Long-time Slashdot reader BigVig209 shares a Chicago Tribune report "on how suburban police departments in the Chicago area use license plate cameras as a crime-fighting tool." Critics of the cameras note that only a tiny percentage of the billions of plates photographed lead to an arrest, and that the cameras generally haven't been shown to prevent crime. More importantly they say the devices are unregulated, track innocent people and can be misused to invade drivers' privacy. The controversy comes as suburban police departments continue to expand the use of the cameras to combat rising crime. Law enforcement officials say they are taking steps to safeguard the data. But privacy advocates say the state should pass a law to ensure against improper use of a nationwide surveillance system operated by private companies.

Across the Chicago area, one survey by the nonprofit watchdog group Muckrock found 88 cameras used by more than two dozen police agencies. In response to a surge in shootings, after much delay, state police are taking steps to add the cameras to area expressways. In the northwest suburbs, Vernon Hills and Niles are among several departments that have added license plate cameras recently. The city of Chicago has ordered more than 200 cameras for its squad cars. In Indiana, the city of Hammond has taken steps to record nearly every vehicle that comes into town.

Not all police like the devices. In the southwest suburbs, Darien and La Grange had issues in years past with the cameras making false readings, and some officers stopped using them...

Homeowner associations may also tie their cameras into the systems, which is what led to the arrest in Vernon Hills. One of the leading sellers of such cameras, Vigilant Solutions, a part of Chicago-based Motorola Solutions, has collected billions of license plate numbers in its National Vehicle Location Service. The database shares information from thousands of police agencies, and can be used to find cars across the country... Then there is the potential for abuse by police. One investigation found that officers nationwide misused agency databases hundreds of times, to check on ex-girlfriends, romantic rivals, or perceived enemies. To address those concerns, 16 states have passed laws restricting the use of the cameras.
The article cites an EFF survey which found 99.5% of scanned plates weren't under suspicion — "and that police shared their data with an average of 160 other agencies."

"Two big concerns the American Civil Liberties Union has always had about the cameras are that the information can be used to track the movements of the general population, and often is sold by operators to third parties like credit and insurance companies."

"An Israeli startup wants to replace chicken coops, barns and slaughterhouses with bioreactors to churn out cell-based meat for American diners," reports Bloomberg: Future Meat Technologies Ltd. is in talks with U.S. regulators to start offering its products in restaurants by the end of next year. The company has just opened what it calls the world's first industrial cellular meat facility, which will be able to produce 500 kilograms (1,102 pounds) a day. "From the get-go, our main focus was around scaling up and reducing cost in order to have a commercially viable product," Chief Executive Officer Rom Kshuk said in an interview... Since the first prototypes, startups have cut costs by 99% and if consumers take to these products, the market could reach $25 billion by 2030, McKinsey & Co. said in a report last week. But to compete with conventional meat, costs need to be slashed even further.

Future Meat Technologies, which has raised $43 million from investors including Tyson Foods Inc., Archer-Daniels-Midland Co. and S2G Ventures LLC, claims the lowest price for cultured chicken breast. It's managed to cut the cost to $4 per 100 grams, a fraction of the original price, and plans to cut it by half again by the end of 2022, Kshuk said. The company's facility, located in the Israeli city of Rehovot, can produce cultured chicken, pork, and lamb, with the production of beef coming soon. Still, it's small compared with some conventional farm factories, some of which slaughter thousands of animals per day. The Good Food Institute said cultured meat production will need to reach millions of tons a year to progress from the demonstration to the industrial stage.

Future Meat will be able to "scale out" production lines and replicate the facility elsewhere, Kshuk said. It plans to target the U.S. market — which has some of the biggest meat consumption rates in the world — before expanding to Europe and China... "We are aiming to reduce the cost more, more and more," the CEO said. "The story here is not to have a premium product. This is really about finding an alternative way to produce meat."
Slashdot reader Beeftopia tipped us off to the story. The company claims in a press release that their platform "enables fast production cycles, about 20-times faster than traditional animal agriculture." "After demonstrating that cultured meat can reach cost parity faster than the market anticipated, this production facility is the real game-changer," says Prof. Yaakov Nahmias, founder and chief scientific officer of Future Meat Technologies. "This facility demonstrates our proprietary media rejuvenation technology in scale, allowing us to reach production densities 10-times higher than the industrial standard. Our goal is to make cultured meat affordable for everyone, while ensuring we produce delicious food that is both healthy and sustainable, helping to secure the future of coming generations."

