TechTarget notes it was Linkerd's original developers who coined the term "service mesh" — describing their infrastructure layer for communication between microservices.

But "There has to be some way of connecting the businesses that are being built on top of Linkerd back to funding the project," argues Buoyant CEO William Morgan. "If we don't do that, then there's no way for us to evolve this project and to grow it in the way that I think we all want."

And so, TechTarget reports... Beginning May 21, 2024, any company with more than 50 employees running Linkerd in production must pay Buoyant $2,000 per Kubernetes cluster per month to access stable releases of the project...

The project's overall source code will remain available in GitHub, and edge, or experimental early releases of code, will continue to be committed to open source. But the additional work done by Buoyant developers to backport minimal changes so that they're compatible with existing versions of Linkerd and to fix bugs, with reliability guarantees, to create stable releases will only be available behind a paywall, Morgan said... Morgan said he is prepared for backlash from the community about this change. In the last section of a company blog post FAQ about the update, Morgan included a question that reads, in part, "Who can I yell at...?"

But industry watchers flatly pronounced the change a departure from open source. "By saying, 'Sorry but we can no longer afford to hand out a production-ready product as free open source code,' Buoyant has removed the open source character of this project," said Torsten Volk, an analyst at Enterprise Management Associates. "This goes far beyond the popular approach of offering a managed version of a product that may include some additional premium features for a fee while still providing customers with the option to use the more basic open source version in production." Open source developers outside Buoyant won't want to contribute to the project — and Buoyant's bottom line — without receiving production-ready code in return, Volk predicted.

Morgan conceded that these are potentially valid concerns and said he's open to finding a way to resolve them with contributors... "I don't think there's a legal argument there, but there's an unresolved tension there, similar to testing edge releases — that's labor just as much as contributing is. I don't have a great answer to that, but it's not unique to Buoyant or Linkerd."
And so, "Starting in May, if you want the latest stable version of the open source Linkerd to download and run, you will have to go with Buoyant's commercial distribution," according to another report (though "there are discounts for non-profits, high-volume use cases, and other unique needs.") The Cloud Native Computing Foundation manages the open source project. The copyright is held by the Linkerd authors themselves. Linkerd is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.

Buoyant CEO William Morgan explained in an interview with TNS that the changes in licensing are necessary to continue to ensure that Linkerd runs smoothly for enterprise users. Packaging the releases has also been demanding a lot of resources, perhaps even more than maintaining and advancing the core software itself, Morgan explained. He likened the approach to how Red Hat operates with Linux, which offers Fedora as an early release and maintains its core Linux offering, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for commercial clients.

"If you want the work that we put into the stable releases, which is predominantly around, not just testing, but also minimizing the changes in subsequent releases, that's hard hard work" requiring input from "world-leading experts in distributed systems," Morgan said.

"Well, that's kind of the dark, proprietary side of things."

"Crypto mines will have to start reporting their energy use in the U.S.," wrote the Verge in January, saying America's Energy department would "begin collecting data on crypto mines' electricity use, following criticism from environmental advocates over how energy-hungry those operations are."

But then "constitutional freedoms" group New Civil Liberties Alliance (founded with seed money from the Charles Koch Foundation) objected. And "on behalf of its clients" — the Texas Blockchain Council and Colorado bitcoin mining company Riot Platforms — the group said it "looks forward to derailing the Department of Energy's unlawful data collection effort once and for all."

While America's Energy department said the survey would take 30 minutes to complete, the complaint argued it would take 40 hours. According to the judge, the complaint "alleged three main sources of irreparable injury..."

- Nonrecoverable costs of compliance with the Survey
- A credible threat of prosecution if they do not comply with the Survey
- The disclosure of proprietary information requested by the Survey, thus risking disclosure of sensitive business strategy

But more importantly, the survey was implemented under "emergency" provisions, which the judge said is only appropriate when "public harm is reasonably likely to result if normal clearance procedures are followed."

Or, as Semafor.com puts it, the complaint was "seeking to push off the reporting deadline, on the grounds that the survey was rushed through...without a public comment period." The judge, Alan Albright, granted the request late Friday night, blocking the [Department of Energy's Information Administration] from collecting survey data or requiring bitcoin companies to respond to it, at least until a more comprehensive injunction hearing scheduled for Feb. 28. The ruling also concludes that the plaintiffs are "likely to succeed in showing that the facts alleged by the U.S. Energy Information Administration to support an emergency request fall far short of justifying such an action."
The U.S. Department of Energy is now...

