An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Anyone who has worked in the financial services sector will at least be aware of Bloomberg Terminal, a research, data and analytics platform used to garner real-time insights on the financial markets. Bloomberg Terminal has emerged as something of an industry standard, used by more than 300,000 people at just about every major financial and investment-related corporation globally -- but it costs north of $20,000 per user each year to license, a fee that is prohibitively high for many organizations. This is something that OpenBB has set out to tackle, by democratizing an industry that has been "dominated by monopolistic and proprietary incumbents" for the past four decades -- and it's doing so with an entirely open source approach.

After launching initially last year as an open source investment research terminal called Gamestonk Terminal, the founding team, Didier Lopes, Artem Veremey, and James Maslek, were approached by OSS Capital to make an investment and build a commercial company on top of the terminal. And so OpenBB is formally launching this week with $8.5 million in funding from OSS Capital, with contributions from notable angel investors including early Google backer Ram Shriram, entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant, and Elad Gil. The newly named OpenBB Terminal is very much an alpha-stage product, one that's aimed at the more technically minded. It's pitched as a "Python-based integrated environment for investment research," allowing any trader to access data science and machine learning smarts to unpack raw, unrefined data.

OpenBB hopes that its open source credentials, and foundations in Python, will position it to win over many new users -- flexibility is the name of the game. [...] Indeed, being open source means that the broader community can add their own flavors to the OpenBB mix -- by way of example, one contributor who was interested in the foreign currency exchange market (Forex) added an Oanda integration to the project. Given that the entire source code is available for anyone to modify, companies can create their own version of the terminal with customizations that suit their niche use-cases. If they want to remove all the clutter and work purely with one type of asset, they can create a sort of light-weight version of the terminal with a much narrower focus on Forex, or cryptocurrency, for example. But who is the actual intended end-user, exactly? In truth, it could be anyone from regional investment banks and hedge funds, to venture capitalists, family offices, and mutual funds. Although the product isn't quite at that stage yet -- that is where the initial seed capital enters the fray. It's all about building the product into something that could serve a potentially large market. OpenBB Terminal will be free for now, but "there will be a concerted push to monetize it," adds VentureBeat. "Some ideas currently under consideration include building a 'slick 21st century UI,' as well as developing a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, where OpenBB serves up the computational power to run machine learning models on vast amounts of data."

"OpenBB is also exploring ways to build bridges between data sources and investors."

Science magazine explores how actual scientists feel about Twitter: "I like that there's a low bar to entry [on Twitter] — I can put something out and see how other scientists are thinking of a problem, people who have a different skill set than mine," says biostatistician Natalie Dean of Emory University, whose Twitter account has some 138,000 followers. But the pandemic has also helped demonstrate the limitations of social media. It can be difficult, for example, for scientists to be heard over the cacophony of messages on Twitter — some 500 million each day. And although some scientists have used the platform to elevate their online presence, that has rarely translated into concrete professional rewards....

[A]s the pandemic exploded and researchers sought to pump out information to each other and an eager public, many saw advantages to Twitter. Its vast reach became a draw: more than 200 million active daily users, including an estimated one-quarter of U.S. adults, according to the Pew Research Center. This allows scientists to use a single platform to share research findings with both peers and the public and to foster open discussions... One result is that the platform has carried posts about a majority of the total COVID-19 literature — about 51% of journal articles on pandemic research had been mentioned in at least one tweet through May 2021, according to a report by the Research on Research Institute (RoRI). That exceeds the number cited in scholarly articles or mentioned in several other communications venues, including news stories, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, blogs, and policy documents. And it's well above the level before the pandemic, when studies found that just 10% to 30% of papers on any scientific topic got a mention on Twitter....

But an emerging body of research about tweeting suggests that, overall, scientists often struggle to be heard on social media. One study, for example, found tweets containing links to scholarly papers typically get little engagement. Of 1.1 million such tweets about papers published before the pandemic, half drew no clicks, and an additional 22% attracted just one or two, according to a 2021 paper in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology.
An information scientist at the University of Ottawa tells the magazine that "We are really not at the point where we want to get, which is, ideally, seeing the impact of research on the greater good of society."

Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the story...

