Facebook "will no longer push through with its plans to sell ads on WhatsApp," writes Engadget, citing a report in the Wall Street Journal which says WhatsApp still "plans at some point to introduce ads to Status." Newsweek reports: WhatsApp is the only app in Facebook's suite of products free from ads, which make up a vast amount of the parent company's revenue, bringing in the majority of its $17.65 billion during Q3 last year. Like rival apps Snapchat or TikTok, advertising features prominently in Messenger and Instagram. But what does it mean for Facebook? The impact of a delayed WhatsApp ad roll-out will not only mean a financial hit, but may also disrupt how much ad data Facebook can possibly extract from users of the app's desktop and web versions. Currently, Facebook does not charge people for access to its products. Instead, it monetizes personal information by selling details about user preferences to companies for use in targeted ads. And there is clearly money to be made via mobile-based ads, which brought in about 94 percent of Facebook's total ad revenue during the third quarter of last year... "My assessment of this is it will be a delayed introduction of ads," social media consultant and commentator Matt Navarra told Newsweek today... "With the current climate of unrest surrounding data privacy and Facebook's plans to integrate its messaging apps backend, as well as the many legal battles they are facing, I suspect they are being cautious with yet more activity that could ruffle feathers at this time," Navarra told Newsweek. "But it's a case of when they do launch ads in WhatsApp, not if," he predicted. The ad strategy sparked clashes between Facebook executives and WhatsApp founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton, and became a factor in their departures from the firm. Koum and Acton, pro-privacy technologists, reportedly feared the app's encryption could be put at risk.

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"European researchers are working on a system that can churn out breathable oxygen from simulated samples of moon dust," reports Gizmodo: "Being able to acquire oxygen from resources found on the Moon would obviously be hugely useful for future lunar settlers, both for breathing and in the local production of rocket fuel," explained Beth Lomax, a chemist from the University of Glasgow, in an European Space Agency (ESA) press release. Lomax, along with ESA research fellow Alexandre Meurisse, are currently plugging away at a prototype that could eventually lead to exactly that: oxygen production from lunar dust. They're currently testing their system at the Materials and Electrical Components Laboratory of the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC), which is based in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. Their prototype is working, but adjustments will be required to make it suitable for use on the Moon, such as reducing its operating temperature.... Interestingly, ESTEC is not treating the metals as an unwanted byproduct. The team is currently looking into various ways of exploiting these metals in a lunar environment, such as transforming them into compounds for 3D printing. The European Space Agency points out that samples returned from the lunar surface were made up of 40-45% percent oxygen by weight.

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Engadget reports on a new tech-industry-in-space comedy premiering tonight on HBO: If you thought that HBO was done mocking technology companies now that Silicon Valley is done, think again. Avenue 5 is the channel's new sitcom, and one that asks the question: "What if tech bros were in charge of more than just our internet histories?'" The answer, at least according to the first half of the season, is that it won't be pretty -- or safe... The Avenue 5 is a large space liner that, in the words of cinematographer Eben Bolter, is designed after a vulgar space hotel that goes too far and "gets the details wrong". This Titanic-like vessel and its 5,000 passengers are on a routine jaunt through the solar system when a minor disaster strikes, and its course is altered. But this is space, where a small deviation changes the flight time from eight weeks to several years. The ship is owned by Herman Judd (Josh Gad) of the Judd Corporation, a self-regarding business magnate who, in Bolter's mind, has "only ever had one good idea." He's not quite an analog for the Bezoses and Musks you may be thinking of, but more a cracked-mirror version of both. Throughout the show, he attempts to impose his thinking on the crisis as if he was still in California, or wherever Silicon Valley moved after the show's alluded-to Huawei Wars. Early on, Judd is presented with the intractable problem of space physics, and he hopes to fix things as he did on Earth. He says, in the Jobsian tradition, that you can make something happen by making someone say that it can. The fight between visionary optimism and reality is harder when you're surrounded by an infinite vacuum, after all. Avenue 5's point seems to be that you can't simply blue-sky your way out of a crisis when reality keeps getting in the way.

