The Southwest Airlines meltdown that stranded thousands of passengers during one of the busiest travel weeks of the year exposed a major industry shortcoming: crew-scheduling technology that was largely built for a bygone era and is due for a major overhaul. From a report: Southwest relies on crew-assignment software called SkySolver, an off-the-shelf application that it has customized and updated, but is nearing the end of its life, according to the airline. The program was developed decades ago and is now owned by General Electric. During the winter storm, amid a huge volume of changes to crew schedules to work through, SkySolver couldn't handle the task of matching crew members and which flights they should work, executives of the Dallas-based carrier said.

Southwest's software wasn't designed to solve problems of that scale, Chief Operating Officer Andrew Watterson said Thursday, forcing the airline to revert to manual scheduling. Unlike some large rivals with hub-and-spoke networks, Southwest planes hopscotch from city to city, which may have been another complicating factor. Many carriers still rely on homegrown solutions, which largely were built on legacy mainframe computers, analysts say. Analysts and industry insiders say the airline industry is overdue for a massive technology overhaul that would take advantage of highly scalable cloud technologies and fully connect disparate sources of real-time data to better coordinate crews with aircraft. The airline sector has been among the slowest to adopt cloud-based and analytics technologies that could help solve complicated transportation network problems, those analysts say.

Computer programmer Zeynep Tufekci now writes about the impact of technology on society. In an opinion piece for the New York Times, Tufekci writes on "the shameful open secret" that earlier this week led Southwest airlines to suddenly cancel 5,400 flights in less than 48 hours. "The recent meltdown was avoidable, but it would have cost them."

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes that the piece "takes a crack at explaining 'technical debt' to the masses." Tufekci writes: Computers become increasingly capable and powerful by the year and new hardware is often the most visible cue for technological progress. However, even with the shiniest hardware, the software that plays a critical role inside many systems is too often antiquated, and in some cases decades old. This failing appears to be a key factor in why Southwest Airlines couldn't return to business as usual the way other airlines did after last week's major winter storm. More than 15,000 of its flights were canceled starting on Dec. 22, including more than 2,300 canceled this past Thursday — almost a week after the storm had passed.

It's been an open secret within Southwest for some time, and a shameful one, that the company desperately needed to modernize its scheduling systems. Software shortcomings had contributed to previous, smaller-scale meltdowns, and Southwest unions had repeatedly warned about it. Without more government regulation and oversight, and greater accountability, we may see more fiascos like this one, which most likely stranded hundreds of thousands of Southwest passengers — perhaps more than a million — over Christmas week.

And not just for a single company, as the problem is widespread across many industries.
"The reason we made it through Y2K intact is that we didn't ignore the problem," the piece argues. But in comparison, it points out, Southwest had already experienced another cancellation crisis in October of 2021 (while the president of the pilots' union "pointed out that the antiquated crew-scheduling technology was leading to cascading disruptions.") "In March, in its open letter to the company, the union even placed updating the creaking scheduling technology above its demands for increased pay."

Speaking about this week's outage, a Southwest spokesman concedes that "We had available crews and aircraft, but our technology struggled to align our resources due to the magnitude and scale of the disruptions."

But Tufekci concludes that "Ultimately, the problem is that we haven't built a regulatory environment where companies have incentives to address technical debt, rather than passing the burden on to customers, employees or the next management.... For airlines, it might mean holding them responsible for the problems their miserly approach causes to the flying public."

Apple's iPhone 14 Emergency SOS via Satellite Feature was put to the test in Alaska yesterday, when a man became stranded in a rural area. MacRumors reports: In the early hours of the morning on December 1, Alaska State Troopers received an alert that a man traveling by snow machine from Noorvik to Kotzebue had become stranded. The man was in a cold, remote location with no connectivity, and he activated the Emergency SOS via satellite feature on his iPhone 14 to alert authorities to his predicament. Apple's Emergency Response Center worked with local search and rescue teams and the Northwest Arctic Borough Search and Rescue Coordinator to send out volunteer searchers directly to the GPS coordinates that were relayed to Apple using the emergency function.

The man was rescued successfully and there were no injuries. The area where he was located is remote and on the fringes of where satellite connectivity is available. Apple says that satellite connectivity might not work in places above 62 degrees latitude, such as northern parts of Canada and Alaska, and Noorvik and Kotzebue are close to 69 degrees latitude. Troopers who helped with the rescue were "impressed with the accuracy and completeness of information included in the initial alert," with the Emergency SOS via Satellite feature designed to ask several questions ahead of when an alert is sent out to expedite rescue missions.

