"A pre-pandemic policy on airport usage is pressuring airlines to keep 'ghost flights' in the air," Wired reported this week — adding "The climate impact is massive." Lufthansa, Germany's national airline, which is based in Frankfurt, has admitted to running 21,000 empty flights this winter, using its own planes and those of its Belgian subsidiary, Brussels Airlines, in an attempt to keep hold of airport slots. Although anti-air travel campaigners believe ghost flights are a widespread issue that airlines don't publicly disclose, Lufthansa is so far the only airline to go public about its own figures.... Lufthansa's own chief executive, Carsten Spohr [said] the journeys were "empty, unnecessary flights just to secure our landing and takeoff rights." But the company argues that it can't change its approach: Those ghost flights are happening because airlines are required to conduct a certain proportion of their planned flights in order to keep slots at high-trafficked airports. A Greenpeace analysis indicates that if Lufthansa's practice of operating no-passenger flights were replicated equally across the European aviation sector, it would mean that more than 100,000 "ghost flights" were operating in Europe this year, spitting out carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to 1.4 million gas-guzzling cars. "We're in a climate crisis, and the transport sector has the fastest-growing emissions in the EU," says Greenpeace spokesperson Herwig Schuster. "Pointless, polluting 'ghost flights' are just the tip of the iceberg." Aviation analysts are split on the scale of the ghost flight problem. Some believe the issue has been overhyped and is likely not more prevalent than the few airlines that have admitted to operating them. Others say there are likely tens of thousands of such flights operating — with their carriers declining to say anything because of the PR blowback.

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Long-time Slashdot reader olddoc and his wife have three frequently-used credit cards, stored and many online businesses for easy checkout. "In the past 6 months we have received fraud notices from the card companies three times." Typically there is a $1 charge in a far away location. Once there was a charge for thousands of dollars at a bar. The card companies seem to pick up the fact that they are fraudulent even though once it was described as "chip present". What can we do to cut down the number of times we have to update all our ongoing bills with a new card number? The original submission acknowledges that "We have never lost money to fraud, just time." But is the problem storing the card numbers with online businesses? Long-time Slashdot reader Z00L00K argues "Never ever do this. Never ever have your card stored at an online business even if it's more inconvenient to enter it every time. You NEVER know how your number is stored, it can be stored in a database that's not secure enough or it can be stored in an encrypted cookie on your computer in which case that cookie might be read and decrypted by just about any web site out there if they have figured out how to access cookies for another site. There are a lot of ways that your card details can leak." That comment also concedes it's possible someone's using a card-number generator to target the same range of credit card numbers. But is there a better solution? Share your own thoughts in the comments. How can you keep your credit card numbers from being stolen?

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"People are still paying between $5,000 and $50,000 to attend the annual flagship TED conference. In 2021," notes The Drift magazine, noting last year's event was held in Monterey, California. "Amid wildfires and the Delta surge, its theme was 'the case for optimism.'" The magazine makes the case that over the last decade TED talks have been "endlessly re-articulating tech's promises without any serious critical reflection." And they start with how Bill Gates told an audience in 2015 that "we can be ready for the next epidemic." Gates's popular and well-shared TED talk — viewed millions of times — didn't alter the course of history. Neither did any of the other "ideas worth spreading" (the organization's tagline) presented at the TED conference that year — including Monica Lewinsky's massively viral speech about how to stop online bullying through compassion and empathy, or a Google engineer's talk about how driverless cars would make roads smarter and safer in the near future. In fact, seven years after TED 2015, it feels like we are living in a reality that is the exact opposite of the future envisioned that year..... At the start of the pandemic, I noticed people sharing Gates's 2015 talk. The general sentiment was one of remorse and lamentation: the tech-prophet had predicted the future for us! If only we had heeded his warning! I wasn't so sure. It seems to me that Gates's prediction and proposed solution are at least part of what landed us here. I don't mean to suggest that Gates's TED talk is somehow directly responsible for the lack of global preparedness for Covid. But it embodies a certain story about "the future" that TED talks have been telling for the past two decades — one that has contributed to our unending present crisis. The story goes like this: there are problems in the world that make the future a scary prospect. Fortunately, though, there are solutions to each of these problems, and the solutions have been formulated by extremely smart, tech-adjacent people. For their ideas to become realities, they merely need to be articulated and spread as widely as possible. And the best way to spread ideas is through stories.... In other words, in the TED episteme, the function of a story isn't to transform via metaphor or indirection, but to actually manifest a new world. Stories about the future create the future. Or as Chris Anderson, TED's longtime curator, puts it, "We live in an era where the best way to make a dent on the world... may be simply to stand up and say something." And yet, TED's archive is a graveyard of ideas. It is a seemingly endless index of stories about the future — the future of science, the future of the environment, the future of work, the future of love and sex, the future of what it means to be human — that never materialized. By this measure alone, TED, and its attendant ways of thinking, should have been abandoned. But the article also notes that TED's philosophy became "a magnet for narcissistic, recognition-seeking characters and their Theranos-like projects." (In 2014 Elizabeth Holmes herself spoke at a medical-themed TED conference.) And since 2009 the TEDx franchise lets licensees use the brand platform to stage independent events — which is how at a 2010 TEDx event, Randy Powell gave his infamous talk about vortex-based mathematics which he said would "create inexhaustible free energy, end all diseases, produce all food, travel anywhere in the universe, build the ultimate supercomputer and artificial intelligence, and make obsolete all existing technology." Yet these are all just symptoms of a larger problem, the article ultimately argues. "As the most visible and influential public speaking platform of the first two decades of the twenty-first century, it has been deeply implicated in broadcasting and championing the Silicon Valley version of the future. TED is probably best understood as the propaganda arm of an ascendant technocracy.