The facility further supports Future Meat Technologies' larger efforts to create a more sustainable future. The company's cruelty-free production process is expected to generate 80% less greenhouse emissions and use 99% less land and 96% less freshwater than traditional meat production.

The New York Times reports: When Yahoo banned working from home in 2013, the reason was one often cited in corporate America: Being in the office is essential for spontaneous collaboration and innovation. "It is critical that we are all present in our offices," wrote Jacqueline Reses, then a Yahoo executive, in a staff memo. "Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people and impromptu team meetings." Today, Ms. Reses, now chief executive of Post House Capital, an investment firm, has a different view. "Would I write that memo differently now?" she said. "Oh yeah." She still believes that collaboration can benefit from being together in person, but over the last year, people found new, better ways to work.

As the pandemic winds down in the United States, however, many bosses are sounding a note similar to Ms. Reses' in 2013. "Innovation isn't always a planned activity," said Tim Cook, chief executive of Apple, about post-pandemic work. "It's bumping into each other over the course of the day and advancing an idea you just had." Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, said working from home "doesn't work for spontaneous idea generation, it doesn't work for culture." Yet people who study the issue say there is no evidence that working in person is essential for creativity and collaboration. It may even hurt innovation, they say, because the demand for doing office work at a prescribed time and place is a big reason the American workplace has been inhospitable for many people...

"There's credibility behind the argument that if you put people in spaces where they are likely to collide with one another, they are likely to have a conversation," said Ethan S. Bernstein, who teaches at Harvard Business School and studies the topic. "But is that conversation likely to be helpful for innovation, creativity, useful at all for what an organization hopes people would talk about? There, there is almost no data whatsoever. All of this suggests to me that the idea of random serendipity being productive is more fairy tale than reality," he said....

Professor Bernstein found that contemporary open offices led to 70 percent fewer face-to-face interactions. People didn't find it helpful to have so many spontaneous conversations, so they wore headphones and avoided one another.
The chief people officer at real estate marketplace Zillow believes this always-in-the-office culture is what's ultimately lead to problems like long hours, the lack of representation, and burnout, according to the New York Times, which notes Zillow, Salesforce, and Ford are now reconfiguring their offices with fewer rows of desks and more places for informal gatherings.

"Some experts have suggested a new idea for the office: not as a headquarters people go to daily or weekly, but as a place people go sometimes, for group hangouts."

The Wall Street Journal reports: Authorities in the U.K. and Japan took aim at affiliates of Binance Holdings Ltd., the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange network, in the latest regulatory crackdown on the wildly popular trade in bitcoin and other digital assets. The U.K. Financial Conduct Authority, the country's lead financial regulator, told consumers Saturday that Binance's local unit wasn't permitted to conduct operations related to regulated financial activities...

Binance Markets Ltd., the company's U.K. arm, applied to be registered with the Financial Conduct Authority and withdrew its application on May 17. "A significantly high number of cryptoasset businesses are not meeting the required standards" under money-laundering regulations, said a spokesperson for the FCA in an email. "Of the firms we've assessed to date, over 90% have withdrawn applications following our intervention."

Japan's financial watchdog issued a statement on June 25, saying that Binance isn't registered to do business in the country...

As of April, Binance operated the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world by trading volume, allowing tens of billions of dollars of trades to pass through its networks, according to data provider CryptoCompare. It was founded in 2017 and initially based in China, later moving offices to Japan and Malta. It recently said it is a decentralized organization with no headquarters... The FCA move doesn't ban customers from using Binance completely; U.K. customers can continue to use Binance's non-U.K. operations for activities the FCA doesn't directly regulate, such as buying and selling direct holdings in bitcoin.
The Financial Times called the move "one of the most significant moves any global regulator has made against Binance" and "a sign of how regulators are cracking down on the cryptocurrency industry over concerns relating to its potential role in illicit activities such as money laundering and fraud, and over often weak consumer protection." But more countries are also taking action, Reuters reports: Last month, Bloomberg reported that officials from the U.S. Justice Department and Internal Revenue Service who probe money laundering and tax offences had sought information from individuals with insight into Binance's business. In April, Germany's financial regulator BaFin warned the exchange risked being fined for offering digital tokens without an investor prospectus.
And CoinDesk adds: Binance is no longer open for business in Canada's most populous province, apparently choosing to close shop rather than meet the fate of other cryptocurrency exchanges that have had actions filed against them for allegedly failing to comply with Ontario securities laws.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Thursday that will convene an "emergency meeting" of its advisers on June 18th to discuss rare but higher-than-expected reports of heart inflammation following doses of the mRNA-based Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. So far, the CDC has identified 226 reports that might meet the agency's "working case definition" of myocarditis and pericarditis following the shots, the agency disclosed Thursday. The vast majority have recovered, but 41 had ongoing symptoms, 15 are still hospitalized, and 3 are in the intensive care unit. The reports represent just a tiny fraction of the nearly 130 million Americans who have been fully vaccinated with either Pfizer or Moderna's doses.

