Elon Musk has taken a 9.2% passive stake in Twitter, according to a 13G filing, Bloomberg News reports. Twitter rose about 26% in pre-market trading.

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What happened after Russia blocked 80 million users of Instagram? Reuters reports: A black and white, melancholy alternative to Instagram that asks users to post sad pictures of themselves may launch in Russia this week, its creators said, to express sadness at the loss of popular services such as the U.S. photo sharing platform.... Although people can still sometimes access [Instagram] using a Virtual Private Network, domestic alternatives have started appearing, the latest being 'Grustnogram', or 'Sadgram' in English. "Post sad pictures of yourself, show this to your sad friends, be sad together," a message on the platform's website read.... "We are very sad that many high quality and popular services are stopping their work in Russia for various reasons," Afisha Daily quoted Alexander Tokarev, one of the service's founders as saying. "We created Grustnogram to grieve about this together and support each other." Insider looks at the larger landscape now for Russia's social media apps: Rossgram joins a slate of Russian versions of major platforms that seek to mimic larger and more popular social media companies, resulting in a landscape of Russian knockoffs that often struggle to attract users while raising questions about how much access the Kremlin has to users' data.... Russia has been trying to coax internet users to turn to its own versions of popular sites, such as YouTube knockoff RuTube, for years. Authorities this year offered online creators the equivalent of $1,700 a month to move their content to RuTube, according to Coda Story, attempting to make up for its minuscule audience. A 2021 report by the Levada Center, an independent polling organization, found that YouTube is used by 37% of Russians, Instagram by 34%, and TikTok by 16%. But some native platforms hold influence too. Out of Russia's 70 million active social media users, according to research by Linkfluence, a market research platform, 83% use a social media platform similar to Facebook called VKontakte, and 55% use another called OdnoKlassniki. According to Alyssa Demus, an associate international and defense researcher at Rand corporation, Russia has long been building up an ecosystem of alternative social media platforms. But people tend to be more skeptical and cautious when using them out of fear that the government is involved in their operations and users' information isn't secure. "Either Russia has a hand in the building of the platform from this start, or they strong arm or co-opt whatever is popular later," Demus told Insider. "I know there's significant use of platforms like WhatsApp or others that are believed to be encrypted for that very reason — so that there can be open communication without the fear of reprisal." Russia has also enacted laws to exert influence on non-Russian social media platforms, including passing legislation stating companies need to place their servers for Russian accounts on Russian territory. "Presumably so they can then sort of meddle and do whatever kind of surveillance they need to," Demus said. Demus adds at one point that "anything Russia touches has the potential to land you in jail." But the article also notes that younger tech-savvy Russians are using VPNs to access sites blocked by the government — ultimately resulting in a kind of "generation gap" where they're less aligned with pro-government rhetoric from state-controlled media.

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Slashdot reader alaskana98 writes: In what has become a stubborn sibling to the 'Face on Mars' phenomenon, the legend of the Dark Knight alien satellite has persisted for years and is the fascinating story of a seemingly mundane NASA photo tied together with reports of seemingly mysterious radio waves captured in the early days of radio, all combining to make the ultimate space conspiracy theory. It goes something like this — an ancient alien space probe, dubbed the 'Dark Knight, has been long orbiting Earth and covertly monitoring its blissfully unaware inhabitants for mysterious purposes for roughly 10,000 years. Flash forward to the 1899, where technological pioneer Nikola Tesla, while experimenting with radio technology in his Colorado laboratory supposedly captured mysterious emanations from an unearthly object. Later in the 1920's, Norwegian engineer Jørgen Hals found that radio signals he transmitted were being echoed back to him a few seconds later, something called 'long delayed echoes' — still unexplained to this day. It has been proposed that these echoes were signals being relayed back to earth by something called a 'Bracewell Probe', a hypothetical automated spacecraft sent out with the goal of making contact with other intelligent species. Flash forward to 1998, an unassuming photo from the STS-88 mission in 1998 to attach the U.S. module to the Russian portion of the ISS captured a tantalizing glimpse of an unnaturally geometric shape menacingly loitering toward the bottom of the frame. To true believers, this was evidence of an ancient probe keeping tabs on the earthly locals. Combined, these disparate events swirl together to create the stuff of dreams for the ardent conspiracy theorist and even the causal sci-fi buff. Ultimately, the object in the STS photo was most likely a thermal cover. The radio waves Tesla heard? Likely natural radio emisions of a natural or terestial source. Space.com took a deep dive into this myth and explored how it — and the - dark knight myth has taken a hold on the imaginations of those who find themselves peering out into the inky blackness of the night and wonder to themselves "are we being watched from above"?