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The region around this Winter's Olympic venues "is in an extreme drought," reports CNN, though "even in normal years, it isn't particularly suitable for snow sports." In fact, it's the first year all the snow for the Winter Games has been created by a single company: It is almost beautiful — except that the venues are surrounded by an endless brown, dry landscape completely devoid of snow. In an Olympic first, though not an achievement to boast about, climate variability has forced the Winter Games to be virtually 100% reliant on artificial snow — part of a trend that is taking place across winter sports venues around the world. Just one of the 21 cities that have hosted the Winter Olympics in the past 50 years will have a climate suitable for winter sports by the end of the century, a recent study found, if fossil fuel emissions remain unchecked. As the planet warms and the weather becomes increasingly more erratic, natural snow is becoming less reliable for winter sports, which forces venues to lean more on artificial snow. But it comes at a cost: human-made snow is incredibly resource-intensive, requiring massive amounts of energy and water to produce in a climate that's getting warmer and warmer. Elite athletes also say that the sports themselves become trickier and less safe when human-made snow is involved.... "There have been recent technological advances that allow for the generation of snow when it is above freezing," explained Jordy Hendrikx, the director of the Snow and Avalanche Laboratory at Montana State University. "This is not your 'light fluffy' snow that you might think of — it is much denser and not very soft...." Making snow demands significant resources, namely energy and water.... And with 1.2 million cubic meters of snow needed to cover roughly 800,000 square meters of competition area... the water demand at this year's Winter Olympics is massive. [According to a "Slippery Slopes" report led by Loughborough University in London on how the climate crisis is affecting the Winter Olympics.] The International Olympic Committee estimated that 49 million gallons of water will be needed to produce snow for The Games, which is a lot when you consider how rapidly the world is running out of freshwater. It's enough to fill 3,600 average-sized backyard swimming pools, or — more to the point — it's a day's worth of drinking water for nearly 100 million people.... The IOC does not face these challenges alone. Artificial snow is being used as a tool to extend ski seasons in competitions and at resorts across the globe, many of which are threatened by the warming temperatures of the climate crisis. These challenges will continue to drive the snow sports industry toward artificial snow when Mother Nature doesn't produce it. But the question remains — just because we can, does that mean we should?