"It's a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison because, again, these are preliminary reports. Not all these will turn out to be true myocarditis or pericarditis reports," cautioned Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, a CDC vaccine safety official. Shimabukuro said their findings were mostly "consistent" with reports of rare cases of heart inflammation that had been studied in Israel and reported from the U.S. Department of Defense earlier this year. The CDC is working on more data and analysis on the reports ahead of the emergency meeting of its own advisers next week, he said, and also planned to analyze the risk of heart inflammation posed by catching COVID-19. The new details about myocarditis and pericarditis emerged first in presentations to a panel of independent advisers for the Food and Drug Administration, who are meeting Thursday to discuss how the regulator should approach emergency use authorization for using COVID-19 vaccines in younger children.

Bing, the search engine owned by Microsoft, is not displaying image results for a search for "Tank man," even when searching from the United States. The apparent censorship comes on the anniversary of China's violent crackdown on protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. From a report: "There are no results for tank man," the Bing website reads after searching for the term. "Tank man" relates to the infamous image of a single protester standing in front of a line of Chinese tanks during the crackdown. China censors and blocks distribution of discussion of tank man and Tiananmen Square more generally. This year, anniversary events in Hong Kong have dwindled in size after authorities banned a vigil. Motherboard verified that the issue also impacts image searches on Yahoo and DuckDuckGo, which both use Bing.

UPDATE: "This is due to an accidental human error and we are actively working to resolve this," a Microsoft spokesperson told Gizmodo via email: As of early Friday evening, searching for "Tank Man" on Bing now returns many results — though the famous photograph only appears in passing in the form of a desktop wallpaper heavily modified to obscure the tanks.

"In the niche world of customers for high-end semiconductors, a bitter feud is pitting bitcoin miners against hardcore gamers," reports Quartz: At issue is the latest line of NVIDIA graphics cards — powerful, cutting-edge chips with the computational might to display the most advanced video game graphics on the market. Gamers want the chips so they can experience ultra-realistic lighting effects in their favorite games. But they can't get their hands on NVIDIA cards, because miners are buying them up and adapting them to crunch cryptographic codes and harvest digital currency. The fierce competition to buy chips — combined with a global semiconductor shortage — has driven resale prices up as much as 300%, and led hundreds of thousands of desperate consumers to sign up for daily raffles for the right to buy chips at a significant mark-up.

To broker a peace between its warring customers, NVIDIA is, essentially, splitting its cutting-edge graphics chips into two dumbed-down products: GeForce for gamers and the Cryptocurrency Mining Processor (CMP) for miners. GeForce is the latest NVIDIA graphics card — except key parts of it have been slowed down to make it less valuable for miners racing to solve crypto puzzles. CMP is based on a slightly older version of NVIDIA's graphics card which has been stripped of all of its display outputs, so gamers can't use it to render graphics.

NVIDIA's goal in splitting its product offerings is to incentivize miners to only buy CMP chips, and leave the GeForce chips for the gamers. "What we hope is that the CMPs will satisfy the miners...[and] steer our GeForce supply to gamers," said CEO Jansen Huang on a May 26 conference call with investors and analysts... It won't be easy to keep the miners at bay, however. NVIDIA tried releasing slowed-down graphics chips in February in an effort to deter miners from buying them, but it didn't work. The miners quickly figured out how to hack the chips and make them perform at full-speed again.

Last year author Sonia Shah predicted that after pandemic-induced lockdowns finally ended, "The hype around online education will be abandoned, as a generation of young people forced into seclusion will reshape the culture around a contrarian appreciation for communal life."

