "We learned on the go. None of us had any telecoms background." But at the end of the interview, he concedes "I myself use Skype right now fairly little. I still have it installed on my phone, but my primary communication methods now are elsewhere."

GigaOm founder Om Malik tells CNBC it was Skype's missteps that enabled the massive growth of WhatsApp, and shared this succinct diagnosis of what's happening to Skype. "Microsoft is where consumer brands go to die." From an accompanying article on CNBC's web site: In 2005 eBay bought it. That deal didn't work out as planned, and an investor group led by Silver Lake purchased a majority stake. Microsoft then stepped in, shelling out $8.5 billion for the company in 2011. Even backed by the world's largest software company, Skype is falling by the wayside. During the pandemic, consumers and business workers turned to tools like Zoom and Meta's WhatsApp, and now there are any number of options to quickly connect with groups of friends and colleagues over smartphones... Microsoft has promoted Skype in Outlook and Windows and even enriched the app with its Bing generative artificial intelligence chatbot. But the numbers still don't look great.

In March 2020, Microsoft said Skype had 40 million daily active users, a number that's since slipped to 36 million, according to a spokesperson. Microsoft's newer Teams communication app, by contrast, is growing in popularity, rising from nearly 250 million monthly users in July 2021 to a record of over 300 million in the first quarter.
Microsoft Teams reached an all-time high of 300 million active users in the second quarter of 2023, according to CNBC's video report. But a research VP at International Data Corp says Microsoft Teams was successful — in taking users away from Skype.

GigaOm's Malik says Microsoft "failed to capitalize on Skype, 100%. Steve Balmer was the king of buying things and not knowing what to do with them... What happened with Skype is the story of every large company with a lot of middle management: they didn't innovate on the product for a very long time."

Jordan Novet from CNBC Business News calls Skype "a product with an uncertain future," arguing that Microsoft "is pouring a lot of engineering resources into making Teams a big destination for communication. It's not doing the same thing with Skype." Could Skype make a comeback? "Anything is possible," Novet concedes. "Microsoft is trying to make Skype happen in a bigger way now." He points out that Skype is now equipped with Bing's AI-powered chatbot, so "You can talk to Bing in Skype. Will that make Skype explode in popularity, or make a comeback? I don't think so."

Microsoft's current head of Skype was not available for CNBC's video. But as a kind of epilogue, they report that Jaan Tallinn, one of Skype's original programmers, now "spends most of his time discussing the dangers of unchecked AI development."

"I don't know what the future holds for Skype..." he tells CNBC. "I'm concerned about humans being wiped out, so it's unlikely that we'll need Skype if that happens."

An anonymous reader shared this report from Reuters: Artificial intelligence chips from Advanced Micro Devices are about 80% as fast as those from Nvidia Corp, with a future path to matching their performance, according a Friday report by an AI software firm.

Nvidia dominates the market for the powerful chips that are used to create ChatGPT and other AI services that have swept through the technology industry in recent months. The popularity of those services has pushed Nvidia's value past $1 trillion and led to a shortage of its chips that the Nvidia says it is working to resolve. But in the meantime, tech companies are looking for alternatives, with hopes that AMD will be a strong challenger. That prompted MosaicML, an AI startup acquired for $1.3 billion earlier this week, to conduct a test comparing between AI chips from AMD and Nvidia.

MosaicML evaluated the AMD MI250 and the Nvidia A100, both of which are one generation behind each company's flagship chips but are still in high demand. MosaicML found AMD's chip could get 80% of the performance of Nvidia's chip, thanks largely to a new version of AMD software released late last year and a new version of open-source software backed by Meta Platforms called PyTorch that was released in March.

LED streetlights "shine brightly while using less energy than traditional bulbs," reports the Washington Post. After switching to LED streetlights one county in Washington state conserved 2,612,491 kilowatt-hours.

But they also discovered a downside. "One year after the change began, the additional glare masked about half of the previously visible stars." Over the past decade, scientists found, the night sky has become nearly 10% brighter each year because of artificial lights, mainly LEDs emitting too much glare. Streetlights are part of the problem, as are sources such as illuminated billboards and stadium lights. Those same outdoor lights are also affecting our health. Common types of LED lights contain higher proportions of bluer wavelengths, which can affect people's nighttime patterns... Without melatonin to trigger sleepiness, people are more likely to stay awake longer. Disruptions in our circadian rhythm have been linked to cancer cases, such as breast cancer, and labeled probably carcinogenic by the World Health Organization. Other research has shown interruptions to our circadian rhythm are linked to some heart problems.
The article has suggestions for your home — everything from blackout curtains to equipping lights with motion detectors or timers and dimmers. And when shopping for new bulbs, "Because our eyes are sensitive to blue light at night, doctors recommend buying LED lights with warmer-color hues, such as yellow or amber. That means using LED lights below 4,000 Kelvin."

City governments are already taking this seriously, according to the article. ("Some cities, such as the District of Columbia, paused a transition to LEDs after residents complained about the bright lights disrupting their sleep.") The article even includes a photo from the International Space Station showing how two cities appear differently from space because they used a different shade of LED light for their street lights.