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ZDNet reporter Steven Vaughan-Nichols has solved the mystery of whether Linus Torvalds is Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto: no. But what's interesting is why the reporter had to ask in the first place: In a GitHub Linux kernel repository, it appeared Torvalds had changed a single line in the Linux Kernel. The change: 'Name = I am Satoshi....' Torvalds himself has been suspected of being Nakamoto several times over the years. But no one who knows him well, and I consider myself one of those, have ever thought he was the Bitcoin mastermind. It's just so, so not Linus. So, while many people were discussing the "evidence," I decided just to ask Linus. Here's what he had to say. "I'm afraid that is just a jokester taking advantage of how GitHub works — it shares git objects between different repositories, so you can use the SHA1 'name' of an object to specify something you did in your own tree, and then use my repository as the web name, and make it look like your object is in my tree...." Torvalds went on, "So the "torvalds/linux" part of that URL is basically just empty noise, designed to fool people into thinking it's in my tree. You could replace it with [another] GitHub repository name — the actual relevant part is just the SHA1 hash part...." "So no," Torvalds concluded, "I'm sadly not the owner of a huge stash of original bitcoins." And, there you have it, folks. Nakamoto's real identity remains a secret. Late last year Vaughan-Nichols also reported on what happened when Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin suggested Torvalds sell an NFT of the 1991 email that first announced Linux to the world . "An amused and appalled Torvalds replied, "I'm staying out of the whole craziness with crypto and NFTs. Those people are cuckoo!"

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"The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Digital Currency Initiative have come up with an initial design for a central bank digital currency," reports Yahoo Finance. Reuters cautions that the newly-released research does not suggest that the U.S. central bank will move toward launching a CBDC, a step it has said it would not take without clear support from the White House and Congress...." Instead the team "developed technology that can be adjusted as more policy questions regarding the structure and purpose of a CBDC are addressed." The Washington Post describes it as "a system that can settle the vast majority of payments in less than two seconds, handles more than 1.7 million transactions per second and operates around-the-clock with no service outages in the case of a disruption in its network." The Boston Globe adds that "The team noted there's a lot more work to do in the next phase, including researching various privacy features, and stressed the digital dollar remains hypothetical until the Fed decides whether to move forward with government-backed electronic cash." Some context from the Washington Post: The ultimate product could help extend financial services to people who lack a bank account and make cross-border payments such as remittances safer and easier, said Neha Narula, director of the Digital Currency Initiative at MIT. Narula, in a conference call with reporters, noted that the Boston researchers "aren't the ones making policy decision on how such a system might operate," so they have aimed to "create a flexible system that can work with a variety of models." Along with a paper describing the team's work to date, researchers on Thursday published open-source code for the platform that would support the digital currency. Jim Cunha, executive vice president of the Boston Fed, called that a first for the central bank, intended to encourage public input that improves the technology.

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Ars Technica recently pointed out that the concept of downvoting posts and comments "has been a staple of the Internet for decades, appearing on sites such as Slashdot, Reddit, and Ars Technica." And Twitter is now experimenting with its own version, according to the International Business Times: After initially announcing the launch of a "downvoting" feature in July, Twitter revealed on Wednesday that it would be taking the feature to the global testing stage, even as questions remain about whether a more positive or negative environment is fostered on the platform as a result. The company announced that the "downvotes" will expand to more people on iOS and Android devices, and reiterated that the votes are not public, but can help the company determine what type of content different people actually wish to see. "We learned a lot about the types of replies you don't find relevant and we're expanding this test — more of you on web and soon iOS and Android will have the option to use reply downvoting. "Downvotes aren't public, but they'll help inform us of the content people want to see...". Twitter has not yet announced when the "downvote" feature will be rolled out to all users, or if it ever will be. While the test should help the company figure out if the downvote option promotes a more hateful environment or fosters a better experience, their final decision is yet to be revealed. The Washington Post includes a screenshot of the downvoting button, describing it as a small arrow to the right of the like button.