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"Google is taking aim at Microsoft's dominance in government technology and security," reports NBC News: Jeanette Manfra, director of risk and compliance for Google's cloud services and a former top U.S. cybersecurity official, said Thursday that the government's reliance on Microsoft — one of Google's top business rivals — is an ongoing security threat. Manfra also said in a blog post published Thursday that a survey commissioned by Google found that a majority of federal employees believe that the government's reliance on Microsoft products is a cybersecurity vulnerability. "Overreliance on any single vendor is usually not a great idea," Manfra said in a phone interview. "You have an attack on one product that the majority of the government is depending on to do their job, you have a significant risk in how the government can continue to function." Microsoft pushed back strongly against the claim, calling it "unhelpful." The study comes as Google is positioning itself to challenge Microsoft's dominance in federal government offices, where Windows and Office programs are commonly used.... The blog post comes as hackers continue to discover critical software vulnerabilities at an increasing pace across major tech products, but especially in Microsoft programs. Last year, researchers discovered 21 "zero-days" — an industry term for a critical vulnerability that a company doesn't have a ready solution for — actively in use against Microsoft products, compared to 16 against Google and 12 against Apple. he most prominent zero-day was used against Microsoft's Exchange email program, which cybersecurity experts say was first employed by Chinese cyberspies and then quickly adopted by criminal hackers, leading to hundreds of companies becoming compromised.

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The Paramount+ streaming service already has five ongoing Star Trek series (including Discovery and Picard). But they've just released a trailer for another one — and it's now derived directly from the original 1960s TV show, even including some of its original characters. The upcoming show's title? Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Ars Technica reports: As we've reported previously, one of the highlights of Star Trek: Discovery's second season was the appearance of classic original series (TOS) characters Capt. Christopher Pike (Anson Mount), Number One (Rebecca Romijn), and Spock (Ethan Peck). All three reprise their roles for Strange New Worlds.... "If you want to seek out new life, go where the aliens are," Pike tells us. But that alien life might not be receptive to first contact, as Pike and the Enterprise find themselves under fire by aliens who consider their presence to be "blasphemy." And romance blooms for both Pike and Spock (separately, not with each other). Star Trek: Strange New Worlds debuts on Paramount+ on May 5, 2022. The streaming platform has already greenlighted a second season, with Paul Wesley (Vampire Diaries ) joining the cast as future Enterprise Capt. James T. Kirk. Ars Technica reports the cast as: Babs Olusanmokun playing Dr. M'BengaCelia Rose Gooding filling Nichelle Nichols' shoes as Cadet Nyota UhuraJess Bush playing Nurse Christine ChapelMelissa Navai playing Lt. Erica OrtegasBruce Orak playing an Aenar named Hemmer.Christina Chong playing La'An Noonien-Singh (a relation of the classic revenge-obsessed Star Trek villain Khan). And on an unrelated note...

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Neowin notes growing support for the "very efficient, potent, royalty-free video codec" AV1, including Microsoft's adding of support for hardware acceleration of AV1 on Windows. But AV1 even turned up in Intel's announcement this week of the Arc A-series, a new line of discrete GPUs, Neowin reports: Intel has been quick to respond and the company has become the first such GPU hardware vendor to have full AV1 support on its newly launched Arc GPUs. While AMD and Nvidia both offer AV1 decoding with their newest GPUs, neither have support for AV1 encoding. Intel says that hardware encoding of AV1 on its new Arc GPUs is 50 times faster than those based on software-only solutions. It also adds that the efficiency of AV1 encode with Arc is 20% better compared to HEVC. With this feature, Intel hopes to potentially capture at least some of the streaming and video editing market that's based on users who are looking for a more robust AV1 encoding solution compared to CPU-based software approaches. From Intel's announcement: Intel Arc A-Series GPUs are the first in the industry to offer full AV1 hardware acceleration, including both encode and decode, delivering faster video encode and higher quality streaming while consuming the same internet bandwidth. We've worked with industry partners to ensure that AV1 support is available today in many of the most popular media applications, with broader adoption expected this year. The AV1 codec will be a game changer for the future of video encoding and streaming.