Back in 1987 Alexander Trevor worked with the GIF format's creator, Steve Wilhite, at CompuServe. 35 years later Fast Company tech editor Harry McCracken (also Slashdot reader harrymcc) located Trevor for the inside story: Wilhite did not come up with the GIF format in order to launch a billion memes. It was 1987, and he was a software engineer at CompuServe, the most important online service until an upstart called America Online took off in the 1990s. And he developed the format in response to a request from CompuServe executive Alexander "Sandy" Trevor. (Trevor's most legendary contribution to CompuServe was not instigating GIF: He also invented the service's CB Simulator — the first consumer chat rooms and one of the earliest manifestation of social networking, period. That one he coded himself as a weekend project in 1980.)

GIF came to be because online services such as CompuServe were getting more graphical, but the computer makers of the time — such as Apple, Commodore, and IBM — all had their own proprietary image types. "We didn't want to have to put up images in 79 different formats," explains Trevor. CompuServe needed one universal graphics format.

Even though the World Wide Web and digital cameras were still in the future, work was already underway on the image format that came to be known as JPEG. But it wasn't optimized for CompuServe's needs: For example, stock charts and weather graphics didn't render crisply. So Trevor asked Wilhite to create an image file type that looked good and downloaded quickly at a time when a 2,400 bits-per-second dial-up modem was considered torrid. Reading a technical journal, Wilhite came across a discussion of an efficient compression technique known as LZW for its creators — Abraham Limpel, Jacob Ziv, and Terry Welch. It turned out to be an ideal foundation for what CompuServe was trying to build, and allowed GIF to pack a lot of image information into as few bytes as possible. (Much later, computing giant Unisys, which gained a patent for LZW, threatened companies that used it with lawsuits, leading to a licensing agreement with CompuServe and the creation of the patent-free PNG image format.)

GIF officially debuted on June 15, 1987. "It met my requirements, and it was extremely useful for CompuServe," says Trevor....

GIF was also versatile, offering the ability to store the multiple pictures that made it handy for creating mini-movies as well as static images. And it spread beyond CompuServe, showing up in Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, and then in Netscape Navigator. The latter browser gave GIFs the ability to run in an infinite loop, a crucial feature that only added to their hypnotic quality. Seeing cartoon hamsters dance for a split second is no big whoop, but watching them shake their booties endlessly was just one of many cultural moments that GIFs have given us.

Wikipedia points out that America's two largest-circulation publications are the two magazine sent out to over 38 million members of massive non-profit AARP (originally the American Association of Retired Persons).

It's now starting its own social network to compete with Facebook (which according to a recent survey is being used by over 72 million Americans over the age of 50), Ars Technica reports: The nonprofit funded the creation of Senior Planet Community, a social media network that encourages users to join pre-existing groups around shared interests, including gardening, travel, fitness, food, and technology. In that way, it feels more like a pared-down version of Reddit or a small collection of forums....

Besides its focus on the 50-plus set, Senior Planet Community stands apart from Facebook in that it's not commercial. The site has no advertising or membership fees. Unless the cost to run the site grows substantially, that probably won't present much of a problem. AARP isn't saying how much it has put into Senior Planet Community, but the organization is famously well-capitalized, with $2.3 billion in net assets and $1.7 billion in revenue in 2020.

At present, the site is bare-bones when compared with Facebook. There's no mobile app yet, though OATS [the affiliate organization that built the social network] says it hopes to develop one. The site is mobile-friendly at least, and all the requisite features are there, including groups, photo sharing, @-mentions, notifications, and direct messaging. As with all social networks, a looming question is how Senior Planet Community will handle moderation. The site has a relatively extensive list of "house rules" that encourages users to "be courteous" and "cite your sources." Posts about politics aren't forbidden, but the rules say posts can't stray off-topic, and users can't "attack individuals, social, ethnic, or political groups and figures." Users can report posts they think violate the rules. Currently, the user base is relatively small, so policing it should be straightforward.

"The moderating team keeps an eye on all comments, posts, and updates added to the platform from the backend.... " Suzanne Myklebust, OATS's director of communications, told Ars.

