"On Saturday, attackers stole hundreds of NFTs from OpenSea users, causing a late-night panic among the site's broad user base," reports the Verge.

"A spreadsheet compiled by the blockchain security service PeckShield counted 254 tokens stolen over the course of the attack, including tokens from Decentraland and Bored Ape Yacht Club." The bulk of the attacks took place between 5PM and 8PM ET, targeting 32 users in total. Molly White, who runs the blog Web3 is Going Great, estimated the value of the stolen tokens at more than $1.7 million.

The attack appears to have exploited a flexibility in the Wyvern Protocol, the open-source standard underlying most NFT smart contracts, including those made on OpenSea. One explanation (linked by CEO Devin Finzer on Twitter) described the attack in two parts: first, targets signed a partial contract, with a general authorization and large portions left blank. With the signature in place, attackers completed the contract with a call to their own contract, which transferred ownership of the NFTs without payment. In essence, targets of the attack had signed a blank check — and once it was signed, attackers filled in the rest of the check to take their holdings.

"I checked every transaction," said the user, who goes by Neso. "They all have valid signatures from the people who lost NFTs so anyone claiming they didn't get phished but lost NFTs is sadly wrong...."

Writing on Twitter shortly before 3AM ET, OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer said the attacks had not originated from OpenSea's website, its various listing systems, or any emails from the company. The rapid pace of the attack — hundreds of transactions in a matter of hours — suggests some common vector of attack, but so far no link has been discovered.
An update to OpenSea's smart contract was scheduled the day before (to remove old and inactive listings from the platform), and the scammer mimicked a genuine OpenSea email, according to The Street. A user who posted the text of the phishing email online explains that the scammer "then got a number of people to sign permissions with WyvernExchange. No exploit, just people not reading sign permissions as normal."

CEO Finzer told Bloomberg that some of the stolen NFTs have actually been returned, with no further malicious activity seen from the attacker's account. "He also dispelled rumors of a $200 million hack, saying the attacker has $1.7 million of Ethereum in his wallet from selling some of the stolen NFTs."

And PC Magazine shares this update about the wallet: CoinDesk reports that Etherscan, which bills itself as "the Ethereum blockchain explorer," has flagged the account that appears to be connected to these NFT thefts. (The public name of which is, fittingly enough, "Fake_Phishing5169.")

Reuters reports: Corn-based ethanol, which for years has been mixed in huge quantities into gasoline sold at U.S. pumps, is likely a much bigger contributor to global warming than straight gasoline, according to a study published Monday.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, contradicts previous research commissioned by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) showing ethanol and other biofuels to be relatively green.... The research, which was funded in part by the National Wildlife Federation and U.S. Department of Energy, found that ethanol is likely at least 24% more carbon-intensive than gasoline due to emissions resulting from land use changes to grow corn, along with processing and combustion....

Under the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), a law enacted in 2005, the nation's oil refiners are required to mix some 15 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol into the nation's gasoline annually. The policy was intended to reduce emissions, support farmers, and cut U.S. dependence on energy imports.
"Today, most gasoline sold in the U.S. contains 10 percent ethanol, and about a third of the corn crop in the country is used to produce the fuel..." reports Ars Technica: The extra land put under the plow released a significant amount of carbon, enough to flip the assessment of corn ethanol from a carbon-negative fuel to a carbon-emitting one. The biggest decline came when new cropland released carbon that had been stored in soils and vegetation, including roots of living plants. Farmers were also less likely to enter a field into the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to plant perennial vegetation on unused farmland.

After the fertilizer was applied, it released a significant amount of nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas that warms the atmosphere 300 times more than the same amount of carbon dioxide over 100 years. The researchers' estimates of the carbon impact of the fertilizer are probably low, too, since the authors didn't calculate how much additional pollution the manufacturing process released or the extent to which degraded water quality in downstream waterways released more greenhouse gases.

