A newspaper in Austin, Texas shares the story behind a cult-classic videogame, the 1985 Macintosh shareware game "Cap'n Magneto."

It was the work of Al Evans, who'd "decided to live life to the fullest after suffering severe burn injuries in 1963" at the age of 17. Beneath the surface, "Cap'n Magneto" is a product of its creator's own quest to overcome adversity after a terrible car crash — an amalgamation of hard-earned lessons on the value of relationships, being an active participant in shaping the world and knowing how to move on... "Whether I was going to survive at all was very iffy," Evans said. "The chance of me living to the age of 28 or 30 was below 30% or something like that." Regardless of how much time he had left, Evans said he refused to let his injuries hold him back from living his life to the fullest. He would live his life with honesty, he decided, and do his best to always communicate with others truthfully. "I wasn't going to spend the next two years of my life dorking around different hospitals. So I said what's the alternative?" Evans said...

To float his many hobbies and interests, however, Evans knew he had to make money. In addition to doing work as a graphic designer and a translator, he picked up computer programming, which opened his eyes to a digital frontier that allowed for the creation of new worlds with the stroke of a keyboard. When he realized the technical capabilities of the Macintosh — the first personal computer that had a graphics-driven user interface and a built-in mouse function — Evans said he set out to build a world that could marry storytelling and graphics. With the help of his wife Cea, Evans created his one and only computer game: "Cap'n Magneto."

"I really wanted to write a good game, and I definitely think it was that," Evans said...

Australia-based gaming historian, author and journalist Richard Moss says, "What really marked it as different, though, was that the alien speech, once ungarbled by a tricorder item that players had to find, would be spoken aloud through the Mac's built-in speech synthesizer and written on-screen in comic-style speech bubbles," Moss said. "And unlike most role playing games of the time, every character you'd meet in the game could be friendly and helpful or cold and dismissive or aggressive and hostile — depending on a mix of random chance and player choice...."

With "Cap'n Magneto," Evans said he wanted to make sure that players could befriend the non-playable alien characters that the hero encounters. Though the game is beatable without their help, it is significantly easier with the help of allies. A reality in which everyone was an enemy, to Evans, was simply dishonest.

"That doesn't reflect the game of life, you know? Some people, well, most people actually, are probably pretty friendly," he said.
35 years after its release, Evans — now 75 years old — received a message on Facebook informing him that the game was still being played — but no one could finish it because the built-in "nagware" required payments that couldn't be completed.

That problem has finally been fixed, and long-time Slashdot reader shanen now shares the web site where the full game can finally be downloaded.

This week Linus Torvalds continued a long email interview with Jeremy Andrews, founding partner/CEO of Tag1 (a global technology consulting firm and the second all-time leading contributor to Drupal). In the first part Torvalds had discussed everything from Apple's ARM64 chips and Rust drivers, to his own Fedora-based home work environment — and reflections on the early days of Linux.

But the second part offers some deeper insight into the way Torvalds thinks, some personal insight, what he'd share with other project maintainers — and some thoughts on getting corporations to contribute to open source development: While open source has been hugely successful, many of the biggest users, for example corporations, do nothing or little to support or contribute back to the very open source projects they rely on. Even developers of surprisingly large and successful projects (if measured by number of users) can be lucky to earn enough to buy coffee for the week. Do you think this is something that can be solved? Is the open source model sustainable?

Linus Torvalds: I really don't have an answer to this, and for some reason the kernel has always avoided the problem. Yes, there are companies that are pure "users" of Linux, but they still end up wanting support, so they then rely on contractors or Linux distributions, and those obviously then end up as one of the big sources of kernel developer jobs.

And a fair number of big tech companies that use the kernel end up actively participating in the development process. Sometimes they end up doing a lot of internal work and not being great at feeding things back upstream (I won't name names, and some of them really are trying to do better), but it's actually very encouraging how many big companies are very openly involved with upstream kernel development, and are major parts of the community.

So for some reason, the kernel development community has been pretty successful about integrating with all the commercial interests. Of course, some of that has been very much conscious: Linux has very much always been open to commercial users, and I very consciously avoided the whole anti-corporate mindset that you can most definitely find in some of the "Free Software" groups. I think the GPLv2 is a great license, but at the same time I've been very much against some of the more extreme forms of "Free Software", and I — and Linux — was very much part of the whole rebranding to use "Open Source".