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

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

Microsoft says they are investigating claims that the Lapsus$ data extortion hacking group breached their internal Azure DevOps source code repositories and stolen data. BleepingComputer reports: Unlike many extortion groups we read about today, Lapsus$ does not deploy ransomware on their victim's devices. Instead, they target the source code repositories for large companies, steal their proprietary data, and then attempt to ransom that data back to the company for millions of dollars. While it is not known if the extortion group has successfully ransomed stolen data, Lapsus has gained notoriety over the past months for their confirmed attacks against NVIDIA, Samsung, Vodafone, Ubisoft, and Mercado Libre. Unfortunately, Lapsus$ has a good track record, with their claims of attacks on other companies later confirmed to be true.

While the leaking of source code makes it easier to find vulnerabilities in a company's software, Microsoft has previously stated that leaked source code does not create an elevation of risk. Microsoft says that their threat model assumes that threat actors already understand how their software works, whether through reverse engineering or previous source code leaks. "At Microsoft, we have an inner source approach -- the use of open source software development best practices and an open source-like culture -- to making source code viewable within Microsoft. This means we do not rely on the secrecy of source code for the security of products, and our threat models assume that attackers have knowledge of source code," explained Microsoft in a blog post about the SolarWinds attackers gaining access to their source code. "So viewing source code isn't tied to elevation of risk." However, source code repositories also commonly contain access tokens, credentials, API keys, and even code signing certificates.

Slashdot reader mmanciop reminded us that Ubuntu released a new version of its "circle of friends" logo this week (which its designer says gives it "a more contemporary look and feel.")

From the Ubuntu blog: We proudly present to you the transformation of the Circle of Friends logo for Ubuntu. The new logo isn't a revolution; rather, it's an evolution of the Circle of Friends. As you can see at the top of the post, the classic white-on-orange colour scheme hasn't changed. But the new version sports sleek lines which bind the Circle of Friends even more closely together.

While it is important to have a respectful continuity with the previous Circle of Friends, the updated version is leaner, more focused, more sophisticated. It also makes a little more sense that the heads are now inside the circle, facing each other and connecting more directly. The rectangular orange tag is a break from the conventional square or circle, as it allows for the boldness of the orange to express itself and provides a recognisable colourful mark across media. Finally, the logo moves from a tiny superscript to a large, dynamic and leading presence.

Some might wonder why we had to touch the Ubuntu logo at all. As one can imagine, it is a daunting honour to work on something so many of us have such a strong connection to. But in the end, a logo should match what it represents. Similar to how Ubuntu continues to evolve and adapt to new uses in technology, its logo should follow suit to encapsulate and reflect such ongoing change.
For comparison, here's the original logo.

Share your reactions in the comments. (For example, how do you think it compares to other logos?) Do you like it more or less than, say, the logo for Raku?

Christopher Alexander, a British-American architect and design theorist that affected fields including software and sociology, died on Thursday, March 17, after a long illness. He was 86. Christopher Newport University reports: Christopher Alexander, a towering figure in architecture and urbanism -- one of the biggest influences on the New Urbanism movement -- died on Thursday, March 17, after a long illness, it was reported by Michael Mehaffy, a long-time collaborator and protege. Alexander was the author or principal author of many books, including A Pattern Language, one of the best-selling architectural books of all time. He is considered to be the father of the pattern language movement in software, which is the idea behind Wikipedia. In 2006, he was one of the first two recipients, along with Leon Krier, of CNU's Athena Medal, which honors those who laid the groundwork for The New Urbanism movement.

In 1965, Alexander wrote a much-cited essay, A City Is Not a Tree, one of the earliest and most trenchant critiques of the dendritic, sprawl pattern of city planning and development. Other works include The Timeless Way of Building and A New Theory of Urban Design. Alexander was more than a theorist: In 2006, when he was awarded the Athena, it was reported he had designed and built more than 200 buildings around the world. In 2012, his The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth, tells the story of a school campus in Japan that was designed and built using the principles that he articulated (see photo at top).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Cryptographic keys generated with older software now owned by technology company Rambus are weak enough to be broken instantly using commodity hardware, a researcher reported on Monday. This revelation is part of an investigation that also uncovered a handful of weak keys in the wild. The software comes from a basic version of the SafeZone Crypto Libraries, which were developed by a company called Inside Secure and acquired by Rambus as part of its 2019 acquisition of Verimatrix, a Rambus representative said. That version was deprecated prior to the acquisition and is distinct from a FIPS-certified version that the company now sells under the Rambus FIPS Security Toolkit brand.