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The Associated Press reports: News Corp., publisher of The Wall Street Journal, said Friday that it had been hacked and had data stolen from journalists and other employees, and a cybersecurity firm investigating the intrusion said Chinese intelligence-gathering was believed behind the operation. The Journal, citing people briefed on the intrusion, reported that it appeared to date back to February 2020 and that scores of employees were impacted. It quoted them as saying the hackers were able to access reporters' emails and Google Docs, including drafts of articles. News Corp., whose publications and businesses include the New York Post and Journal parent Dow Jones, said it discovered the breach on Jan. 20. It said customer and financial data were so far not affected and company operations were not interrupted. But the potential impact on news reporting and sources was a serious concern. News organizations are prime targets for the world's intelligence agencies because their reporters are in constant contact with sources of sensitive information. Journalists and newsrooms from Mexico and El Salvador to Qatar, where Al-Jazeera is based, have been hacked with powerful spyware. Mandiant, the cybersecurity firm examining the hack, said in a statement that it "assesses that those behind this activity have a China nexus, and we believe they are likely involved in espionage activities to collect intelligence to benefit China's interests...." FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a speech this week that the bureau opens investigations tied to suspected Chinese espionage operations about every 12 hours, and has more than 2,000 such probes. He said Chinese government hackers have been pilfering more personal and corporate data than all other countries combined. While state-backed Russian hacking tends to get more headlines, U.S. officials say China has been stealthily stealing far more valuable commercial and personal data over the past few decades as digital technology took hold. CBS News reports that "preliminary findings point to a supply chain hack," since News Corp wrote in its report that they'd discovered one of the third-party providers supporting their technology and "cloud-based" systems "was the target of persistent cyberattack activity." The Associated Press adds that major newsrooms have also been compromised previously, including a 2013 cyberespionage attack against the New York Times in 2013. A former information security executive at the paper explaining "that while major newsrooms have shown a lot of progress in the last few years in helping their journalists navigate an increasingly hostile digital world, those efforts are not adequate to defend against a skilled and determined adversary like China."

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Meta's stock plunged 26% Thursday — its biggest one-day drop ever, lowering its marketing valuation by more than $230 billion. And then on Friday it dropped just a little bit more. A New York Times technology correspondent offers six reasons Meta is in trouble: User growth has hit a ceiling. The salad days of Facebook's wild user growth are over. Even though the company on Wednesday recorded modest gains in new users across its so-called family of apps — which includes Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp — its core Facebook social networking app lost about half a million users over the fourth quarter from the previous quarter. That's the first such decline for the company in its 18-year history, during which time it had practically been defined by its ability to bring in more new users. The dip signaled that the core app may have reached its peak. Meta's quarterly user growth rate was also the slowest it has been in at least three years. Meta's executives have pointed to other growth opportunities, like turning on the money faucet at WhatsApp, the messaging service that has yet to generate substantial revenue. But those efforts are nascent. Investors are likely to next scrutinize whether Meta's other apps, such as Instagram, might begin to hit their top on user growth.... Apple's changes are limiting Meta and Google is stealing online advertising share. Last spring, Apple introduced an "App Tracking Transparency" update to its mobile operating system, essentially giving iPhone owners the choice as to whether they would let apps like Facebook monitor their online activities. Those privacy moves have now hurt Meta's business and are likely to continue doing so... On Wednesday, David Wehner, Meta's chief financial officer, noted that as Apple's changes have given advertisers less visibility into user behaviors, many have started shifting their ad budgets to other platforms. Namely Google. In Google's earnings call this week, the company reported record sales, particularly in its e-commerce search advertising. That was the very same category that tripped up Meta in the last three months of 2021. Unlike Meta, Google is not heavily dependent on Apple for user data. Mr. Wehner said it was likely that Google had "far more third-party data for measurement and optimization purposes" than Meta's ad platform. Mr. Wehner also pointed to Google's deal with Apple to be the default search engine for Apple's Safari browser. That means Google's search ads tend to appear in more places, taking in more data that can be useful for advertisers. That's a huge problem for Meta in the long term, especially if more advertisers switch to Google search ads. Meta's other problems include competition from TikTok (and the problems with monetizing "Reels," Meta's own TikTok clone on Instagram), as well as pending antitrust investigations (and the way it hampers future social media acquisitions). But with Meta expected to continue spending more than $10 billion a year on virtual reality, "still the province of niche hobbyists [that] has yet to really break into the mainstream," the article also suggests its final reason for why Meta is in trouble: that "Spending on the metaverse is bonkers."