Beerismydad shares a report from the Associated Press: Former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, who fled prosecution after revealing highly classified surveillance programs, has received a Russian passport and taken the citizenship oath, Russian news agencies quoted his lawyer as saying Friday. Lawyer Anatoly Kucherena was reported as saying that Snowden got the passport and took the oath on Thursday, about three months after Russian President Vladimir Putin granted him citizenship.

The reports did not specify whether Snowden has renounced his U.S. citizenship. The United States revoked his passport in 2013, leading to Snowden being stranded in a Moscow airport for weeks after arriving from Hong Kong, aiming to reach Ecuador. Russia eventually granted him permanent residency. He married American Lindsay Mills in 2017 and the couple has two children. Further reading: Should the U.S. Pardon Edward Snowden?

The U.S. Treasury is clarifying some of the details of its sanctions on decentralized crypto mixer Tornado Cash, including the right to disseminate the code involved. From a report: "U.S. persons would not be prohibited by U.S. sanctions regulations from copying the open-source code and making it available online for others to view, as well as discussing, teaching about, or including open-source code in written publications, such as textbooks, absent additional facts," FAQs posted on September 13 say. The new guidance further outlines a process for applications from users with crypto stranded in Tornado Cash's mixing pools. "OFAC would have a favorable licensing policy towards such applications, provided that the transaction did not involve other sanctionable conduct," the FAQs say of Treasury's Office of Foreign Asset Control. The clarification from the Treasury follows six individuals suing it over the sanctions last week. Coinbase is bankrolling the lawsuit.

Blockstream and Jack Dorsey's Block, formerly Square, are breaking ground on a solar- and battery-powered bitcoin mine in Texas that uses solar and storage technology from Tesla. Tesla's 3.8 megawatt solar PV array and 12 megawatt-hour Megapack will power the facility. From a report: Blockstream co-founder and CEO Adam Back, a British cryptographer and a member of the "cypherpunk" crew, told CNBC on the sidelines of the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami that the mining facility is designed to be a proof of concept for 100% renewable energy bitcoin mining at scale.

[...] Miners provide demand to these semi-stranded assets and make renewables in Texas economically viable, according to Castle Island Venture's Nic Carter. The constraint is that West Texas has roughly 34 gigawatts of power, five gigawatts of demand, and only 12 gigawatts of transmission. You can think of bitcoin miners as temporary buyers who keep the energy assets operational until the grid is able to fully absorb them. Back said the off-grid mine, expected to be completed later this year, highlights another key tenet of the bitcoin network: Miners are location agnostic and can "do it from anywhere without local infrastructure."

"When Brent Whitehead and Matt Lohstroh were sophomores at Texas A&M University, they decided to get into the business of mining bitcoin on the oil fields of East Texas," reports CNBC: Whitehead, an engineer hailing from a family with a long history in oil and gas production, and Lohstroh, a finance major with a bitcoin obsession, ignored the skeptics, and sunk all the cash they had earned from their high school side gigs in lawn care and landscaping into Giga Energy Solutions, a company that mints bitcoin from stranded natural gas.

For years, oil and gas companies have struggled with the problem of what to do when they accidentally hit a natural gas formation while drilling for oil. Whereas oil can easily be trucked out to a remote destination, gas delivery requires a pipeline. If a drilling site is right next door to a pipeline, they chuck the gas in and take whatever cash the buyer on the other end is willing to pay that day. But if it's 20 miles from a pipeline, drillers often burn it off, or flare it. That is why you will typically see flames rising from oil fields. Beyond the environmental implications of flare gas, drillers are also, in effect, burning cash. To these two 23-year-old Aggie alums, it was a big problem with an obvious solution.

Giga places a shipping container full of thousands of bitcoin miners on an oil well, then diverts the natural gas into generators, which convert the gas into electricity that is then used to power the miners. The process reduces CO2-equivalent emissions by about 63% compared to continued flaring, according to research from Denver-based Crusoe Energy Systems. "Growing up, I always saw flares, just being in the oil and gas industry. I knew how wasteful it was," Whitehead told CNBC on the sidelines of the North American Prospect Expo summit in Houston, a flagship event for the industry. "It's a new way to not only lower emissions but to monetize gas." Whitehead tells CNBC they have signed deals with more than 20 oil and gas companies, four of which are publicly traded. Giga also says they're also in talks with sovereign wealth funds, and they are expanding, fast.