A single activist helped turn the tide against NSO Group, one of the world's most sophisticated spyware companies now facing a cascade of legal action and scrutiny in Washington over damaging new allegations that its software was used to hack government officials and dissidents around the world. It all started with a software glitch on her iPhone. Reuters: An unusual error in NSO's spyware allowed Saudi women's rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul and privacy researchers to discover a trove of evidence suggesting the Israeli spyware maker had helped hack her iPhone, according to six people involved in the incident. A mysterious fake image file within her phone, mistakenly left behind by the spyware, tipped off security researchers. The discovery on al-Hathloul's phone last year ignited a storm of legal and government action that has put NSO on the defensive. How the hack was initially uncovered is reported here for the first time. Al-Hathloul, one of Saudi Arabia's most prominent activists, is known for helping lead a campaign to end the ban on women drivers in Saudi Arabia. She was released from jail in February 2021 on charges of harming national security.

Soon after her release from jail, the activist received an email from Google warning her that state-backed hackers had tried to penetrate her Gmail account. Fearful that her iPhone had been hacked as well, al-Hathloul contacted the Canadian privacy rights group Citizen Lab and asked them to probe her device for evidence, three people close to al-Hathloul told Reuters. After six months of digging through her iPhone records, Citizen Lab researcher Bill Marczak made what he described as an unprecedented discovery: a malfunction in the surveillance software implanted on her phone had left a copy of the malicious image file, rather than deleting itself, after stealing the messages of its target. He said the finding, computer code left by the attack, provided direct evidence NSO built the espionage tool. "It was a game changer," said Marczak. "We caught something that the company thought was uncatchable." The discovery amounted to a hacking blueprint and led Apple to notify thousands of other state-backed hacking victims around the world, according to four people with direct knowledge of the incident.

President Biden is expected to issue an executive order next week directing agencies across the government to study cryptocurrencies and a central bank digital currency (CBDC), and come up with a government-wide strategy to regulate digital assets. Yahoo Finance: According to an administration official familiar with the matter, the forthcoming directive will commission a study of a CBDC and ask a range of agencies -- including the Departments of Treasury, State, Justice and Homeland Security -- to develop a report on the future of money and payment systems. Meanwhile, the Director of the Office of Science and Tech policy will do a technical evaluation of what might be needed to support a CBDC system.

The move comes as Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday that a rift has developed between the White House and Treasury over crypto regulation, but a Treasury official disputed the account as "inaccurate." The administration is engaged in a wide-ranging effort to regulate the sector, with the FBI forming a new crypto unit led by a seasoned computer crimes prosecutor. The Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), created after the 2008 financial crisis to monitor risks to the system, will be asked to study financial stability issues that arise from digital assets. The President's Working Group on Financial Markets has already tasked the FSOC with looking into systemic risks of stablecoins.

As both the Chrome and Firefox browsers approach their 100th versions, what should be a reason for the developers to celebrate could turn into a bit of a mess. From a report: It turns out that much like the Y2K bug, the triple-digit release numbers coded in the browsers' User-Agents (UAs) could cause issues with a small number of sites, Bleeping Computer reported. Mozilla launched an experiment last year to see if version number 100 would affect sites, and it just released a blogpost with the results. It did affect a small number of sites (some very big ones, though) that couldn't parse a user-agent string containing a three-digit number. Notable ones still affected included HBO Go, Bethesda and Yahoo, according to a tracking site. The bugs include "browser not supported" messages, site rendering issues, parsing failures, 403 errors and so on.

A U.S. district judge "sentenced a Nintendo Switch hacker to 40 months in federal prison," reports the Independent: Gary Bowser, 52, is one of the leaders of the "Team Xecuter" hacker criminal enterprise, a notorious video game piracy gang, authorities said. The gang sold software to hack and download stolen games to various consoles. Besides the Nintendo Switch console, Team Xecuter also targeted the Nintendo 3DS, the Nintendo Entertainment System Classic Edition, the Sony PlayStation Classic and Microsoft's Xbox.

Bowser, a Canadian citizen, was the public face of the group and handled Team Xecuter's public relations and operated its websites. He was arrested in October 2020 in the Dominican Republic and extradited to the US to stand trial in New Jersey. He pleaded guilty in October 2021 to two criminal counts — conspiracy to circumvent technological measures and to traffic in circumvention devices, and trafficking in circumvention devices. As part of his plea deal, Bowser agreed to pay $4.5m in restitution to Nintendo.