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The BBC reported Friday that "Facebook users around the world have been waking up to find themselves locked out of their accounts for no apparent reason." The message many received reads: "Your Facebook account was disabled because it did not follow our Community Standards. This decision can't be reversed." [It appeared in a popup window with the title, "We Cannot Review the Decision to Disable Your Account."] One user told the BBC there was no warning or explanation given. While the message appeared on April 1st (April Fool's Day), the lockouts were real, confirmed on Twitter by Facebook's policy communications director Andy Stone. Later Friday he tweeted that "Earlier today, a technical issue caused a small number of people to have trouble accessing Facebook. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience." Numerous Twitter users then replied, complaining that their own accounts had been — and remained — disabled. "This happened to my father a couple of weeks ago and we are desperate to get his account back," one Twitter user told the Facebook communications official — while trying to explain the glitch's impact. "He has stage 4 cancer and uses the account to update his friends on his progress."

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The C programming language has many problems. But now the Registers notes that "Aria Beingessner, a member of the teams that implemented both Rust and Swift, has an interesting take... That C isn't a programming language anymore...." "And it hasn't been for a long time," Beingessner writes in an online essay: This isn't about the fact that C is actually horribly ill-defined due to a billion implementations or its completely failed integer hierarchy. That stuff sucks, but on its own that wouldn't be my problem. My problem is that C was elevated to a role of prestige and power, its reign so absolute and eternal that it has completely distorted the way we speak to each other. Rust and Swift cannot simply speak their native and comfortable tongues — they must instead wrap themselves in a grotesque simulacra of C's skin and make their flesh undulate in the same ways it does.... Everyone had to learn to speak C to talk to the major operating systems, and then when it came time to talk to eachother we suddenly all already spoke C so... why not talk to eachother in terms of C too? Oops! Now C is the lingua franca of programming. Oops! Now C isn't just a programming language, it's a protocol. The Register picks up the argument: it's fair (if wildly controversial) to say, as this 2018 Association for Computing Machinery paper puts it, that C is not a low-level programming language. As its subtitle says: "Your computer is not a fast PDP-11." This is not a relative assessment: that is, it's not saying that there are other programming languages that are lower-level than C. It's an absolute one: C is often praised for being "close to the metal," for being a "portable assembly language." It was, once, but it hasn't been since the 1970s; the underlying computational models of modern computers are nothing like the one that C represents, which was designed for a 1970s 16-bit minicomputer. The Register summarizes what happens when a language has to interface with an operating system — and thus, that operating system's C code. [I]t has to call C APIs. This is done via Foreign Function Interfaces (FFIs).... In other words, even if you never write any code in C, you have to handle C variables, match C data structures and layouts, link to C functions by name with their symbols.... The real problem is that C was never designed or intended to be an Interface Definition Language, and it isn't very good at it.

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"For 50 years, interplanetary probes have returned thousands of striking images of the surface of Mars, but never a single sound." So says the largest fundamental science agency in Europe, the French National Centre for Scientific Research (France's state research organisation). Then they made a surprising discovery, reports CBS News: Researchers studying recordings made by microphones on NASA's Perseverance rover found that sound travels much slower on Mars than it does on Earth... In addition, the researchers realized that there are two speeds of sound on Mars — one for high-pitched sounds and one for low-pitched sounds. This would "make it difficult for two people standing only five meters apart to have a conversation," according to a press release on the findings. The unique sound environment is due to the incredibly low atmospheric surface pressure. Mars' pressure is 170 times lower than Earth's pressure. For example, if a high-pitched sound travels 213 feet on Earth, it will travel just 26 feet on Mars. While sounds on Mars can be heard by human ears, they are incredibly soft. "At some point, we thought the microphone was broken, it was so quiet," said Sylvestre Maurice, an astrophysicist at the University of Toulouse in France and lead author of the study, according to NASA. Besides the wind, "natural sound sources are rare," the press release said. But NASA scientists think Mars may become more noisy in the autumn months, when there is higher atmospheric pressure. "We are entering a high-pressure season," co-author of the study Baptiste Chide said in the press release. "Maybe the acoustic environment on Mars will be less quiet than it was when we landed."