• Restrained from requiring Plaintiffs or their members to respond to the Survey
• Restrained from collecting data required by the Survey
• "...and shall sequester and not share any such data that Defendants have already received from Survey respondents."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

Microplastics have been found in sediment layers that date back as early as the first half of the 1700s, "showing microplastics' pernicious ability to infiltrate even environments untouched by modern humans," reports Futurism. From the report: A team of European researchers made this alarming discovery after studying the sediment layers at three lakes in Latvia, as detailed in a study published in the journal Science Advances. The scientists were studying lake sediment to test if the presence of microplastics in geological layers would be a reliable indicator for the beginning of the Anthropocene Epoch, defined in the study as starting in 1950 and meant to delineate when humans started having a large impact on our environment.

Scientists have long used layers of ash or ice to study past events on Earth, leading to the question of whether microplastics can serve as a reliable chronological marker for the Anthropocene. Clearly not, according to this new research, which found microplastics in every layer of sediment they dredged up, including one from 1733. "We conclude that interpretation of microplastics distribution in the studied sediment profiles is ambiguous and does not strictly indicate the beginning of the Anthropocene Epoch," the scientists wrote.

Kalyeena Makortoff reports via The Guardian: US regulators have accused a man of making $1.8 million by trading on confidential information he overheard while his wife was on a remote call, in a case that could fuel arguments against working from home. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said it charged Tyler Loudon with insider trading after he "took advantage of his remote working conditions" and profited from private information related to the oil firm BP's plans to buy an Ohio-based travel centre and truck-stop business last year.

The SEC claims that Loudon, who is based in Houston, Texas, listened in on several remote calls held by his wife, a BP merger and acquisitions manager who had been working on the planned deal in a home office 20ft (6 meters) away. The regulator said Loudon went on a buying spree, purchasing more than 46,000 shares in the takeover target, TravelCenters of America, without his wife's knowledge, weeks before the deal was announced on 16 February 2023. TravelCenters's stock soared by nearly 71% after the deal was announced. Loudon then sold off all of his shares, making a $1.8m profit.

Loudon eventually confessed to his wife, and claimed that he had bought the shares because he wanted to make enough money so that she did not have to work long hours anymore. She reported his dealings to her bosses at BP, which later fired her despite having no evidence that she knowingly leaked information to her husband. She eventually moved out of the couple's home and filed for divorce.

Google is shutting down the Google Pay app, as the standalone app has largely been replaced by Google Wallet. According to TechCrunch, Google Pay "will only be available in Singapore and India" after its shuts down in the United States. From the report: Users can continue to access the app's most popular features right from Google Wallet, which Google says is used five times more than the Google Pay app in the United States. After June 4, users will no longer be able to send, request or receive money through the U.S. version of the Google Pay app. Users have until that date to view and transfer their Google Pay balance to their bank account via the app. If you still have funds in your account after that date, you can view and transfer your funds to your bank from the Google Pay website.

Users who used the Google Pay app to find offers and deals can still so do using the new deals destination on Google Search, the company says. Google Wallet is the company's primary place for mobile payments in the United States, and will likely remain so. The app lets you use your phone to pay in stores, board a plane, ride transit, store loyalty cards, save driver's licenses and start your car via a digital key.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Beware the apes, Reddit told the world in its IPO documents, though not in such explicit terms. Put simply, the company warned potential investors that one of its subreddits, the infamous r/WallStreetBets, could make its stock price and volume extremely volatile -- and there's little Reddit can do about it. Reddit listed r/WallStreetBets as one of the possible risks to investing in the company in its S-1 form on Thursday, referencing the subreddit's role in the meme stock craze of 2021, where retail investors banded together to raise the price of struggling companies like GameStop and AMC. The goal of r/WallStreetBets back then was to screw over professional investors on Wall Street and make them lose money for betting against certain companies.