Federal agents said that he caused a loss of about $65m (about £48m) to gaming companies.
"The hacking group was initially adamant that its hardware and software modifications that circumvented copyright protections were intended for homebrew application development, not to enable users to steal software..." notes Hot Hardware.

"Following the guilty plea, Bowser settled a civil lawsuit with Nintendo to the tune of $10 million, on top of the $4.5 million in restitution he already owed."

"The mystery of how cryptocurrency miners are paying for their energy-intensive mining operations in rural areas has been solved," writes Slashdot reader fermion. "Instead of paying up to 40% in taxes, the miners build mining operations in 'opportunity zones.' There are few requirements to show these produce jobs or any income." The HuffPost reports: [Some cryptocurrency traders] are attempting to take advantage of a controversial tax incentive in Republicans' 2017 major tax legislation -- specifically, by investing in "opportunity zones," which were sold as a plan to buoy the poorest American neighborhoods but have evolved into a way for wealthy investors to funnel billions in untaxed profits into virtually any venture they choose. The law allowed companies and investors to delay and reduce their capital gains taxes after they sell a financial asset like stock, so long as they invest the money in a new project located in one of thousands of struggling American neighborhoods designated as opportunity zones. If the investment lasts for more than 10 years, the profits from the new business are completely tax-free. Investors face few requirements to prove that their projects will create jobs or housing for a community's existing residents, and scores of them have taken advantage of opportunity zones to erect high-end hotels and luxury real estate in gentrifying neighborhoods.

Crypto investors -- whose profits are subject to the capital gains tax of nearly 40% -- are making their own run at using opportunity zones by investing in energy-intensive crypto mining operations in rural places around the country. "It's a perfect fit," said Blake Christian, a Utah accountant who specializes in opportunity zones and has a newfound clientele of crypto investors. "They've just had this big windfall and invariably they're looking for a way to save some money because they're about to get drilled on short term capital gains taxes. And they want to keep rolling the dice" by staying invested in the crypto market. Fifteen or 20 clients of Christian's clients, who have made money in the low seven-figures mining or trading cryptocurrency, have set up warehouses in opportunity zones full of powerful computers that solve equations in order to "mine" cryptocurrency and lease the computing power to other customers. The ideal location for a crypto mine is close to plentiful, cheap electrical power -- of which many rural opportunity zones have plenty. One of Christian's clients is setting one up next to a Texas oil field that has promised bargain-basement rates on natural gas. Another client's startup has a similar arrangement with a solar power provider.

Tom Frazier's company, Redivider Blockchain, is raising money to manufacture prefabricated, moveable data centers that can be plunked down anywhere in the country; he sees opportunity zone status not as a black mark but as a political opportunity. He argues that by setting up shop in opportunity zones, crypto businesses could generate crucial goodwill around an industry and technology still facing widespread derision and skepticism. "We're creating jobs where Americans need them," he told HuffPost in a recent interview. Frazier said opportunity zones have gotten a reputation as a boondoggle because the vast majority of investments have involved glitzy, one-off real estate projects. Data center businesses could support tech and manufacturing jobs at locations all over the country, he said. [...] Critics say there's nothing wrong with ambitious business -- just that they don't require giant federal tax breaks. "Why are we taking forgone taxpayer revenue and subsidizing this, of all the things we want to spend our nation's money on?" said Brett Theodos, an Urban Institute senior fellow and skeptic of opportunity zones. "Is crypto mining a bad thing? Maybe yes if you're the environment, maybe not for an individual community. But is it something we need to be subsidizing, as the federal government, in order to produce? I'm not clear why we'd want to do that."

Last month streamers in China discovered that Fight Club had arrived on streaming platform Tencent — but with an entirely new ending where local authorities "rapidly figured out the whole plan and arrested all criminals....."

But now there's been another round of changes, according to the Hollywood Reporter. "After widespread online backlash to clumsy censorship of the film's ending, Chinese streaming service Tencent Video backtracked in recent days and restored most of the cuts it had made." Crucially, Fight Club's complete ending is now viewable in full in China...

