An area of land nearly a third larger than India has turned from humid conditions to dryland -- arid areas where agriculture is difficult -- in the past three decades, research has found. From a report: Drylands now make up 40% of all land on Earth, excluding Antarctica. Three-quarters of the world's land suffered drier conditions in the past 30 years, which is likely to be permanent, according to the study by the UN Science Policy Interface, a body of scientists convened by the United Nations.

Africa lost about 12% of its GDP owing to the increasing aridity between 1990 and 2015, the report found. Even worse losses are forecast: Africa will lose about 16% of its GDP, and Asia close to 7%, in the next half decade. Ibrahim Thiaw, executive secretary of the UN convention to combat desertification (UNCCD), said: "Unlike droughts -- temporary periods of low rainfall -- aridity represents a permanent, unrelenting transformation. Droughts end. When an area's climate becomes drier, however, the ability to return to previous conditions is lost. The drier climates now affecting vast lands across the globe will not return to how they were, and this change is redefining life on Earth."

Some crops will be particularly at risk: maize yields are projected to halve in Kenya by 2050, if current trends continue. Drylands are areas where 90% of the rainfall is lost to evaporation, leaving only 10% for vegetation. Two-thirds of land globally will store less water by mid-century, according to the report published on Monday.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Scientific advisers to the European Commission are calling for a moratorium across the EU on efforts to artificially cool Earth through solar geoengineering. That includes controversial technologies used to reflect sunlight back into space, primarily by sending reflective particles into the atmosphere or by brightening clouds.

Proponents argue that this can help in the fight against climate change, especially as planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions continue to climb. But small-scale experiments have triggered backlash over concerns that these technologies could do more harm than good. The European Commission asked its Group of Chief Scientific Advisors (GCSA) and European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies (EGE) to write up their opinions on solar geoengineering, which were published today alongside a report synthesizing what little we know about how these technologies might work.

There's "insufficient scientific evidence" to show that solar geoengineering can actually prevent climate change, says the opinion written by the GCSA. "Given the currently very high levels of scientific and technical uncertainty ... as well as the potential harmful uses, we advocate for a moratorium on all large-scale [solar geoengineering] experimentation and deployment," writes the EGE in the second highly anticipated opinion.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Fans post about him on social media. Swag bearing his name sells out on the regular. College professors dedicate class sessions and textbook sections to him. Foreign government officials have been known to express jealousy over his skills, and one prominent economist refers to him as a "national treasure." Meet FRED, a 33-year-old data tool from St. Louis, Mo., and the economics world's most unlikely celebrity.

Even if you have not interacted with FRED yourself, there is a good chance you've encountered him without knowing it. The tool's signature baby blue graphs dot social media and crop up on many of the world's most popular news websites. Many people feel that way about FRED. The website had nearly 15 million users last year, and it is on track for even more in 2024, up from fewer than 400,000 as recently as 2009. Their reasons for clicking are diverse: FRED users are coming for freshly released unemployment data, to check in on egg inflation or to find out whether business is booming in Memphis.

That appeal crosses political lines. Larry Kudlow, who directed the National Economic Council during the first Trump administration, has tweeted and retweeted FRED charts. Groups as disparate as the spending-focused Alaskans for a Sustainable Budget and the pro-worker advocacy organization Employ America have used its charts to back up their arguments. It is even occasionally used by professional and White House economists, who tend to have access to sophisticated data tools, for quick charts. "It is unfathomable for me now, to think of the days before FRED," said Ernie Tedeschi, the director of economics at the Budget Lab at Yale and a former chief economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

When he speaks to foreign government economists, he noted, they are often "jealous" of the data tool, which is more comprehensive and easier to use than what other countries offer. "It's a compliment to FRED," he said. FRED -- whose name stands for Federal Reserve Economic Data -- was born in 1991. But he was a sparkle in the eye of the St. Louis Fed long before that. The story started in the 1960s, with an economist named Homer Jones (now sometimes referred to as the "grandfather of FRED"). Mr. Jones was the director of research at the Fed's branch in St. Louis, and he wanted to make central bank decisions more data-based, so he started to mail typed data reports to Fed officials around the country.