This week the Atlantic's technology staff writer is now suggesting that "As the stress of the pandemic is beginning to recede, our relationship with the internet might be renegotiated..." As vaccination rates tick up, and IRL social life resumes, it's getting easier to imagine that we're on the brink of something big: a coordinated withdrawal from swiping and streaming, a new consensus that staying home to watch Netflix is no longer a chill Friday-night plan, but an affront. Could this be real? Are we about to start the summer of a Great Offlining...?

A few signs that this movement could be upon us: Netflix reported its worst first quarter in eight years, after seeing historic growth in 2020. Tinder conceded that more than half of its Gen Z users have no intention of using its videochat features ever again. Clubhouse downloads dropped significantly in April, prompting worry that the app was always just "a temporary salve to being stuck inside."

On The Cut, Safy-Hallan Farah has predicted a post-pandemic future in which our culture prioritizes, among other things, "earnestness," "communism," and "being extremely offline." The writer Luke Winkie forecasts a 10-week period of everyone abandoning the internet, adding that "offline is going to hit like a drug." Discourse's Patrick Redford put it best, writing that "the idea of further screen-only interaction with my friends and loved ones after a year overstuffed with them makes me want to toss my phone into the Pacific Ocean...."

[B]ut it's hard to imagine that a Great Offlining is really in the cards. Instead, we could be heading for a Great Rebalancing, where we reconfigure how we do our work and how we organize our time on the internet. We've grown more aware of how we rely on one another — online as well as off — and of the tools we have or could build for responding to a crisis. The biggest tech companies' accrual of power remains one of the most serious problems of my lifetime, but I no longer talk about the internet itself as if it were an external and malignant force, now that I've lived in such intimate contact with it for so long.

Dartmouth college switched to remote tests when the coronavirus ended in-person exams — then accused 17 medical students of cheating, reports the New York Times: At the heart of the accusations is Dartmouth's use of the Canvas system to retroactively track student activity during remote exams without their knowledge. In the process, the medical school may have overstepped by using certain online activity data to try to pinpoint cheating, leading to some erroneous accusations, according to independent technology experts, a review of the software code and school documents obtained by The New York Times.

Dartmouth's drive to root out cheating provides a sobering case study of how the coronavirus has accelerated colleges' reliance on technology, normalizing student tracking in ways that are likely to endure after the pandemic. While universities have long used anti-plagiarism software and other anti-cheating apps, the pandemic has pushed hundreds of schools that switched to remote learning to embrace more invasive tools. Over the last year, many have required students to download software that can take over their computers during remote exams or use webcams to monitor their eye movements for possibly suspicious activity, even as technology experts have warned that such tools can be invasive, insecure, unfair and inaccurate.

Some universities are now facing a backlash over the technology....

While some students may have cheated, technology experts said, it would be difficult for a disciplinary committee to distinguish cheating from noncheating based on the data snapshots that Dartmouth provided to accused students. And in an analysis of the Canvas software code, the Times found instances in which the system automatically generated activity data even when no one was using a device. "If other schools follow the precedent that Dartmouth is setting here, any student can be accused based on the flimsiest technical evidence," said Cooper Quintin, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights organization, who analyzed Dartmouth's methodology.

Seven of the 17 accused students have had their cases dismissed. In at least one of those cases, administrators said, "automated Canvas processes are likely to have created the data that was seen rather than deliberate activity by the user," according to a school email that students made public. The 10 others have been expelled, suspended or received course failures and unprofessional-conduct marks on their records that could curtail their medical careers... Tensions flared in early April when an anonymous student account on Instagram posted about the cheating charges. Soon after, Dartmouth issued a social media policy warning that students' anonymous posts "may still be traced back" to them.... The conduct review committee then issued decisions in 10 of the cases, telling several students that they would be expelled, suspending others and requiring some to retake courses or repeat a year of school at a cost of nearly $70,000...

Several students said they were now so afraid of being unfairly targeted in a data-mining dragnet that they had pushed the medical school to offer in-person exams with human proctors. Others said they had advised prospective medical students against coming to Dartmouth.

Amid the hodgepodge of Verizon Media assets that Apollo Global Management is buying from Verizon -- Yahoo Finance, TechCrunch, advertising technology, Yahoo Fantasy -- there's one cash flow stream that will not die: AOL. From a report: The famed internet company that once bought Time Warner for $182 billion and used to make billions of dollars annually selling dial-up modem access, still has a monthly subscription service called AOL Advantage. In 2015, 2.1 million people were still using AOL's dial-up service. That revenue stream has dried up. The number of dial-up users is now "in the low thousands," according to a person familiar with the matter.