Researcher Hanno Bock said that the vulnerable SafeZone library doesn't sufficiently randomize the two prime numbers it used to generate RSA keys. (These keys can be used to secure Web traffic, shells, and other online connections.) Instead, after the SafeZone tool selects one prime number, it chooses a prime in close proximity as the second one needed to form the key. "The problem is that both primes are too similar," Bock said in an interview. "So the difference between the two primes is really small." The SafeZone vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2022-26320. Cryptographers have long known that RSA keys that are generated with primes that are too close together can be trivially broken with Fermat's factorization method. French mathematician Pierre de Fermat first described this method in 1643. Fermat's algorithm was based on the fact that any number can be expressed as the difference between two squares. When the factors are near the root of the number, they can be calculated easily and quickly. The method isn't feasible when factors are truly random and hence far apart. The security of RSA keys depends on the difficulty of factoring a key's large composite number (usually denoted as N) to derive its two factors (usually denoted as P and Q). When P and Q are known publicly, the key they make up is broken, meaning anyone can decrypt data protected by the key or use the key to authenticate messages.

So far, Bock has identified only a handful of keys in the wild that are vulnerable to the factorization attack. Some of the keys belong to printers originally branded as Fuji Xerox and now belonging to Canon. Printer users can use the keys to generate a Certificate Signing Request. The creation date for the keys was 2020 or later. The weak Canon keys are tracked as CVE-2022-26351. Bock also found four vulnerable PGP keys, typically used to encrypt email, on SKS PGP key servers. A user ID tied to the keys implied they were created for testing, so he doesn't believe they're in active use. Bock said he believes all the keys he found were generated using software or methods not connected to the SafeZone library. If true, other software that generates keys might be easily broken using the Fermat algorithm. It's plausible also that the keys were generated manually, "possibly by people aware of this attack creating test data." The researcher found the keys by searching through billions of public keys that he either had access to, were shared with him by other researchers, or that were available through certificate transparency programs. UPDATE: The headline incorrectly stated that a "600-Year-Old Algorithm" was used. It's been changed to "379-Year-Old-Algorithm" to reflect the updated headline on Ars.

Pi day is here — 3/14. And to celebrate, NASA released their ninth annual NASA Pi Day Challenge — "some math problems related to current and future NASA missions."

MIT Bloggers released a videogame-themed video to welcome the class of 2026.

If you Google "pi day" (or Pi), you're given an interactive doodle that (when you click the pi symbol in the upper-left) presents a Simon-like game challenging you to type in approximations of pi to an ever-increasingnumber of digits.

Guinness World Records points out that the most accurate value of pi is 62,831,853,071,796 digits, "achieved by University of Applied Sciences (Switzerland) in Chur, Switzerland, on 19 August 2021." (Note: the number of digits looks suspiciously significant....)

And USA Today published an article which shares the history of how Pi Day got started. Former physicist Larry Shaw, who connected March 14 with 3.14, celebrated the first Pi Day at the Exploratorium with fruit pies and tea in 1988. The museum said Shaw led Pi Day parades there every year until his passing in 2017.

In 2009, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution marking March 14 as National Pi Day.

The date is significant in the world of science. Albert Einstein was born on this day in 1879. The Exploratorium said it added a celebration of Einstein's life as part of its Pi Day activities after Shaw's daughter, Sara, realized the coincidence. March 14 also marks the death of renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, who passed away in 2018.
And "For those who don't enjoy math, you get pie," the article quips, noting that numerous pizza chains and restaurants are offering appropriately-adjusted one-day sale prices on pizza (and fruit) pies.

Instacart has even released a list showing which pie flavors enjoy the highest popularity over the national average in each of America's 50 states. ("New York — Boston Cream Pie. Washington — Marionberry Pie....")

This week Silicon Valley's Computer History Museum posted a PDF transcript (and video excerpts) from an interview with 81-year-old Margaret Hamilton, the programmer/systems designer who in the 1960s became director of the Software Engineering Division at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory which developed the on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo program. Prior to that Hamilton had worked on software to detect an airplane's radar signature, but thought, "You know, 'I guess I should delay graduate school again because I'd like to work on this program that puts all these men on the Moon....'"

"There was always one thing that stood out in my mind, being in the onboard flight software, was that it was 'man rated,' meaning if it didn't work a person's life was at stake if not over. That was always uppermost in my mind and probably many others as well."

