"Extreme drought has drastically reduced reservoir levels and is causing a decline in electricity production from hydropower," reports the Washington Post.

"Yet while climate change has parched the West, these same forces have greatly increased precipitation in much of the Midwest, the South and the East. There, hydropower is gaining momentum, and supporters say that in many places it is poised for a big resurgence." And the Post sees this benefiting "a growing effort to retrofit so-called nonpowered dams, or any dams created for a need other than hydropower, for electricity production..." In 2016, a U.S. Department of Energy study forecast that hydropower in the United States could expand from its current capacity of 101 gigawatts to nearly 150 gigawatts by 2050. This growth would come not from new dam construction but from upgrading existing hydroelectric resources, adding pumped storage capacity, and retrofitting nonpowered dams for hydropower.... Nonpowered dams compose the vast majority of America's dam infrastructure. They can be found across the country, come in all sizes and were built to address a wide array of needs, including flood control, navigation, water supply and recreation.

Out of the estimated 90,000 dams in the United States, about 2,200 of them generate hydroelectric power. These hydropower resources, however, account for 7 percent of national energy production and contribute 37 percent of the nation's renewable energy supply....

Solar and wind produce energy intermittently, but hydropower can operate day or night, 24/7. Some hydropower facilities can shut down or ramp up energy production very quickly, providing energy grids with stopgap flexibility during peak demand or in the case of blackouts.... The addition of hydropower to nonpowered dams can be financially attractive to developers. Typically the dam's operation is not changed, so there is usually much less opposition from communities and environmental groups than there would be to a new dam project.
The article points out that last year's U.S. infrastructure funding included money to add hydropower to "nonpowered dams."

SFGATE reports on the alarming rise of "Buy Now, Pay Later" services that are being heavily marketed by influencers and brands on TikTok and Instagram. "Gen Z, in particular, has fallen in love with the short-term loans, spending 925% more now through point-of-sale services than in January 2020," notes the report.

"But coupling nearly instantaneous loans with an influencer-addled social media culture that prioritizes exorbitant spending and normalizes debt could be further jeopardizing the financial futures of young people through just four easy payments." Here's an excerpt from the report: Financial experts who spoke with SFGATE expressed significant concerns about the way companies are targeting Gen Z consumers. "They are marketing very heavily to an audience that is younger, that might not just have as much experience on how to use credit and what credit implications are or what it means to have multiple loans at one time," Marisabel Torres, the California policy director of the Center for Responsible Lending, told SFGATE.

Few of the services do significant credit checks, which would help determine whether people will be able to repay the loans. And plenty of people are spending more than they can afford: 43% of Gen Z users have missed at least one payment, according to a survey by the polling site Piplsay. Of Gen Z consumers who used a point-of-sale loan for something they needed, 30% missed at least two payments, according to a survey by Credit Karma.

The companies are fully aware that their services encourage people to spend more. In fact, several of them market it as a benefit to stores that want to partner with them. "We do see larger cart sizes, larger purchases, relative to what they would put onto their debit cards and credit cards," Libor Michalek, the president of technology at Affirm, told SFGATE. Still, high-level staffers at Affirm and Afterpay -- both based in San Francisco -- positioned their services as more responsible, less predatory alternatives to credit cards and personal loans in interviews with SFGATE. They also emphasized the accessibility of these services, especially for younger consumers looking to bolster their credit and consumers working to restore their credit scores, despite the fact that many of the services don't report on-time payments to credit agencies. The report concludes by saying regulation is (probably) on its way. California Attorney General Rob Bonta, for example, signaled his support earlier this year for increasing regulations around point-of-sale loans. We're likely to see other states look into it in the coming months and years as well.

"While these services may be a responsible alternative to credit card debt for a good chunk of consumers, it seems increasingly likely that, without regulations, this kind of debt will burden the most financially vulnerable, just as credit cards, payday loans and layaway have in the past," reports SFGATE.

At the end of the year 2000, Noah Grey created the free and open-source blogging software Greymatter (now maintained by a community of users). Wil Wheaton's new book describes it as "the original, primordial blogging platform. Blogs look like they do... because Noah Grey did it first."

Three days ago Noah Grey created a Gofundme campaign headlined "I am losing my home in four days."