Bruce Perens, original co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, has responded to questions from Slashdot readers about a new alternative he's developing that hopefully helps "Post Open" developers get paid.

But first, "One of the things that's clear from the Slashdot patter is that people are not aware of what I've been doing, in general," Perens says. "So, let's start by filling that in..."

Read on for the rest of his wide-ranging answers....

This week a Florida-based Bitcoin-tech company named MARA Holdings announced it had bought a 114-megawatt Texas wind farm, reports Chron.com, "and will subsequently take it off the power grid and use it to energize its mining operations."

MARA's CEO tells the site they're "leveraging renewable resources that would have otherwise been curtailed" while "reducing our bitcoin production costs through vertical integration, and demonstrating MARA's commitment to environmental stewardship." The wind farms were not a part of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) grid, but instead they were located within the Southwest Power Pool, which manages the market for the central U.S., including but not limited to most or parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota and North Dakota... A 114-MW facility could power somewhere between 20,000 and 100,000 homes, depending on who you ask...

Historically, the facilities use up a lot of power and have generated backlash from neighbors who have complained about the noise of the machines inside. Texas has been a haven for cryptocurrency tech companies, primarily because of the state's space, deregulated power market and friendly business climate. Two weeks ago, the Public Utilities Commission adopted a rule requiring crypto and other virtual currency miners within the ERCOT grid to register their locations, ownership information and electricity demands, to further ensure that they could be watchful of this emerging source of energy consumption.
"Crypto mining operations currently consume around 2.3 percent of US electricity, and it requires roughly 155,000kWh to mine one Bitcoin," notes the site Data Centre Dynamics. This is the second off-grid power deal MARA has signed over the last few months. In October, it launched a 25MW micro data center operation across oil wellheads in Texas and North Dakota. The data center will be powered exclusively by excess natural gas from oilfield production that would have otherwise been flared. The operation will be distributed across wellheads in Texas and North Dakota, with operational status expected by January 2025.
Some context from Bloomberg: A few years ago Bitcoin miners took part in a global scramble for electricity to power their specialized computers... But the rise of AI, with its insatiable demand for electricity, dwarfed the needs of crypto and upended energy markets worldwide. Miners must now compete with much-larger tech firms for connections to electrical grids and power contracts. "Bitcoin miners are being forced to go look at marginal generation," said [MARA CEO Fred] Thiel. "The AI guys can afford to pay a much higher amount for energy than a Bitcoin miner"... MARA's plan to mine only when the wind is blowing makes economic sense because its mine will house last-generation computers that would otherwise have been retired, Thiel said.
"Thiel said he'd be interested to potentially buy more wind farms over time."

The head of America's FCC "has drafted plans to regulate the cybersecurity of telecommunications companies," reports the Washington Post, and the plans could include financial penalties phone network operators with insufficient security — "the first time the agency has asserted such powers under federal wiretapping law." Rosenworcel said the FCC's authority in this matter comes from Section 105 of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act [passed in 1994] — a single sentence that stipulates, without elaboration, that telecommunications carriers should ensure systems security "in accordance with regulations prescribed by the Commission." As one of the measures, she is seeking to require network providers to submit an annual certification to the FCC that they are implementing a cybersecurity risk management plan. In addition to imposing fines, the FCC could coordinate with other agencies to pursue criminal penalties against carriers deemed too careless on cybersecurity...

Biden administration officials said voluntary efforts to protect against aggressive Chinese hacking activity have fallen short. "We've had for the last decade voluntary public-private partnership efforts," Neuberger told The Post in a recent interview. "But we continue to see successful breaches, and in many cases, as with ransomware attacks, we continue to see pretty basic cybersecurity practices not being followed." With China's hackers becoming more brazen, pre-positioning themselves in U.S. critical networks, "we need to lock our digital doors," Neuberger said...