Interestingly, Hamilton had originally received two job offers from the Apollo Space Program, and had told them to flip a coin to settle it. ("The other job had to do with support systems. It was software, but it wasn't the onboard flight software.") But what's fascinating is the interview's glimpses at some of the earliest days of the programming profession: There was all these engineers, okay? Hardware engineers, aeronautical engineers and all this, a lot of them out of MIT... But the whole idea of software and programming...? Dick Battin, Dr. Battin, when they told him that they were going to be responsible for the software...he went home to his wife and said he was going to be in charge of software and he thought it was some soft clothing...
Hamilton also remembers in college taking a summer job as a student actuary at Travelers Insurance in the mid-1950s, and "all of a sudden one day word was going around Travelers that there were these new things out there called computers that were going to take away all of their jobs... Pretty soon they wouldn't have jobs. And so everybody was talking about it. They were scared they wouldn't have a way to make a living.

"But, of course, it ended up being more jobs were created with the computers than there were...."

Hamilton's story about Apollo 8 is amazing...

Friday the Verge reported: The Main Directorate for Combating Organized Crime and Corruption of Belarus (GUBOPiK) has detained prominent Wikipedia editor Mark Bernstein, according to the Belarusian publication Zerkalo.

The arrest comes after Bernstein's personal information was shared on GOBUPiK's public Telegram channel. Bernstein is one of the top 50 editors of Russian Wikipedia. The Verge was able to confirm that Bernstein's information — including his social media, Wikipedia handle, and place of work — had been shared in GUBOPik's channel on the messaging app. A video of Bernstein's arrest was also posted alongside his photo and personal details. In the photo itself, Bernstein is accused of "distributing fake anti-Russian information." The channel has since been made private....

In an activity log of Bernstein's purported Wikimedia username, you can see that he's made over 200,000 edits to Russian Wikipedia articles. Currently, his account is described as "blocked indefinitely."
"Earlier in March, Slate reported on the same Wikipedia editor and his efforts to ensure the correct information hits pages about the invasion," adds The Byte.

On Saturday the human rights site Charter 97 reported that Bernstein was given 15 days of arrest, "according to the Viasna human rights center."

An interesting tidbit from Mike Melanson's column, "This Week in Programming."

"If a proposal unveiled this week gets its way, JavaScript developers will soon have something that many of them have long been asking for: a type system, of some sort at least." A blog post by TypeScript senior program manager Daniel Rosenwasser lays out the background and reasoning for the proposal for type syntax in JavaScript. He writes that "if we pull this all off, we have the chance to make one of the most impactful improvements to the world of JavaScript."

The proposal, which shares authors from Microsoft, Bloomberg, Igalia, and a number of other sources, suggests that JavaScript developers should be able to "add type annotations to their JavaScript code, allowing those annotations to be checked by a type checker that is external to JavaScript" and then be ignored at runtime. "Because this new syntax wouldn't change how surrounding code runs, it would effectively act as comments," writes Rosenwasser in his blog post, later adding that "JavaScript could carve out a set of syntax for types that engines would entirely ignore, but which tools like TypeScript, Flow, and others could use...."

One noteworthy part of the proposal lays out exactly what is not being proposed:

"Our team isn't proposing putting TypeScript's type-checking in every browser and JavaScript runtime — nor are we proposing any new type-checker to be put in the browser. We think doing that would cause problems for JavaScript and TypeScript users alike due to a range of issues, such as runtime performance, compatibility issues with existing TypeScript code, and the risk of halting innovation in the type-checking space." Similarly, several features from TypeScript that generate code, such as enums, namespaces, and parameter properties, are being explicitly excluded "because they have runtime semantics, generating JavaScript code rather than simply being stripped out and ignored...."

As the proposal's authors note, the proposal itself is presented as a "strawperson proposal".... Thus far, it would appear that there is debate aplenty, alongside a rather robust enthusiasm for the advent of type functionality coming to a JavaScript near you.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A company that plans to drill deeper into Earth than ever before, creating holes that would extend a record-shattering 12 miles under our planet's surface, has raised a total of $63 million since its launch in 2020. Most recently, Quaise Energy, a startup that aims to revolutionize the geothermal energy market, secured $40 million in series A funding in February, reports Axios. The goal of these super-deep holes is to access a limitless amount of renewable energy from the heat deep inside Earth.