"I am deeply ashamed and afraid of having to doing this, but I have no choice." My sister and I are about to lose our house. It's being foreclosed next Tuesday (May 3rd)... unless we can pay $35,000 before then. (We could pay $23k and get to keep the house for now, but will be left to pay off the rest over an unknown amount of time....)

I don't know who among the few friends I have that will read this can contribute anything at all, and heaven knows I understand.... [T]his was sprung on us with no warning, and having the money ready to go is our only salvation....
Noah's plea was retweeted by long-time geeks who remembered his contribution, including tech entrepreneur Anil Dash as well as the founder of Harvard's Nieman Lab. And a San Antonio newspaper reported on another response from Texas: Alex Mahan, the brand director of Lockheed Martin, wrote on Twitter: "I coded my first blog in 2000 with Greymatter. If it weren't for Noah, I might not have had a career in web development. He was always helpful and patient with my beginner questions back then. Please throw down some $ if you are able."
Wil Wheaton himself apparently got involved. (Several people made donations along with the tagline #WilSentMe.)

And with an average donation size of $95.87, a total of 1,073 people ultimately donated... $102,873.

By the end of the day Friday, wearing a t-shirt that says 127.0.0.1, Noah Grey shared a tearful video on Twitter.

"This has been the craziest, most emotionally overwhelming day of — of my life.... Oh my god, thank you. It hardly even feels like enough to say the words. But thank you so much. Everybody, oh my god... It may take me time to respond to all of this, but I will — I will.... I have never felt so seen. I have never felt so — I've never felt embraced by the internet before.
"I've seen some say this feels like 'the Old Internet' in action...." Grey posted on Twitter this weekend. "But 20+ years ago I was still a struggling mentally-ill man who wanted to matter... and never dared let himself feel he *might* til now. I am shattered with gratitude."

A Bloomberg opinion columnist calls the RobinHood stock-trading app "a symbol of the 'memestock' boom that galvanized a generation of bored locked-down day traders.

"But judging by the company's latest figures, the mania is over." In the first quarter, Robinhood's monthly active users fell 10% year-on-year to 15.9 million, the lowest since the end of 2020. It's a loose metric, to be sure, covering debit-card swipes and webpage log-ins. Net funded accounts have held steady, but activity is flatlining: Transaction revenues fell by almost half, and average quarterly revenue per user slumped 61% to $53. In a post-lockdown era of rising inflation, consumers have less money and fewer hours to spare. Eyeballs and finger-swipes are not guaranteed.

This will put Robinhood's premium "tech" valuation — around seven times annual revenue, a higher multiple than Meta Platforms Inc.'s — under extra pressure. Shares of the financial-services company have already fallen 71% in six months, a drop that began well before Ukraine.

With fewer reasons to get excited about risky, hyped-up trades such as bitcoin (down 40% since October), the feedback loop of fear is spreading. Trading platform Coinbase Global Inc., which like Robinhood went public last year amid a retail-driven frenzy, is down 62%.

The average Robinhood user is 31 years old with an account balance of $240. It's a band of merry men (women are a minority on the platform) who dabble. While the company's business model differs from that of social-media and streaming apps, the reversal of fortunes looks a lot like the post-Covid "attention recession" that's also battering the likes of Netflix and Spotify Technology.
"The lost merry memestock men already appear disillusioned," the columnist argues. "What happens next, if speculative bets keep deflating, may swear them off trading for good."

But he also sees Robinhood is "talking up its appeal to paid 'Gold' customers and is launching a more diversified, bank-like suite of products. With its recent announcement of a new debit card, Robinhood no doubt aspires to become a super-app like unlisted fintech Revolut, valued at around $33 billion, according to CBInsights."

The San Francisco Chronicle reports: San Francisco's office occupancy rate continued its spring recovery, rising above New York and San Jose last week, according to a review by a building security firm. After four months of increases, 33.4% of San Francisco workers were back at their desks last week, higher than New York's 32.9% and San Jose's 31%, but still behind seven major cities in security firm Kastle's Back to Work Barometer.... The city of Austin has consistently had the highest office occupancy tracked by Kastle and was at 58% last week, followed by fellow Texas cities Houston and Dallas. [And Los Angeles charts at around 40%]

Both San Francisco Mayor London Breed and New York Mayor Eric Adams have urged firms to bring back workers to the office to help revitalize urban streets and the broader economy. "You can't stay home in your pajamas all day," Adams said at an event in February. "That is not who we are as a city. You need to be out, cross-pollinating ideas, interacting with humans. It is crucial. We're social creatures, and we must socialize to get the energy that we need as a city...."

