Meta's head of commerce and financial technologies Stephane Kasriel posted on Twitter that the company will sunset its NFT and digital collectibles features on Instagram and Facebook. TechCrunch reports: This short-lived product only began testing with select Instagram creators last May, plus some Facebook users in June. By July, Meta expanded NFT support on Instagram for creators in 100 countries. Less than a year later, Meta is moving on from NFTs. "We're winding down digital collectibles (NFTs) for now to focus on other ways to support creators, people, and businesses," Kasriel wrote in a Twitter thread.

A Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch that it is shifting its investments away from NFTs toward products like Meta Pay, as well as features that enable creators to earn money directly on Meta platforms, like its tipping feature called gifts. The company also said it is testing ways for creators to earn ad revenue on Reels. "Let me be clear: creating opportunities for creators and businesses to connect with their fans and monetize remains a priority, and we're going to focus on areas where we can make impact at scale, such as messaging and monetization opps for Reels," Kasriel wrote.

"Meta, the parent firm of Facebook and Instagram, is working on a standalone, text-based social network app," reports the BBC.
BR> "It could rival both Twitter and its decentralised competitor, Mastodon." A spokesperson told the BBC: "We're exploring a standalone decentralized social network for sharing text updates...." According to MoneyControl, the new app is codenamed P92, and will allow users to log in through their existing Instagram credentials.

Meta's app will be based on a similar framework to the one that powers Mastodon, a Twitter-like service which was launched in 2016. The new app would be decentralised — it cannot be run at the whim of a single entity, bought or sold....

It was not immediately clear when Meta would roll out the new app.

Breaking news from CNN: Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Sunday instructed the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to guarantee Silicon Valley Bank customers will have access to all of their money starting Monday.

By guaranteeing all deposits — even the uninsured money customers kept with the failed SVB bank — the government can ensure public confidence in America's banking system, said Yellen, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and FDIC Chairman Martin J. Gruenberg in a joint statement....

The FDIC opened an auction Sunday for bids to acquire the bank, the Treasury Department said in a briefing with lawmakers in the California delegation, two sources familiar with the briefing told CNN.... Under Secretary for Domestic Finance Nellie Liang and Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs Jonathan Davidson led the briefing, during which they told members that the FDIC is prepared "to operate the institution" to ensure depositors can maintain payroll for their employees and that more operations will emerge in coming days, one of the sources said.
The treasury secretary's statement clarified that "No losses associated with the resolution of Silicon Valley Bank will be borne by the taxpayer." We are also announcing a similar systemic risk exception for Signature Bank, New York, New York, which was closed today by its state chartering authority. All depositors of this institution will be made whole. As with the resolution of Silicon Valley Bank, no losses will be borne by the taxpayer. Shareholders and certain unsecured debtholders will not be protected. Senior management has also been removed. Any losses to the Deposit Insurance Fund to support uninsured depositors will be recovered by a special assessment on banks, as required by law.

Finally, the Federal Reserve Board on Sunday announced it will make available additional funding to eligible depository institutions to help assure banks have the ability to meet the needs of all their depositors.
Meanwhile, congresswoman Nancy Pelosi said there are multiple potential buyers for SVB, and "What we would hope to see by tomorrow morning is for some other bank to buy the bank." The UK arm of the bank has already received a bid from the Bank of London.

From the treasury secretary's statement: The U.S. banking system remains resilient and on a solid foundation, in large part due to reforms that were made after the financial crisis that ensured better safeguards for the banking industry.

Those reforms combined with today's actions demonstrate our commitment to take the necessary steps to ensure that depositors' savings remain safe.

"Based on initial data review, vehicle is healthy," Relativity Space tweeted today. "More info to follow on cause of aborts today. Thanks for playing."

Remaining back on the launchpad is the largest 3D printed object ever to exist. And they're still hoping to launch it into space.

They'd planned a launch this morning from Cape Canaveral, Florida of a 110-foot rocket (33.5 meters) on a mission they're calling GLHF — "Good Luck, Have Fun".