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Ars Technica looks at the "in-space propulsion company" Impulse Space, which just announced $20 million in seed funding this week to help it build something called an "orbital transfer vehicle." The company was founded by rocket scientist Tom Mueller, who the article describes as the first employee hired by Elon Musk for SpaceX, leading the development of SpaceX's Merlin rocket engine. Impulse Space is apparently positioning itself for its own role in a future with lots of reusable rockets and cheaper launch costs: Founded last September, Impulse Space will initially seek to provide "last mile" delivery services for satellites launched as part of rideshare missions, likely including on SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket.... While the company is not ready to discuss its specific technology, the goal is to deliver the most delta-V capability [velocity from fuel-burning] in the most efficient manner. Impulse Space released a teaser video on this earlier this month. [The video's title? "Hello, Solar System...!" And it concludes with the words "Big things have small beginings."] Impulse Space will seek to complement launch services with sustainable delivery in space, using green propellants and having vehicles with de-orbit capability. Barry Matsumori, who recently joined as the company's chief operating officer, said the company recognizes that if tens or hundreds of satellites will be launching on these heavy-lift rockets, they're going to need to reach different orbits and have different purposes... The company's initial business strategy involves low Earth orbit, but it envisions the need for sustainable transportation from the Earth to the Moon — in the form of a tug — and the storage and movement of propellant in both low Earth orbit and the lunar environment. Once a company mines a space resource, after all, it will have to go somewhere.

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The Seattle Times surveys the landscape after a historic unionization vote at an Amazon warehouse in New York — and finds the same sentiments are spurring activism by workers three timezones away: As the world watched thousands of Amazon warehouse workers in New York form on Friday the company's first U.S. union, a handful of employees of a Seattle thrift store celebrated their own victory. Sixteen workers at Crossroads Trading Co. in search of higher wages, more hours and better benefits voted unanimously Wednesday to form a union at the chain's store in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood. Organizers at Crossroads said they built off the momentum and union support in the neighborhood from another successful union drive at a Starbucks store just a few blocks away. Now, a group of security workers who have contracts with Amazon, Microsoft and Sound Transit are taking a similar tack, hoping to use the swell of enthusiasm created by Amazon workers in Staten Island to bring more workers in Seattle into the union fold.... Since Amazon Labor Union started organizing — unofficially with a walkout in 2020 in protest of the company's treatment of workers amid the COVID-19 pandemic — the union wave appears to have swelled in the Seattle area. A group of workers at an Amazon Fresh store in Seattle's Central District organized to form Amazon Workers United, and now three more stores in the area are starting their own drives, according to organizer Joseph Fink. Workers at Verizon retail stores in Everett and Lynnwood are currently casting votes in a union election. Ballots were sent to workers in March and votes will be counted this month. In Seattle, a Starbucks retail store on Capitol Hill became the first unionized store in the region.... Watching workers at companies including Starbucks and Amazon face anti-union tactics did stoke fears of retaliation for union efforts at Crossroads, said Emma Mudd, a sales associate and one of the lead union organizers. But it exposed the playbook that companies might follow — and showed what workers could do to push back, engage one another and put public pressure on the company. "It was helpful to have tangible examples, because we did have conversations to prepare for union busting," Mudd said. "It was really helpful to see how those workers were able to push through it."