But AOL still has a fairly lucrative base of customers who pay for technical support and identity theft services each month. There are about 1.5 million monthly customers paying $9.99 or $14.99 per month for AOL Advantage, said another person, who asked not to be named because the information is private. If average revenue per user is $10 per month, conservatively, that's $180 million of annual revenue.

AOL and Yahoo are being sold again, this time to a private equity firm. From a report: Wireless company Verizon will sell Verizon Media, which consists of the once-pioneering tech platforms, to Apollo Global Management in a $5 billion deal. Verizon said Monday that it will keep a 10% stake in the new company, which will be called Yahoo. Yahoo at the end of the last century was the face of the internet, preceding the behemoth tech platforms to follow, such as Google and Facebook. And AOL was the portal, bringing almost everyone who logged on during the internet's earliest days. Verizon spent about $9 billion buying AOL and Yahoo over two years starting in 2015, hoping to jump-start a digital media business that would compete with Google and Facebook.

Business Insider reports: Former Netflix vice president of IT Michael Kail was convicted by a federal jury on Friday of 28 counts of fraud and money laundering, the U.S. Department of Justice announced in a press release.

Kail, who was indicted in 2018, used his position to create a "pay-to-play" scheme where he approved contracts with outside tech companies looking to do business with Netflix in exchange for taking bribes and kickbacks, according to evidence presented to the jury, the release said. Kail accepted bribes or kickbacks from nine different companies totaling more than $500,000 as well as stock options, according to the Department of Justice's press release...

Netflix sued Kail after he left the company in 2014 to take a role as Yahoo's CIO, accusing him of fraud and breaching his fiduciary duties.
One FBI agent says that Kail "stole the opportunity to work with an industry pioneer from honest, hardworking, Silicon Valley companies," according to the details in the Department of Justice statement: To facilitate kickback payments, the evidence at trial showed that Kail created and controlled a limited liability corporation called Unix Mercenary, LLC. Established on February 7, 2012, Unix Mercenary had no employees and no business location. Kail was the sole signatory to its bank accounts...

Kail faces a maximum sentence of twenty years in prison and a fine of $250,000, or twice his gross gain or twice the gross loss to Netflix, whichever is greater, for each count of a wire or mail fraud conviction, and ten years in prison and a fine of $250,000 for each count of a money laundering conviction.

According to Bloomberg, Verizon is considering selling AOL and Yahoo -- two once high-flying dot-com brands it purchased in 2015 and 2017, respectively. Bloomberg reports: Verizon Media could fetch as much as $5 billion [...]. The company is talking to Apollo Global Management about a deal, they said. It couldn't immediately be learned how a deal would be structured or if other suitors may emerge. No final decision has been made and Verizon could opt to keep the unit. The move comes as Verizon divests tertiary media assets while ramping up its focus on its wireless business and the the rollout of its 5G service. Last year, it agreed to sell the HuffPost online news service to BuzzFeed Inc. and it unloaded the blogging platform Tumblr in 2019. This divestiture would mark Verizon's final retreat from an expensive foray into online advertising, a strategy that never really took off.

"An Oklahoma woman was recently informed that she was charged with felony embezzlement of rented property for not returning a VHS tape over 20 years ago," reports Business Insider: Caron McBride reportedly rented the "Sabrina The Teenage Witch" tape at a now closed store in Norman, Oklahoma in 1999, according to KOKH-TV. She was charged a year later, in March 2000, after it was not returned, KOKH-TV reported citing documents. McBride was notified about the charge by the Cleveland County District Attorney's Office when she was attempting to change the name of her license after she got married, the news station reported...

"I had lived with a young man, this was over 20 years ago. He had two kids, daughters that were 8, 10, or 11 years old, and I'm thinking he went and got it and didn't take it back or something. I have never watched that show in my entire life, just not my cup of tea. Meanwhile, I'm a wanted felon for a VHS tape," McBride told the news station.
"Documents show the movie was rented at movie place in Norman, Oklahoma, which closed in 2008..." reports one local news station: McBride said over the last 20 years, she's been let go from several jobs without being given a reason why, and said it now all makes sense. "This is why. Because when they ran my criminal background check, all they're seeing is those two words: felony embezzlement," McBride said.
"The DA's office says the charge was filed under a previous district attorney," reports a local Oklahoma station, "and after reviewing the case, they thought it was fit to dismiss it."