Because frankly, some of the almost religious overtones of rms and the FSF were just nutty, and a certain portion of the community was actively driving commercial use away.

And I say that as somebody who has always been wary of being too tainted by commercial interests... I do think that some projects may have shot themselves in the foot by being a bit too anti-commercial, and made it really hard for companies to participate...

But is it sustainable? Yes. I'm personally 100% convinced that not only is open source sustainable, but for complex technical issues you really need open source simply because the problem space ends up being too complex to manage inside one single company. Even a big and competent tech company.

But it does require a certain openness on both sides. Not all companies will be good partners, and some developers don't necessarily want to work with big companies.
In the interview Torvalds also thanks the generous education system in Finland, and describes what it was like moving from Finland to America. And as for how long he'll continue working on Linux, Torvalds says, "I do enjoy what I do, and as long as I feel I'm actually helping the project, I'll be around...

"in the end, I really enjoy what I do. I'd be bored to tears without kernel development."

Austin, Texas is America's fastest-growing major metro area, reports Bloomberg Businessweek, growing 30% from 2010 to 2019. But today a minimum wage worker hoping to afford a one-bedroom rental "would now need to work a 125-hour week."

And meanwhile, homeowner Matthew Congrove says he's now getting a half-dozen all-cash offers on his house every week. "In the boldest attempt, a stranger simply showed up at his home unannounced and asked to buy it..." Even Congrove — a software engineer who moved from Florida seven years ago — is most concerned about how the new wave of tech workers is affecting his adopted city's culture. Lately, he's seen more T-shirts bearing startup logos than band names. New condos have sprouted up where quirky bungalows once stood. And the commute time to his downtown office has tripled. "They just keep coming," Congrove says. "The fleece vests, the tech bros — that's definitely imported from California."

During the pandemic, Austin has welcomed more new residents from the Bay Area than from any other region outside Texas, according to records provided to Bloomberg by the U.S. Postal Service... Oracle late last year said it was moving its headquarters to Austin, and a stream of tech elites including prominent investor Jim Breyer and the chief executive officers of Dropbox and Splunk made plans to relocate. Elon Musk, the second-richest man in the world, is now a resident of Texas — though he hasn't said where — and Tesla Inc. is building a factory in Austin's outskirts, where Musk has said the company will need 10,000 people by 2022. He's also expanding the Austin area operations for Boring Co. and SpaceX, and has moved his personal foundation to the city's downtown.

For all his boosterism, even Musk recognizes the potential hazards of the influx he's helping spark. In a tweet on April 4, he called out the "urgent need to build more housing in greater Austin area!"

The region is facing the same boomtown dynamics that have plagued San Francisco for decades.... "There is a fairly broad-based concern that some of the things that aren't working in other areas are going to be brought here," says Dax Williamson, a managing director for Silicon Valley Bank who leads its technology banking practice for Central Texas. "If we price out the musicians we're going to find ourselves in a bad place." In a sign that may already be happening, Tesla recently selected a warehouse in southern Austin that served as music rehearsal space, with plans to transform it into a $2.5 million Tesla showroom this summer.

Hating California is a tradition in Texas, but Austin's growing pains aren't all California's fault. According to the Austin Chamber, more than half of newcomers from 2014 to 2018 came from other parts of the state, followed by just 8% from California and 3% from New York... Still, out-of-state arrivals from affluent cities tend to be richer than average existing residents and, as a consequence, have a greater impact on the local economy. "Probably 5 out of 10 of my clients are Californians, and others could say the same thing," says Susan Horton, president of the Austin Board of Realtors. "The majority are all tech people, and the last wave were all coming to work at Tesla."

An otherwise meaningless game during Monday's preliminary stage of the $200,000 Magnus Carlsen Invitational left a pair of grandmasters in stitches while thrusting one of chess's most bizarre and least effective openings into the mainstream. From a report: Norway's Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura of the United States had already qualified for the knockout stage of the competition with one game left to play between them. Carlsen, the world's top-ranked player and reigning world champion, started the dead rubber typically enough by moving his king's pawn with the common 1 e4. Nakamura, the five-time US champion and current world No 18, mirrored it with 1 ... e5. And then all hell broke loose. Carlsen inched his king one space forward to the rank where his pawn had started. The self-destructive opening (2 Ke2) is known as the bongcloud for a simple reason: you'd have to be stoned to the gills to think it was a good idea.