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While Nokia stopped sales in Russia and denounced the invasion of Ukraine, the New York Times reported Monday that Nokia had previously "worked with state-linked Russian companies to plan, streamline and troubleshoot" the connection between a Russian telecom and the government's powerful SORM digital surveillance tool. But Nokia says the claims are "misleading," reports ITWire. Slashdot reader juul_advocate shares ITWire's report, which labels the Times' story "a rehashing of a story published by the American tech website TechCrunch back in 2019." A Nokia spokesperson said, in a detailed rebuttal, that the Times had confirmed that the documents used as source material for the story were the same as those used by TechCrunch.... The Russian lawful intercept system is known as System for Operative Investigative Activities, or SORM. Nokia said the Times had suggested that its networks play an active part in enabling equipment used for SORM. "This is incorrect. Like any other network infrastructure supplier, Nokia is required to ensure that the networking products we sell have passive capability to interface with lawful intercept equipment of law enforcement agencies," the company said. "This is governed by internationally recognised standards, as well as local regulations. All Nokia deals go through a strict human rights due diligence process that has been externally assessed and vetted by the Global Network Initiative. We are the first and only telecommunications equipment vendor to have this external assessment in place...." [I]t is a third party which converts the standards-based interface in Nokia's products to fit with the legal intercept requirements — a fact which is also reflected in the 2019 documents." The Finnish company, one of four that is able to supply end-to-end 5G networks, added: "As Nokia has made clear to The New York Times, Nokia does not manufacture, install or service SORM equipment or systems. Any suggestions that we do, are incorrect. "Lawful intercept is a standard capability that exists in every network in almost every nation. It provides properly authorised law enforcement agencies with the ability to track and view certain data and communications passing through an operator's network for purposes of combatting crime." In short, Nokia's rebuttal argues, "The information that was already published by TechCrunch in 2019 does not show anything more than Nokia's product interfaces meeting the standards-based, legal requirements related to lawful intercept."

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This week the New York Times published an opinion piece by three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas L. Friedman arguing that greener energy is the best response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Friedman starts by decrying America's "umpteenth confrontation with a petro-dictator whose viciousness and recklessness are possible only because of the oil wealth he extracts from the ground. "No matter how the war ends in Ukraine, it needs to end with America finally, formally, categorically and irreversibly ending its addiction to oil." Nothing has distorted our foreign policy, our commitments to human rights, our national security and, most of all, our environment than our oil addiction. Let this be the last war in which we and our allies fund both sides.... As long as we're addicted to oil, we are always going to be begging someone, usually a bad guy, to move the price up or down, because we alone are not masters of our own fate. This has got to stop... Friedman notes that global oil prices collapsing between 1988 and 1992 "helped bankrupt the Soviet Union and hasten its collapse.... We can create the same effects today by overproducing renewables and overemphasizing energy efficiency." Among his suggestions are requiring power companies to transition faster to renewable energy sources — as well as "eliminating the regulatory red tape around installing rooftop solar systems." And he's also got a solution for the spike in fuel prices: If you want to lower gasoline prices today, the most surefire, climate-safe method would be to reduce the speed limit on highways to 60 miles per hour and ask every company in America that can do so to let its employees work at home and not commute every day. Those two things would immediately cut demand for gasoline and bring down the price. Is that too much to ask to win the war against petro-dictators like Putin — a victory in which the byproduct is cleaner air, not burning tanks?

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Justin E. H. Smith is a professor of the history and philosophy of science. Princeton University Press has just published his new book — titled The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is. (Definite internet as "the part that we are glued to for most hours of our waking lives" which in its current usage "hinders the exercise of attention, which, indeed, in the book I try to argue is crucial to a thriving human life.") Smith recently answered questions from the science editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Some radically condensed excerpts: [T]he "crisis moment" comes when the intrinsically neither-good-nor-bad algorithm comes to be applied for the resolution of problems, for logistical solutions, and so on in many new domains of human social life, and jumps the fence that contained it as focusing on relatively narrow questions to now structuring our social life together as a whole. That's when the crisis starts.... You identify as another contributing factor to our crisis moment the internet's addictive nature. How do algorithms play a role in addiction...? [T]he reason why they abandoned the fire hose and started nudging us this way or that is because the social media companies are private for-profit companies, and the more they can nudge us to watch or to keep looking, to keep refreshing, the more money they're going to make. So that's not a philosophical problem. It's just a massively concerted effort to streamline and maximize our screen time..... [E]verything seems to be geared toward harnessing attention and exploiting attention on the designers' parts, rather than in cultivating attention on the user's part.... You could also ask, however, of social media... are you really conversing? Are you really debating? And I think the answer is, almost always, no. What's happening on social media is rather a simulation of discussion and debate. Or, as I like to put it, Twitter is a debate-themed video game, in the same way that, say, Grand Theft Auto is a stolen-car-chase-themed video game.... [S]ocial media [is] more like a false suffocation or a perversion of the thing it pretends to be.... [T]his is a real problem because there's no other game in town. At this point, if you have any lingering hope for the prospects of deliberative democracy, the idea that you need to find a neutral public space to pursue it in, it's just so obvious that the only possible setting is online. I mean, you can go print pamphlets in your basement if you want but that's not going to get your movement very far. So we only have one choice as a public space, and it's a spurious one. It's one that can't be a public space because its raison d'être is something quite different.... In different government/enterprise meshes in different systems throughout the world, including the United States, but also significantly, China, we're seeing one and the same thing slowly emerge, again, under very different legal systems in very different cultures with different historical legacies. And that is, namely, a system in which algorithms constrain and define and limit our identities rather than enabling us to cultivate our freedoms. The interview (and the book) re-visit 17th-century German philosopher/early modern polymath Gottfried Leibniz — who built a gear-and-wheel-driven "reckoning engine" — as the first incarnation for the tech utopian dream of outsourcing our reasoning. "[I]t goes from the mid-1670s to precisely the mid-2010s, by which point it became painfully obvious that such outsourcing of reason was actually causing problems even as it was solving old problems. It was certainly not the path to world peace and stability that one might have hoped for in an earlier generation."