"This funding round brings us closer to providing clean, renewable baseload energy," said Carlos Araque, CEO and co-founder of Quaise Energy, according to BusinessWire. "Our technology allows us to access energy anywhere in the world, at a scale far greater than wind and solar, enabling future generations to thrive in a world powered with abundant clean energy." Geothermal energy has a low profile compared to other renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, and hydro, but Quaise believes it is "at the core of an energy-independent world," according to the company's website. This form of energy is among the oldest power sources harnessed by humans, but it only accounts for about 0.4 percent of net energy production in the United States, which is the world's biggest geothermal producer.

Quaise, which is a spinoff from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), intends to pioneer this technology using vacuum tubes known as gyrotrons that shoot millimeter-wave light beams, powered by electrons in a strong magnetic field. Using these devices, the company plans to burn almost twice as far into Earth as the deepest holes ever made, such as Russia's Kola Superdeep Borehole or Qatar's Al Shaheen oil well, both of which extend for about 7.5 miles. Gyrotrons are powerful enough to heat plasma in nuclear fusion experiments, making them an ideal tool to probe unprecedented depths of some 12 miles, where subterranean rocks roil at temperatures of about 500C (930F). Water pumped into this searing environment would instantly vaporize as steam that could be efficiently converted to electricity. Araque and his team at Quaise plan to funnel their seed money into prototype technologies within the next few years. By 2028, the company aspires to retrofit coal-fueled power plants into geothermal energy hotspots, reports ScienceAlert. The process of drilling out these super-deep holes would take a few months, but once the setup is complete, they could provide limitless energy to a region for up to a century, according to Araque.

The Wikimedia Foundation has issued a statement supporting Russian Wikipedia volunteers after a censorship demand from internet regulators. From a report: On Tuesday, tech and communications regulator Roskomnadzor threatened to block Wikipedia over the Russian-language page covering Russia's invasion of Ukraine, claiming it contained "false messages" about war casualties and the effects of economic sanctions, among other things. "On March 1st 2022 the Wikimedia Foundation received a Russian government demand to remove content related to the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine posted by volunteer contributors to Russian Wikipedia," reads the statement sent to The Verge via email. "As ever, Wikipedia is an important source of reliable, factual information in this crisis. In recognition of this important role, we will not back down in the face of efforts to censor and intimidate members of our movement. We stand by our mission to deliver free knowledge to the world."

By combining CRISPR technology with a protein designed with artificial intelligence, it is possible to awaken individual dormant genes by disabling the chemical "off switches" that silence them. Researchers from the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle describe this finding in the journal Cell Reports. Phys.Org reports: The new technique controls gene activity without altering the DNA sequence of the genome by targeting chemical modifications that help package genes in our chromosomes and regulate their activity. Because these modifications occur not in, but on top of genes, they are called epigenetic, from the Greek epi "over" or "above" the genes. The chemical modifications that regulate gene activity are called epigenetic markers. Scientists are particularly interested in epigenetic modifications because not only do they affect gene activity in normal cell function, epigenetic markers accumulate with time, contribute to aging, and can affect of the health of future generations as we can pass them on to our children.
[...]
In the new paper, [the researchers] show that by using this technique, they were able to block PRC2 and selectively turn on four different genes. They were also able to show they could transdifferentiate induced pluripotent stem cells to placental progenitor cells by simply turning on two genes. Finally, the researchers were able to show how the technique can be used to find the location of specific PRC2-controlled regulatory regions from where individual genes are activated. The location of many of these are unknown. In this case, they identified a promoter region -- called a TATA box -- for a gene called TBX18. Although current thinking is that these promotor regions are close to the gene, within in 30 DNA base pairs, they found for this gene the promoter region was more than 500 base pairs away.

SFGate reports: The largest plane ever built has been destroyed at an airport outside Kyiv, Ukraine Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba said Sunday....

The Antonov An-225 Mriya was built in Ukraine in 1985 when the nation was still controlled by the Soviet Union. It has six turbofan engines and is the heaviest aircraft ever built. It was created as a strategic airlift cargo craft, carrying Soviet space orbiters, but was later purchased by Antonov Airlines. It's since been used to airlift oversized cargo and large loads of emergency aid during natural disasters....