The wink-wink move immediately sent Nakamura, who's been a visible champion of the bongcloud in recent years, into an uncontrollable fit of laughter. Naturally, the American played along with 2 ... Ke7, which marked the first double bongcloud ever played in a major tournament and its official entry to chess theory (namely, the Bongcloud Counter-Gambit: Hotbox Variation). "Don't do this!" cried the Hungarian grandmaster Peter Leko from the commentary booth, looking on in disbelief as the friendly rivals quickly settled for a draw by repetition after six moves. "Is this, uh, called bongcloud? Yeah? It was something like of a bongcloud business. This Ke2-Ke7 stuff. Please definitely don't try it at home. Guys, just forget about it." Why is the bongcloud so bad? For one, it manages to break practically all of the principles you're taught about chess openings from day one: it doesn't fight for the center, it leaves the king exposed and it wastes time, all while eliminating the possibility of castling and managing to impede the development of the bishop and queen. Even the worst openings tend to have some redeeming quality. The bongcloud, not so much. What makes it funny (well, not to everyone) is the idea that two of the best players on the planet would use an opening so pure in its defiance of conventional wisdom.

Startups hope there's no turning back for online learning, even as more students return to the classroom. From a report: After a tough year of toggling between remote and in-person schooling, many students, teachers and their families feel burned out from pandemic learning. But companies that market digital learning tools to schools are enjoying a coronavirus windfall. Venture and equity financing for education technology start-ups has more than doubled, surging to $12.58 billion worldwide last year from $4.81 billion in 2019, according to a report from CB Insights, a firm that tracks start-ups and venture capital. During the same period, the number of laptops and tablets shipped to primary and secondary schools in the United States nearly doubled to 26.7 million, from 14 million, according to data from Futuresource Consulting, a market research company in Britain. "We've seen a real explosion in demand," said Michael Boreham, a senior market analyst at Futuresource. "It's been a massive, massive sea change out of necessity."

But as more districts reopen for in-person instruction, the billions of dollars that schools and venture capitalists have sunk into education technology are about to get tested. Some remote learning services, like videoconferencing, may see their student audiences plummet. "There's definitely going to be a shakeout over the next year," said Matthew Gross, the chief executive of Newsela, a popular reading lesson app for schools. "I've been calling it 'The Great Ed Tech Crunch.'" Yet even if the ed-tech market contracts, industry executives say there is no turning back. The pandemic has accelerated the spread of laptops and learning apps in schools, they say, normalizing digital education tools for millions of teachers, students and their families. "This has sped the adoption of technology in education by easily five to 10 years," said Michael Chasen, a veteran ed-tech entrepreneur who in 1997 co-founded Blackboard, now one of the largest learning management systems for schools and colleges. "You can't train hundreds of thousands of teachers and millions of students in online education and not expect there to be profound effects."

A whole list of countries -- including Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Sweden and Latvia -- have suspended dosing of the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine over reports of dangerous blood clots in some recipients. The company and international regulators say there is no evidence the shot is to blame, but that isn't stopping countries from taking action out of an abundance of caution. Derek Lowe, a medical chemist working in the pharmaceutical industry, explains what's going on with this vaccine: I think that there are several distinct levels to this problem. The first, obviously, is medical. The big question is, are the reports of vascular problems greater than one would expect in the vaccinated population as a whole? It's not clear to me what the answer is, and it may very well be "No, they aren't." That CNBC link above quotes Michael Head at Southampton as saying that the data so far look like the problems show up at at least the same levels, and may even be lower in the vaccinated group. AstraZeneca has said that they're aware of 15 events of deep vein thrombosis and 22 events pulmonary embolisms, but that's in 17 million people who have had at least one shot -- and they say that is indeed "much lower than would be expected to occur naturally in a general population of this size." It also appears to be similar to what's been seen with the other coronavirus vaccines, which rather than meaning "they're all bad" looks like they're all showing the same baseline signal of such events across a broad population, without adding to it.

In that case, this could be an example of what I warned about back in December (and many others have warned about as well), the post hoc ergo propter hoc "false side effects" problem. I've been looking this morning, and so far have not found anyone clearly stating that the problems seen are running higher in the vaccinated patients [...]. I realize that there's a possibility (not a likely one, though) that some particular batch of vaccine is more problematic, but I haven't seen any solid evidence of that, either.