Around a fifth of San Francisco office space remains vacant and rents have been flat.
That's better than during the omicron surge, when occupancy in New York and San Francisco was around 10%. (According to the article, citing figures from Kastle.) But there's also other metrics.

The newspaper notes that the number of people exiting the stations for the San Francisco's public rail system "were up in the first three months of the year but still only around a quarter of pre-pandemic levels."

UnknowingFool writes: In 2020, Paragon Software announced they wanted to upstream their previously proprietary NTFS driver into Linux. After a year of review, the NTFS3 driver was added to the Linux 5.15 kernel. While Paragon pledged to maintain their driver, there have been no major updates to the driver despite a growing list of patches that have submitted. Developer Kari Argillander has raised his concerns on the mailing list that the driver is orphaned, and that the Paragon maintainer has not responded to any messages about fixes. An offer to co-maintain the driver has also been met with "radio silence".

78-year-old rancher Ed Butcher has, for 60 years, lived with a nuclear missile as his closest neighbor — an active U.S. government nuclear missile, buried just beneath his cow pasture.

"Do you think they'll ever shoot it up into the sky?" asks his wife Pam, during a visit from the Washington Post.

"I used to say, 'No way,' " Ed said. "Now it's more like, 'Please God, don't let us be here to see it.' " The missile was called a Minuteman III, and the launch site had been on their property since the Cold War, when the Air Force paid $150 for one acre of their land as it installed an arsenal of nuclear weapons across the rural West. About 400 of those missiles remain active and ready to launch at a few seconds notice in Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, Colorado and Nebraska. They are located on bison preserves and Indian reservations. They sit across from a national forest, behind a rodeo grandstand, down the road from a one-room schoolhouse, and on dozens of private farms like the one belonging to the Butchers, who have lived for 60 years with a nuclear missile as their closest neighbor.

It's buried behind a chain-link fence and beneath a 110-ton door of concrete and steel. It's 60 feet long. It weighs 79,432 pounds. It has an explosive power at least 20 times greater than the atomic bomb that killed 140,000 people in Hiroshima. An Air Force team is stationed in an underground bunker a few miles away, ready to fire the missile at any moment if the order comes. It would tear out of the silo in about 3.4 seconds and climb above the ranch at 10,000 feet per second. It was designed to rise 70 miles above Earth, fly across the world in 25 minutes and detonate within a few hundred yards of its target. The ensuing fireball would vaporize every person and every structure within a half-mile. The blast would flatten buildings across a five-mile radius. Secondary fires and fatal doses of radiation would spread over dozens more miles, resulting in what U.S. military experts have referred to as "total nuclear annihilation."

"I bet it would fly right over our living room," Ed said. "I wonder if we'd even see it."

"We'd hear it. We'd feel it," Pam said. "The whole house would be shaking."

"And if we're shooting off missiles, you can bet some are headed back toward us," Ed said... "I guess we'd head for the storage room," Ed said.

"Make a few goodbye calls," Pam said. "Hold hands. Pray."

Ed got up to clear his plate. "Good thing it's all hypothetical. It's really only there for deterrence. It'll never actually explode."

"You're right," Pam said. "It won't happen. Almost definitely not."

"Everyone's favorite security focused operating system, OpenBSD 7.1 has been released for a number of architectures," writes long-time Slashdot reader ArchieBunker, "including Apple M1 chips."

Phoronix calls it "the newest version of this popular, security-minded BSD operating system." With OpenBSD 7.1, the Apple Silicon support is now considered "ready for general use" with keypad/touchpad support for M1 laptops, a power management controller driver added, I2C and SPI controller drivers, and a variety of other driver additions for supporting the Apple Silicon hardware.