Giga's 11-person team is adding another six employees this month.... Giga tells CNBC that its revenue was more than $4 million in 2021, and it's on track to earn more than $20 million by the end of 2022. Whitehead says that some of their mining sites have helped to revitalize the local economy by creating jobs, such as field technicians and bitcoin pumpers, who go out to check the sites. In the small communities where they've set up a bitcoin mine, they are sometimes the largest source of revenue. "An area that was just a ghost town has now found ways to take their stranded energy that they were wasting and monetize it, and that's what gets me excited, because like that's what is helping the community overall," said Whitehead.

"Almost 5,000 flights were canceled across the world over Christmas weekend," reports NBC News, "as holiday travel plans were brought to a halt amid the rapidly spreading omicron variant of Covid-19." About 2,800 global flights were canceled on Christmas Day alone, according to flight tracker FlightAware, with some airline companies citing the spread of the new variant as the cause for the disruption...

Several major airlines, including United, Delta and Alaska, said they had been forced to cancel hundreds of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day flights after the omicron variant infected employees and crew members. United said some of its 210 cancellations Saturday were also a result of close contact situations.

The Biden administration is looking for communities willing to serve as temporary homes for tens of thousands of metric tons of nuclear waste currently stranded at power plants around the country. Bloomberg reports: The Energy Department filed (PDF) a public notice Tuesday that it is restarting the process for finding a voluntary host for spent nuclear fuel until a permanent location is identified. "Hearing from and then working with communities interested in hosting one of these facilities is the best way to finally solve the nation's spent nuclear fuel management issues," Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a statement. The agency, in its notice, requested input on how to proceed with a "consent-based" process for a federal nuclear storage facility, including what benefits could entice local and state governments and how to address potential impediments. Federal funding is also possible, the notice said. Approximately 89,000 metric tons of nuclear waste is being stored at dozens of nuclear power plants and other sites around the country.
[...]
One such interim storage site could be in Andrews, Texas. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in September approved a license for a proposal by Orano CIS LLC and its joint venture partner, J.F. Lehman & Co.'s Waste Control Specialists LLC, to establish a repository in the heart of Texas' Permian Basin oil fields for as many as 40,000 metric tons of radioactive waste. The joint venture envisioned having nuclear waste shipped by rail from around the country and sealed in concrete casks where it would be stored above ground at a site about 30 miles (48.28 kilometers) from Andrews. But the plan has drawn opposition from Texas authorities and local officials who once embraced it as an economic benefit but have since had a change of heart. A similar nuclear waste storage project, proposed in New Mexico by Holtec International Corp., is awaiting approval by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The agency said it expects to make a decision on that proposal in January 2022.

Heidi Thorsen owns the coin-only laundromat "Lunar Laundry" in Seattle — and discovered an odd phenomenon, reports the Seattle Times. "Thorsen went to her bank to replenish her coin supply. But the bank was so short on change, she could only buy a few $10, 40-quarter rolls, and most often there were none at all..."

Thorsen speaks for many in the local coin-operated economy, a diverse, somewhat old-school community of businesses and consumers that has been in a state of agitation since COVID-19 interrupted the normal cycle of coins. "It's something I have to think about all the time," says Queen Anne resident Dan White, whose apartment has a coin-operated laundry. Early in the pandemic, White had to frantically group-text friends to secure enough quarters for a weekend's wash... "People that aren't using quarters for a laundry machine have no idea that this is even happening." Indeed, the Great Quarter Shortage has exposed another social and economic divide as a subset of consumers and businesses must scramble to replace what COVID has made scarce. The result is a kind of two-bit black market, rife with clever workarounds and conspiracy theories, and no small amount of social friction...

Technically, there is no quarter shortage, in Seattle or anywhere. The U.S. Mint produced nearly 24% more coins in 2020 than in 2019, despite a temporary pandemic slowdown, and continues to roll them out at "near record levels," according to Mint officials. The problem, federal officials say, is many of the roughly 55 billion quarters estimated to be in circulation have been stranded by the pandemic in places — under your couch cushions, say, or in your console coin holder — where the coin-operated economy can't touch them. It's a smaller, less visible version of the supply chain crisis, but with quarters instead of cargo containers.