It's entirely possible that the everyday people on r/WallStreetBets, a subreddit of 15 million retail investors who refer to themselves as "apes" and "degenerates," and other online forums could do the same thing with Reddit's stock, the company stated. Reddit writes: "Given the broad awareness and brand recognition of Reddit, including as a result of the popularity of r/ wallstreetbets among retail investors, and the direct access by retail investors to broadly available trading platforms, the market price and trading volume of our Class A common stock could experience extreme volatility for reasons unrelated to our underlying business or macroeconomic or industry fundamentals."

The volatility could cause people to lose all or part of their investment, the company explained, if they are unable to sell their shares at or above the IPO price. The long-term effect of movements like those propelled by r/WallStreetBets is already documented, with the takeaway being that surges of interest and heavy investment don't necessarily bring success to companies over time.

An anonymous reader shares a report: News publishers are worried -- with good reason -- about changes coming to Google Search. AI-generated content replacing links on some of the most valuable space on the internet, in particular, has left media types with a lot of questions, starting with "is this going to be a traffic-destroying nightmare?" The News filter disappearing from Google search results for some users this week won't help publishers sleep any easier. Google confirmed some users were not seeing the News filter as part of ongoing testing. "We're testing different ways to show filters on Search and as a result, a small subset of users were temporarily unable to access some of them," a Google spokesperson confirmed via email.

Three top-tier X-class solar flares launched off the sun between Wednesday and Thursday. The first two occurred seven hours apart, coming in at X1.9 and X1.6 magnitude respectively. The third, the most powerful of the current 11-year "solar cycle," ranked an impressive X6.3. From a report: Solar flares, or bursts of radiation, are ranked on a scale that goes from A, B and C to M and X, in increasing order of intensity. They usually originate from sunspots, or bruiselike discolorations on the surface of the sun. Sunspots are most common near the height of the 11-year solar cycle. The current cycle, number 25, is expected to reach its peak this year. The more sunspots, the more opportunities for solar flares.

Solar flares and accompanying coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, can influence "space weather" across the solar system, and even here on Earth. CMEs are slower shock waves of magnetic energy from the sun. Flares can reach Earth in minutes, but CMEs usually take at least a day. All three of the X-class solar flares disrupted shortwave radio communications on Earth. But the first two flares did not release a CME; the verdict is still out regarding whether the third flare did. High-frequency radio waves propagate by bouncing off electrons in Earth's ionosphere. That's a layer of Earth's atmosphere between 50 and 600 miles above the ground.

When a solar flare occurs, that radiation travels toward Earth at the speed of light. It can ionize additional particles in the lower ionosphere. Radio waves sent from devices below it then impact that extra-ionized layer and lose energy, and aren't able to be bent by ions at the top of the ionosphere. That means signals can't travel very far, and radio blackouts are possible. Three back-to-back radio blackouts occurred in response to the trio of flares, but primarily over the Pacific and Indian oceans. They were rated "R3" or greater on a 1 through 5 scale. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center, that results in a "wide area blackout of [high frequency] radio communication, [and] loss of radio contact for about an hour on sunlit side of Earth." Low-frequency navigation signals, like those used on aircraft traveling overseas, can be degraded too.

Bruce66423 writes: The data watchdog has ordered a leisure centre group to stop using facial recognition tech to monitor its staff. The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) says Serco Leisure has been unlawfully processing the biometric data of more than 2,000 employees at 38 UK leisure facilities. It did so to check staff attendance - a practice the ICO said was "neither fair nor proportionate."

Serco Leisure says it will comply with the enforcement notice. But it added it had taken legal advice prior to installing the cameras, and said staff had not complained about them during the five years they had been in place. The firm said it was to "make clocking-in and out easier and simpler" for workers. "We engaged with our team members in advance of its roll-out and its introduction was well-received by colleagues," the company said in a statement.

U.S. health insurance giant UnitedHealth Group said Thursday in a filing with government regulators that its subsidiary Change Healthcare was compromised likely by government-backed hackers. From a report: In a filing Thursday, UHG blamed the ongoing cybersecurity incident affecting Change Healthcare on suspected nation state hackers but said it had no timeframe for when its systems would be back online. UHG did not attribute the cyberattack to a specific nation or government, or cite what evidence it had to support its claim.

Change Healthcare provides patient billing across the U.S. healthcare system. The company processes billions of healthcare transactions annually and claims it handles around one-in-three U.S. patient records, amounting to around a hundred million Americans. The cyberattack began early Wednesday, according to the company's incident tracker.