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"Russia's Roscosmos will stop working with NASA and other western space agencies on the International Space Station," reports Engadget: On early Saturday morning, Roscosmos director Dmitry Rogozin slammed international sanctions against Russia and said normal cooperation between the space agency and its western counterparts would only be possible after they were lifted.... Rogozin said Roscosmos would submit proposals on ending its work with NASA and other international space agencies to Russian authorities. It's unclear how the decision would affect the space station. The ISS is not owned by any single country. The US, European Union, Russia, Canada and Japan operate the station through a cooperative agreement between the countries. Roscosmos, however, is critical to the ISS. The Russian Orbital Segment handles guidance control for the entire station.... The ISS isn't the first joint space program to see its future thrown into uncertainty due to rising tensions between the West and Russia. In March, Roscosmos said it would not ferry OneWeb's internet satellites to space until the UK government sold its stake in the company. That same month, the European Space Agency announced it was suspending its joint ExoMars mission with Roscosmos. But in the middle of all this, "There are currently seven astronauts onboard the ISS — three Russian cosmonauts, three NASA astronauts and one German-born ESA astronaut, Matthias Maurer..." reports UPI: The three Russian cosmonauts are Sergey Korsakov, Oleg Artemyev and Denis Matveev. It was not immediately clear how the suspension of cooperation would impact the cosmonauts at the ISS. Artemyev has expressed support for Russia and its decision to invade Ukraine in a statement made last month after he boarded the space station in a yellow and blue uniform, the colors of the Ukrainian flag. "There is no need to look for secret signs and symbols in our uniform. Color is just color," he said. "Despite the fact that we are in space, we are together with our president and people!"

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Bitcoin hit a milestone Friday "that gets the world ever closer to the moment when the final new bitcoin will enter the world," reports Axios. "The supply of coins broke 19 million..." "Bitcoin is hard-coded so that it has both a predictable emission schedule and a hard cap of 21 million bitcoin." Bitcoin was created to be money "with a fixed supply that no one can change," the article points out. But it'll be a long time before the price of bitcoin actually feels any effect: The next network-level event likely to impact price is the next time the block reward drops in half, which will happen in a little over two years.... The 18 millionth bitcoin was mined in 2019, but the 21 millionth won't be mined until roughly 2140, provided the network sticks to the plan. That's because every four years the emission schedule drops in half.