Cyber requirements can make a difference, she said. After the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack in 2021 shut down one of the nation's largest energy pipelines for several days, creating a national security scare, the Transportation Security Administration issued several security directives, and today, all of the country's several dozen critical pipeline companies are in compliance, she said. Similar directives were subsequently issued for rail and aviation sectors, and the compliance rates in those industries are now at 68 and 57 percent respectively, she said.

"OpenAI is partnering with defense tech company Anduril," wrote the Verge this week, noting that OpenAI "used to describe its mission as saving the world." It was Anduril founder Palmer Luckey who advocated for a "warrior class" and autonomous weapons during a talk at Pepperdine University, saying society's need people "excited about enacting violence on others in pursuit of good aims." The Verge notes it's OpenAI's first partnership with a defense contractor "and a significant reversal of its earlier stance towards the military." OpenAI's terms of service once banned "military and warfare" use of its technology, but it softened its position on military use earlier this year, changing its terms of service in January to remove the proscription.
Hours after the announcement, some OpenAI employees "raised ethical concerns about the prospect of AI technology they helped develop being put to military use," reports the Washington Post. "On an internal company discussion forum, employees pushed back on the deal and asked for more transparency from leaders, messages viewed by The Washington Post show." OpenAI has said its work with Anduril will be limited to using AI to enhance systems the defense company sells the Pentagon to defend U.S. soldiers from drone attacks. Employees at the AI developer asked in internal messages how OpenAI could ensure Anduril systems aided by its technology wouldn't also be directed against human-piloted aircraft, or stop the U.S. military from deploying them in other ways. One OpenAI worker said the company appeared to be trying to downplay the clear implications of doing business with a weapons manufacturer, the messages showed. Another said that they were concerned the deal would hurt OpenAI's reputation, according to the messages...

OpenAI executives quickly acknowledged the concerns, messages seen by The Post show, while also writing that the company's work with Anduril is limited to defensive systems intended to save American lives. Other OpenAI employees in the forum said that they supported the deal and were thankful the company supported internal discussion on the topic. "We are proud to help keep safe the people who risk their lives to keep our families and our country safe," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement...

[OpenAI] has invested heavily in safety testing, and said that the Anduril project was vetted by its policy team. OpenAI has held feedback sessions with employees on its national security work in the past few months, and plans to hold more, Liz Bourgeois, an OpenAI spokesperson said. In the internal discussions seen by The Post, the executives stated that it was important for OpenAI to provide the best technology available to militaries run by democratically-elected governments, and that authoritarian governments would not hold back from using AI for military uses. Some workers countered that the United States has sold weapons to authoritarian allies. By taking on military projects, OpenAI could help the U.S. government understand AI technology better and prepare to defend against its use by potential adversaries, executives also said.
"The debate inside OpenAI comes after the ChatGPT maker and other leading AI developers including Anthropic and Meta changed their policies to allow military use of their technology," the article points out. And it also notes another concern raised in OpenAI's internal discussion forum.

The comment said "that defensive use cases still represented militarization of AI, and noted that the fictional AI system Skynet, which turns on humanity in the Terminator movies, was also originally designed to defend against aerial attacks on North America.

This week AWS pledged up to $100 million in cloud-computing credits for educational organizations over the next five years, to help them build "technology-based learning experiences" on AWS, including:

• AI assistants
• coding curriculums - connectivity tools
• student learning platforms
• mobile apps
• chatbots

One example shared by Amazon: The nonprofit Code.org will use AWS's cloud credits to scale their AI teaching assistant that "has already helped teachers reduce the time they spend assessing students' coding projects by up to 50%." (Amazon's blog post notes that "Improved efficiency means teachers have more time to work on personalized lesson plans and coach students" — and that Code.org's assistant uses an AWS service for building AI tools...)