But McBride still has to get an attorney to expunge the incident from her record.

The law enforcement arm of the U.S. Postal Service has been quietly running a program that tracks and collects Americans' social media posts, including those about planned protests, according to a document obtained by Yahoo News. From the report: The details of the surveillance effort, known as iCOP, or Internet Covert Operations Program, have not previously been made public. The work involves having analysts trawl through social media sites to look for what the document describes as "inflammatory" postings and then sharing that information across government agencies. "Analysts with the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) monitored significant activity regarding planned protests occurring internationally and domestically on March 20, 2021," says the March 16 government bulletin, marked as "law enforcement sensitive" and distributed through the Department of Homeland Security's fusion centers. "Locations and times have been identified for these protests, which are being distributed online across multiple social media platforms, to include right-wing leaning Parler and Telegram accounts."

Online electronics retailer Newegg said it is now accepting dogecoin as a method of payment. From a report: Customers will be able to complete transactions using the dogecoin held in their BitPay wallet, according to an announcement Tuesday. Newegg first began accepting payments in bitcoin in July 2014. The company is now among the first retailers to accept dogecoin as payment. Further reading: Dogecoin Rips in Meme-Fueled Frenzy on Pot-Smoking Holiday.

QAnon "was all but confirmed to be a hoax by the person who ran the hoax," writes Mashable, citing the finale of a six-episode documentary on HBO by Cullen Hoback.

"All of it leads back to the same place — that there are very few other people who could have and would have made the Q drops other than the person who ran the place where they were posted," notes Newsweek: Ahead of the first episode, Ron Watkins posted on encrypted messaging service Telegram stating: "I am not Q. I've never spoken privately with Q. I don't know who Q is." However, during the final episode, Hoback suggests that Ron Watkins slips up and inadvertently reveals that he posted as Q on 8kun
A BBC investigative reporter on disinformation tweeted that climactic moment from Cullens' documentary, adding "It was so good it made the whole six hours worth it."

Or as Mashable puts it, "Ron Watkins seems to admit he's Q, in the dumbest possible ending to QAnon," calling it "so anticlimactic it bordered on absurd." The previously camera-shy Watkins — who runs 8kun [formerly 8chan] alongside his father, Jim — has long been the key suspect for the identity of Q... But his accidental reveal, the slip of the mask is huge, if anticlimactic, news... It's wild and so...dumb...that this is how we all find out — because Watkins slipped up for a second.

It makes sense since Q had somewhat inexplicably tied its fortunes to posting only on 8chan/8kun. It's inexplicable unless, you know, the Watkins family was behind the ordeal.
Insider notes that Fredrick Brennan, the software developer who created 8chan and has since become a vocal critic, also believes Q is one of the Watkins' — a theory investigated last June by the Atlantic. And in a September investigation, ABC News reported on the likelihood that Watkins is Q, finding that he and his son, Ron, were the "two Americans most clearly associated" with Q drops. The theory was also popularized by a September "Reply All" podcast episode...

At the end of February 2020, Watkins registered the PAC, "Disarm the Deep State," with the Federal Elections Commission.
They also note that after the documentary aired on HBO, "the community reacted as many experts suspected it would: denial and accusations of 'fake news.'" Watkins had apparently gone to great lengths to suggest to Cullen that Q was instead former Trump advisor Steve Bannon. And last week, the BBC reporter points out, Watkins' father began suggesting a new theory: that Q was actually....documentary maker Cullen Hoback. But the BBC reporter adds: Based on the finale of #QIntotheStorm Q drops are over for good. Both Jim and Ron told Cullen Hoback Q would end after the election, and that's exactly what happened.

We already had proof of the end given there haven't been any drops since 8 December, but we can now be certain.
Hoback's tweet specifically says that "Both Ron and Jim, but especially Ron, told me multiple times over the years that they believed Q would cease at the election." And Hoback adds:

"Ron implied on more than one occasion it *might be* a marketing campaign."