OpenBSD 7.1 also has a number of other improvements benefiting the 64-bit ARM (ARM64) and RISC-V architectures. OpenBSD 7.1 also brings SMP kernel improvements, support for futexes with shared anonymous memory, and more. On the graphics front there is updating the Linux DRM code against the state found in Linux 5.15.26 as well as now enabling Intel Elkhart Lake / Jasper Lake / Rocket Lake support.
The Register notes OpenBSD now "supports a surprisingly wide range of hardware: x86-32, x86-64, ARM7, Arm64, DEC Alpha, HP PA-RISC, Hitachi SH4, Motorola 88000, MIPS64, SPARC64, RISC-V 64, and both Apple PowerPC and IBM POWER." The Register's FOSS desk ran up a copy in VirtualBox, and we were honestly surprised how quick and easy it was. By saying "yes" to everything, it automatically partitioned the VM's disk into a rather complex array of nine slices, installed the OS, a boot loader, an X server and display manager, plus the FVWM window manager. After a reboot, we got a graphical login screen and then a rather late-1980s Motif-style desktop with an xterm.

It was easy to install XFCE, which let us set the screen resolution and other modern niceties, and there are also KDE, GNOME, and other pretty front-ends, plus plenty of familiar tools such as Mozilla apps, LibreOffice and so on....

We were expecting to have to do a lot more work. Yes, OpenBSD is a niche OS, but the project gave the world OpenSSH, LibreSSL, the PF firewall as used in macOS, much of Android's Bionic C library, and more besides.... In a world of multi-gigabyte OSes, it's quite refreshing. It felt like stepping back into the early 1990s, the era of Real Unix, when you had to put in some real effort and learn stuff in order to bend the OS to your will — but in return, you got something relatively bulletproof.

Dirk Hohndel gets frequently mentioned on Slashdot. He was a very early contributor to Linux (and for the last five years the chief open source officer and vice president at VMware). But he's also the guy who interviews Linus Torvalds in the keynote sessions of Open Source Summits.

Hohndel "has a well known track record with Linux going back to the 1990's," reports Phoronix, and was even a member of the Linux Foundation Board of Directors.

But they add that now Hohndel has "somewhat surprisingly has moved on to promoting a blockchain effort."

Dirk Hohndel was CTO at SUSE going back to the mid-90's before joining Intel for a fifteen year run that ended in 2016 where he was Intel's Chief Linux and Open-Source Technologist...

When Dirk left VMware unexpectedly at the beginning of the year, he wrote on LinkedIn that he felt he completed his job at the company in driving open-source transformation. He was leaving to go "look for the next opportunity, the next step in my career" and now it apparently is with blockchain. The surprising news today is that he's joined the Cardano Foundation. The Cardano Foundation is a Swiss-based foundation built around the Cardano public blockchain platform. Cardano is open-source and is the most notable proof-of-stake blockchain that was started by Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson. Cardano has its own cryptocurrency, ADA....

Dirk will be serving as the Cardano Foundation's Chief Open-Source Officer.
Interestingly, Linus Torvalds appears to be less enthralled with blockchain technologies. Last year ZDNet reported on the reaction when Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin suggested Torvalds sell an NFT of the 1991 email that first announced Linux to the world.

"An amused and appalled Torvalds replied, "I'm staying out of the whole craziness with crypto and NFTs. Those people are cuckoo!"

Earlier this week the Voice of America news service shared a story that begins with exclusive photos from a nuclear lab "from which a Ukrainian official says Russian troops stole radioactive material that could be harmful if mishandled...." It is housed in a building run by a state agency managing the exclusion zone around Chernobyl's nearby decommissioned nuclear power plant, where a 1986 explosion caused the world's worst nuclear accident. The director of the agency, Evgen Kramarenko, provided the laboratory photos to VOA, saying he took them on an April 5 visit, five days after Russian troops withdrew from Chernobyl....

"We have a laboratory that had a big quantity of radioactive instruments that are used to calibrate our radiation dosimeters," Kramarenko told VOA. A dosimeter is a safety device, typically worn by individuals as a badge, that measures exposure to ionizing radiation, including nuclear radiation. The agency's dosimeters are calibrated using small metallic containers of radioactive material made by Ukrainian state enterprise USIE Izotop, which displays a photo of them on its website.