Early in the pandemic, many consumers and businesses stopped using physical currency out of safety concerns. Overall cash purchases in 2020 dropped nearly 27% compared with 2019, while the rate at which coins and bills change hands fell more than 70% — the steepest drop on record — and hasn't recovered, Federal Reserve data show. As coins accumulated in homes and handbags, retailers that were typically quarter-negative even before COVID went even further in the red and made even more frequent coin purchases from banks. Consumers, meanwhile, were also less frequently hauling in their caches of spare change to banks or coin kiosks. As the circulation of coins slowed, and as the reopening economy led banks to order more coins from the Federal Reserve, the country's central bank saw its own coin inventory fall below normal levels. In June 2020, the Reserve imposed a "temporary" restriction on coin orders by private banks that, despite a brief reprieve this year, remains in effect. Some banks restricted their own coin sales, even to big retail customers — and many still do.

The bank is "shorting us on our order a lot," says Dave Garcia, assistant store director at Ballard Market, which, like many retailers, has suspended its own quarter sales to consumers...
It's a problem for the "unbanked" without debit cards and the small-business owners who depend on them and "can't afford to upgrade to digital payments and the touchless economy." (And the article points out this includes laundromats, more than half of which are still coin-operated in the U.S.) The CEO of the Coin Laundry Association even tells the Times that some laundromats have resorted to installing a kill switch on their change machines, just so if noncustomers try to make change, "they just cut the power to the machine."

The owner of the Lunar Laundry ultimately installed a digital system that lets customers pay through a phone app after scanning a washer's QR code. A bar owner in Seattle even believes a conspiracy theory that the government is prolonging the shortage to push everyone to digital currencies so their purchases can all be tracked.

But in fact, the Times notes, "Solving the quarter crisis has become a top priority of the Federal Reserve, where a specially empaneled U.S. Coin Task Force is working to persuade Americans to spend those quarters and other coins back into circulation..."

About half of the world's fossil fuel assets will be worthless by 2036 under a net zero transition, according to research. From a report: Countries that are slow to decarbonise will suffer but early movers will profit; the study finds that renewables and freed-up investment will more than make up for the losses to the global economy. It highlights the risk of producing far more oil and gas than required for future demand, which is estimated to leave $11tn-$14tn in so-called stranded assets -- infrastructure, property and investments where the value has fallen so steeply they must be written off. The lead author, Jean-Francois Mercure of the University of Exeter, said the shift to clean energy would benefit the world economy overall, but it would need to be handled carefully to prevent regional pockets of misery and possible global instability. "In a worst-case scenario, people will keep investing in fossil fuels until suddenly the demand they expected does not materialise and they realise that what they own is worthless. Then we could see a financial crisis on the scale of 2008," he said, warning oil capitals such as Houston could suffer the same fate as Detroit after the decline of the US car industry unless the transition is carefully managed.

Stranded in Yemen's war zone, a decaying supertanker has more than a million barrels of oil aboard. If -- or when -- it explodes or sinks, thousands may die. From a report: Soon, a vast, decrepit oil tanker in the Red Sea will likely sink, catch fire, or explode. The vessel, the F.S.O. Safer -- pronounced "Saffer" -- is named for a patch of desert near the city of Marib, in central Yemen, where the country's first reserves of crude oil were discovered. In 1987, the Safer was redesigned as a floating storage-and-off-loading facility, or F.S.O., becoming the terminus of a pipeline that began at the Marib oil fields and proceeded westward, across mountains and five miles of seafloor. The ship has been moored there ever since, and recently it has degraded to the verge of collapse. More than a million barrels of oil are currently stored in its tanks. The Exxon Valdez spilled about a quarter of that volume when it ran aground in Alaska, in 1989.

The Safer's problems are manifold and intertwined. It is forty-five years old -- ancient for an oil tanker. Its age would not matter so much were it being maintained properly, but it is not. In 2014, members of one of Yemen's powerful clans, the Houthis, launched a successful coup, presaging a brutal conflict that continues to this day. Before the war, the Yemeni state-run firm that owns the ship -- the Safer Exploration & Production Operations Company, or sepoc -- spent some twenty million dollars a year taking care of the vessel. Now the company can afford to make only the most rudimentary emergency repairs. More than fifty people worked on the Safer before the war; seven remain. This skeleton crew, which operates with scant provisions and no air-conditioning or ventilation below deck -- interior temperatures on the ship frequently surpass a hundred and twenty degrees -- is monitored by soldiers from the Houthi militia, which now occupies the territory where the Safer is situated. The Houthi leadership has obstructed efforts by foreign entities to inspect the ship or to siphon its oil. The risk of a disaster increases every day.