JSTOR: At the end of 2023, JSTOR -- a vast digital library of secondary and primary sources to support teaching and learning -- reached a once unimaginable goal: providing JSTOR access in 1,000 prisons. Spread across four continents, the JSTOR Access in Prison initiative now supports the education and growth of more than 550,000 incarcerated people.

Incarcerated learners have been left behind for decades. Limited access to the internet and scarce funding and support for higher education in prisons made access to digital libraries like JSTOR all but impossible. In October 2021, with funding from the Mellon Foundation, JSTOR set an ambitious goal to change that. The aspiration? For every incarcerated college student in the United States to have access to JSTOR, along with the research skills to use it and other digital resources.

Prior to 2021, JSTOR developed an offline index of its digital library. At the time, less than twenty prisons had access to it. Since then, developers have created an online version that meets the unique needs of carceral settings, most recently delivering online access on tablets. These changes -- and the leadership of Stacy Burnett, a graduate of the Bard Prison Initiative who was hired to lead the JSTOR Access in Prison initiative -- have enabled 1,000 prisons and more than 500,000 people to gain access to the digital equivalent of a college library.

Switzerland is advocating for a United Nations expert group to explore the merits of solar geoengineering. The proposal seeks to ensure multilateral oversight of solar radiation modification (SRM) research, amidst concerns over its potential implications for food supply, biodiversity, and global inequalities. The Guardian reports: The Swiss proposal, submitted to the United Nations environment assembly that begins next week in Nairobi, focuses on solar radiation modification (SRM). This is a technique that aims to mimic the effect of a large volcanic eruption by filling the atmosphere with sulphur dioxide particles that reflect part of the sun's heat and light back into space. Supporters of the proposal, including the United Nations environment program (UNEP), argue that research is necessary to ensure multilateral oversight of emerging planet-altering technologies, which might otherwise be developed and tested in isolation by powerful governments or billionaire individuals.

Critics, however, argue that such a discussion would threaten the current de-facto ban on geoengineering, and lead down a "slippery slope" towards legitimization, mainstreaming and eventual deployment. Felix Wertli, the Swiss ambassador for the environment, said his country's goal in submitting the proposal was to ensure all governments and relevant stakeholders "are informed about SRM technologies, in particular about possible risks and cross-border effects." He said the intention was not to promote or enable solar geoengineering but to inform governments, especially those in developing countries, about what is happening.

The executive director of the UNEP, Inger Andersen, stressed the importance of "a global conversation on SRM" in her opening address to delegates at a preliminary gathering in Nairobi. She and her colleagues emphasized the move was a precautionary one rather than an endorsement of the technology.

Stephanie Saul reports via the New York Times: Yale University will require standardized test scores for admission for students applying to enter for the class entering in the fall of 2025, becoming the second Ivy League university to abandon test-optional policies that had been widely embraced during the Covid pandemic. Yale officials said in an announcement on Thursday that the shift to test-optional policies might have unwittingly harmed students from lower-income families whose test scores could have helped their chances. While it will require standardized tests, Yale said its policy would be "test flexible," permitting students to submit scores from subject-based Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate tests in lieu of SAT or ACT scores. The decision follows a similar decision in February from Dartmouth College. MIT also announced that it had reinstated its testing requirement in 2022.

Longtime Slashdot reader Rei writes: In a blog post today, Bluesky, the social media network founded by Jay Graber, announced that they have finally opened to federation. Users can now operate their own PDS (backend) servers. How to do so is discussed on the developers' blog and a new Discord channel for PDS administrators.

As the blog notes, there are key differences between the AT Protocol/Bluesky federation and ActivityPub/Mastodon federation, including: global conversation (rather than local-server based with remote content only brought in from follows); a decentralized user account not bound to a specific host; user-composable moderation lists not inherently tied to a specific server, offsetting the need for defederation; user-composable feeds/algorithms, not tied to servers; and full account portability, without the need to be initiated by your server, protecting users from rogue admins or servers that disappear.