"Most of those calibration instruments were stolen. They look like coins. If the Russian soldiers carry them around, it's very dangerous for them," Kramarenko said....

In a Saturday Facebook post, Kramarenko's agency said occupying Russian troops stole samples of fuel-containing materials from the lab in addition to the radioactive calibration instruments. The agency said it was possible that the Russians threw away the items elsewhere in Chernobyl's exclusion zone, but that a likelier scenario is that they kept items as "souvenirs."

Oracle has begun making a new version of Solaris 11.4 available for free/open-source developers and for non-production personal use. Phoronix reports: Solaris 11.4 CBE is the "Common Build Environment" and intended for open-source developers and strictly non-production personal use... That is if you want Solaris for new installs in 2022. The new Solaris 11.4 "CBE" spin is effectively a rolling release and from Oracle's perspective hopes to ease the integration of the open-source software relied upon by Solaris rather than being bound to the dated 11.4.0 GA release.

Downloading the new Solaris 11.4 CBE does require an Oracle account. The CBE builds are also described as "similar to a beta, they are pre-release builds of a particular SRU." The non-production use license is put out under the Oracle Technology Network Early Adopter License Agreement for Oracle Solaris. Oracle will allow upgrading from these free CBE releases to paid SRU releases under Oracle support contracts. More details for those interested in Oracle Solaris 11.4 CBE via the Oracle Solaris blog.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: On March 29, wind turbines produced more electricity than coal and nuclear, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, an agency that collects energy statistics for the government, says. In the past, wind-powered electricity has gone beyond coal and nuclear on separate days, but this was the first time wind surpassed both on the same day. Natural gas is still the largest source of electricity generation in the country.

The EIA notes that in the spring and fall months, nuclear and coal generators reduce their output because demand tends to be lower, which could contribute to why wind turbines produced more electricity that day. But wind taking the No. 2 spot may be short-lived. The agency says electricity generation from wind on a monthly basis has been lower than natural gas, coal and nuclear generation. According to EIA projections, wind is not expected to surpass any other method in any month of 2022 or 2023.

"English rock band Pink Floyd has released new music for the first time in 28 years," reports UPI, "with proceeds from the track going to humanitarian relief in Ukraine amid its ongoing conflict with Russia."

"The single will be available on all streaming and download platforms..." the band said on their official web site. [Including downloads on Amazon Music and Apple Music]. "This is the first new original music that they have recorded together as a band since 1994's The Division Bell." The track sees David Gilmour and Nick Mason joined by long-time Pink Floyd bass player Guy Pratt and Nitin Sawhney on keyboards and features an extraordinary vocal performance by Andriy Khlyvnyuk of Ukrainian band Boombox.... David, who has a Ukrainian daughter-in-law and grandchildren says: "We, like so many, have been feeling the fury and the frustration of this vile act of an independent, peaceful democratic country being invaded and having its people murdered by one of the world's major powers...."

"Recently I read that Andriy had left his American tour with Boombox, had gone back to Ukraine, and joined up with the Territorial Defense. Then I saw this incredible video on Instagram, where he stands in a square in Kyiv with this beautiful gold-domed church and sings in the silence of a city with no traffic or background noise because of the war. It was a powerful moment that made me want to put it to music." While writing the music for the track, David managed to speak with Andriy from his hospital bed in Kyiv where he was recovering from a mortar shrapnel injury. "I played him a little bit of the song down the phone line and he gave me his blessing...."

Speaking about the track David says, "I hope it will receive wide support and publicity. We want to raise funds for humanitarian charities and raise morale. We want to express our support for Ukraine and, in that way, show that most of the world thinks that it is totally wrong for a superpower to invade the independent democratic country that Ukraine has become".

All proceeds will go towards Ukrainian humanitarian relief.
On March 11 the band had posted another update on their official site: To stand with the world in strongly condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the works of Pink Floyd, from 1987 onwards, and all of David Gilmour's solo recordings are being removed from all digital music providers in Russia and Belarus....

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SFGate: Bad news for anyone hoping that Bay Area workers return to the office for good: San Francisco leads the nation in how many days employees want to work from home. According to a recent survey co-conducted by Stanford economics professor Nicholas Bloom, workers want to cut how many days they spend in the office by more than 53%, a nation-leading number. That's 4 percentage points more than New York and 6 percentage points more than Los Angeles.