A vessel without power is known as a dead ship. The Safer died in 2017, when its steam boilers ran out of fuel. A boiler is a tanker's heart, because it generates the power and the steam needed to run vital systems. Two diesel generators on deck now provide electricity for basic needs, such as laptop charging. But crucial processes driven by the boiler system have ceased -- most notably, "inerting," in which inert gases are pumped into the tanks where the crude is stored, to neutralize flammable hydrocarbons that rise off the oil. Before inerting became a commonplace safety measure, in the nineteen-seventies, tankers blew up surprisingly often, and with lethal consequences: in December, 1969, three of them exploded within seventeen days, killing four men. Since the boilers on the Safer stopped working, the ship has been a tinderbox, vulnerable to a static-electric spark, a discharged weapon, a tossed cigarette butt. [...] The Safer is not sinking. It is not on fire. It has not exploded. It is not leaking oil. Yet the crew of the ship, and every informed observer, expects disaster to occur soon. But how soon? A year? Six months? Two weeks? Tomorrow? In May, Ahmed Kulaib, the former executive at sepoc, told me that "it could be after five minutes."

The Guardian reports on "a new breed of scambaiters...taking over TikTok and YouTube."

And one of them has more than 1.5 million followers across both video platforms. "Three to four days a week, for one or two hours at a time, Rosie Okumura, 35, telephones thieves and messes with their minds," reports the Guardian: For the past two years, the LA-based voice actor has run a sort of reverse call centre, deliberately ringing the people most of us hang up on — scammers who pose as tax agencies or tech-support companies or inform you that you've recently been in a car accident you somehow don't recall. When Okumura gets a scammer on the line, she will pretend to be an old lady, or a six-year-old girl, or do an uncanny impression of Apple's virtual assistant Siri. Once, she successfully fooled a fake customer service representative into believing that she was Britney Spears. "I waste their time," she explains, "and now they're not stealing from someone's grandma...."

Batman became Batman to avenge the death of his parents; Okumura became a scambaiter after her mum was scammed out of $500... Thankfully, the bank was able to stop the money leaving her mother's account, but Okumura wanted more than just a refund. She asked her mum to give her the number she'd called and called it herself, spending an hour and 45 minutes wasting the scammer's time. "My computer's giving me the worst vibes," she began in Kim Kardashian's voice. "Are you in front of your computer right now?" asked the scammer. "Yeah, well it's in front of me, is that... that's like the same thing?" Okumura put the video on YouTube and since then has made over 200 more videos, through which she earns regular advertising revenue (she also takes sponsorships directly from companies).

"A lot of it is entertainment — it's funny, it's fun to do, it makes people happy," she says when asked why she scambaits. "But I also get a few emails a day saying, 'Oh, thank you so much, if it weren't for that video, I would've lost $1,500.'" Okumura isn't naive — she knows she can't stop people scamming, but she hopes to stop people falling for scams. "I think just educating people and preventing it from happening in the first place is easier than trying to get all the scammers put in jail...."
The Guardian also describes Jim Browning, a Northern Irish YouTuber with nearly 3.5 million subscribers who's been posting scambaiting videos for seven years. "Browning regularly gets access to scammers' computers and has even managed to hack into the closed-circuit TV footage of call centres in order to identify individuals. He then passes this information to the 'relevant authorities' including the police, money-processing firms and internet service providers...."

And they also tell the story of an American software engineer who joined with friends to convince a scammer he'd been offered a high-paying job — only to end up stranded in Laos after paying for a 600-miles flight.

"He was crying... that was the one where I was like, 'Ah, maybe I'm taking things a little too far.'"

A ransomware attack affecting a pipeline that supplies 45% of the fuel supplies for the Eastern U.S. has now led U.S. president Biden to declare a regional emergency providing "regulatory relief" to expand fuel delivery by other routes.

Axios reports: Friday night's cyberattack is "the most significant, successful attack on energy infrastructure" known to have occurred in the U.S., notes energy researcher Amy Myers Jaffe, per Politico. It follows other significant cyberattacks on the federal government and U.S. companies in recent months... 5,500 miles of pipeline have been shut down in response to the attack.
The BBC reports: Experts say fuel prices are likely to rise 2-3% on Monday, but the impact will be far worse if it goes on for much longer... Colonial Pipeline said it is working with law enforcement, cyber-security experts and the Department of Energy to restore service. On Sunday evening it said that although its four mainlines remain offline, some smaller lateral lines between terminals and delivery points are now operational...