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Scientific American reports: These are boom times for astronomers hunting black holes. The biggest ones — supermassive black holes that can weigh billions of suns — have been found at the centers of most every galaxy, and we have even managed to image one. Meanwhile, researchers now routinely detect gravitational waves rippling through the universe from smaller merging black holes. Closer to home, we have witnessed the dramatic celestial fireworks produced when the Milky Way's own supermassive black hole and its more diminutive cousins feed on gas clouds or even entire stars. Never before, though, have we seen a long-predicted phenomenon: an isolated black hole drifting aimlessly through space, born and flung out from the collapsing core of a massive star. Until now. Scientists have announced the first-ever unambiguous discovery of a free-floating black hole, a rogue wanderer in the void some 5,000 light-years from Earth. The result, which appeared January 31 on the arXiv preprint server but has not yet been peer-reviewed, represents the culmination of more than a decade of ardent searching. "It's super exciting," says Marina Rejkuba from the European Southern Observatory in Germany, a co-author on the paper. "We can actually prove that isolated black holes are there." This discovery may be just the start; ongoing surveys and upcoming missions are expected to find dozens or even hundreds more of the dark, lonely travelers. "It's the tip of the iceberg," says Kareem El-Badry from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who was not involved in the paper.... The odds of seeing such an event for an isolated black hole were slim, but given that millions of stellar-mass black holes are predicted to be drifting through our galaxy, some might turn up in sufficiently broad and deep surveys of the sky.... This black hole's mass offers further evidence that astrophysicists' formation models are correct — that solitary black holes can rise from the ashes of especially hefty stellar progenitors.... Rogue stellar-mass black holes, long predicted but only now observationally confirmed, might well be sufficiently common in our galaxy to support demographic studies of their population. Pinning down their true abundance, masses and other properties could shore up our still-incomplete theories of stellar evolution — or reveal important new gaps in our understanding. "If confirmed, this is a very exciting discovery!" adds the astronomy column at Syfy.com. "We know those black holes are out there, and this research points to how we can find them." The precise astrometry was partly performed using the Hubble Space Telescope over a six-year interval, according to the research paper (shared by Slashdot reader Obipale).

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From Mike Melanson's "This Week in Programming" column: The second beta of Go 1.18 was released this week, following up the first beta, which the team writes was "the most downloaded Go beta ever, with twice as many downloads as any previous release." With it comes support for generics in both gopls [the official Go language server] and Visual Studio Code's Go extension. In addition to the long-awaited generics feature, Go 1.18 introduces fuzzing and the new Go workspace mode. Having put the first beta through its paces, the team also writes that it "has also proved very reliable; in fact, we are already running it in production here at Google." Nonetheless, Beta 2 is here to make sure everything is good, as Beta 1 uncovered some "obscure bugs in the new support for generics". The release candidate is also expected later this month, with the final Go 1.18 release slated for March. And while we're talking about Go 1.18, Go AWK creator Ben Hoyt decided to take a look at Go performance from version 1.2 to 1.18 using the performance of his own tool "when compiled using each released version of Go from 1.2 (the earliest version I could download) to 1.18 (which is in beta now)." As you might expect (or hope, rather), Go has picked up the pace over recent versions. "Overall, countwords is now about 5x as fast as it would have been with Go 1.2, and sumloop is 14x as fast! (Though I first released GoAWK when Go was already at version 1.11, so it wasn't around for the huge early gains.)," Hoyt writes. "For an actively-developed compiler like Go, it's cool to be able to get performance improvements just by waiting and letting others do all the hard work. :-)"

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"A few years ago, GitHub introduced sponsorships that allowed anybody to make direct financial contributions to open source developers," TechCrunch reported this week, adding that Microsoft-owned GitHub is now "taking this concept a bit further by launching sponsor-only repositories, that is, private repositories that only sponsors will get access to." GitHub says the idea here is to give funders early access to projects as they are being built, for example, or access to what the company calls "sponsorware," that is access to projects just for sponsors. The company notes that developers can also use these repositories to host discussions with sponsors. And to give developers some flexibility here, they can attach specific repositories to different sponsorship tiers... The company is also adding a new call to action to sponsor-enabled repositories to give more visibility to the program. "In effect, the new feature formalizes something that many developers were already enabling themselves manually," reports VentureBeat, "but GitHub now takes care of all the heavy lifting such as sending invites..." The launch comes at a time when industry and government are looking for new ways to support and secure the software supply chain. The recently discovered Log4j vulnerability resurfaced age-old questions around the security of open source software, particularly software that isn't backed by full-time developer teams. For example, one of Log4j's core maintainers has a full-time job elsewhere as a software architect, and only works on "Log4j and other open source projects" in his spare time. With Sponsors-only repositories, developers will not only be able to solicit donations, but also better engage with backers — corporate or otherwise — at a deeper and more personalized level... Elsewhere, GitHub also now allows developers to attach metadata to their sponsor page URLs, which may help them track how new sponsors arrived on the scene — for example, they can see whether a tweet they sent out resulted in any direct sponsor signups.