San Francisco also ranks third -- behind New York City and Los Angeles -- in how much less they intend to spend in the city while they are in the office. According to a slide deck provided by Bloom to SFGATE, the average San Francisco office worker will spend an average of $5,293 less per year compared with before the COVID-19 pandemic. He first presented these findings at a conference at New York's Federal Reserve Bank, as first reported by Bloomberg. "Employers value working from home -- they really like it, as it's a huge hiring and retention policy," Bloom said. "Why wouldn't you do something that makes them more productive and happier?"

Bloom went on to say that "tech workers, on average, value working from home two to three days a week as much as an 11% pay increase," reports SFGate.

InfiniteZero shares a report from Space.com: Last Wednesday (March 23), NASA astronaut Raja Chari and the European Space Agency's Matthias Maurer spent nearly seven hours outside the International Space Station, performing a variety of maintenance work. Amazingly, astrophotographer Sebastian Voltmer managed to capture a snapshot of the spacewalk action from the ground -- and from Maurer's hometown of Sankt Wendel, Germany, no less. "I feel like I just made a once-in-a-lifetime image," Voltmer wrote at SpaceWeather.com, which featured the photo in its online gallery.

UnknowingFool writes: Google has proposed a change on how Linux kernel handles shutdowns specifically when NVMe drives are used. The issue that Google is finding is that the current NVMe drivers use synchronous APIs when shutting down and it can take 4.5 seconds for each NVMe drive. For a system with 16 NVMe drives that could take more than a minute longer. While this is a problem that only large enterprise systems face currently, more enterprises are replacing their mechanical disk RAID servers with SSD ones.

[...] The proposed patches from Google allow for an optional asynchronous shutdown interface at the bus level. The new interface maintains backwards compatibility with the synchronous implementation. As part of the patches, all PCI Express based devices are moved to use the async interface, implements the changes at the PCIe level, and then the changes to the NVMe driver to exploit the async shutdown interface.

The Washington Post reports Russian troops in Ukraine "have relied, with surprising frequency, on unsecured communication devices such as smartphones and push-to-talk radios."

But this is leaving Russia's units "vulnerable to targeting...further underscoring the command-and-control deficiencies that have come to define Moscow's month-long invasion, observers say." The Russian military possesses modern equipment capable of secure transmission, but troops on the battlefield have reached for simpler-to-use but less-secure lines because of uneven discipline across the ranks, an apparent lack of planning for conducting a sustained fight over long distances, and Russian attacks on Ukraine's communication infrastructure that it, too, has relied on, experts say.

A European intelligence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss NATO's battlefield assessments, said that since the invasion began in late-February, there have been multiple instances of Russian commanders confiscating their subordinates' personal phones for fear they would unwittingly give away a unit's location.... There is evidence that the United States and other NATO countries have provided Ukrainian forces with electronic warfare equipment capable of interrupting Russian transmissions and allowing them to target Russian command posts, said Kostas Tigkos, a Russian military expert at the defense analysis firm Janes Group. By destroying Russia's communication nodes, the Ukrainians could pressure their adversaries to use less-secure equipment, he said, increasing the likelihood their conversations will be intercepted or their positions triangulated....

There is anecdotal evidence that Russia's unsecured communications have led to battlefield losses. One Russian general was purportedly killed in an airstrike after his cellphone was detected by the Ukrainians, the New York Times reported earlier this month.
The Post reports that Russian military transmissions over unsecured lines are now even being listened to by amateur radio enthusiasts at online sites like WebSDR (a software-defined radio receiver connected to the internet).

"Don't say the last names on air!" one Russian service member was apparently overheard saying by Shadow Break International, a U.K.-based open-source intelligence consultancy.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Thirty five years after Andy Warhol's death, the NY Times reports on a new wave of Warhol-Mania as the famed pop artist is currently the subject of a Netflix documentary series (The Andy Warhol Diaries), an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum and multiple theatrical works. The documentary revisits the 1985 launch of the Commodore Amiga, where Warhol demonstrated the Amiga's then-unparalleled graphical power by 'painting' Blondie lead singer Debbie Harry's portrait. Even as the flood-filling goes bad, Warhol does his best to put on a brave public face ("This is kind of pretty. Oh, it's beautiful."), but reveals his true thoughts in his demo day diary entry.