The second half of the medical problem is naturally what happens when you suspend dosing of what is, in many cases in the EU, the only vaccine available. We've been seeing cases falling here in the US ever since a peak on the first week of January -- many of us were worried about what might have been a rise in February but which now just seems to have been a plateau, with cases continuing to drop since then. But many European countries are definitely seeing another wave of infections, and the EU case numbers as a whole are going in the opposite direction to the US ones. There are surely a lot of reasons for this, with new viral variants being one, slow vaccine rollouts being another, and now complete vaccination halts set to add even more. Put as bluntly as possible, even if the AZ/Oxford vaccine has these side effects (which again, I don't see any evidence for yet), you are still very likely to kill more people by not giving it. Lowe goes on to question what good the EMA and World Health Organization's recommendations and regulatory approvals are when one European country after another shuts down its use.

He also brings up the third problem, which is public confidence. "The AZ/Oxford vaccine has been in trouble there since the day the first data came out," writes Lowe. "The efficacy numbers looked lower than the other vaccines that had reported by then, and as mentioned, the presentation of the data was really poorly handled and continued to be so for weeks. Now with these dosing suspensions, I have to wonder if this vaccine is ever going to lose the dark cloud it's currently sitting under..."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Dark clouds loom over the pine forest surrounding Hummelsta, a town of 1,000 people that hasn't had any local shops for a decade. Since December, a red wooden container, about the size of a mobile home, has offered a lifeline. It's a mini supermarket that locals can access round-the-clock. "We haven't had any shops here during the time we have been here, and getting this now is perfect," says 31-year-old Emma Lundqvist who moved to Hummelsta with her boyfriend three years ago. "You don't need to get into the city to buy this small stuff," she adds, pointing to the packet of bacon she's popped in for. There's a wide assortment of groceries available, from fresh fruit and vegetables to Swedish household staples like frozen meatballs, crisp breads and wafer bars. But there are no staff or checkouts here. You open the doors using the company's app, which works in conjunction with BankID, a secure national identification app operated by Sweden's banks. Then, you can scan barcodes using your smartphone and the bill is automatically charged to a pre-registered bank card.

The store is part of the Lifvs chain, a Stockholm-based start-up that launched in 2018 with the goal of returning stores to remote rural locations where shops had closed down because they'd struggled to stay profitable. In Asia several companies including Alibaba are testing unstaffed stores in more urban locations. Amazon has also opened supermarkets in US cities and this month in the UK, which use sensors and cameras to work out what you've bought, so there's not even the need for self-scanning. But Lifvs co-founder Daniel Lundh saw the opportunity in rural locations: "There were food deserts where people had to travel to the next town or city to pick up their groceries and so we definitely saw that there was a need." Alongside skipping the need to pay cashiers, the firm also avoids pricey long-term rental leases. And if there's less footfall than expected in one location, the wooden containers can easily be picked up and tested elsewhere.

Thunderbolt, Intel's super-speedy connection technology, isn't widely used. But that may change in the coming year, as more computer makers incorporate the USB competitor into their new models. From a report: Intel has hoped Thunderbolt, which debuted in 2011 on Apple's 2011 MacBook Pro, would become commonplace for computer users. A year later, the chipmaker forecast that "most PCs" would have Thunderbolt by 2015 to 2017. Despite the hype, only premium PCs carry the fast connection. To get a boost in adoption, Intel has built Thunderbolt into its newest Core processors, code-named Tiger Lake, which means laptop makers get Thunderbolt without having to pay extra for separate controller chips. Because Intel chips are so widely used, the company says Thunderbolt will now have its moment to shine.

"I would expect by 2022 Thunderbolt will be in more than 50% of the PCs sold," said Jason Ziller, who runs Intel's connectivity products, adding that more than half of laptops that ship in the next year will "definitely" carry the technology. Ziller has led Thunderbolt work since before it debuted in Apple's 2011 MacBook Pro laptops almost exactly 10 years ago. PC ports don't capture the imagination the way fast processors or smartphone cameras do. But they're a crucial part of most people's computing experience. Thunderbolt ports provide fast and versatile connections to external storage devices, monitors, network adapters and other peripherals. They can replace ports for HDMI, DisplayPort, Ethernet and power. The new Thunderbolt 4 lets multiport docks and hubs offer three Thunderbolt ports instead of just one.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Over the weekend, word emerged that a hacker breached far-right social media website Gab and downloaded 70 gigabytes of data by exploiting a garden-variety security flaw known as an SQL injection. A quick review of Gab's open source code shows that the critical vulnerability -- or at least one very much like it -- was introduced by the company's chief technology officer. The change, which in the parlance of software development is known as a "git commit," was made sometime in February from the account of Fosco Marotto, a former Facebook software engineer who in November became Gab's CTO. On Monday, Gab removed the git commit from its website. Below is an image showing the February software change, as shown from a site that provides saved commit snapshots.