$100 million sounds pretty generous. But long-time Slashdot reader theodp notes the application for the cloud credits limits education organization to $100,000 in credits (though "your organization may be able to apply for a credits expansion" if needed). Do these figures suggest Amazon expects less than 1,000 organizations to apply for free cloud-computing over the next five years? ($100,000,000/$100,000 = 1,000)

theodp also spotted a GitHub comment from a Code.org software engineer comparing accuracy for its teaching assistant after a switch from GPT-4 Turbo to Claude. Both before and after the switch, the teaching assistant averaged an accuracy rate of 77%, the comment notes.

I guess that 77% accuracy rate is what Amazon is calling "improved efficiency" that "means teachers have more time to work on personalized lesson plans and coach students." (Maybe you're never to young to learn that AI makes mistakes?)

"The U.S. government on Friday ordered testing of the nation's milk supply for bird flu," reports the Associated Press, "to better monitor the spread of the virus in dairy cows." Raw or unpasteurized milk from dairy farms and processors nationwide must be tested on request starting Dec. 16, the Agriculture Department said. Testing will begin in six states — California, Colorado, Michigan, Mississippi, Oregon and Pennsylvania.

Officials said the move is aimed at "containing and ultimately eliminating the virus," known as Type A H5N1, which was detected for the first time in March in U.S. dairy cows. Since then, more than 700 herds have been confirmed to be infected in 15 states. "This will give farms and farmworkers better confidence in the safety of their animals and ability to protect themselves, and it will put us on a path to quickly controlling and stopping the virus' spread nationwide," Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a statement.

The risk to people from bird flu remains low, health officials said. Pasteurization, or heat treatment, kills the virus in milk, leaving it safe to drink... At least 58 people in the U.S. have been infected with bird flu, mostly farm workers who became mildly ill after close contact with infected cows, including their milk, or infected poultry.

The use of lead in gasoline "might have harmed the mental health of a generation," reports USA Today. Gen X bears an extra burden of conditions such as depression, anxiety, ADHD and neurotic behavior because of the leaded gasoline they were exposed to as children, according to a study published Wednesday in the peer-reviewed Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. Leaded gas was banned in the United States in 1996, but the study said years of exposure during development made them particularly vulnerable.

Lead gas peaked from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s, and children born during that era would later develop some of the highest rates of mental health symptoms, the study said. The study also linked leaded gas to "disadvantageous" traits, such as struggling to concentrate, stay on task or organizing thoughts. "I tend to think of Generation X as 'generation lead,'" said Aaron Reuben, a study co-author and assistant professor of clinical neuropsychology at the University of Virginia. "We know they were exposed to it more and we're estimating they have gone on to have higher rates of internalizing conditions like anxiety, depression and symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder...."

Researchers linked the lead exposure to an estimated 151 million "excess mental disorders" in the United States over the 75-year period. The estimates should be "considered a floor" because it relies mainly on gas and not exposure from lead in paint and pipes, Reuben said... Those born between 1966 and 1986 generally had higher mental illness levels linked to lead exposure with the rates peaking for those born between 1966 and 1970, the study said. Those rates coincided with the peak use of lead in gas from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s... The study said the peak lead use coincided with increased demand for psychiatric care and higher rates of juvenile delinquency.
Today there's routine blood screenings for high levels of lead, study co-author Reuben says. But in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, "folks were walking around with an average blood lead value that today would trigger clinical follow-up."

"Okay, we're doing this," begins a new announcement at The Verge: Today we're launching a Verge subscription that lets you get rid of a bunch of ads, gets you unlimited access to our top-notch reporting and analysis across the site and our killer premium newsletters, and generally lets you support independent tech journalism in a world of sponsored influencer content. It'll cost $7 / month or $50 / year — and for a limited time, if you sign up for the annual plan, we'll send you an absolutely stunning print edition of our CONTENT GOBLINS series, with very fun new photography and design... A surprising number of you have asked us to launch something like this, and we're happy to deliver. If you don't want to pay, rest assured that big chunks of The Verge will remain free — we're thinking about subscriptions a lot differently than everyone else...