Despite the difference, a number of projects, such as Bridgy-Fed, plan to bridge Bluesky and Mastodon together, with all of Bluesky appearing as a single Mastodon server on ActivityPub, and Mastodon users being translated to a decentralized identifier (DID) for AT Protocol (atproto) calls.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN Business: AT&T's network went down for many of its customers across the United States Thursday morning, leaving customers unable to place calls, text or access the internet. By a little after 3 pm ET, roughly 11 hours after reports of the outage first emerged, the company said that it had restored service to all impacted customers. "We have restored wireless service to all our affected customers. We sincerely apologize to them," AT&T said in a statement. The company added that it is "taking steps to ensure our customers do not experience this again in the future."

The Federal Communications Commission confirmed Thursday afternoon that it is investigating the outage. The White House says federal agencies are in touch with AT&T about network outages but that it doesn't have all the answers yet on what exactly led to the interruptions. Although Verizon and T-Mobile customers reported some network outages, too, they appeared far less widespread. T-Mobile and Verizon said their networks were unaffected by AT&T's service outage and customers reporting outages may have been unable to reach customers who use AT&T.

Thursday morning, more than 74,000 AT&T customers reported outages on digital-service tracking site DownDetector, with service disruptions beginning around 4 am ET. That's not a comprehensive number: It tracks only self-reported outages. Reports had been rising steadily throughout the morning but leveled off in the 9 am ET hour. By 12:30 pm ET, the DownDetector data showed some 25,000 AT&T customers still reporting outages. By 2 pm ET, fewer than 5,000 customers were still reporting issues. Earlier Thursday, AT&T acknowledged that it had a widespread outage but did not provide a reason for the system failure. By late morning, AT&T said most of its network was back online, and it confirmed Thursday afternoon that service was fully restored. According to an anonymous industry source, the issue for the outage appears to be related to how cellular services hand off calls from one network to the next, a process known as peering. They said there's no indication that it was the result of a cyberattack or other malicious activity.

The FCC confirmed that it is investigating the incident. "We are aware of the reported wireless outages, and our Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau is actively investigating," the FCC said in a statement posted on X. "We are in touch with AT&T and public safety authorities, including FirstNet, as well as other providers."

The Supreme Court's conservative majority seemed skeptical Wednesday as the Environmental Protection Agency sought to continue enforcing an anti-air-pollution rule in 11 states while separate legal challenges proceed around the country. From a report: The EPA's "good neighbor" rule is intended to restrict smokestack emissions from power plants and other industrial sources that burden downwind areas with smog-causing pollution. Three energy-producing states -- Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia -- challenged the rule, along with the steel industry and other groups, calling it costly and ineffective. The rule is on hold in a dozen states because of the court challenges.

The Supreme Court, with a 6-3 conservative majority, has increasingly reined in the powers of federal agencies, including the EPA, in recent years. The justices have restricted EPA's authority to fight air and water pollution -- including a landmark 2022 ruling that limited EPA's authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants that contribute to global warming. The court also shot down a vaccine mandate and blocked President Joe Biden's student loan forgiveness program.

The court is currently weighing whether to overturn its 40-year-old Chevron decision, which has been the basis for upholding a wide range of regulations on public health, workplace safety and consumer protections. A lawyer for the EPA said the "good neighbor" rule was important to protect downwind states that receive unwanted air pollution from other states. Besides the potential health impacts, the states face their own federal deadlines to ensure clean air, said Deputy U.S. Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart, representing the EPA.

An anonymous reader shares a report: When Google Wallet launched in 2022, Google kept the "GPay" app around in a handful of countries. The company announced today that the old Google Pay app is soon going away in the US. That app, which appears as "GPay" on your Android homescreen, was Google's previous vision for mobile payments and finance.

It was "designed around your relationships with people and businesses" with conversation-like threads serving as a purchase history, while keeping track of your spending was another big aspect. GPay will stop working in the US from June 4, 2024. It will remain available for users in India and Singapore as Google continues to "build for the unique needs in those countries." As part of the app going away, Google is shutting down peer-to-peer payments that let you send, request, or receive money from others in the US. Google's P2P offering never really took off.

The U.S. FTC will order Avast to pay $16.5 million and ban the company from selling the users' web browsing data or licensing it for advertising purposes. From a report: The complaint says Avast violated millions of consumers' rights by collecting, storing, and selling their browsing data without their knowledge and consent while misleading them that the products used to harvest their data would block online tracking. "While the FTC's privacy lawsuits routinely take on firms that misrepresent their data practices, Avast's decision to expressly market its products as safeguarding people's browsing records and protecting data from tracking only to then sell those records is especially galling," said FTC Chair Lina M. Khan.