News of the cuts went viral around the world and sparked much debate and embarrassment on Chinese social media about local censorship practices.... [I]t would appear that the backlash has been deemed more troublesome than the fictional film's ending, as Tencent has now restored 11 of the 12 minutes it originally cut from the 137-minute movie. The minute still missing is mostly comprised of brief nude sex scenes between Brad Pitt's and Helena Bonham Carter's characters.
Insider reports that changing the original ending provoked comments like these on China's Twitter-like platform Weibo:

- "This has become a Chinese-only joke. Even dogs won't want to watch this."

- "This is exactly why, even if you have streaming platform subscriptions, you still have to watch pirated versions."


And it brought massive attention to China's history of changing movies, notes the Wrap since "word quickly spread across the globe, bringing embarrassment to the country," reports the Wrap: Censorship of American films and TV shows at the behest of Chinese officials has become common as Hollywood has made in-roads in the country over the past decade. Last year, an episode of "The Simpsons" in which the titular family visits China was removed from Disney+ in Hong Kong over a joke made in the film about the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 and the Chinese government's censorship of the event.
Even the South China Morning Post reported that Chuck Palahniuk, the author of the novel that inspired the film, "appeared to mock the move on Twitter. 'Everyone gets a happy ending in China!' he wrote..." Similar changes have been made to other films in China in the past. Nicolas Cage's 2005 crime film Lord of War had its final half-hour cut and replaced with text reading, "Yuri Orlov confessed all the crimes officially charged against him in court and was sentenced to life imprisonment in the end."
And another example from the Hollywood Reporter: After 20th Century Fox's Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody won multiple Oscars in the 2018, it was granted a theatrical release in China — but only after all mentions of Freddie Mercury's homosexuality were cut from the film.
But in this case a global popular outcry appears to have been too embarrasing to endure. According to the Hollywood Reporter now we even have an expected ending to the story of how China tried to censor Fight Club.

"Reversals of censorship actions are extremely rare within China's entertainment industry — but cuts to Hollywood movies are not."

"The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Digital Currency Initiative have come up with an initial design for a central bank digital currency," reports Yahoo Finance.

Reuters cautions that the newly-released research does not suggest that the U.S. central bank will move toward launching a CBDC, a step it has said it would not take without clear support from the White House and Congress...." Instead the team "developed technology that can be adjusted as more policy questions regarding the structure and purpose of a CBDC are addressed."

The Washington Post describes it as "a system that can settle the vast majority of payments in less than two seconds, handles more than 1.7 million transactions per second and operates around-the-clock with no service outages in the case of a disruption in its network."

The Boston Globe adds that "The team noted there's a lot more work to do in the next phase, including researching various privacy features, and stressed the digital dollar remains hypothetical until the Fed decides whether to move forward with government-backed electronic cash."

Some context from the Washington Post: The ultimate product could help extend financial services to people who lack a bank account and make cross-border payments such as remittances safer and easier, said Neha Narula, director of the Digital Currency Initiative at MIT. Narula, in a conference call with reporters, noted that the Boston researchers "aren't the ones making policy decision on how such a system might operate," so they have aimed to "create a flexible system that can work with a variety of models."

Along with a paper describing the team's work to date, researchers on Thursday published open-source code for the platform that would support the digital currency. Jim Cunha, executive vice president of the Boston Fed, called that a first for the central bank, intended to encourage public input that improves the technology.

"If a rock falls on Mars, and no one is there to see it, does it leave a trace?" jokes the New York Times, answering "Yes, and it's a beautiful herringbone-like pattern, new research reveals." Scientists have now spotted thousands of tracks on the red planet created by tumbling boulders. Delicate chevron-shaped piles of Martian dust and sand frame the tracks, the team showed, and most fade over the course of a few years.