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CNN reports that wastewater-based epidemiology "has proven to be so reliable in dozens of pilot projects across the U.S. that the government has invested millions to create the National Wastewater Surveillance System, or NWSS, a network of 400 testing sites spread across 19 states that is coordinated by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention." The pilot programs have already been "quietly operating behind the scenes, generating data for public health departments across the country, since September 2020." For the first time, the CDC has published data that looks at how much coronavirus is turning up in the country's wastewater. It added this testing data to its Covid-19 dashboard. Tests show that there's been a decrease in the amount of virus at two-thirds of the 255 sites reporting data from the latest 15-day period. The NWSS includes 400 sites overall, and more than 500 more will begin submitting data in the coming weeks, the CDC says.... [G]enetic material from the virus gets flushed down the toilet into the wastewater stream, where it can be detected by the same kinds of tests labs use to detect the virus from nasal swabs: real time polymerase chain reaction tests, or RT-PCR. This kind of testing is highly sensitive. It can pick up the presence of the virus when just one person out of 100,000 in a given area, or sewershed, is infected. And because wastewater testing doesn't depend on people to realize they're sick and seek out a test, or even to have symptoms at all, it's often the earliest warning a community has that wave of Covid-19 infections is on the way. The CDC estimates that...the samples typically turn positive in an area four to six days before clinical cases show up. "As long as people are using a toilet that's connected to a sewer, we can get information on those cases in that community," said Amy Kirby, a CDC microbiologist who leads the NWSS project... [But] this kind of testing can't signal when a community is free from the virus because the threshold of detection — how many people have to be positive in an area to show up in a water sample — isn't known. For these reasons, the CDC says, wastewater surveillance is best used along with case-based surveillance.... Kirby says wastewater monitoring will be around long after Covid is gone, too. By the end of the year, the CDC plans to expand the number of pathogens tracked on the dashboard to include influenza, a fungal superbug called Candida auris, and foodborne threats like E. coli and salmonella.

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An anonymous reader shares a report from the University of Bonn in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany: A few years ago, a novel measurement technique showed that protons are probably smaller than had been assumed since the 1990s. The discrepancy surprised the scientific community; some researchers even believed that the Standard Model of particle physics would have to be changed. Physicists at the University of Bonn and the Technical University of Darmstadt have now developed a method that allows them to analyze the results of older and more recent experiments much more comprehensively than before. This also results in a smaller proton radius from the older data. So there is probably no difference between the values -- no matter which measurement method they are based on. The study appeared in Physical Review Letters. [...] Using this method, the physicists reanalyzed readings from older, as well as very recent, experiments -- including those that previously suggested a value of 0.88 femtometers. With their method, however, the researchers arrived at 0.84 femtometers; this is the radius that was also found in new measurements based on a completely different methodology. So the proton actually appears to be about 5 percent smaller than was assumed in the 1990s and 2000s. At the same time, the researchers' method also allows new insights into the fine structure of protons and their uncharged siblings, neutrons. So it's helping us to understand a little better the structure of the world around us -- the chair, the air, but also the stars in the night sky.