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Early last month on the London Metals Exchange, a Chinese metals producer named Tsingshan Holding Group "wagered a massive bet that the price of nickel would fall," reports CNN Business. At the peak Tsingshan's position "was equivalent to about an eighth of all of the outstanding contracts in the market." But between Friday, March 4 and Tuesday March 8, the metal soared in value from about $29,000 to $100,000 per ton. "If prices had stood at $100,000 the company would have owed the London Metals Exchange $15 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal." The spike generated margin calls higher than the London Metals Exchange [the LME] had ever seen — and if paid, they would force multiple defaults that would ripple through the exchange and destabilize the global market. Exchange executives scrambled to respond, ultimately throwing a lifeline to the brokers representing Tsingshan and other producers. In an unprecedented move, they halted trading and retroactively canceled all 9,000 trades that occurred on Tuesday, worth about $4 billion in total. The market would remain dark for a week, unleashing a tidal wave of chaos and a mob of angry investors onto the exchange. In its wake, threats of lawsuits abound and trust has eroded. [The day it re-opened, CNN also reported the exchange "had to suspend the electronic trading of nickel shortly after it resumed due to a technical problem."] Now, the 145 year-old British giant is teetering on a nickel. Over the past century-and-a-half the LME, known for its ring of red couches and barking brokers, has successfully trudged its way through world wars, meltdowns and defaults. But nickel, the metal used in stainless steel and the lithium-ion battery cells in most electric vehicles, might be what finally brings the world's largest market for base metals contracts to its knees."The world's pricing mechanism for nickel is failing," said Daniel Ghali, the director of commodities strategy at TD Securities. "The question is, will it continue to fail?" Others weren't as diplomatic. "The LME is now very likely going to die a slow self-inflicted death through the loss of confidence in it and its products," tweeted Mark Thompson, executive vice-chairman at Tungsten West, a mining development company.... Until 2012, the LME was owned by its members, the same people who traded on the exchange — but then it was sold to Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEX) for $2.2 billion.... The LME's lack of transparency allows two or three big names to throw around vast sums of money and "hijack" a relatively illiquid market, said Adrian Gardner, principal analyst of nickel markets at Wood Mackenzie.... Sitting on the other side of the short were hedge funds, who had bet that nickel supply would decrease because of Russia's invasion of Ukraine (Russia provides about 20% of all top-grade nickel). When the LME decided to retroactively cancel those $4 billion in gains on March 8, it was hedge funds who lost giant sums of money. Global investment management firm AQR, which has $124 billion in assets under management, was among those that lost money when trades were canceled. "The winners were commodity producers and their banks, and the losers are the various clients that AQR and other large asset managers represent: firefighters, municipal workers, and university endowments," said Jordan Brooks, principal at AQR Capital Management. AQR is considering legal action against the exchange. Investors, said Brooks, "acted in good faith and provided liquidity, but the LME just decided to shift their trading gains to commodities producers and their banks...." Volume in trading has yet to recover, raising questions about the LME's ability to accurately benchmark the price of the metal. Fewer than 210 contracts were traded in the first hour after the market opened on Tuesday. That's down about 60% from the 90-day average before the trading halt. Other metals on the LME, like copper and aluminum, have also seen a decrease in trade volume.... The Chicago Mercantile Exchange doesn't currently trade nickel, but perhaps it soon will. "[The LME] did something that was egregious and a betrayal of trust," said Brooks. "I'd be shocked if the strategic plans of other exchanges haven't changed in the past three weeks."

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SpaceNews reports: The launch was the latest in a series of Electron launches of BlackSky satellites arranged by Spaceflight. That deal included launches of pairs of BlackSky satellites in November and December 2021 as well as a failed Electron launch in May 2021.... Rocket Lab did not attempt to recover the first stage of the Electron after this launch. The company said in November that, after three launches where it recovered Electron boosters after splashing down in the ocean, it was ready to attempt a midair recovery of a booster by catching it with a helicopter, the final step before reusing those boosters. The company has not announced when that recovery will take place, but hinted it would take place soon.... Lars Hoffman, senior vice president of global launch services at Rocket Lab, during a panel session at the Satellite 2022 conference March 22...added that the company has a "full manifest" of Electron launches this year, including the first from Launch Complex 2 at Wallops Island, Virginia, with a goal of launching on average once per month. "We're keeping pace with the market. We're trying not to get too far ahead." Meanwhile, in mid-March Space.com reported that the launch-service provider Astra "bounced back from last month's launch failure with a groundbreaking success, deploying satellites in Earth orbit for the first time ever" with its low-cost two-stage launch vehicle, LV0009. (Watch video of the launch here.) It was a huge moment for Astra, which suffered a failure last month during its first-ever launch with operational payloads onboard.... Astra aims to break into the small-satellite launch market in a big way with its line of cost-effective, easily transported and ever-evolving rockets. The company had conducted five orbital flights before today, four of them test missions from Kodiak. Astra reached orbit successfully on the most recent of those four test flights, a November 2021 mission that carried a non-deployable dummy payload for the U.S. Department of Defense. But the company stumbled on its next mission, its first with operational payloads onboard... Astra investigators soon got to the bottom of both problems, tracing the fairing issue to an erroneous wiring diagram and the tumble to a software snafu. The company instituted fixes, clearing LV0009's path to the pad... LV0009 rose into the Alaska sky smoothly and ticked off its early milestones as planned. Stage separation and fairing deploy went well, and the rocket's second stage cruised to the desired orbit with no apparent issues. LV0009 deployed its payloads successfully about nine minutes after liftoff.... One of the known payloads is OreSat0, a tiny cubesat built by students at Portland State University in Oregon that is designed to serve as a testbed for future cubesats that will study Earth's climate and provide STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) outreach opportunities.