Rockfalls have been spotted elsewhere in the solar system, including on the moon and even a comet. But a big open question is the timing of these processes on other worlds — are they ongoing or did they predominantly occur in the past?A study of these ephemeral features on Mars, published last month in Geophysical Research Letters, says that such boulder tracks can be used to pinpoint recent seismic activity on the red planet. This new evidence that Mars is a dynamic world runs contrary to the notion that all of the planet's exciting geology happened much earlier, s aid Ingrid Daubar, a planetary scientist at Brown University who was not involved in the study...

To arrive at this finding, Vijayan, a planetary scientist at the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmadabad, India, who uses a single name, and his colleagues pored over thousands of images of Mars' equatorial region. The imagery was captured from 2006 through 2020 by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera onboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and revealed details as small as 10 inches across. "We can discriminate individual boulders," Vijayan said. The team manually searched for chain-like features — a telltale signature of a rock careening down an incline — on the sloped walls of impact craters. Vijayan and his collaborators spotted more than 4,500 such boulder tracks, the longest of which stretched more than a mile and a half...

Roughly one-third of the tracks the researchers studied were absent in early images, meaning that they must have formed since 2006... The researchers suggest that winds continuously sweeping over the surface of Mars redistribute dust and sand and erase the ejecta. Because boulder fall ejecta fades so rapidly, seeing it implies that a boulder was dislodged recently, the team suggest. And a common cause of rockfalls, on Earth and elsewhere, is seismic activity.... Since 2019, hundreds of marsquakes have been detected by NASA's InSight lander, and two of the largest occurred last year in the Cerberus Fossae region.
Today the Mars lander InSight is back in operation after a two-week break to avoid dust storms, while dust storms also delayed the 19th flight of NASA's Ingenuity helicopter.

And elsewhere on Mars, the Perserverance rover successfully dislodged two pebbles stuck in its sample-collecting apparatus.

America's National Labor Relations Board is an independent agency of the federal government that enforces U.S. labor law.

And its prosecutors "plan to formally accuse Amazon.com of illegally firing an activist who was trying to unionize its New York warehouses," as well as other violations of the law, reports Bloomberg — unless Amazon settles the case first.

New York Focus reports that the fired worker had commuted from a homeless shelter to Amazon's fulfillment center on New York's Staten Island — a facility where Amazon has held mandatory anti-union meetings. But it's not the only place there's been tension between Amazon and union organizers: In March, an NLRB investigation into the firing of Queens Amazon warehouse worker and labor leader Jonathan Bailey found that the company illegally interrogated and threatened him. NBC News reported that eight other workers also said "they had been fired, disciplined or retaliated against for protected activity." A month later, the NLRB found that Amazon had illegally retaliated against Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, who was fired in 2020 for their workplace activism while employed at Amazon's headquarters in Seattle
The Amazon Labor Union (founded by current and former Amazon employees) "has filed a petition to hold an election at four of the e-commerce giant's facilities in Staten Island," Bloomberg reported Friday. And an official for the group told Bloomberg it could galvanize support for a union if they could get the fired worker reinstated. "It would be monumental for him to go back to the same building that he was terminated from and speak his truth and let workers know that it's OK to speak out." Amazon has been grappling with an unprecedented wave of activism and organizing in North America, including walkouts over safety concerns in Staten Island and elsewhere, as well as unionization drives in Alabama, Canada and New York.... In December, Amazon reached a settlement with the labor board requiring the company to inform workers nationwide of their legal rights and to let employees organize on its property during their time off.

Slashdot reader DevNull127 shares a transcript from a recent segment on CNN: CNN: Here's a moral question peculiar to these days: Is it wrong to mock people who publicly crusade against the Covid vaccine, and then die of the disease?

Or does it drive home the message about saving lives?

There are entire web sites that are devoted to such mockery. Sorry Antivaxxer.com gleefully tales stories and photos of anti-vaccine advocates who end up in the ICU, intubated, or dead from the disease.

One recent case of this kind of tasteless taunting spurred two dueling opinion pieces in the Los Angeles Times. Orange County Republican Kelly Ernby, a former assistant D.A. and state assembly candidate who had lobbied publicly against the Covid vaccines, passed away earlier this month at age 46 from Covid complications. She was unvaccinated. Ernby's death unleashed a torrent of reaction on the internet. On her own Facebook page under a Christmas collage that she had posted, there are now more than 4,600 comments. Some are sympathy notes; many other are not.