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"Developers reacted with astonishment and anger at Apple's 27% commission policy as a minimal form of compliance with a new antitrust law regarding the App Store," reports 9to5Mac. After being ordered by Dutch regulators to allow developers to opt-out of the App Store payment platform, Apple announced today that it "would reduce its commission by only three percent" from the 30 percent commission it typically charges developers, reports 9to5Mac. Additionally, Apple said it would "impose onerous administrative overheads -- such as applying for permission to use a specific API, maintaining a separate version of the app, and filing reports with Apple." 9to5Mac highlights a number of reactions from disgruntled developers: Macworld did a great roundup of reactions to this by a number of well-known developers: "Apple was blasted by developers on Twitter who took issue with the exorbitant fee. Steve Troughton-Smith called the move 'absolutely vile' [...] Marco Arment wrote that you 'can just FEEL how much they despise having to do any of this.' Others noted that it 'defeats the purpose of the law' and that developers will still need to pay at least 3 percent to the payment provider, thus negating even the small savings." Steve Troughton-Smith retweeted our story, and commented: "Absolutely vile. This says everything about @tim_cook's Apple and what it thinks of developers. I hope the company gets exactly what it deserves. Everybody on their executive team should be ashamed, and some of them should not be here when it's all over. We all see you." Marco Arment highlighted the conditions imposed by Apple: - Separate app, only available in Netherlands - Cannot also support IAP - Must display scary sheets before payment - Website links are all to a single URL specified in Info.plist with no parameters - Must submit monthly report to Apple listing EVERY external transaction Adding: "And after you pay your ~3% to your payment processor, Apple's 27% commission takes you right back up to 30%. Glorious. Come on, THIS is comedy. Amazing, ridiculous comedy. I'd be surprised if a single app ever took them up on this. (And that's exactly by design.)"

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Engineers from the University of Delaware developed a method for effectively capturing 99 percent of carbon dioxide from the air using an electrochemical system powered by hydrogen, a press statement reveals. Interesting Engineering reports: The new system, outlined in a new paper in the journal Nature Energy, was actually born out of a setback in another research project. The team behind the new technology was originally working on hydroxide exchange membrane (HEM) fuel cells, a more affordable and environmentally friendly alternative to traditional acid-based fuel cells. While working on that technology, the team was faced with a serious obstacle. HEM fuel cells, they found, are very sensitive to carbon dioxide in the air, making it hard for the batteries to function properly. Fast forward a few years later, and the researchers that once tried to combat the effects of carbon dioxide on HEM fuel cells are now using it to our advantage. "Once we dug into the mechanism, we realized the fuel cells were capturing just about every bit of carbon dioxide that came into them, and they were really good at separating it to the other side," said Brian Setzler, a co-author on the paper. The team leveraged the built-in "self-purging" process seen in HEM fuel cells to create a carbon dioxide separator that could be placed upstream from their fuel cell stacks. "It turns out our approach is very effective. We can capture 99 percent of the carbon dioxide out of the air in one pass if we have the right design and right configuration," said study lead and UD Professor Yushan Yan. Today, the team has a more compact system that is capable of filtering greater quantities of air. According to the researchers, their soda can-sized early prototype device is capable of filtering roughly 10 liters of air per minute and of removing about 98 percent of CO2. What's more, they found that a smaller electrochemical cell measuring 2 inches by 2 inches could be used to continuously remove roughly 99 percent of CO2 found in the air flowing at a rate of approximately two liters per minute. The team's prototype is designed to scrub CO2 out of a vehicle's exhaust, though it could also be used for a number of other applications, including aircraft, spacecraft, and submarines.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: About a tenth of the global oil and gas industry's methane emissions have been found to come from a group of "ultra-emitter" sites located mostly in Turkmenistan, Russia and the US. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that governments recently agreed to slash by 2030. While huge plumes of methane leaking from gas pipelines have been detected by satellites at individual sites, such as a gas well in Ohio and several pipelines in central Turkmenistan, little has been know about their extent globally. Now, images captured by an instrument aboard a satellite have been run through an algorithm to automatically detect the biggest plumes of methane streaming from oil and gas facilities worldwide. These ultra-emitters were spotted pumping out more than 25 tons of methane an hour. That's "a heck of a lot," says Steve Hamburg at Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), a US non-profit organization. Collectively, these contribute about 8 million tons of methane a year, about a tenth of the oil and gas industry's total annual emissions for 2019-20. Turkmenistan was the biggest ultra-emitter, releasing more than a million tons of methane between 2019 and 2020. Russia was second at just under a million tons, followed by the US, Iran, Algeria and Kazakhstan. The US count is probably low because it excluded a major oil and gas region, the Permian basin, due to monitoring difficulties. By contrast to these countries, other major oil producing countries, including Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, had very few ultra-emitters. "The study also found that ultra-emitting sites are releasing so much methane, which could be sold, that it should be cost effective to solve," reports New Scientist. "For the six worst countries, tackling those plumes should cost up to $300 less per ton than it would typically cost to reduce methane from oil and gas facilities in those nations." The report also notes that these findings "are based on a snapshot and some ultraemitters may have gone undetected." The findings have been published in the journal Science.

