Cryptocurrency Magnate’s Plan to Turn 67,000 Acres into Blockchain-Based ‘Smart City’

“A cryptocurrency company that owns 67,000 acres in rural northern Nevada wants state government to grant technology companies power to form local governments on land they own,” reports the Associated Press. Jeffrey Berns, CEO of Nevada-based Blockchains LLC, ultimately envisions “a city where people not only purchase goods and services with digital currency but also log their entire online footprint —…

Golang Approves Generics, While Python Accepts Pattern-Matching Proposals

From today’s “This Week in Programming” column:
Rejoice, long at last, all you Gophers, for the question of whether or not the Go programming language will adopt generics has finally, after many years of debate, been answered this week with the acceptance of a proposal made last month. In this most recent proposal, Golang team member Ian Lance Taylor writes that generics…

Biden Team Pledges Aggressive Steps To Address Chip Shortage

The Biden administration is working to address the global semiconductor shortage that has caused production halts in U.S. industries including autos, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said. From a report: The administration is identifying choke points in supply chains and discussing an immediate path forward with businesses and trading partners, Psaki told reporters at the White House on Thursday. In…

About Half of Global Wastewater Is Treated, Instead of Previous Estimate of 20%, Study Finds

schwit1 shares a report from UPI: The study published Monday in the journal Earth System Science Data, estimated 359 billion cubic meters of wastewater is produced each year — which is “equivalent to 144 million Olympic-sized swimming pools,” Edward Jones, a doctoral researcher at Utrecht University and the study’s lead author, said in a statement. Researchers found that 52% of that…

They Stormed the Capitol. Their Apps Tracked Them

In 2019 two New York Times opinion writers obtained cellphone app data “containing the precise locations of more than 12 million individual smartphones for several months in 2016 and 2017.” (It’s data that they say is “supposed to be anonymous, but it isn’t. We found celebrities, Pentagon officials and average Americans.”) Now they’ve obtained a remarkable new trove of data, “this…

The Open-Source Magma Project Will Become 5G’s Linux

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Magma was developed by Facebook to help telecom operators deploy mobile networks quickly and easily. The project, which Facebook open-sourced in 2019, does this by providing a software-centric distributed mobile packet core and tools for automating network management. This containerized network function integrates with the existing back end of a mobile network and…

Hacker Group Inserted Malware In NoxPlayer Android Emulator

A mysterious hacking group has compromised the server infrastructure of a popular Android emulator and has delivered malware to a handful of victims across Asia in a highly-targeted supply chain attack. ZDNet reports: The attack was discovered by Slovak security firm ESET on January 25, last week, and targeted BigNox, a company that makes NoxPlayer, a software client for emulating Android…

Jeff Bezos To Step Down as Amazon CEO

Amazon announced on Tuesday that AWS CEO Andy Jassy will replace Jeff Bezos as CEO during the third quarter of this year. Bezos will transition to executive chair of Amazon’s board. In a statement, Bezos said: I’m excited to announce that this Q3 I’ll transition to Executive Chair of the Amazon Board and Andy Jassy will become CEO. In the Exec…

While Recreating CentOS as ‘Rocky Linux’, Gregory Kurtzer Also Launches a Sponsoring Startup

“Gregory Kurtzer, co-founder of the now-defunct CentOS Linux distribution, has founded a new startup company called Ctrl IQ, which will serve in part as a sponsoring company for the upcoming Rocky Linux distribution,” Ars Technica reports:
Kurtzer co-founded CentOS Linux in 2004 with mentor Rocky McGaugh, and it operated independently for 10 years until being acquired by Red Hat in 2014. When…

Suspected Russian Hack Extends Far Beyond SolarWinds Software, Investigators Say

Investigators probing a massive hack of the U.S. government and businesses say they have found concrete evidence the suspected Russian espionage operation went far beyond the compromise of the small software vendor publicly linked to the attack. From a report: Close to a third of the victims didn’t run the SolarWinds software initially considered the main avenue of attack for the…