The rocket's makers — California-based Relativity Space — call it "the world's first 3D printed rocket." A full 85% of the rocket's weight comes from 3D printed parts, explains Wired, and "only the computing system, electronics, and readily available parts like fasteners were not." Named Terran 1, the 7.5-foot-wide rocket (2.2 meters) inaugurates the company's ambitious plans for 3D printing in space: Relativity Space wants to use Terran 1 to (comparatively) cheaply lift satellites for other companies and NASA into Earth orbit. It also plans to construct Terran R, a larger, more powerful, fully reusable rocket that the company hopes will compete with SpaceX's Falcon 9, which has a smaller payload capacity and only reuses the rocket's first stage. In late 2024, Relativity plans to test using Terran R to launch payloads to Mars; another startup, Impulse Space, will provide the lander.
From the company's web site: Like its structure, all Relativity engines are 3D printed and use liquid oxygen and liquid natural gas, which are not only the best for rocket propulsion, but also for reusability, and the easiest to eventually transition to methane on Mars.
The tagline for the company's Twitter feed says they're "Building humanity's multiplanetary future." And excitement is running high, reports Spaceflight Now" "There are a number of firsts here potentially on this rocket," said Josh Brost, vice president of revenue operations at Relativity Space....

"Hard to believe the day is nearly here to launch Terran 1, our first rocket!" Tim Ellis, co-founder and CEO of Relativity Space tweeted Tuesday....

The company now boasts some 1,000 employees, a million-square-foot headquarters and factory in Long Beach, California, and $1.3 billion in venture capital and equity fundraising, including an early $500,000 investment from billionaire Mark Cuban. In 2021, the company reached a valuation of $4.2 billion before launching any rockets....

"No new company has ever had their liquid rocket make it to space on their first attempt," Brost, also a former engineer and manager at SpaceX, told Spaceflight Now in a pre-launch interview. "So if everything goes incredibly well, and we achieve orbit on our first launch ... that would be a remarkable milestone for us, which we would be, of course, over the moon excited about. But that doesn't define success for us."
Wired adds that they're not the only company working on space-related 3D printing: Australia's Fleet Space has already been producing lightweight, 3D-printed radio frequency antennas for satellites. Next year, using printers half the size of a bus, they plan to create a satellite constellation called Alpha that will be entirely 3D-printed.... Flavia Tata Nardini, the company's CEO, believes space-based 3D printing is coming next. "In my ideal future, in 10 to 15 years, I won't have to launch satellites from here; I can build them up there."

Krisztian Sandor writes via CoinDesk: U.S.-based stablecoin issuer Circle held a part of its USDC stablecoin's cash reserves at Silicon Valley Bank as of Jan. 17, according to the firm's latest attestation (PDF). USDC is the second-largest stablecoin on the market, with a $43 billion circulating supply that is fully backed by government bonds and cash-like assets. According to Circle's January reserve report, the firm held some $9.88 billion of cash deposited at regulated banks to back USDC's value. USDC's banking partners included Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), the California-based bank that was taken over by regulators and shut down on Friday. The full list of banks that held cash for Circle's USDC are Bank of New York Mellon, Citizens Trust Bank, Customers Bank, New York Community Bank (a division of Flagstar Bank, N.A.), Signature Bank, Silicon Valley Bank and Silvergate Bank. Circle also keeps some part of USDC reserves in a dedicated BlackRock fund.

Circle said last week it had cut ties with Silvergate Bank, the crypto-friendly bank that halted operations and said it would "voluntarily liquidate" its assets earlier this week. Signature Bank's holding company's (SI) shares have dropped 12% on the news about SVB's shutdown. Signature said in December that it would reduce deposits tied to crypto firms by as much as $10 billion. Simon Dixon, CEO of online investment platform BnkToTheFuture, tweeted that Circle's chief executive Jeremy Allaire said the firm held "most of their cash is in BNY Melon," while sharing a screenshot from March 2. BnkToTheFuture is an investor and shareholder in Circle.

Twitter's decline is paving the way for other platforms to build next-generation replacements. And now the biggest player in the game is getting involved: Meta is in the early stages of building a dedicated app for people to post text-based updates. From a report: "We're exploring a standalone decentralized social network for sharing text updates," the company told Platformer exclusively in an email. "We believe there's an opportunity for a separate space where creators and public figures can share timely updates about their interests." News that Meta has been exploring a text-based network was first reported Thursday by MoneyControl. The app is codenamed P92 and will allow users to log in through their existing Instagram credentials, the outlet reported.