If you're a Verge reader, you know we've been covering massive, fundamental changes to how the internet works for years now. Most major social media platforms are openly hostile to links, huge changes to search have led to the death of small websites, and everything is covered in a layer of AI slop and weird scams. The algorithmic media ecosystem is now openly hostile to the kind of rigorous, independent journalism we want to do.

A few years ago, we decided the only real way to survive all this was to stand apart and bet on our own website so that we could remain independent of these platforms and their algorithms. We didn't want to write stories to chase Google Search trends or because we thought they'd do well on social media. And we definitely didn't want to compromise our famously strict ethics policy to accept brand endorsement deals from the companies we cover, which almost all of our competitors in the creator economy are forced to do in order to run sustainable businesses...

[W]e intend to keep making this thing together for a long, long time. So many of you like The Verge that we've actually gotten a shocking number of notes from people asking how they can pay to support our work. It's no secret that lots of great websites and publications have gone under over the past few years as the open web falls apart, and it's clear that directly supporting the creators you love is a big part of how everyone gets to stay working on the modern internet. At the same time, we didn't want to simply paywall the entire site — it's a tragedy that traditional journalism is retreating behind paywalls while nonsense spreads across platforms for free.
The print premium for subscribers is described as a "beautiful / deranged print product" that's drawn from a series of articles "about what Google had done to the web, capped off by a feature about search engine optimization titled 'The People Who Ruined the Internet.'" But it ships with a satirical cover that instead proclaims it as "The Verge Guide to Search Engine Optimization". A tongue-in-check announcement explains: [A] year has passed, and we've had a change of heart. Maybe search engine optimization is actually a good thing. Maybe appeasing the search algorithm is not only a sustainable strategy for building a loyal audience, but also a strategic way to plan and produce content. What are journalists, if not content creators? Anyway, SEO community, consider this our apology. And what better way to say "our bad, your industry is not a cesspool of AI slop but a brilliant vision of what a useful internet could look like" than collecting all the things we've learned in one handy print magazine? Which is why I'm proud to introduce The Verge Guide to Search Engine Optimization: All the Tips, Tricks, Hints, Schemes, and Techniques for Promoting High-Quality Content!
Whoops — slip off the cover and the real title appears: "CONTENT GOBLINS" (written in green slime). Again, it's "an anthology of stories about 'content' and the people who 'make' it." In very Verge fashion, we are meeting the moment where the internet has been overrun by AI garbage by publishing a beautifully designed, limited edition print product. (Also, the last time we printed a magazine, it won a very prestigious design award.) Content Goblins collects some of our best stories over the past couple years, capturing the cynical push for the world's great art and journalism to be reduced into units that can be packaged, distributed, and consumed on the internet. Consider Content Goblins as our resistance to that movement. With terrific new art and photography, we're making the case that great reporting is vital and enduring — and worth paying for.

This gorgeous, grotesque magazine can be yours if you commit to an annual subscription to The Verge — while supplies last.

Today a group of German scientists presented data suggesting Earth is absorbing more sunlight than in the past, reports Ars Technica, "largely due to reduced cloud cover." We can measure both the amount of energy the Earth receives from the Sun and how much energy it radiates back into space.... The new paper finds that the energy imbalance set a new high in 2023, with a record amount of energy being absorbed by the ocean/atmosphere system. This wasn't accompanied by a drop in infrared emissions from the Earth, suggesting it wasn't due to greenhouse gases, which trap heat by absorbing this radiation. Instead, it seems to be due to decreased reflection of incoming sunlight by the Earth....

Using two different data sets, the teams identify the areas most effected by this, and they're not at the poles, indicating loss of snow and ice are unlikely to be the cause. Instead, the key contributor appears to be the loss of low-level clouds [particularly over the Atlantic ocean]... The drop in low-level clouds had been averaging about 1.3 percent per decade. 2023 saw a slightly larger drop occur in just one year....