One thing's certain: the popularity of LED lights is expected to continue: They consume up to 90% less energy and can last up to 25 times longer than traditional incandescent lights. As the most energy-efficient bulb on the market, it's no surprise that so many people are adopting the technology. The Energy Department estimated LEDs made up about 19 percent of all lighting installations in 2017, saving about 1 percent of total energy consumed in the United States. By 2035, the lights are expected to comprise 84 percent of lighting installations. Roadways, parking, building exteriors and area lights — which are applications typically high in lumens, a measure of brightness — are expected to see nearly full conversion to LED lights by 2035.

Renowned scientific journal Nature has announced in an editorial that it will not publish images or video created using generative AI tools. From a report: The ban comes amid the publication's concerns over research integrity, consent, privacy, and intellectual property protection as generative AI tools increasingly permeate the world of science and art. Founded in November 1869, Nature publishes peer-reviewed research from various academic disciplines, mainly in science and technology. It is one of the world's most cited and most influential scientific journals. Nature says its recent decision on AI artwork followed months of intense discussions and consultations prompted by the rising popularity and advancing capabilities of generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney.

Roughly 800,000 Maryland drivers with license plates designed to commemorate the War of 1812 are now inadvertently advertising a website for an online casino based in the Philippines. From a report: In 2012, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812, Maryland redesigned its standard license plate to read "MARYLAND WAR OF 1812." The license plates, which were the default between 2012 and 2016, have the URL www.starspangled200.org printed at the bottom. Sometime within the last year, www.starspangled200.org stopped telling people about how Marylander Francis Scott Key was inspired to write the national anthem "The Star Spangled Banner" after watching British ships bombard Fort McHenry in Baltimore during the War of 1812 and started instead redirecting to a site called globeinternational.info, in which a blinking, bikini-clad woman advertises "Philippines Best Betting Site, Deposit 100 Receive 250."

The issue was spotted by a Redditor who said "I was never a fan of having a plate celebrating the War of 1812, but I'm even more upset now that I (and tons of other Marylanders) are driving advertisements for international online gambling." Domain registration information shows that starspangled200.org has been re-registered and transferred a handful of times within the last few years. It is not exactly clear when it stopped being a website about American history. The Internet Archive shows that as recently as December 2022, the website explained that "the young United States was embroiled in the War of 1812 and the Chesapeake Bay region felt the brunt of it." A snapshot from today, however, explains that "Extremely lenient laws govern gaming," in the Philippines. "This is a result of the growing popularity of gambling among tourists and the enormous casino resorts that have recently been built."

Bitwarden, the popular open-source password management program, has launched Bitwarden Passwordless.dev, a developer toolkit for integrating FIDO2 WebAuthn-based passkeys into websites and applications. The New Stack reports: Bitwarden Passwordless.dev uses an easy-to-use application programming interface (API) to provide a simplified approach to implementing passkey-based authentication with your existing code. This enables developers to create seamless authentication experiences swiftly and efficiently. For example, you can use it to integrate with FIDO2 WebAuthn applications such as Face ID, fingerprint, and Windows Hello. Enterprises also face challenges in integrating passkey-based authentication into their existing applications. Another way Bitwarden Passwordless.dev addresses this issue is by including an admin console. This enables programmers to configure applications, manage user attributes, monitor passkey usage, deploy code, and get started instantly.

"Passwordless authentication is rapidly gaining popularity due to its enhanced security and streamlined user login experience," said Michael Crandell, CEO of Bitwarden. "Bitwarden equips developers with the necessary tools and flexibility to implement passkey-based authentication swiftly and effortlessly, thereby improving user experiences while maintaining optimal security levels."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Bcrypt turns 25 this year, and Niels Provos, one of its coinventors, says that looking back, the algorithm has always had good energy, thanks to its open source availability and the technical characteristics that have fueled its longevity. Provos spoke to WIRED about a retrospective on the algorithm that he published this week in Usenix ;login:. Like so many digital workhorses, though, there are now more robust and secure alternatives to bcrypt, including the hashing algorithms known as scrypt and Argon2. Provos himself says that the quarter-century milestone is plenty for bcrypt and that he hopes it will lose popularity before celebrating another major birthday.

A version of bcrypt first shipped with the open source operating system OpenBSD 2.1 in June 1997. At the time, the United States still imposed stringent export limits on cryptography. But Provos, who grew up in Germany, worked on its development while he was still living and studying there. "One thing I found so surprising was how popular it became," he says. "I think in part it's probably because it was actually solving a problem that was real, but also because it was open source and not encumbered by any export restrictions. And then everybody ended up doing their own implementations in all these other languages. So these days, if you are faced with wanting to do password hashing, bcrypt is going to be available in every language that you could possibly operate in. But the other thing that I find interesting is that it's even still relevant 25 years later. That is just crazy."

Provos developed bcrypt with David Mazieres, a systems security professor at Stanford University who was studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he and Provos collaborated on bcrypt. The two met through the open source community and were working on OpenBSD. [...] Password security is always lagging, though, and both Provos and Mazieres expressed disbelief and disappointment that the state of passwords broadly has not evolved in decades. Even new schemes like passkeys are only just beginning to emerge. "Bcrypt should have been superseded already," Provos says. "It's surprising how much reliance we still have on passwords. If you had asked me 25 years ago, I would not have guessed that."