The commit shows a software developer using the name Fosco Marotto introducing precisely the type of rookie mistake that could lead to the kind of breach reported this weekend. Specifically, line 23 strips the code of "reject" and "filter," which are API functions that implement a programming idiom that protects against SQL injection attacks. This idiom allows programmers to compose an SQL query in a safe way that "sanitizes" the inputs that website visitors enter into search boxes and other web fields to ensure that any malicious commands are stripped out before the text is passed to backend servers. In their place, the developer added a call to the Rails function that contains the "find_by_sql" method, which accepts unsanitized inputs directly in a query string. Rails is a widely used website development toolkit.

"Sadly Rails documentation doesn't warn you about this pitfall, but if you know anything at all about using SQL databases in web applications, you'd have heard of SQL injection, and it's not hard to come across warnings that find_by_sql method is not safe," Dmitry Borodaenko, a former production engineer at Facebook who brought the commit to my attention wrote in an email. "It is not 100% confirmed that this is the vulnerability that was used in the Gab data breach, but it definitely could have been, and this code change is reverted in the most recent commit that was present in their GitLab repository before they took it offline." Ironically, Fosco in 2012 warned fellow programmers to use parameterized queries to prevent SQL injection vulnerabilities.

Apple is going to make one of the most powerful types of attacks on iPhones much harder to pull off in an upcoming update of iOS. From a report: The company quietly made a new change in the way it secures the code running in its mobile operating system. The change is in the beta version of the next iOS version, 14.5, meaning it is currently slated to be added to the final release. Several security researchers who specialize in finding vulnerabilities in and crafting exploits for iOS believe this new mitigation will make it much harder for hackers to take control of an iPhone with a technique known as a zero-click (or 0-click) exploit, which allows a hacker to take over an iPhone with no interaction from the target. Apple also told Motherboard it believes the changes will impact 0-click attacks.

"It will definitely make 0-clicks harder. Sandbox escapes too. Significantly harder," a source who develops exploits for government customers told Motherboard, referring to "sandboxes" which isolate applications from each other in an attempt to stop code from one program interacting with the wider operating system. Motherboard granted multiple exploit developers anonymity to speak more candidly about sensitive industry issues. Like the name suggests, zero-click attacks allow hackers to break into a target without needing the victim to interact with anything, such as a malicious phishing link. This means that the attack is generally harder for the targeted user to detect. These are generally very sophisticated attacks. These attacks may now become much rarer, according to several security researchers who look for vulnerabilities in iOS.

The Cornell Alliance for Science seeks to build "a significant international alliance of partners" to "correct misinformation and counter conspiracy theories" slowing progress on climate change, synthetic biology, agricultural innovations, and other issues.

Slashdot reader wooloohoo shares their article about research on Ghana's first gene-edited crop — a high-yielding sweet potato with increased beta carotone content. "For sweet potatoes, we want to look at how we can use the CRISPR-Cas9 system to increase beta carotene," said Samuel Acheampong of the University of Cape Coast's Department of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, who has been working on the project for the past year. "Beta carotene is a big deal for us because as animals, when we eat beta carotene, our cells are able to convert them into vitamin A."

The World Health Organization estimates that between 250,000 and 500,000 children in developing nations go blind every year as a result of vitamin A deficiency, making it the world's leading preventable cause of childhood blindness. Some 50 percent of them die within a year of losing their sight. Respiratory illnesses and infectious and diarrheal diseases in children also have been linked to vitamin A deficiency. Acheampong is using CRISPR-Cas9 to knock out the genes responsible for the production of an enzyme in the sweet potato that converts beta carotene into other products. This will leave higher beta carotene content in the crop, which when consumed by humans will allow them to produce vitamin A. Sweet potato is a very popular vegetable in Ghana, making it ideal for a biofortification effort of this kind...

Additionally, Acheampong is researching how to increase the size of the crop's storage roots. "I'm looking at a set of genes which affects the transport of sugars in plants. So I'm trying to use the CRISPR genome editing to knock out some sets of genes so that there will be more flow of sugars in the crop, which will definitely lead to increase in the yield...."