Details about the project are scant. The product is still in its earliest stages, sources said, and there is no time frame for it being released. But legal and regulatory teams have already started to investigate potential privacy concerns around the app so they can be addressed before launch, we're told. Adam Mosseri, who runs Instagram, is taking the lead on the project, sources said. The most remarkable aspect of the project is that Meta plans for the network to be decentralized. While the company would not elaborate beyond its statement, in a decentralized network individual users are typically able to set up their own, independent servers and set server-specific rules for how content is moderated. Building a decentralized network could also give Meta the opportunity for its new app to interoperate with other social products -- a previously unheard-of gesture from a company known for building some of the most lucrative walled gardens in the industry's history.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: HP customers are showing frustration online as the vendor continues to use firmware updates to discourage or, as users report, outright block the use of non-HP-brand ink cartridges in HP printers. HP has already faced class-action lawsuits and bad publicity from "dynamic security," but that hasn't stopped the company from expanding the practice. Dynamic security is a feature used by HP printers to authenticate ink cartridges and prevent use of cartridges that aren't HP-approved. As the company explains: "Dynamic security relies on the printer's ability to communicate with the security chips or electronic circuitry on the cartridges. HP uses dynamic security measures to protect the quality of our customer experience, maintain the integrity of our printing systems, and protect our intellectual property. Dynamic security equipped printers are intended to work only with cartridges that have new or reused HP chips or electronic circuitry. The printers use the dynamic security measures to block cartridges using non-HP chips or modified or non-HP electronic circuitry. Reused, remanufactured, and refilled cartridges that reuse the HP chip or electronic circuitry are unaffected by dynamic security."

HP is set on continuing to use DRM to discourage its printer customers from spending ink and toner money outside of the HP family. "HP have updated their printers to outright ban 'non-HP' ink! They no longer shows the 'can't guarantee quality' message, but instead cancels your print completely until you inset a HP ink cartridge," Reddit user grhhull posted Tuesday. "After contacting HP, they advised 'this is due to the recent 'update' of all printers.'" It's unclear when HP issued updates for which model printers, but there are alleged customer complaints online stemming from late last year, showing plenty of customers surprised their printer no longer worked with non-HP ink cartridges after an update. Some pointed to third-party brands they had relied on for years.

HP community support threads include complaints about the OfficeJet 7740 and OfficeJet Pro 6970. HP lists both printers, as well as others, as able to circumnavigate dynamic security under specific conditions. However, HP's support page states this only applies to models manufactured before December 1, 2016. For more examples, there are comments on HP's support community suggesting that HP's OfficeJet 6978 and 6968 were recently affected. Both printers are discontinued, but HP's product pages make it clear that the fickle nature of dynamic security means that third-party ink could stop working at any time. And HP's dynamic security page also leaves the door open for the sudden bricking of functioning ink: "Firmware updates delivered periodically over the internet will maintain the effectiveness of the dynamic security measures," the page reads. "Updates can improve, enhance, or extend the printer's functionality and features, protect against security threats, and serve other purposes, but these updates can also block cartridges using a non-HP chip or modified or non-HP circuitry from working in the printer, including cartridges that work today."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, a group of AI researchers from Google and the Technical University of Berlin unveiled PaLM-E, a multimodal embodied visual-language model (VLM) with 562 billion parameters that integrates vision and language for robotic control. They claim it is the largest VLM ever developed and that it can perform a variety of tasks without the need for retraining. According to Google, when given a high-level command, such as "bring me the rice chips from the drawer," PaLM-E can generate a plan of action for a mobile robot platform with an arm (developed by Google Robotics) and execute the actions by itself.

PaLM-E does this by analyzing data from the robot's camera without needing a pre-processed scene representation. This eliminates the need for a human to pre-process or annotate the data and allows for more autonomous robotic control. It's also resilient and can react to its environment. For example, the PaLM-E model can guide a robot to get a chip bag from a kitchen -- and with PaLM-E integrated into the control loop, it becomes resistant to interruptions that might occur during the task. In a video example, a researcher grabs the chips from the robot and moves them, but the robot locates the chips and grabs them again. In another example, the same PaLM-E model autonomously controls a robot through tasks with complex sequences that previously required human guidance. Google's research paper explains (PDF) how PaLM-E turns instructions into actions.