"Moreover, the volume of data Avast released is staggering: the complaint alleges that by 2020 Jumpshot had amassed "more than eight petabytes of browsing information dating back to 2014." More specifically, the FTC says UK-based company Avast Limited harvested consumers' web browsing information without their knowledge or consent using Avast browser extensions and antivirus software since at least 2014.

AmiMoJo writes: Most of the UK companies that took part in the world's biggest ever four-day working week trial have made the policy permanent, research shows. Of the 61 organisations that took part in a six-month UK pilot in 2022, 54 (89%) are still operating the policy a year later, and 31 (51%) have made the change permanent. More than half (55%) of project managers and CEOs said a four-day week -- in which staff worked 100% of their output in 80% of their time -- had a positive impact on their organisation, the report found.

For 82% this included positive effects on staff wellbeing, 50% found it reduced staff turnover, while 32% said it improved job recruitment. Nearly half (46%) said working and productivity improved. The report's author, Juliet Schor, professor of sociology at Boston College, said the results showed "real and long lasting" effects. "Physical and mental health, and work-life balance are significantly better than at six months. Burnout and life satisfaction improvements held steady," she said.

Sarah Perez reports via TechCrunch: The CEO of meditation app Insight Timer, Christopher Plowman, is frustrated. He doesn't think the teachers who leverage his app's marketplace to reach their students should have to share 30% of their income with Apple -- its commission on in-app purchases -- and for the past 12 months, Apple had also agreed. After Apple loosened its rules around in-app donations in 2022, Insight Timer took advantage of the option to adjust a digital donations feature that allowed Insight Timers' teachers to collect "tips" from their user profiles and during live events. Apple reviewed the app and approved its release on the App Store. Now the tech giant has changed its mind -- it wants to collect a commission from this content, and Insight Timer had no choice but to comply or have its iOS business shut down, Plowman says. [...]

In section 3.2.1 of Apple's App Review guidelines, the company explains that apps can route around Apple's in-app purchase if the app enables individual users to "give a monetary gift to another individual" and "100% of the funds" go to the receiver of the gift. Insight Timer capitalized on this option to allow its users to tip meditation teachers, healers, musicians, and others who use its app to teach classes on meditation, managing stress, finding happiness or spiritual enlightenment, and more. Insight Timer implemented the feature using Stripe as the payment provider on the back end, as the rule permits. Users can opt to donate funds to the teacher, but they don't have to. Insight Timer's main business is selling premium subscriptions to its app, which offer additional features, like offline listening, journaling, and unlimited access to its courses. Fifty percent of this revenue is shared with the teachers, so they don't have to rely on donations to fund their work. During the time the commission-free donations feature was live, Insight Timer's users donated roughly $100,000 per month to the app's teachers, Plowman says.

Apple appeared to have blessed this use case, as the tech giant went on to approve 47 more updates to Insight Timer's app over the course of a 12-month period. When a question arose, Insight Timer explained that these were donations -- it doesn't take a cut of that revenue -- and Apple would approve the app. Late last year, those approvals stopped. An app reviewer told Insight Timer that these donations were no longer considered monetary gifts -- they were now "digital content." That meant they were also now subject to Apple's commissions. This decision doesn't hurt Insight Timer's bottom line, as the app's main business is subscriptions. Instead, it hurts the community of teachers who generate additional funds via users' donations. Now, with Apple demanding 30% of that revenue, the teachers are getting a 30% pay cut overnight, so to speak.

Plowman says he went back and forth with Apple over this feature, trying to understand why the donations option that Apple had previously allowed -- 47 times! -- was now subject to commission. Apple compromised and said it would allow the donations' link on teachers' profiles to be subject to its commission-free rules, but all other donations -- from live events, from meditations themselves -- had to be commissioned. It wouldn't allow those links to point to the donation link on the teachers' profiles, either. "And I was like, well, what's the point of building an ice cream stand across the road if you won't let the customers cross the road to buy the ice cream?" Plowman argued. In the end, the two parties didn't reach any sort of resolution. Plowman was given until February to comply with Apple's decision, or his business would be shut out of the App Store.