In response to the piling on, Los Angeles Times columnist Nicholas Goldberg wrote, "I don't understand how crowing over the death of others furthers useful debate — or increases vaccination rates." But a few days later, Goldberg's colleague Michael Hiltzik published a column expressing the exact opposite. "Mocking anti-vaxxers' Covid deaths is ghoulish, yes — but may be necessary." Michael Hiltzik joins me now, he's the L.A. Times' business columnist. He's also a Pulitzer Prize winner. Michael let's make clear at the outset: you are not talking about the everyday people who don't get vaxxed, sadly contract Covid, and die. You're talking about people with a platform, right?

Michael Hiltzik: That's correct... In my column, I pointed out that the unvaccinated really fall into three categories. There are those who can't get vaccinated for legitimate reasons — small children, people with genuine medical contra-indications of vaccination. Then there's a fairly large group of people who I think have been duped into resisting the vaccine, duped by misinformation and disinformation about the vaccines, and sort of nonsense about preserving our freedoms in the face of this pandemic.

The real targets who are important here are those who spent the last few months or years of their lives crusading against sensible, safe policies such as vaccination and social distancing and what have you — and ended up paying the ultimate price for their own — basically, their own folly.

[CNN puts a pargraph on the screen, highlighting Hiltzik's comment that "Mockery is not necessarily the wrong reaction to those who publicly mocked anti-Covid measures and encouraged others to follow suit, before they perished of the disease the dangers of which they belittled."]

Michael Hiltzik: You know, we have sort of a cultural habit of not speaking ill of the dead, of treating the good deceased — looking at the good that they've done during their lives. I'm not sure that in this case that's entirely appropriate, because so many of them actually have promoted reckless, dangerous policies.

And as I wrote there, they took innocent people along with them.

So is mockery the only response? Well, I don't know — but as I wrote, every one of these deaths is a teachable moment. And unfortunately we haven't been learning from the lesson that we should be hearing from them.
In his column, Hiltzik had argued that "[P]leas for 'civility' are a fraud.

"Their goal is to blunt and enfeeble criticism and distract from its truthfulness. Typically, they're the work of hypocrites."

Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot wanted to share this New York Times article which makes the point that "The stunning Covid vaccines manufactured by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna drew upon long-buried discoveries made in the hopes of ending past epidemics..." They remain a marvel: Even as the Omicron variant fuels a new wave of the pandemic, the vaccines have proved remarkably resilient at defending against severe illness and death. And the manufacturers, Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna, say that mRNA technology will allow them to adapt the vaccines quickly, to fend off whatever dangerous new version of the virus that evolution brings next.

Skeptics have seized on the rapid development of the vaccines — among the most impressive feats of medical science in the modern era — to undermine the public's trust in them. But the breakthroughs behind the vaccines unfolded over decades, little by little, as scientists across the world pursued research in disparate areas, never imagining their work would one day come together to tame the pandemic of the century. The pharmaceutical companies harnessed these findings and engineered a consistent product that could be made at scale, partly with the help of Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration's multibillion-dollar program to hasten the development and manufacture of vaccines, drugs and diagnostic tests to fight the new virus.

For years, though, the scientists who made the vaccines possible scrounged for money and battled public indifference. Their experiments often failed. When the work got too crushing, some of them left it behind. And yet on this unpredictable, zigzagging path, the science slowly built upon itself, squeezing knowledge from failure.

The vaccines were possible only because of efforts in three areas. The first began more than 60 years ago with the discovery of mRNA, the genetic molecule that helps cells make proteins. A few decades later, two scientists in Pennsylvania decided to pursue what seemed like a pipe dream: using the molecule to command cells to make tiny pieces of viruses that would strengthen the immune system. The second effort took place in the private sector, as biotechnology companies in Canada in the budding field of gene therapy — the modification or repair of genes to treat diseases — searched for a way to protect fragile genetic molecules so they could be safely delivered to human cells. The third crucial line of inquiry began in the 1990s, when the U.S. government embarked on a multibillion-dollar quest to find a vaccine to prevent AIDS. That effort funded a group of scientists who tried to target the all-important "spikes" on H.I.V. viruses that allow them to invade cells. The work has not resulted in a successful H.I.V. vaccine. But some of these researchers, including Dr. Graham, veered from the mission and eventually unlocked secrets that allowed the spikes on coronaviruses to be mapped instead.