PaLM-E is a next-token predictor, and it's called "PaLM-E" because it's based on Google's existing large language model (LLM) called "PaLM" (which is similar to the technology behind ChatGPT). Google has made PaLM "embodied" by adding sensory information and robotic control. Since it's based on a language model, PaLM-E takes continuous observations, like images or sensor data, and encodes them into a sequence of vectors that are the same size as language tokens. This allows the model to "understand" the sensory information in the same way it processes language. In addition to the RT-1 robotics transformer, PaLM-E draws from Google's previous work on ViT-22B, a vision transformer model revealed in February. ViT-22B has been trained on various visual tasks, such as image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, and image captioning.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The US can stop Twitter from releasing details about the government's demands for user information in national security investigations, a court ruled (PDF), in the same week House Republicans are to grill national security officials over surveillance. Twitter had protested the government's redactions to a 2014 "transparency report" that featured a numerical breakdown of national security-related data requests from the previous year. The US appeals court in San Francisco on Monday agreed with a lower-court judge that the Justice Department had shown a "compelling" interest in keeping that information secret. Based on classified and unclassified declarations provided by government officials, the court was "able to appreciate why Twitter's proposed disclosure would risk making our foreign adversaries aware of what is being surveilled and what is not being surveilled -- if anything at all," US Circuit Judge Daniel Bress wrote for the three-judge panel.

Although the case is almost a decade old, the ruling comes just as lawmakers and US national security agencies gear up for a bruising fight over making changes to a key surveillance program. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, described by intelligence officials as a key authority, expires on Dec. 31 unless Congress votes to renew it. US agencies use the authority to compel internet and technology companies to turn over information about suspected foreign terrorists and spies. Changes to Section 702 could include altering what companies like Twitter are required to do in response to government demands. "The case at issue in Monday's decision involved efforts by Twitter to share information about two types of federal law enforcement demands on the social media company: 'national security letters' for subscriber information, which would cover metadata but not the substance of any electronic communications, and orders under FISA, which could include content," adds Bloomberg.

Judge Daniel Bress wrote: "The government may not fend off every First Amendment challenge by invoking national security. But we must apply the First Amendment with due regard for the government's compelling interest in securing the safety of our country and its people."

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp shares his perspective on the 10th anniversary of Code.org: Remember this?" asks tech-backed Code.org on Twitter as it celebrates its achievements.... "It's the viral video that launched Code.org back in 2013!" Code.org also reminds its 1M Twitter followers that What Most Schools Don't Teach starred tech leaders Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Tony Hsieh, and Drew Houston.

But 10 years later, the promise of unlimited tech jobs and crazy-fun workplaces promoted in the video by these Poster Boys for K-12 Computer Science hasn't exactly aged well, and may serve as more of a cautionary tale about hubris for some rather than evoke fond memories.

"Our policy at Facebook is literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find," exclaimed Zuckerberg in the video. But ten years later, Facebook's policy is firing as many employees as it can — 11,000+ and counting. Houston, who sang the praises of working in cool tech workplaces in the video ("To get the very best people we try to make the office as awesome as possible"), went on to make remote work the standard practice at Dropbox, cut 11% of his employees, and reported a $575M loss on unneeded office space. Under pressure, Gates left Microsoft, Dorsey left Twitter, and Hsieh tragically left (Amazon-owned) Zappos, and the companies they co-founded recently unveiled plans for massive layoffs and halted ambitious office expansion plans as tech employees push back on return-to-the-office edicts.

Still, there's no denying the success of what the National Science Foundation called the "amazing marketing prowess" of tech giant supported and directed Code.org when it comes to pushing coding into American classrooms. The nonprofit boasts of having 80M+ student accounts, reported it had spent $74.7M to train 113,000+ K-12 teachers to deliver its K-12 CS curriculum, and has set its sights on making CS a high school graduation requirement in every state by 2030.