He estimates it will take him up to five years to complete his research before any conversation can begin around putting the product in the hands of farmers. "Getting it to the market may take a long time, depending on regulations, etc.," he said.
In another article, The Alliance for Science cites a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing who argues "it is unlikely that genome editing-based next generation breeding will completely displace conventional approaches; only when combined with other technologies, such as high-throughput phenotyping, genomic selection and speed breeding, can we guarantee the widespread implementation of genome editing in agriculture."

"This multidisciplinary approach will advance plant breeding to help secure a second Green Revolution in order to meet the increasing food demands of a rapidly growing global population under ever-changing climate conditions."

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

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

All the content at TheDonald.win has now been replaced with a single post, explaining that the mod team had been struggling to deal with a flood of content from "a small group of extremists."

The Washington Post tells the story of the 41-year-old Army veteran who owned the domain — and ended up hosting the entire community that had been banned from Reddit's TheDonald forum.

"You might be happy being some ethno-nationalist, but I'm not," said Williams, recalling his exchanges with a handful of particularly hardcore moderators. "I don't want anything to do with this...."

Williams finally took decisive action on Jan. 21, two weeks after the Capitol assault, after waking to news that a group of other moderators had started their own site and used it to attack him. Soon, Williams used his power as the Web address owner to knock TheDonald offline. Then he defended himself publicly against his former compatriots, who had criticized him as a "rogue" and a selfish coward. Williams, who lives in Texas and has three young children, also endured death threats, online harassment and FBI questioning, he said...

The November election, followed by Trump's baseless claims of widespread electoral fraud, further intensified the viciousness on TheDonald. Williams said he'd become increasingly aware of what he believed were intentional efforts by nefarious actors to push the site's boundaries...

[E]ven as a Trump loyalist, scenes of Trump's supporters — some of whom almost certainly met and organized themselves on TheDonald — overrunning the Capitol depressed Williams, he said. The site soon featured in critical news reports, criminal investigations and articles of impeachment for Trump. The domain registrar, Epik, warned that the site would get kicked offline after a flood of complaints about hateful, threatening content. Incoming queries from the FBI, Epik and journalists writing about TheDonald's role in the Capitol attack inundated Williams, for whom moderating the site already had become something of a full-time job. Williams also knew that members of TheDonald community had indeed used the site to instigate the assault. "People definitely used the site to communicate and coordinate," he said, echoing the conclusions of independent researchers...

He now is spending his time caring for family and trying to get a new site, America.win, up and running. Unlike TheDonald, it will not offer unfettered discussion. It will be, he said, more of an aggregator of what Williams considers important content about free markets, individual liberty and other "common patriotic causes."

He has a parting message for those who might still be caught up in the roiling forums of the sort he once joined, then moderated, then killed off: Things often are not as they seem. QAnon is not real. What may look online like a magical, mystical voice of secret wisdom may just be a guy hiding behind the Internet's veil, trying to keep it all going, hoping it doesn't spin out of control.

"The U.S. app Clubhouse erupted among Chinese social-media users over the weekend," reports Bloomberg, "with thousands joining discussions on contentious subjects...undisturbed by Beijing's censors." On the invite-only, audio-based social app where users host informal conversations, Chinese-speaking communities from around the world gathered to discuss China-Taiwan relations and the prospects of unification, and to share their knowledge and experience of Beijing's crackdown on Muslim Uighurs in the far west region of Xinjiang. Open discussion of such topics is off limits in China, where heavy government censorship is the norm...

On Friday night, a room attracted more than 4,000 people from both sides of the Taiwan Strait to share their stories and views on a range of topics including uniting the two sides. In another room on Saturday, several members of the Uighur ethnic community now living overseas shared their experience of events in Xinjiang, where China has rolled out a widely criticized re-education program that saw an estimated 1 million people or more put into camps...