"The day started off with dread as I woke up from my dreams and thought about my live appearance for Commodore computers," Warhol recalls in the documentary (in an AI-generated voice). "And how nothing is worth all this worrying, to wake up and feel so terrified. Commodore wants me to be a spokesman. It's a $3,000 machine that's like the Apple thing, but can do 100 times more. The whole day was spent being nervous and telling myself that if I could just get good at stuff like this, then I could make money that way, and I wouldn't have to paint. The drawing came out terrible. And I called it a masterpiece. It was a real mess.

"I said I wanted to be Walt Disney and that if I'd had this machine ten years ago, I could have made it."

Five NFT versions of Warhol's recovered Amiga artwork were sold for $3,377,500 last May to benefit the Andy Warhol Foundation.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Slate.com: On March 1, after a week of horror in Ukraine, reports came out that Russia's censorship office had threatened to block Russian Wikipedia. A 32-year-old who asked to be called Alexander soon made a plan to download a local copy of Russian-language Wikipedia to keep with him in eastern Russia. "I did it just in case," he told me over Instagram Messenger before sharing that he and his wife are "working on moving to another country" with their two dogs, Prime and Shaggy. (Instagram has been blocked in Russia, but many continue to access it using virtual private networks. On Monday, the Russian government officially declared Facebook and Instagram "extremist organizations.")

Alexander wasn't the only Russian citizen to make a local copy of Wikipedia. Data suggests that after the threats of censorship, Russians started torrenting Wikipedia in droves. Currently, Russia is the country with the most Wikipedia downloads—by a landslide. Before the invasion, it rarely broke the top 10, but after the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, it has kept a solid hold on first place. The 29-gigabyte file that contains a downloadable Russian-language Wikipedia was downloaded a whopping 105,889 times during the first half of March, which is a more than 4,000 percent increase compared with the first half of January. According to Stephane Coillet-Matillon, who leads Kiwix, the organization that facilitates these downloads, Russian downloads now constitute 42 percent of all traffic on Kiwix servers, up from just 2 percent in 2021. "We had something similar back in 2017 when Turkey blocked Wikipedia," he said, "but this one is just another dimension." "Wikipedia routinely makes a dump of its databases available publicly, which Kiwix compresses into an archive so it can be more easily shared," adds Slate. "The entirety of English Wikipedia, from 'List of Informally Named Dinosaurs' to 'Floor' to 'Skunks as Pets' and everything in between, is 87 GB with pictures or 47 GB without. Russian-language Wikipedia is even smaller, continuing 1.8 million articles compared with English Wikipedia's 6.4 million."

An anonymous Slashdot reader summarizes some important news from the web page of Jason Donenfeld (creator of the open-source VPN protocol WireGuard): The Linux kernel's random number generator has seen its first set of major improvements in over a decade, improving everything from the cryptography to the interface used. Not only does it finally retire SHA-1 in favor of BLAKE2s [in Linux kernel 5.17], but it also at long last unites '/dev/random' and '/dev/urandom' [in the upcoming Linux kernel 5.18], finally ending years of Slashdot banter and debate:

The most significant outward-facing change is that /dev/random and /dev/urandom are now exactly the same thing, with no differences between them at all, thanks to their unification in random: block in /dev/urandom. This removes a significant age-old crypto footgun, already accomplished by other operating systems eons ago. [...] The upshot is that every Internet message board disagreement on /dev/random versus /dev/urandom has now been resolved by making everybody simultaneously right! Now, for the first time, these are both the right choice to make, in addition to getrandom(0); they all return the same bytes with the same semantics. There are only right choices.
Phoronix adds: One exciting change to also note is the getrandom() system call may be a hell of a lot faster with the new kernel. The getrandom() call for obtaining random bytes is yielding much faster performance with the latest code in development. Intel's kernel test robot is seeing an 8450% improvement with the stress-ng getrandom() benchmark. Yes, an 8450% improvement.