Interestingly, concomitant with Code.org's 10th anniversary celebration was the release of a new academic paper — Breaking the Code: Confronting Racism in Computer Science through Community, Criticality, and Citizenship — that provocatively questions whether K-12 CS, at least in its current incarnation, is a feature or a bug. From the paper: "We are currently seeing an unprecedented push of computing into P-12 education systems across the US, with calls for compulsory computing education and changes to graduation requirements.... Although computing creep narratives are typically framed in lofty democratic terms, the 'access' narrative is ultimately a corporate play. Broadening participation in computing serves corporate interests by offering an expanded labor supply from which to choose the most productive workers. It is true that this might benefit an elite subset of BIPOC individuals, but the macroeconomics of the global labor market mean that access to computing is unlikely to ever benefit BIPOC communities at scale. [...] There are several nonprofits invested in the growth of computing, many with mission statements that do explicitly cite equity (and sometimes racial equity, in particular). Some of the larger nonprofits, though, are mainly funded by (and thus ultimately serve) corporate interests (e.g., Code. org).

schwit1 writes: In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when little was known about the virus, the U.K. government briefly considered asking the public to exterminate every cat amid fears that the pets could spread the disease. Lord Bethell, a former deputy Health Minister from 2020 to 2021, revealed the news Wednesday during an interview with Britain's Channel 4 News.

"Can you imagine what would have happened if we had wanted to do that?" he added. The U.K. has some 10.9 million cats, according to the 2022 PDSA Animal Wellbeing report. The bombshell revelations have sparked astonishment from some on social media, with users sharing images of their own cats and vowing they would have put up a fight. 10 Downing Street's own feline friend Larry's unofficial Twitter parody account wrote: "hard not to take this personally."

According to web services chief Mikhail Parakhin, Microsoft is giving Bing preview testers a toggle to change the chatbot's responses. Engadget reports: A Creative option allows for more "original and imaginative" (read: fun) answers, while a Precise switch emphasizes shorter, to-the-point replies. There's also a Balanced setting that aims to strike a middle ground.

The company reined in the Bing AI's responses after early users noticed strange behavior during long chats and 'entertainment' sessions. As The Verge observes, the restrictions irked some users as the chatbot would simply decline to answer some questions. Microsoft has been gradually lifting limits since then, and just this week updated the AI to reduce both the unresponsiveness and "hallucinations." The bot may not be as wonderfully weird, but it should also be more willing to indulge your curiosity.

Longtime Slashdot reader smooth wombat writes: Late Wednesday night, Silvergate Capital informed the SEC it won't be able to file its annual report on time, and is determining if it can continue to operate. Unlike most traditional banks which have steered clear of crypto, Silvergate is a dominant lender to the crypto industry.

The La Jolla, California-based bank reported a $1 billion loss for the fourth quarter as investors panicked over the collapse of FTX, the exchange founded by Sam Bankman-Fried that is now at the center of a massive federal fraud investigation.

FTX's collapse in November rippled through the digital asset sector, forcing several firms to halt operations and even declare bankruptcy as liquidity dried up and investors fled. But unlike FTX, BlockFi, Celsius, Voyager and other crypto companies that folded last year, Silvergate is a traditional, federally-insured lender that has positioned itself as a gateway to the crypto sector. Coinbase, the largest U.S. crypto exchange, severed ties with Silvergate. The company tweeted: "Out of an abundance of caution, Coinbase is no longer accepting or initiating payments to or from Silvergate."

Galaxy Digital, a crypto financial services company, issued a similar statement: "In light of recent developments, Galaxy has stopped accepting or initiating transfers to Silvergate. As a firm, we continue to have no material exposure to Silvergate, and this action was taken out of an abundance of caution."

China says a ban on the use of TikTok by official European Union institutions will harm business confidence in Europe. From a report: In the latest salvo in the battle over the Chinese-owned video sharing app, the European Parliament, the European Commission and the EU Council have banned TikTok from being installed on official devices. [...] China has been pushing back, though its ruling Communist Party has long blocked many foreign social media platforms and messaging apps, including YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram -- and TikTok. A Chinese version of the app, Douyin, is permitted, but its content is not the same as that found on TikTok. "The EU claims to be the most open market in the world, but recently it has been taking restrictive measures and unreasonably suppressing other countries' companies on the grounds of national security," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said at a daily briefing Wednesday. "This will dampen the international community's confidence in the business environment in the EU. The EU should match its words with deeds, respect the market economy and fair competition, stop overstretching and abusing the concept of national security and provide an open, fair, transparent and non-discriminatory business environment for all companies," Mao said.