So, what could be causing the clouds to go away? The researchers list three potential factors. One is simply the variability of the climate system, meaning 2023 might have just been an extremely unusual year, and things will revert to trends in the ensuing years. The second is the impact of aerosols, which both we and natural processes emit in copious quantities. These can help seed clouds, so a reduction of aerosols (driven by things like pollution control measures) could potentially account for this effect. The most concerning potential explanation, however, is that there may be a feedback relationship between rising temperatures and low-level clouds. Meaning that, as the Earth warms, the clouds become sparse, enhancing the warming further. That would be bad news for our future climate, because it suggests that the lower range of warming estimates would have to be adjusted upward to account for it.
If the decline in reflectivity wasn't just caused by normal variability, the researchers warn, "the 2023 extra heat may be here to stay..."

"The Rust Foundation is dedicated to ensuring a healthy Rust ecosystem," according to a new announcement today, " which depends on a growing pool of well-trained developers to thrive." The latest SlashData Developer Nation survey found Rust to be the fastest-growing programming language, doubling its users over the past two years. As Rust's adoption continues to accelerate, the demand for a multifaceted ecosystem of quality training will too.
Their blog post highlights three examples of the Rust community "creating new pathways for learning Rust" and "addressing the critical need for Rust training in academic settings..." Rust-Edu operates as a non-profit through Portland State University, with funding from Futurewei. Their mission is to "spread Rust use and development through academic curricula and communities throughout the world, making Rust the language of choice for 'systems programming' in its broadest sense through shared efforts of faculty, students and the Rust community." They focus on three main areas: curriculum development, educational tools, and language improvements...

teach-rs, pronounced "teachers," is a modular and reusable university course designed for in-person teaching in Rust. Its mission is to introduce Rust in higher education and ensure that more students enter the job market with considerable Rust experience. The teach-rs project provides ready-to-use Rust teaching materials, including slide decks and exercises that can be adapted to various teaching contexts... As an open source permissively licensed project, teach-rs enables educators to share and improve resources, making introducing Rust instruction into their programs more accessible. Many institutions now use teach-rs in their courses, including the Slovak University of Technology, RustIEC (a collaboration between Vrije Universiteit Brussel and KU Leuven), and the University Politehnica of Bucharest. At the time of this writing, teach-rs has nearly 3000 stars on GitHub...

Under the guidance of The Rust Foundation's Global Rust Coordinator and Rust Nation UK's organizer Ernest Kissiedu, Mordecai Etukudo (Mart) has developed a guide to help educational institutions adopt Rust in their systems. This resource walks organizations through the entire implementation process, from initial assessment to community engagement.

A tsunami warning was issued — and then cancelled about an hour later — for 400 miles of California coastline after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast near California's northern border with Oregon. "About 5 million people were under the warning while it was in effect," reports a San Francisco news site.

Phones had sounded with an emergency tone in affected areas, with a warning that "You are in danger. Get away from coastal waters. Move to high ground or inland now." Warning sirens sounded in some areas, and as a precaution San Francisco paused service for its BART trains travelling under the San Francisco Bay. But while tsunami waves were originally predicted to hit San Francisco at 12:10 p.m. — they didn't. New information prompted the cancellation of the tsunami warning.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the news.

The Solana JavaScript SDK "was temporarily compromised yesterday in a supply chain attack," reports BleepingComputer, "with the library backdoored with malicious code to steal cryptocurrency private keys and drain wallets." Solana offers an SDK called "@solana/web3.js" used by decentralized applications (dApps) to connect and interact with the Solana blockchain. Supply chain security firm Socket reports that Solana's Web3.js library was hijacked to push out two malicious versions to steal private and secret cryptography keys to secure wallets and sign transactions... Solana confirmed the breach, stating that one of their publish-access accounts was compromised, allowing the attackers to publish two malicious versions of the library... Solana is warning developers who suspect they were compromised to immediately upgrade to the latest v1.95.8 release and to rotate any keys, including multisigs, program authorities, and server keypairs...