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ZDNet is reporting on a security breach leaking "a massive list of Telnet credentials for more than 515,000 servers, home routers, and IoT (Internet of Things) 'smart' devices." The list, which was published on a popular hacking forum, includes each device's IP address, along with a username and password for the Telnet service, a remote access protocol that can be used to control devices over the internet... Some devices were located on the networks of known internet service providers (indicating they were either home router or IoT devices), but other devices were located on the networks of major cloud service providers... According to experts to who ZDNet spoke this week, and a statement from the leaker himself, the list was compiled by scanning the entire internet for devices that were exposing their Telnet port. The hacker then tried using (1) factory-set default usernames and passwords, or (2) custom, but easy-to-guess password combinations.... To our knowledge, this marks the biggest leak of Telnet passwords known to date. As ZDNet understands, the list was published online by the maintainer of a DDoS-for-hire (DDoS booter) service... When asked why he published such a massive list of "bots," the leaker said he upgraded his DDoS service from working on top of IoT botnets to a new model that relies on renting high-output servers from cloud service providers.

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Maybe the solution to the paywall model is daily subscriptions. I pay $1 to read Vanity Fair for today only. Tomorrow it's the New Yorker. Use my browser wallet to pay.

A couple of worthwhile podcasts. Brian Lehrer's Impeachment podcast is the adult version of what you hear on cable news. It still focuses on process and horse races but it goes into more detail, Lehrer has a sharp mind, and is a great interviewer, so you learn more. And Planet Money, always good, has a piece on privacy and billboards. I kept wanting to show them their own story about social credit in China. No longer are the concerns about privacy theoretical and narrow. It's definitely coming to the US.

"[A]t the very time that it's become increasingly difficult for anyone to conduct their day to day lives without using the Net, some categories of people are increasingly being treated badly by many software designers," argues long-time Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein: The victims of these attitudes include various special needs groups — visually and/or motor impaired are just two examples — but the elderly are a particular target. Working routinely with extremely elderly persons who are very active Internet users (including in their upper 90s!), I'm particularly sensitive to the difficulties that they face keeping their Net lifelines going. Often they're working on very old computers, without the resources (financial or human) to permit them to upgrade. They may still be running very old, admittedly risky OS versions and old browsers — Windows 7 is going to be used by many for years to come, despite hitting its official "end of life" for updates a few days ago. Yet these elderly users are increasingly dependent on the Net to pay bills (more and more firms are making alternatives increasingly difficult and in some cases expensive), to stay in touch with friends and loved ones, and for many of the other routine purposes for which all of us now routinely depend on these technologies.... There's an aspect of this that is even worse. It's attitudes! It's the attitudes of many software designers that suggest they apparently really don't care about this class of users much — or at all. They design interfaces that are difficult for these users to navigate. Or in extreme cases, they simply drop support for many of these users entirely, by eliminating functionality that permits their old systems and old browsers to function. He cites the example of Discourse, the open source internet forum software, which recently announced they'd stop supporting Internet Explorer. Weinstein himself hates Microsoft's browser, "Yet what of the users who don't understand how to upgrade? Who don't have anyone to help them upgrade? Are we to tell them that they matter not at all?" So he confronted Stack Exchange co-founder Jeff Atwood (who is also one of the co-founders of Discourse) on Twitter — and eventually found himself blocked. "Far more important though than this particular case is the attitude being expressed by so many in the software community, an attitude that suggests that many highly capable software engineers don't really appreciate these users and the kinds of problems that many of these users may have, that can prevent them from making even relatively simple changes or upgrades to their systems — which they need to keep using as much as anyone — in the real world."