Bluesky, the Twitter alternative backed by Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey, has hit the App Store and more testers are gaining access. Though the app is still only available as an invite-only beta, its App Store arrival signals that a public launch could be nearing. TechCrunch reports: We haven't heard much from Bluesky since October 2022, when the team behind the project shared an update on the Bluesky blog, detailing the status of the social protocol that powers its new Twitter-like app, also called Bluesky. AT (originally called ADX, or "Authenticated Transfer Protocol,") is Bluesky's main effort while the Bluesky mobile app serves to showcase the protocol in action. [...]

We received an invite to the service and found it to be a functional, if still rather bare-bones, Twitter-like experience. Users create a handle which is then represented as @username.bsky.social as well as the display name that appears more prominently in bold text, as on Twitter. As a brand-new app, Bluesky's suggested user list didn't immediately impress with big names of public figures during onboarding. The app itself presents a simplified user interface where you can click a plus button to create a post of 256 characters, which can include photos. Where Twitter asks "What's happening?," Bluesky asks "What's up?" You can search for and follow other individuals, much like on Twitter, then view their updates in a Home timeline. User profiles contain the same sort of features you'd expect: a profile pic, background, bio and metrics, like the number of followers and posts a user has, as well as how many people they're following. Profile feeds are also divided into two sections, like Twitter: posts and posts & replies.

Bluesky users can share, mute and block accounts, but advanced tools, like adding them to lists, are not yet available. The discover tab in the bottom center of the app's navigation is useful, offering more "who to follow" suggestions and a running feed of recently posted Bluesky updates. The latter gives you the opportunity to find more people who you might like to follow, based on their posts rather than just a bio. Posts themselves can be replied to, retweeted, liked and, from a three-dot menu, reported, shared via the iOS Share Sheet to other apps, or copied as text. Another tab lets you check on your Notifications, including likes, reposts, follows and replies, also much like Twitter. There are no DMs. You can download the app here, but you're still going to need an invite code.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: With Starlink speeds slowing due to a growing capacity crunch, SpaceX said a launch happening as soon as today will deploy the first "V2 Mini" satellites that provide four times more per-satellite capacity than earlier versions. Starlink's second-generation satellites include the V2 Minis and the larger V2. The larger V2s are designed for the SpaceX Starship, which isn't quite ready to launch yet, but the V2 Minis are slimmed-down versions that can be deployed from the Falcon 9 rocket. "The V2 Minis are smaller than the V2 satellites (hence the name) but don't let the name fool you," SpaceX said in a statement provided to Ars yesterday. "The V2 Minis include more advanced phased array antennas and the use of E-band for backhaul, which will enable Starlink to provide ~4x more capacity per satellite than earlier iterations."

SpaceX didn't specify the amount of data that each V2 Mini satellite can provide, but its first-generation satellites were designed for an aggregate downlink capacity of 17 to 23Gbps per satellite. The Federal Communications Commission recently gave SpaceX approval to launch 7,500 of the 30,000 planned second-generation satellites. A SpaceX Falcon 9 launch tentatively scheduled for today would put 21 V2 Minis into orbit. The larger V2 satellites that can't launch until Starship is ready will be able to send signals directly to cell phones, a capability that'll be used by SpaceX and T-Mobile in a partnership announced in August 2022. "Each Starlink V2 Mini satellite weighs about 1,760 pounds (800 kilograms) at launch, nearly three times heavier than the older Starlink satellites," notes Spaceflight Now. "They are also bigger in size, with a spacecraft body more than 13 feet (4.1 meters) wide, filling more of the Falcon 9 rocket's payload fairing during launch."

UPDATE: SpaceX successfully launched the first batch of "V2 Mini" Starlink satellites. "A Falcon 9 rocket hauled the 21 Starlink satellites into a 230-mile-high (370-kilometer) orbit after lifting off from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 6:13:50 p.m. EST (2313:50 GMT) Monday," reports Spaceflight Now. "SpaceX delayed the launch from earlier Monday afternoon to wait for radiation levels to abate following a solar storm that sparked dramatic auroral displays visible across Northern Europe and Canada." You can watch the launch here. Elon Musk also shared video of the first V2 satellites to reach orbit.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Several independent publishers have had their books removed from Kindle Unlimited because they breached an exclusivity agreement with Amazon. The actions of the book giant are covered by the mutually agreed terms. However, in many cases, it's not the authors who breached the agreement, but pirate sites who copied them, as pirates do. [...] Over the past few weeks, several authors complained that Amazon had removed their books from Kindle Unlimited because they violated their agreement. The piracy angle is front and center, raising plenty of questions and uncertainty.