Independent oil market analyst Gaurav Sharma told the BBC there is a lot of fuel now stranded at refineries in Texas. "Unless they sort it out by Tuesday, they're in big trouble," said Sharma. "The first areas to be impacted would be Atlanta and Tennessee, then the domino effect goes up to New York..." The temporary waiver issued by the Department of Transportation enables oil products to be shipped in tankers up to New York, but this would not be anywhere near enough to match the pipeline's capacity, Mr Sharma warned.
UPDATE (5/10): "On Monday, U.S. officials sought to soothe concerns about price spikes or damage to the economy by stressing that the fuel supply had so far not been disrupted," reports the Associated Press, "and the company said it was working toward 'substantially restoring operational service' by the weekend."

CNN reports that a criminal group originating from Russia named DarkSide "is believed to be responsible for a ransomware cyberattack on the Colonial Pipeline, according to a former senior cyber official. DarkSide typically targets non-Russian speaking countries, the source said... Bloomberg and The Washington Post have also reported on DarkSide's purported involvement in the cyberattack..."

If so, NBC News adds some sobering thoughts: Although Russian hackers often freelance for the Kremlin, early indications suggest this was a criminal scheme — not an attack by a nation state, the sources said. But the fact that Colonial had to shut down the country's largest gasoline pipeline underscores just how vulnerable American's cyber infrastructure is to both criminals and national adversaries, such as Russia, China and Iran, experts say. "This could be the most impactful ransomware attack in history, a cyber disaster turning into a real-world catastrophe," said Andrew Rubin, CEO and co-founder of Illumio, a cyber security firm...

If the culprit turns out to be a Russian criminal group, it will underscore that Russia gives free reign to criminal hackers who target the West, said Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of the cyber firm CrowdStrike and now executive chairman of a think tank, the Silverado Policy Accelerator. "Whether they work for the state or not is increasingly irrelevant, given Russia's obvious policy of harboring and tolerating cyber crime," he said.
Citing multiple sources, the BBC reports that DarkSide "infiltrated Colonial's network on Thursday and took almost 100GB of data hostage. After seizing the data, the hackers locked the data on some computers and servers, demanding a ransom on Friday. If it is not paid, they are threatening to leak it onto the internet... "

The BBC also shares some thoughts from Digital Shadows, a London-based cyber-security firm that tracks global cyber-criminal groups to help enterprises limit their exposure online: Digital Shadows thinks the Colonial Pipeline cyber-attack has come about due to the coronavirus pandemic — the rise of engineers remotely accessing control systems for the pipeline from home. James Chappell, co-founder and chief innovation officer at Digital Shadows, believes DarkSide bought account login details relating to remote desktop software like TeamViewer and Microsoft Remote Desktop.

He says it is possible for anyone to look up the login portals for computers connected to the internet on search engines like Shodan, and then "have-a-go" hackers just keep trying usernames and passwords until they get some to work.

"We're seeing a lot of victims now, this is seriously a big problem now," said Mr Chappell.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last month, Red Hat caused a lot of consternation in the enthusiast and small business Linux world when it announced the discontinuation of CentOS Linux. Long-standing tradition -- and ambiguity in Red Hat's posted terms -- led users to believe that CentOS 8 would be available until 2029, just like the RHEL 8 it was based on. Red Hat's early termination of CentOS 8 in 2021 cut eight of those 10 years away, leaving thousands of users stranded. Red Hat's December announcement of CentOS Stream -- which it initially billed as a "replacement" for CentOS Linux -- left many users confused about its role in the updated Red Hat ecosystem.

As of February 1, 2021, Red Hat will make RHEL available at no cost for small-production workloads -- with "small" defined as 16 systems or fewer. This access to no-cost production RHEL is by way of the newly expanded Red Hat Developer Subscription program, and it comes with no strings -- in Red Hat's words, "this isn't a sales program, and no sales representative will follow up." Red Hat is also expanding the availability of developer subscriptions to teams, as well as individual users. Moving forward, subscribing RHEL customers can add entire dev teams to the developer subscription program at no cost. This allows the entire team to use Red Hat Cloud Access for simplified deployment and maintenance of RHEL on well-known cloud providers, including AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

Stefan Thomas, a German-born programmer living in San Francisco, has two guesses left to figure out a password that is worth, as of this week, about $220 million. From a report: The password will let him unlock a small hard drive, known as an IronKey, which contains the private keys to a digital wallet that holds 7,002 Bitcoin. While the price of Bitcoin dropped sharply on Monday, it is still up more than 50 percent from just a month ago when it passed its previous all-time high around $20,000. The problem is that Mr. Thomas years ago lost the paper where he wrote down the password for his IronKey, which gives users 10 guesses before it seizes up and encrypts its contents forever. He has since tried eight of his most commonly used password formulations -- to no avail. "I would just lay in bed and think about it," Mr. Thomas said. "Then I would go to the computer with some new strategy, and it wouldn't work, and I would be desperate again."