"Thanks to Clubhouse I have the freedom and the audience to express my opinion," a Finland-based doctor and activist who goes by Halmurat Harri Uyghur told Bloomberg News.
Bloomberg spoke to Michael Norris, a research/strategy manager at a Shanghai-based consultancy, who said most Chinese Clubhouse users he'd spoken to are part of the tech/investment/marketing world. "Those who do engage in political discussion on Clubhouse take on a degree of personal risk," he said. "While most are aware Clubhouse records real names, phone numbers and voice, they are broadly unaware about recent cases in China involving interrogation and jail for errant posts on Twitter." Since Clubhouse so far is only accessible on Apple Inc.'s iPhone and users must have a non-Chinese Apple account, the app has only gained traction among a small cohort of educated citizens, according to Fang Kecheng, a communications professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. "I don't think it can really reach the general public in China," he said. "If so, it will surely get blocked."
Reuters highlights the significance of the event: "I don't know how long this environment can last", said one user in a popular Weibo post that was liked over 65,000 times. "But I will definitely remember this moment in Internet history."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Just after 1 A.M. on January 12, a prolific Wikiepdian edited the entry for the album Death Breathing. The small edit was the addition of a hyperlink and it was the billionth edit done to the English language Wikipedia. "The article on the album Death Breathing was amended by Wikipedian Ser Amantio di Nicolao, one of over 3.9 million edits done by the Wikipedian with the highest edit count other than bots," said a note in Wikimedia-l, a listserv that documents various Wikimedia matters. Wikipedia relies on volunteers who constantly assess, edit, and argue over the specifics of the information in its vast online encyclopedia. Every edit is catalogued, tagged, and assigned a unique URL when it's pushed through. The Death Breathing edit secured the billionth. "Pedants may be aware that this is only the thousand million since the move to MediaWiki software and not all of the hundreds of thousands of previous edits have since been reloaded," the notice said. "So if we could work out the true counts since edit one it probably came one, maybe two days earlier."

"I don't have the exact numbers but there were definitely many edits made that aren't recorded in the current system," Wikiepdian "The Cunctator" told Motherboard in an email. "Many of the UseModWiki edits were reintegrated with the history but there is a lacuna that covers my peak of editing in about August 2001 to February 2002 (I was the primary editor of September 11 related content). I don't know if the edit count reflects deleted edits or edits on deleted pages. One point that isn't made enough when discussing Wikipedia is how much of Google's wealth is built on its abuse of Wikipedia copyleft. But Death Breathing got the edit with the thousand million counter."

A hacker took control of people's internet-connected chastity cages and demanded a ransom to be paid in Bitcoin to unlock it. From a report: "Your cock is mine now," the hacker told one of the victims, according to a screenshot of the conversation obtained by a security researcher that goes by the name Smelly and is the founder of vx-underground, a website that collects malware samples. In October of last year, security researchers found that the manufacturer of an Internet of Things chastity cage -- a sex toy that users put around their penis to prevent erections that is used in the BDSM community and can be unlocked remotely -- had left an API exposed, giving malicious hackers a chance to take control of the devices. That's exactly what happened, according to a security researcher who obtained screenshots of conversations between the hacker and several victims, and according to victims interviewed by Motherboard. A victim who asked to be identified only as Robert said that he received a message from a hacker demanding a payment of 0.02 Bitcoin (around $750 today) to unlock the device. He realized his cage was definitely "locked," and he "could not gain access to it."

Matthew Green, a cryptographer and professor at Johns Hopkins University, shares in a series of tweets: My students Max and Tushar Jois spent most of the summer going through every piece of public documentation, forensics report, and legal document we could find to figure out how police were "breaking phone encryption." This was prompted by a claim from someone knowledgeable, who claimed that forensics companies no longer had the ability to break the Apple Secure Enclave Processor, which would make it very hard to crack the password of a locked, recent iPhone. We wrote an enormous report -- a draft of which you can read here (PDF) about what we found, which we'll release after the holidays. The TL;DR is kind of depressing: Authorities don't need to break phone encryption in most cases, because modern phone encryption sort of sucks.

I'll focus on Apple here but Android is very similar. The top-level is that, to break encryption on an Apple phone you need to get the encryption keys. Since these are derived from the user's passcode, you either need to guess that -- or you need the user to have entered it. Guessing the password is hard on recent iPhones because there's (at most) a 10-guess limit enforced by the Secure Enclave Processor (SEP). There's good evidence that at one point in 2018 a company called GrayKey had a SEP exploit that did this for the X. See photo. There is really no solid evidence that this exploit still works on recent-model iPhones, after 2018. If anything, the evidence is against it. So if they can't crack the passcode, how is law enforcement still breaking into iPhones (because they definitely are)? The boring answer very likely is that police aren't guessing suspects' passcodes. They're relying on the fact that the owner probably typed it in. Not after the phone is seized, in most cases. Beforehand. The full thread on Twitter here.