Raven Kennedy, known for The Plated Prisoner Series, took her frustration to Instagram earlier this month. The author accused Amazon of sending repeated "threats". This eventually resulted in the removal of her books from Kindle Unlimited, ostensibly because these were listed on pirate sites. "Copyright infringement is outside of my control. Even though I pay a lot of money to a company to file takedown notices on my behalf, and am constantly checking the web for pirated versions, I can't keep up with all the intellectual theft. "And rather than support and help their authors, Amazon threatens me. The ironic thing is, these pirates are getting the files FROM Amazon," Kennedy added. A similar experience was shared by Carissa Broadbent, author of The War of Lost Hearts Trilogy. Again, Amazon removed a book from Kindle Unlimited for an issue that the author can't do much about. "A few hours ago, I got a stomach-dropping email from [Amazon] that Children of Fallen Gods had been removed from the Kindle store with zero warning, because of content 'freely available on the web' -- IE, piracy that I do not have any control over," Broadbent noted.

These and other authors received broad support from their readers, and sympathy from the general public. A Change.org petition launched in response has collected nearly 35,000 signatures to date, with new ones still coming in. Author Marlow Locker started the petition to send a wake-up call to Amazon. According to her, Amazon should stand behind its authors instead of punishing them for the fact that complete strangers have decided to pirate their books. Most authors will gladly comply with the exclusivity requirements, but only as far as this lies within their control. Piracy clearly isn't, especially when it happens on an almost industrial scale. "Currently, many automated systems use Amazon as a place to copy the e-files that they use for their free websites. It's completely absurd that the same company turns around and punishes an author by removing their book from KDP Select," the petition reads. From the commentary seen online, several authors have been able to resolve their issues with Amazon. And indeed, the books of Broadbent and Kennedy appear to be back online. That said, the exclusivity policy remains in place. Amazon notes that the books removed from Kindle Unlimited still remain for sale on Amazon's regular store. They also stress that authors are issued a warning with an extended timeline to try and resolve the issue before any action is taken.

"The problem is, of course, that individual authors can't stop piracy," adds TorrentFreak. "If it was that easy, most authors would be happy to do so. However, if billion-dollar publishing companies and the U.S. Government can't stop it, Amazon can't expect independent authors to 'resolve' the matter either."

Last week ZDNet reported Linux had added upstream support for the Apple M1 Pro, M1 Max, and M1 Ultra chips and then concluded that "newer Mac owners can look forward to running Linux on their M1-powered machines."

Saturday Asahi Linux called ZDNet's story "misleading and borderline false," posting on Twitter that "You will not be able to run Ubuntu nor any other standard distro with 6.2 on any M1 Mac. Please don't get your hopes up." We are continuously upstreaming kernel features, and 6.2 notably adds device trees and basic boot support for M1 Pro/Max/Ultra machines. However, there is still a long road before upstream kernels are usable on laptops. There is no trackpad/keyboard support upstream yet.

While you can boot an upstream 6.2 kernel on desktops (M1 Mac Mini, M1 Max/Ultra Mac Studio) and do useful things with it, that is only the case for 16K page size kernel builds. No generic ARM64 distro ships 16K kernels today, to our knowledge.

Our goal is to upstream everything, but that doesn't mean distros instantly get Apple Silicon support. As with many other platforms, there is some integration work required. Distros need to package our userspace tooling and, at this time, offer 16K kernels. In the future, once 4K kernel builds are somewhat usable, you can expect zero-integration distros to somewhat work on these machines (i.e. some hardware will work, but not all, or only partially). This should be sufficient to add a third-party repo with the integration packages.

But for out-of-the-box hardware support, distros will need to work with us to get everything right. We are already working with some, and we expect to announce official Apple Silicon support for a mainstream distro in the near future. Just not quite yet!

Three long-time Slashdot readers all submitted this story — schwit1, sinij, and DevNull127.