Although Kuleba's tweet confirmed the plane's demise, Antonov says it is still gathering information on the massive plane's fate.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Friday that cyberattacks could trigger Article 5 of the organization's charter, the so-called "commitment clause" that considers an attack on any NATO ally an attack on all. NBC News reports: Stoltenberg's comment comes as national security professionals and cybersecurity industry professionals remain on high alert for any major attacks. While conflict on the ground in Ukraine continues to escalate, little has been seen thus far in terms of major cyberwar activities. Still, some hacker and activist groups have sprung into action. One ransomware group announced Friday that it supported the Russian government and would respond to cyberattacks on Russia by going after "critical infrastructures of an enemy." As for attacks on Ukraine, the country's computer emergency response team said Friday that it had seen a large email phishing campaign from Belarus targeted at military personnel. The statement comes amid a major cyberattack on Nvidia that was initiated at the same time as the Russian cyber warfare division started their offensive against Ukraine. Security researchers are concerned that somebody could put something malicious in one of the software updates that are then sent out to Nvidia's clients.

DidgetMaster writes: Hard drive costs now hover around $20 per terabyte (TB). Drives bigger than 20TB are now available. Fast SSDs are more expensive, but the average user can now afford these in TB capacities as well. Yet, we are still using antiquated file systems that were designed decades ago when the biggest drives were much less than a single gigabyte (GB). Their oversized file records and slow directory traversal search algorithms make finding files on volumes that can hold more than 100 million files a nightmare. Rather than flexible tagging systems that could make searches quick and easy, they have things like "extended attributes" that are painfully slow to search on. Indexing services can be built on top of them, but these are not an integral part of the file system so they can be bypassed and become out of sync with the file system itself.

It is time to replace file systems with something better. A local object store that can effectively manage hundreds of millions of files and find things in seconds based on file type and/or tags attached is possible. File systems are usually free and come with your operating system, so there seems to be little incentive for someone to build a new system from scratch, but just like we needed the internet to come along and change everything we need a better data storage manager.

See Didgets for an example of what is possible. In a Substack article, Didgets developer Andy Lawrence argues his system solves many of the problems associated with the antiquated file systems still in use today. "With Didgets, each record is only 64 bytes which means a table with 200 million records is less than 13GB total, which is much more manageable," writes Lawrence. Didgets also has "a small field in its metadata record that tells whether the file is a photo or a document or a video or some other type," helping to dramatically speed up searches.

Do you think it's time to replace file systems with an alternative system, such as Didgets? Why or why not?

From Mike Melanson's "This Week in Programming" column: The 20th anniversary of .NET is upon us this week and with it, Microsoft is pulling out all the stops in celebration of what it says is "the most loved framework by developers for three years in a row now — 2019, 2020, 2021, according to Stack Overflow's developer survey."

First launched in 2002, .NET is, in some ways, something that Microsoft can roll out as evidence of its changed ways over the years. It went from a company embroiled in a monopoly case just a year before this release, to one that later decided to turn around, mend its former ways, and open source .NET Core. "When Microsoft made another major transformation, this time towards open source, .NET was also at the forefront," Microsoft writes in this week's celebratory blog post. "By 2012, we had fully open-sourced the ASP.NET MVC web framework and were accepting contributions. It was one of Microsoft's first major open-source projects at the time. In 2014, we started to build a cross-platform and open-source .NET on GitHub and were floored at the incredible support and contributions from the open-source community...."

Certainly, in comparison to the Microsoft we once knew, there has been a massive shift in its approach to open source software and openness in general. Indeed, these days, Microsoft is also synonymous with another giant in the world of open source, its now-subsidiary GitHub — as well as the npm Registry and countless other projects. Microsoft has transformed from a company that was once led by a man who said that "Linux is a cancer" to one that has more recently welcomed Linux to the Windows desktop, among numerous other open source endeavors.
The column ends by remembering what it calls "Microsoft 'hot reload' drama" last year — Microsoft's removal of the feature from the .NET SDK repo (and its subsequent return, with an apology). "All that's to say, perhaps all's well that ends well, and we should indeed celebrate 20 years of success with a now open source framework. In the same breath, vigilance may be necessary should we want to celebrate another such anniversary in the future."