Bitcoin, which has been on an extraordinary and volatile eight-month run, has made a lot of its holders very rich in a short period of time, even as the coronavirus pandemic has ravaged the world economy. But the cryptocurrency's unusual nature has also meant that there are many people who are locked out of their Bitcoin fortunes as a result of lost or forgotten keys. They have been forced to watch, helpless, as the price has risen and fallen dramatically, unable to cash in on their digital wealth. Of the existing 18.5 million Bitcoin, around 20 percent -- currently worth around $140 billion -- appear to be in lost or otherwise stranded wallets, according to the cryptocurrency data firm Chainalysis. Wallet Recovery Services, a business that helps find lost digital keys, said it has gotten 70 requests a day from people who want help recovering their riches, three times the number of a month ago. Bitcoin owners who are locked out of their wallets speak of endless days and nights of frustration as they have tried to access their fortunes. Many have owned the coins since Bitcoin's early days a decade ago, when no one had confidence that the tokens would be worth anything.

The man on the trail went by "Mostly Harmless." He was friendly and said he worked in tech. After he died in his tent, no one could figure out who he was. Wired: It's usually easy to to put a name to a corpse. There's an ID or a credit card. There's been a missing persons report in the area. There's a DNA match. But the investigators in Collier County couldn't find a thing. Mostly Harmless' fingerprints didn't show up in any law enforcement database. He hadn't served in the military, and his fingerprints didn't match those of anyone else on file. His DNA didn't match any in the Department of Justice's missing person database or in CODIS, the national DNA database run by the FBI. A picture of his face didn't turn up anything in a facial recognition database. The body had no distinguishing tattoos.

Nor could investigators understand how or why he died. There were no indications of foul play, and he had more than $3,500 cash in the tent. He had food nearby, but he was hollowed out, weighing just 83 pounds on a 5'8" frame. Investigators put his age in the vague range between 35 and 50, and they couldn't point to any abnormalities. The only substances he tested positive for were ibuprofen and an antihistamine. His cause of death, according to the autopsy report, was "undetermined." He had, in some sense, just wasted away. But why hadn't he tried to find help? Almost immediately, people compared Mostly Harmless to Chris McCandless, whose story was the subject of Into the Wild. McCandless, though, had been stranded in the Alaska bush, trapped by a raging river as he ran out of food. He died on a school bus, starving, desperate for help, 22 miles of wilderness separating him from a road. Mostly Harmless was just 5 miles from a major highway. He left no note, and there was no evidence that he had spent his last days calling out for help.

The investigators were stumped. To find out what had happened, they needed to learn who he was. So the Florida Department of Law Enforcement drew up an image of Mostly Harmless, and the Collier County investigators shared it with the public. In the sketch, his mouth is open wide, and his eyes too. He has a gray and black beard, with a bare patch of skin right below the mouth. His teeth, as noted in the autopsy, are perfect, suggesting he had good dental care as a child. He looks startled but also oddly pleased, as if he's just seen a clown jump out from behind a curtain. The image started to circulate online along with other pictures from his campsite, including his tent and his hiking poles.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The date was April 20, 1978; the scene, the Great Hall of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art on Astor Place. On the stage where Abraham Lincoln once spoke sat two men, the Italian modernist Massimo Vignelli and the cartographer John Tauranac, constituting two sides of the Great Subway Map Debate. Six years earlier, Vignelli's firm had reimagined the New York subway map into a groovy rainbowlike diagram, one that graphic designers loved and many riders found hard to navigate. Tauranac was the head of a committee that had engaged Michael Hertz Associates to re-re-draw it into the topographically grounded, graphically busy, and not particularly elegant map that -- modest updates aside -- is the one we all still use. Vignelli's diagram was a joy to look at and was nearly useless as an aboveground navigation tool. Hertz and Tauranac's map functioned pretty well as a map to getting around town but inspired comparatively little delight. Vignelli said the Hertz map made him "puke." Tauranac countered with paeans to real-world use. (The moderator for the evening was Peter Blake, New York's first architecture critic.) By the end of the Great Debate, the aesthetes sensed they were going to lose, and indeed they did. Hertz's practical problem-solving work replaced Vignelli's the following year, and the aesthetes have been rolling their eyes ever since. Jonathan Barnett, then a City College professor, summed up the evening by asking, "Why can't we have both maps?"