DevNull127 writes: Four U.S. agencies have concluded that the Covid-19 virus originated at the Wuhan market, the Wall Street Journal reports. The U.S. National Intelligence Council reached the same conclusion. Then there's two more agencies (including America's CIA) that are "undecided."

But there is one agency that decided — with "low confidence" — that the virus had somehow leaked from a lab. (And the FBI also decided with "moderate confidence" on that same theory.) "The new report highlights how different parts of the intelligence community have arrived at disparate judgments about the pandemic's origin," writes the Wall Street Journal — adding that unfortunately U.S. officials "declined" to give any details on what led to the Energy Department's position.
The Wall Street Journal also notes: Despite the agencies' differing analyses, the update reaffirmed an existing consensus between them that Covid-19 wasn't the result of a Chinese biological-weapons program, the people who have read the classified report said....

Some scientists argue that the virus probably emerged naturally and leapt from an animal to a human, the same pathway for outbreaks of previously unknown pathogens. Intelligence analysts who have supported that view give weight to "the precedent of past novel infectious disease outbreaks having zoonotic origins," the flourishing trade in a diverse set of animals that are susceptible to such infections, and their conclusion that Chinese officials didn't have foreknowledge of the virus, the 2021 report said.
Also responding to the Department of Energy's outlying position was a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at Canada's University of Saskatchewan, who posted a series of observations on Twitter: The available evidence shows overwhelmingly that the pandemic started at Huanan market via zoonosis. I have no idea what this evidence that Department of Energy has is. All I know that it is "weak" and resulted in a conclusion of "low confidence".

It reportedly comes from the DOE's own network of national labs rather than through spying. But I do know that to be consistent with the available scientific evidence, the DOE has to explain how the virus emerged twice over 2 wks in humans at the same market the size of a tennis court, over 8 km & across a river from the only lab in Wuhan working on SARSr-CoVs....

Claims of a progenitor at WIV are pure speculation & unsupported by evidence.... Despite 3 years of a global search for this evidence, it has not materialized, while evidence supporting zoonosis associated with Huanan has continued to stack up. At some point, an absence of evidence might just be evidence of absence.

More than 126,000 Californians are without electricity, reports ABC News. But Reuters notes that meanwhile "more than 400,000 customers of Detroit based DTE Energy remained without power on Saturday, the Detroit News reported," suffering through "a separate storm that clobbered the U.S. Plains, Midwest and Great Lakes regions earlier this week" that finally moved over the Atlantic.

And ABC News notes that as of Saturday morning, "more than 30 million Americans are under weather alerts in the West" — roughly 1 in 11 Americans — "ranging from blizzard warnings in the mountains near Los Angeles to wind chill alerts in the Northern Plains" near Wyoming. But California's problems came from its own major storm that delivered heavy snow, record rainfall, and damaging winds — a storm that "will be moving from southern California across the entire country over the next few days, eventually moving northeast by Tuesday." The Los Angeles area saw record rainfall on Friday, and it came along with 50- to 70-mile-per-hour winds. Burbank, California, saw 4.6 inches of rain Friday — stranding cars in floods and causing dozens of flight delays and cancellations. Records for daily rainfall were also set at the Los Angeles International Airport and the cities of Fresno, Bakersfield, Modesto and Oxnard.... Multiple stretches of I-5 in Los Angeles County were shuttered on Saturday due to rain and snow.
Snowflakes even fell around the "Hollywood" sign, reports Reuters. But bad weather wasn't just hitting southern California: In Northern California, San Francisco was expected to experience record cold temperatures on Saturday, and the National Weather Service warned residents of the state capital of Sacramento to avoid travel from Sunday through Wednesday as rain and snow started up again after a reprieve on Saturday. "Extreme impacts from heavy snow & winds will cause extremely dangerous to impossible driving conditions & likely widespread road closures & infrastructure impacts!" the agency said on Twitter. The next set of storms, expected to hit on Sunday, will bring wind gusts of up to 50 miles per hour (80 kph) in the Sacramento Valley, and up to 70 miles per hour in the nearby Sierra Nevada mountains....

A massive low-pressure system driven from the Arctic was responsible for the unusual conditions, said Bryan Jackson, a forecaster at the NWS Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland.
This week one political cartoonist suggested a connection between "crazy weather" and climate change.