Once the threat actors gain access to these keys, they can load them into their own wallets and remotely drain all stored cryptocurrency and NFTs... Socket says the attack has been traced to the FnvLGtucz4E1ppJHRTev6Qv4X7g8Pw6WPStHCcbAKbfx Solana address, which currently contains 674.86 Solana and varying amounts of the Irish Pepe , Star Atlas, Jupiter, USD Coin, Santa Hat, Pepe on Fire, Bonk, catwifhat, and Genopets Ki tokens. Solscan shows that the estimated value of the stolen cryptocurrency is $184,000 at the time of this writing.

For anyone whose wallets were compromised in this supply chain attack, you should immediately transfer any remaining funds to a new wallet and discontinue the use of the old one as the private keys are now compromised.
Ars Technica adds that "In social media posts, one person claimed to have lost $20,000 in the hack."

The compromised library "receives more than ~350,000 weekly downloads on npm," Socket posted. (Although Solana's statement says the compromised versions "were caught within hours and have since been unpublished."

11 years ago his hard drive ended up in a U.K. landfill — with 8,000 bitcoin. It's now worth $800 million... and James Howell wants it back.

The Guardian reports that his "bid to become extremely rich reached a judge on Tuesday with a team of lawyers arguing that it was still possible to launch a hunt for his missing hard drive containing the bitcoin." They claimed that rather than searching for a "needle in a haystack", the position of the bitcoin hoard had been narrowed down to a small area and there was a "finely tuned" plan to retrieve it... [Howells] has been asking Newport city council for help in getting the hard drive back, and even said he would share the money with the authority, to no avail... James Goudie KC, representing the council, said Howells had no legal claim to the hard drive. He said: "Anything that goes into the landfill goes into the council's ownership."

Goudie said Howells' offer to share some of the bitcoin with Newport council amounted to a bribe. He said: "He is trying to buy something the council is not in a position to sell...." Before the hearing, a spokesperson for Newport council said: "The council has told Mr Howells multiple times that excavation is not possible under our environmental permit and that work of that nature would have a huge negative environmental impact on the surrounding area. "Responding to Mr Howells' baseless claims are costing the council and Newport taxpayers time and money which could be better spent on delivering services."
Howells was 28 when he lost the hard drive, and has said he may as well keep trying to recover it — because he'll always know that it's out there. Howells' legal teams are "working pro bono," the article notes, "on the basis that they get a share of the bitcoin profits if successful..." And TechSpot points out that "There's also the question of whether the data on the drive would still be accessible after more than a decade of sitting under a pile of rotting garbage.

"Howells has a team of data recovery engineers who are also working pro bono..."

Thanks to Slashdot reader jjslash for sharing the news.

Bitcoin just broke $100,000 USD for the first time and reached as high as $104k, and is now sitting at $102,857 at the time of this writing.

Slashdot was pretty early on Bitcoin.

Thoughts, nocoiners?

In March, 2023 the Internet Archive lost in court, with a judge ruling they couldn't scan entire books and then lend them as ebooks. The Internet Archive appealed to a higher court, which also ruled against them in September of 2024.

Today, the Internet Archive made an announcement: that "While we are deeply disappointed with the Second Circuit's opinion in Hachette v. Internet Archive, the Internet Archive has decided not to pursue Supreme Court review." We will continue to honor the Association of American Publishers agreement to remove books from lending at their member publishers' requests.

We thank the many readers, authors and publishers who have stood with us throughout this fight. Together, we will continue to advocate for a future where libraries can purchase, own, lend and preserve digital books.

Bruce Perens wrote the original Open Source definition back in 1997, and then co-founded the Open Source Initiative with Eric Raymond in 1998. But after resigning from the group in 2020, Perens is now diligently developing an alternative he calls "Post Open" to "meet goals that Open Source fails at today" — even providing a way to pay developers for their work.