It could take a while before the handshake comes back, if it ever does. Business conferences, however, are set to restart in the U.S. the moment health code allows. And despite uncertainty around when exactly that will be, convention organizers are holding out hope -- and event space -- for a possible return in the coming weeks. From a report: One of those optimists is Peter Diamandis. He convened some of his employees at their office in Culver City, California, last Wednesday for a low-key, in-person holiday gathering. There, Diamandis said his flagship annual conference, Abundance 360, was still on for late January in Malibu, California, according to a person familiar with the situation who asked not to be identified. It will feature seminars on technology and entrepreneurialism, as well as a video address from Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff. Diamandis said last week that the company was taking precautions to hold the event safely. Anyone attending in person would have to take a nose-swab test 72 hours before arrival and each day during the conference itself. He was closely tracking infection rates and regulatory guidance, he said. "Many of our members definitely want to get together in person (if possible)," he wrote in an email to Bloomberg.

One day later, though, Diamandis changed his mind. The company canceled the in-person program for most people scheduled to attend Abundance 360, according to a message to staff reviewed by Bloomberg. The summit will be limited to about 16 people who paid $30,000 for special events and coaching, internal documents show. (Although that, too, could be cancelled depending on the health situation, Diamandis wrote in an email to Bloomberg.) Everyone else will get access to online programs. Of the many important things lost this year, conferences are pretty far down the list. But for the organizations that put on the events, the coronavirus pandemic has severely altered their operations. Cancellations in the U.S. this year will cost as much as $22 billion, according to estimates from the Center for Exhibition Industry Research, a trade group. Most conferences are sticking to online-only through early next year, including CES, the largest technology industry conference typically held in January, or are postponing until the second half of the year, said Heather Keenan, president of Key Events, a meeting and events-planning firm. Some are exploring hybrid events with the choice of online or in person starting in May, she said.

Elon Musk would consider leveraging Tesla's mega $554 billion market cap to buy a legacy automaker, but only if it was on friendly terms, the billionaire entrepreneur said Tuesday in a wide-ranging interview with Axel Springer CEO Mathias Dopfner. From a report: Musk, who received an award Tuesday from the media giant, discussed his various interests and businesses, notably SpaceX and Tesla, both of which he leads. Dopfner noted that Tesla's valuation far exceeds the market cap of incumbent automakers like BMW, Daimler and VW, which along with others in the industry once dismissed Musk's ability to make electric vehicles mainstream. When asked if it would be a serious option to buy one of the legacy automakers, Musk said it was possible, but only under certain conditions. "Well, I think we're definitely not going to launch a hostile takeover," Musk said. "So I suppose if there was a friendly one, if somebody said, 'Hey, we think it would be a good idea to merge with Tesla,' we certainly could have that conversation. But, you know, we don't want it to be a hostile takeover sort of situation." Tesla today sits in an enviable position -- although Musk said once again that its share price is too high. The company, which will join the S&P 500 Index on December 21, is now the most valuable automaker in the world, surpassing rivals that produce far more vehicles annually.

Global fitness giant Under Armour announced this morning that it will be selling MyFitnessPal to investment firm Francisco Partners for $345 million, five and a half years after acquiring it for $475 million. The company also announced that it will be winding down the Endomondo platform which it also acquired at the same time for $85 million. TechCrunch reports: In a press release announcing the news, Under Armour said the reason for this decision was to simplify and focus its brand, keeping it aimed at its "target consumer -- the Focused Performer" in the interest of building "a singular, cohesive UA ecosystem." The fact that Under Armour is selling MyFitnessPal at a discount (not even including five years of inflation and stated MyFitnessPal user growth) indicates there's more to this than just maintaining focus.

It's definitely true that both MyFitnessPal (which claimed 80 million users in 2015 at the time of acquisition, and has more than 200 million users according to today's press release) and Endomondo were aimed at more casual and entry-level fitness users, who might be working out for the first time, or looking to improve their daily health, but aren't likely training for endurance-sport competitions. Under Armour's overall brand image is more associated with professional athletics, and with an enthusiast/semi-pro clientele (or those aspiring to that designation). What's more likely going on here is that Under Armour sees diminishing value in this segment over the long term... The company is going to continue to own and operate the MapMyFitness platform, which includes MapMyRun and MapMyRide.