In early 2020, these different strands of research came together. The spike of the Covid virus was encoded in mRNA molecules. Those molecules were wrapped in a protective layer of fat and poured into small glass vials. When the shots went in arms less than a year later, recipients' cells responded by producing proteins that resembled the spikes — and that trained the body to attack the coronavirus.

The extraordinary tale proved the promise of basic scientific research: that once in a great while, old discoveries can be plucked from obscurity to make history.

Yahoo Japan is telling its 8,000 employees they can work anywhere in the country -- and even be flown into work when the job requires it -- bucking the trend of companies looking to return workers to offices in the third year of the coronavirus pandemic. The Japan Times reports: The program takes effect April 1 and allows employees to commute by plane, which wasn't previously an option, the company said in a statement Wednesday. While Yahoo is best known for its internet portal in Japan, it's a unit of SoftBank Group's Z Holdings, which also owns the Line messaging app and PayPay mobile payments service. Ninety percent of the company's employees are now working remotely, according to President Kentaro Kawabe, who tweeted that an overwhelming majority of them said their performance has held steady or improved at home. "So we're allowing Yahoo employees to live anywhere in Japan. This doesn't mean we're denying the benefits of the office -- you'll be able to fly in when needed," he added.

Yahoo is setting a commuting budget of $1,300 per month per worker and lifting its previous daily cap. In-person communication will still be encouraged as the initiative is also aimed at bolstering morale and well-being, with social gatherings to be subsidized by [$44] per employee a month. The company has had an "office anywhere" remote work system in place since 2014, however it had capped the number of work-from-home days before the virus took hold to five days a month.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A defunct hydro plant in Costa Rica is getting a new lease on life by powering crypto mining, and bringing clean energy to a rapidly expanding business. More than 650 machines from 150 customers operate non-stop from this plant next to the Poas River, just outside of capital city San Jose. Costa Rica generates nearly all its energy from green sources, where the state has a monopoly on energy distribution. But the government stopped buying electricity due to surplus power in the country, forcing the plant to reinvent itself.

Eduardo Kooper is the owner of Data Center CR and the plant. "We had a lot of power, but we did nothing with it. We had to pause activity for nine months. We looked for many alternatives -- from making fried food, frozen food -- everything that used a lot of energy. Just a year ago, someone told me about Bitcoin, blockchain, and digital mining." Kooper, skeptical at first, learned that the crypto mining business requires a lot of energy, much of which comes from fossil fuels. The company invested $500,000 to venture into hosting digital mining computers. "Our market is the international miner who is looking for better conditions," said Kooper. "That miner is looking for clean energy, cheap energy that is economically viable, and looking for internet connection, where he finds it is where that miner is going to go."

Brian Fagioli, reporting for BetaNews: The developers of the Ubuntu-based operating system have agreed to accept an undisclosed amount of money from Mozilla in exchange for making significant changes to Linux Mint. This includes removal of modifications to Firefox and a big change for search. The devs share the upcoming changes to Firefox in Linux Mint 19 and higher.
The default start page no longer points to https://www.linuxmint.com/start/
The default search engines no longer include Linux Mint search partners (Yahoo, DuckDuckGo...) but Mozilla search partners (Google, Amazon, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ebay...)
The default configuration switches from Mint defaults to Mozilla defaults.
Firefox no longer includes code changes or patches from Linux Mint, Debian or Ubuntu.