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Twitter co-founder/former CEO Jack Dorsey made a remarkable statement Saturday on Twitter. "The days of Usenet, IRC, the web...even email (with PGP)...were amazing. "Centralizing discovery and identity into corporations really damaged the internet. "I realize I'm partially to blame, and regret it." Within two hours, his statement had been retweeted or quote-tweeted 4,700 times — while his original tweet drew 22,900 likes (and attracted over 2,000 comments). But it's not clear why 45-year-old Dorsey is reflecting nostalgically on 1990s-era bullletin board and chat technologies. The only thing in the news today about Jack Dorsey is a small blurb from The Information linking to a larger (paywalled) article titled "Jack Dorsey, Marc Andreessen and the Makings of a Crypto Holy War" The war of words, blocks, and memes between Jack Dorsey and Marc Andreessen wasn't only fascinating because of the billionaire egos at play. They really did seem to be grappling with an important question: Is there a superior economic system waiting to be rolled out, and if so, who should control it...? [T]he debate was an important one, with roots in both men's pasts and hints of a continuing war between Dorsey's Bitcoin maximalists and Andreessen's "crypto polyamorists."

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Former Amazon employee Christian Smalls later spearheaded their historic successful unionization drive, reports Insider. On Friday he celebrated by popping open a bottle of champagne, adding "We want to thank Jeff Bezos for going to space, because when he was up there, we was signing people up. We were out here getting signatures...." Smalls became a vocal Amazon labor advocate over coronavirus safety measures in March 2020, and was fired the same month for what the company said was an unrelated event. In a leaked memo obtained by Vice in 2020, an Amazon lawyer told Jeff Bezos was that Smalls was "not smart, or articulate, and to the extent the press wants to focus on us versus him, we will be in a much stronger PR position...." Smalls told Insider his group never had the resources of a traditional union, and "We started from scratch with nothing." But now the president of the powerful Teamsters union says his own group "will step up the pressure on Amazon and mount its own efforts to unionize the company..." reports the Guardian: In an interview with the Guardian Sean O'Brien said it was vital to organize Amazon, asserting that the e-commerce company has "total disrespect" for its workers and was putting downward pressure on standards for unionized warehouse workers and truck drivers across the U.S. "You have an employer like Jeff Bezos taking a joyride into space, and he bangs on his workers to be able to fund his trip," said O'Brien, who was inaugurated as Teamsters president on 22 March. He asserted that Amazon workers would benefit greatly from joining the Teamsters, saying that Amazon's drivers and warehouse workers are treated and paid considerably worse than their unionized counterparts at other companies.... Concerned that Amazon's lower pay is undercutting Teamster employers and Teamster contracts, O'Brien said he didn't want Amazon to threaten the livelihood of Teamsters or "diminish the standards established by collective bargaining agreements".... News of the Staten Island victory comes as union activity is experiencing a resurgence in the U.S. Meanwhile, long-time Slashdot reader theodp shares Amazon's reaction: The complete April 1st Statement from Amazon on Staten Island union vote: "We're disappointed with the outcome of the election in Staten Island because we believe having a direct relationship with the company is best for our employees. "We're evaluating our options, including filing objections based on the inappropriate and undue influence by the National Labor Relations Board that we and others (including the National Retail Federation and U.S. Chamber of Commerce) witnessed in this election." Both groups actually only objected to one specific lawsuit brought against Amazon by America's National Labor Relations Board seeking reinstatement of an employee fired 23 months earlier. The National Retail Federation argues that suit gave the appearance of trying to influence the election, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce similarly made the argument that the action "seems dubiously timed to sway voters." Engadget reported last month that that employee was also "fired in the early days of the pandemic after he helped lead protests over safety concerns involving the company's COVID-19 protocols."

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