As of this morning, perhaps we do.

The MTA has unveiled its new digital map, the first one that uses the agency's own data streams to update in real time. It supersedes the blizzard of paper service-change announcements that are taped all over your subway station's entrance. It's so thoroughly up-to-the-moment that you can watch individual trains move around the system on your phone. Pinch your fingers on the screen, and you can zoom out to see your whole line or borough, as the lines resolve into single strands. Drag your fingers apart, and you'll zoom in to see multiple routes in each tunnel springing out, widening into parallel bands -- making visible individual service changes, closures and openings, and reroutings. Click on a station, and you can find out whether the elevators and escalators are working. The escalators at 34th Street-11th Avenue, as of press time, are 18 for 20. And the whole thing resolves the Great Subway Map Debate almost by accident along the way, because when you're zoomed-in it draws on the best parts of Vignelli's diagram -- the completeness of its parallel, stranded routes and the swoopy aesthetics -- and the zoomed-out version echoes the Hertz map's best features, its graspable consolidation of multiple lines into single ones and its representation of the physical world.

"One of America's largest internet providers is uploading its oldest broadband technology into the sunset," reports USA Today, complaining that AT&T will be leaving some future customers without any choices for wired broadband. "We're beginning to phase out outdated services like DSL and new orders for the service will no longer be supported after October 1," a corporate statement sent beforehand read. "Current DSL customers will be able to continue their existing service or where possible upgrade to our 100% fiber network."

DSL — a broadband connection delivered over old copper telephone lines — is no prize at AT&T. The company doesn't sell downloads faster than 6 Mbps, less than a fourth of the 25-Mbps minimum definition of the Federal Communications Commission and further cramps their utility with stringent data caps of just 150 gigabytes. But the technology that provided many people (myself included) their first real broadband still works to provide an always-on connection and far more capacity than satellite connectivity.

"I'm really not surprised that AT&T is phasing out DSL, as it's an obsolete technology," emailed one soon-be-stranded DSL subscriber, retiree Jack Mangold of Collettsville, North Carolina. "I am, however, very disappointed that AT&T has no interest in replacing DSL in rural areas with some other technology." AT&T reported 653,000 total DSL connections at the end of its second quarter, compared to 14.48 million on its fiber-optic and hybrid-fiber services. The latter, sold as "AT&T Internet," combines fiber trunk lines with DSL last-mile connections for faster speeds.

The company has seen DSL subscribers steadily dwindle. Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst at the research firm Leichtman Research Group, wrote in an email that two years ago, AT&T had just over a million DSL customers. "AT&T basically gave up on fighting cable over a third of its territory" said Dave Burstein, editor of the trade publication Fast Net News.

Kanye West is being sued for pulling the tried-and-true Silicon Valley tactic of allegedly stealing trade tech secrets. Gizmodo reports: First spotted by TMZ, the suit is being spearheaded by small, Pennsylvania-based ecommerce company MyChannel (MYC, for short). MYC allege that after pouring millions of dollars and half a year's worth of work into mocking up a spiffy new site for Ye's online clothing store, the rapper stepped out on their contract. According to the lawsuit, West then took the company's ideas for himself, and from the sound of things, just... ghosted them -- breaking multiple promises, violating NDAs, and acting like a huge tool in the process.

According to the [30+ pages of MYC's complaint], West initially contracted MYC back in the spring of 2018 with the promise that if the company created a juiced-up video platform for his e-commerce site, he'd not only, y'know, pay the company for its services, but would invest a hefty $10 million into the business. MYC also had West sign an NDA just to make sure that the company's proprietary video tech wouldn't be "ripped off" without any payment. Probably assuming that Kanye would keep his word, MYC says its team spent the next six months clocking 80 hour workweeks on the project, spending tens of thousands on the proposed video software in the process. Not only that, but because Kanye "demanded" that the team move its HQ from its home in Philly over to California, and later Chicago, living expenses sunk them even deeper into the hole. All told, MYC claims to have spent spent $7 million of its own funds before confronting West and telling him to make good on his end of the deal.

Instead of fulfilling his side of the bargain, the suit describes how West -- who it's worth pointing out is a literal billionaire -- came up with some "untrue perceived slight," and cut all ties with MYC's team, leaving them stranded and in a mountain of debt. Meanwhile, West spent the months immediately afterward using what MYC describes as a near-carbon copy of their platform as part of the promotion for "Sunday Service," West's so-called pop-up church experience.