A British company is suing Microsoft for $370m in damages [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source] in the English High Court, alleging that the US company is trying to crush a multibillion-dollar market in second-hand versions of its software. From a report: ValueLicensing buys pre-owned Microsoft software licences from companies that upgrade their IT or become insolvent, and then resells them across the UK and Europe. It claims on its website that its customers can save up to 70 per cent by buying used software, and points to one NHS Trust that allegedly saved $1.37 m by using Microsoft Office 2019, rather than the latest version of the office tools suite. Jonathan Horley, ValueLicensing's founder, accused Microsoft of harming competition in the used software market by persuading companies to relinquish their perpetual licences, often in exchange for discounts on Microsoft's cloud-based software, such as Office 365. "Microsoft has an incentive to move to its new cloud-based model and remove the old licences from the market so customers have no choice but to move to its subscription model," said Mr Horley, in an interview with the Financial Times.

After 16 years of asinine questions and dubious answers, Yahoo Answers is shutting down next month. From a report: The company announced that starting April 20, users won't be able to post new questions or answer other people's questions; on May 4, the site will become inaccessible, and will redirect to the Yahoo homepage. Users who've posted questions and answers in the past can download their data via request before June 30, 2021, here. "While Yahoo Answered was once a key part of Yahoo's products and services, it has become less popular over the years as the needs of our members have changed," an announcement that went out to users, as spotted by the good people of the r/DataHoarder subreddit, said.

The New York Times tells the story of the Baikal-Gigaton Volume Detector, the largest neutrino telescope in the Northern Hemisphere and one of the world's biggest underwater space telescopes, now submerged in the world's deepest lake in Siberia.

The Times includes a quote from 80-year-old Russian physicist Grigori V. Domogatski, who has actually "led the quest" for this underwater telescope for 40 years. "If you take on a project, you must understand that you have to realize it in any conditions that come up," Dr. Domogatski said, banging on his desk for emphasis. "Otherwise, there's no point in even starting." [T]his hunt for neutrinos from the far reaches of the cosmos, spanning eras in geopolitics and in astrophysics, sheds light on how Russia has managed to preserve some of the scientific prowess that characterized the Soviet Union — as well as the limitations of that legacy... In the 1970s, despite the Cold War, the Americans and the Soviets were working together to plan a first deep water neutrino detector off the coast of Hawaii. But after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the Soviets were kicked out of the project. So, in 1980, the Institute for Nuclear Research in Moscow started its own neutrino-telescope effort, led by Dr. Domogatski. The place to try seemed obvious, although it was about 2,500 miles away: Baikal.

The project did not get far beyond planning and design before the Soviet Union collapsed, throwing many of the country's scientists into poverty and their efforts into disarray. But an institute outside Berlin, which soon became part of Germany's DESY particle research center, joined the Baikal effort.... By the mid 1990s, the Russian team had managed to identify "atmospheric" neutrinos — those produced by collisions in Earth's atmosphere — but not ones arriving from outer space. It would need a bigger detector for that. As Russia started to reinvest in science in the 2000s under President Vladimir V. Putin, Dr. Domogatski managed to secure more than $30 million in funding to build a new Baikal telescope...

Construction began in 2015, and a first phase encompassing 2,304 light-detecting orbs suspended in the depths is scheduled to be completed by the time the ice melts in April. (The orbs remain suspended in the water year-round, watching for neutrinos and sending data to the scientists' lakeshore base by underwater cable....) The Baikal telescope looks down, through the entire planet, out the other side, toward the center of our galaxy and beyond, essentially using Earth as a giant sieve. For the most part, larger particles hitting the opposite side of the planet eventually collide with atoms. But almost all neutrinos — 100 billion of which pass through your fingertip every second — continue, essentially, on a straight line. Yet when a neutrino, exceedingly rarely, hits an atomic nucleus in the water, it produces a cone of blue light called Cherenkov radiation. The effect was discovered by the Soviet physicist Pavel A. Cherenkov, one of Dr. Domogatski's former colleagues down the hall at his institute in Moscow. If you spend years monitoring a billion tons of deep water for unimaginably tiny flashes of Cherenkov light, many physicists believe, you will eventually find neutrinos that can be traced back to cosmic conflagrations that emitted them billions of light-years away.

The orientation of the blue cones even reveals the precise direction from which the neutrinos that caused them came.
Business Insider notes it's run by an international team of researchers from the Czech Republic, Germany, Poland, Russia, and Slovakia — and according to Russian news agency TASS cost nearly $34 million.

80-year-old Dr. Domogatski tells the Times, "You should never miss the chance to ask nature any question."