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The NFT marketplace is rife with people buying their own NFTs in order to drive up prices, according to a report released this week by blockchain data firm Chainalysis. Engadget reports: Known as "wash trading," the act of buying and selling a security in order to fool the market was once commonplace on Wall Street, and has been illegal for nearly a century. But the vast, unregulated NFT marketplace has shown to be a golden opportunity for scammers. The report tracked instances of the same traders selling the same NFTs back and forth at least 25 times, a likely incident of wash trading. It identified a group of 110 alleged NFT wash traders who have made roughly $8.9 million in profit from this practice. Researchers also discovered significant evidence of money laundering in the NFT marketplace in the last half of 2021. The value sent to NFT marketplaces by addresses associated with scams spiked significantly in the third quarter of 2021, worth more than $1 million worth of cryptocurrency, according to the report. Roughly $1.4 million dollars of sales in the fourth quarter of 2021 came from such illicit addresses. "NFT wash trading exists in a murky legal area. While wash trading is prohibited in conventional securities and futures, wash trading involving NFTs has yet to be the subject of an enforcement action," wrote the authors of the report.

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slack_justyb writes: "Quietly making its v1.0 debut yesterday was system76-scheduler as a Rust-written daemon aiming to improve Linux desktop responsiveness and catering to their Pop!_OS distribution," reports Phoronix. The daemon will work with the kernel's CFS scheduler to give priority to components that System76 deems important for its distro. Out of the box, the scheduler will assign priority to the X.Org Server and desktop window managers/compositors, while pushing compilers and other background tasks lower. However, the scheduler will be configurable via Rusty Object Notation (RON) files found in /etc/system76-scheduler/assignments/ and /usr/share/system76-scheduler/assignments/. Over on the GitHub page for the project, the team indicates that they are indeed making a trade-off from the default CFS to benefit Desktop configurations over the typical load a server might see.

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Google is trying to salvage its failing Stadia game service with a new focus on striking deals with Peloton, Bungie, and others under the brand "Google Stream." Business Insider reports: When Google announced last year that it was shutting down its internal gaming studios, it was seen as a blow to the company's big bet on video games. Google, whose Stadia cloud service was barely more than a year old, said it would instead focus on publishing games from existing developers on the platform and explore other ways to bring Stadia's technology to partners. Since then, the company has shifted the focus of its Stadia division largely to securing white-label deals with partners that include Peloton, Capcom, and Bungie, according to people familiar with the plans. Google is trying to salvage the underlying technology, which is capable of broadcasting high-definition games over the cloud with low latency, shopping the technology to partners under a new name: Google Stream. (Stadia was known in development as "Project Stream.") The Stadia consumer platform, meanwhile, has been deprioritized within Google, insiders said, with a reduced interest in negotiating blockbuster third-party titles. The focus of leadership is now on securing business deals for Stream, people involved in those conversations said. The changes demonstrate a strategic shift in how Google, which has invested heavily in cloud services, sees its gaming ambitions. Google has continued to prop up the Stadia consumer platform with a steady stream of titles. After Google closed Stadia's internal game studios, known as Stadia Games & Entertainment, insiders said the directive was to build out what was internally dubbed a "content flywheel" -- a steady flow of independent titles and content from existing publishing deals that would be much more affordable than securing AAA blockbusters, two former employees familiar with the conversations said. "The key thing was that they would not be spending the millions on the big titles," one said. "And exclusives would be out of the question." Executives and employees for the Stadia product have also shifted roles. Phil Harrison, the former PlayStation executive Google tapped to run its gaming operations, now reports to the company's head of subscriptions. Patrick Seybold, a Google spokesperson, told Insider in a statement: "We announced our intentions of helping publishers and partners deliver games directly to gamers last year, and have been working toward that. The first manifestation has been our partnership with AT&T who is offering Batman: Arkham Knight available to their customers for free. While we won't be commenting on any rumors or speculation regarding other industry partners, we are still focused on bringing great games to Stadia in 2022. With 200+ titles currently available, we expect to have another 100+ games added to the platform this year, and currently have 50 games available to claim in Stadia Pro."

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