To make it all happen, he envisions software developers owning (and controlling) a not-for-profit corporation developing a body of software called "the Post Open Collection" and collecting its licensing fees to distribute among developers. The hope? To "make it possible for an individual developer to stay at home and code all day, and make their living that way without having to build a company."

The not-for-profit entity — besides actually enforcing its licensing — could also:

• Provide tech support, servicing all Post-Open software through one entity.
• Improve security by providing developers with cryptographic-hardware-backed authentication guaranteeing secure software chain-of-custody.
• Handle onerous legal requirements like compliance with the EU Cyber Resilience Act "on behalf of all developers in the Post Open Collection".
• Compensate documentation writers.
• Fund lobbying on behalf of developers, along with advocacy for their software's privacy-preserving features.

"We've started to build the team," Perens said in a recent interview, announcing weeks ago that attorneys are already discussing the structure of the future organization and its proposed license.

But what do you think? Perens has agreed to answer questions from Slashdot readers...

He's also Slashdot reader #3,872. (And Perens is also an amateur radio operator, currently on the board of M17 — a community of open source developers and radio enthusiasts — and in general support of Open Source and Amateur Radio projects through his non-profit HamOpen.org.) But more importantly, Perens "was the person to announce 'Open Source' to the world," according to his official site. Now's your chance to ask him about his next new big idea...

Ask as many questions as you'd like, but please, one per comment. We'll pick the very best questions — and forward them on to Bruce Perens himself to answer!

UPDATE: Bruce Perens has answered your questions!

America's next president "announced Wednesday he has selected Jared Isaacman, a billionaire businessman and space enthusiast who twice flew to orbit with SpaceX, to become the next NASA administrator," reports Ars Technica: In a post on X, Isaacman said he was "honored" to receive Trump's nomination. "Having been fortunate to see our amazing planet from space, I am passionate about America leading the most incredible adventure in human history," Isaacman wrote. "On my last mission to space, my crew and I traveled farther from Earth than anyone in over half a century. I can confidently say this second space age has only just begun...."

"Jared Isaacman will be an outstanding NASA Administrator and leader of the NASA family," said Jim Bridenstine, who led NASA as administrator during Trump's first term in the White House. "Jared's vision for pushing boundaries, paired with his proven track record of success in private industry, positions him as an ideal candidate to lead NASA into a bold new era of exploration and discovery. I urge the Senate to swiftly confirm him." Lori Garver, NASA's deputy administrator during the Obama administration, wrote on X that Isaacman's nomination was "terrific news," adding that "he has the opportunity to build on NASA's amazing accomplishments to pave our way to an even brighter future."

Isaacman, 41, is the founder and CEO of Shift4, a mobile payment processing platform, and co-founded Draken International, which owns a fleet of retired fighter jets to pose as adversaries for military air combat training... Isaacman, an evangelist for the commercial space industry, has criticized some of NASA's decisions on the Artemis program. In several posts on X, he questioned the agency's decision to fund two redundant lunar landers, while not planning for any backup to the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which costs $2.2 billion per copy, not including expenses for ground infrastructure or the Orion spacecraft itself. One of those casualties might be the SLS rocket. The program is managed by NASA, with suppliers spread across the United States and prime contractors working under cost-plus arrangements with the space agency, meaning the government is on the hook to pay for any delays or cost overruns.
If confirmed he'll be the 4th NASA administrator who's actually flown in space, according to the article.

And according to Wikipedia, Isaacman was the commander of Inspiration4, a private spaceflight using SpaceX's Crew Dragon Resilience that launched in 2021. The crew returned to Earth on September 18, 2021, after orbiting at 585 km (364 mi) in altitude. The mission was part of a fundraiser for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, to which Isaacman pledged to donate $100 million.
Thanks to Slashdot reader FallOutBoyTonto for sharing the news.