The value of bitcoin fell under the $40,000 mark in early morning trading today. From a report: The popular cryptocurrency sold off sharply this morning, while rival tokens like ether also lost value. Currently worth $39,831 per coin, bitcoin is off 4.3% and ether 5.1%, according to Coinbase data. While it is always risky to cover price changes in the crypto world, the fall in the value of bitcoin has crossed the threshold from notable to material. Yahoo Finance indicates that bitcoin's recent all-time high saw the cryptocurrency trade as high as $68,789.62 per coin. Today's price puts bitcoin's current drawdown at just over 42%. That's twice the swing required for bitcoin to have entered a technical bear market, and four times what it would need to meet the requirements of a correction.

Electric cars make up less than 5% of new U.S. vehicle sales today — but automakers are betting on increasing demand. Chevy even plans to stop producing gas-powered cars altogether over the next 15 years, according to the Washington Post.

But they also ponder the implications of this year's recall of the Chevy Bolt: The crisis involving the Chevrolet Bolt was a painful reminder for the auto industry that despite treating the electric vehicle era as essentially inevitable — a technical fait accompli — significant obstacles to manufacturing the cars, and especially their batteries, continue to threaten that future. "It's a terrible thing that has happened," Tim Grewe, GM's general director for electrification strategy and cell engineering, said in an interview in September...

The recall of the Bolt covered all of the roughly 141,000 units GM had ever built. The company identified the issue as dual defects that led battery materials to make contact with one another and the components to combust spontaneously. It's a danger that comes directly from the core challenge of creating electric-vehicle batteries: the competition to pack more and more energy into them... Even as automakers seek to phase out gasoline engines en masse, high-voltage car batteries remain in their early stages of mass production. Many manufacturers are experimenting with new technologies and battery chemistries. While they do so, they are discovering defects — some of which can prove catastrophic.... Electric-car-battery explosions can release massive amounts of energy — and the fires can burn for hours, stretching longer and registering hotter than fires in cars with internal-combustion engines...

LG, which has made batteries for the Bolt's entire run, is reimbursing GM for nearly $2 billion of costs associated with the recall.... GM has been hit hardest by fire concerns — but Audi and Hyundai also have recalled EVs over fire risks.

U.S. health officials on Monday cut isolation restrictions for Americans who catch the coronavirus from 10 to five days, and similarly shortened the time that close contacts need to quarantine. The Associated Press reports: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials said the guidance is in keeping with growing evidence that people with the coronavirus are most infectious in the two days before and three days after symptoms develop. The decision also was driven by a recent surge in COVID-19 cases, propelled by the omicron variant.

Early research suggests omicron may cause milder illnesses than earlier versions of the coronavirus. But the sheer number of people becoming infected -- and therefore having to isolate or quarantine -- threatens to crush the ability of hospitals, airlines and other businesses to stay open, experts say. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said the country is about to see a lot of omicron cases. "Not all of those cases are going to be severe. In fact many are going to be asymptomatic," she told The Associated Press on Monday. "We want to make sure there is a mechanism by which we can safely continue to keep society functioning while following the science."

Last week, the agency loosened rules that previously called on health care workers to stay out of work for 10 days if they test positive. The new recommendations said workers could go back to work after seven days if they test negative and don't have symptoms. And the agency said isolation time could be cut to five days, or even fewer, if there are severe staffing shortages. Now, the CDC is changing the isolation and quarantine guidance for the general public to be even less stringent. The guidance is not a mandate; it's a recommendation to employers and state and local officials.

"The privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo continues to grow rapidly, with the company now averaging over 100 million daily search queries and growing by almost 47% in 2021..." reports BleepingComputer: In 2020, DuckDuckGo received 23.6 billion total search queries and achieved a daily average of 79 million search queries by the end of December.

In 2021, DuckDuckGo received 34.6 billion total search queries so far and currently has an average of 100 million search queries per day, showing a 46.4% growth for the year.

While DuckDuckGo's growth is considerable, it still only has 2.53% of the total market share, with Yahoo at 3.3%, Bing at 6.43%, and Google holding a dominant share of 87.33% of search engine traffic in the USA. However, as people continue to become frustrated with how their data is being used by tech giants like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple, we will likely see more people switch to privacy-focused search engines.
This year DuckDuckGo also released their own email forwarding service, and announced work on the DuckDuckGo Privacy Browser for Desktop — which will be built from scratch and not be based on Chromium.