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Two months ago the Washington Post reported that Google "has partnered with health-care provider Ascension to collect and store personal data for millions of patients, including full names, dates of birth and clinical histories, in order to make smarter recommendations to physicians." Now CNBC reports that the medical record vendor Epic Systems "has been phoning customers to tell them it will not pursue further integration with Google Cloud. The company is instead focusing on Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, citing insufficient interest from customers in Google. "The move comes as Google is facing criticism from privacy advocates about its work with Ascension, one of the largest U.S. health systems," CNBC adds. But could this start influencing which cloud provider hospitals choose for their records? "We've historically seen hospital systems make these decisions independently of their medical record provider," said Aneesh Chopra, the president of health-technology company CareJourney and the former chief technology officer of the United States. "It will be interesting to see if Epic's thumb on the scale moves cloud market share...." Epic isn't alone in its move. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Cerner decided against pursuing a data-storage relationship with Google despite being offered tens of millions of dollars in incentives. The company was on the hunt for a cloud vendor to help it store 250 million patient medical records. In the end, Cerner went with Amazon. In 2017 CNBC reported Cerner's collaboration with Amazon would initially focus on a "popular health product...which enables hospitals to gather and analyze huge volumes of clinical data to improve patients' health outcomes and lower treatment costs."

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The US company demonstrates how it would rescue astronauts during a failing rocket launch.

"Last month, astronomers noticed Betelgeuse had faded much more than usual," writes the Steamboat Pilot & Today. "This is the faintest it has been in over a century of observations. "What's up with Betelgeuse?" The Grim Reefer quotes their report: Well, probably nothing. It is most likely experiencing a super minimum as two of its variability cycles sync up and reach minimum brightness at the same time. On the other hand, stars like Betelgeuse are well advanced in age and are destined to explode as supernovas at the end of their lives. There hasn't been a bright supernova in our Milky Way galaxy since the supernova of 1604. Sure, we've seen supernovas in galaxies far, far away, but none have been seen close to home. So, there is some excitement in the astronomical community, warranted or not, that Betelgeuse might be ready to pop. Astrophysicists theorize that a pronounced fading might presage an impending supernova explosion. If Betelgeuse continues to fade into January and beyond, then look out -- the end might be near. A Forbes science writer remains skeptical, but points out that "some astronomers now think there's a much closer star that could 'nova'..." A star called V Sagittae, 7,800 light years distant in the tiny constellation of Sagitta (just below Cygnus in the famous "Summer Triangle" asterism of stars) is barely visible even in mid-sized telescopes, but new research suggests that it could explode around the year 2083... "Around the year 2083, its accretion rate will rise catastrophically, spilling mass at incredibly high rates onto the white dwarf, with this material blazing away," says Professor Emeritus Bradley E. Schaefer, LSU Department of Physics & Astronomy. "In the final days of this death-spiral, all of the mass from the companion star will fall onto the white dwarf, creating a super-massive wind from the merging star, appearing as bright as Sirius, possibly even as bright as Venus." The uncertainty of the prediction is plus or minus 16 years, so it could happen between 2067 and 2099, most likely near the middle of this range. It promises to be a wonderful sight.

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I've been having a big change of thinking re RSS.

In 1999, I compromised. I wanted journalism and blogging to share a common format. So I ditched the format I designed and accepted Netscape's adaptation in its place, to create unity. And it worked, it was the level playing field I had hoped for. Blogging and journalism both thrived in RSS. But at a price.

The price was forcing blogs into the same format that news orgs used. Problem is, as we can see clearly with Twitter, that format isn't the only one.

As Twitter discovered, its style of writing doesn't fit into the model of RSS. People were disappointed when they stopped publishing tweets via RSS. But this was the right thing to do, in hindsight. It wasn't working.

I turned a corner in 2017 with my blog. I realized then, though I wouldn't have put it this way, the price I paid by merging formats with Netscape was too great. It forced blogging into the title-description-body model of journalism. But blog posts are more free-form, they don't all fit into that structure.

So now I'm thinking about what I could have done differently in 1999, if I had evolved my syndication format the way my blog wanted to go, not the way RSS pushed us.

Trump nearly started World War III. Clearly his motives, as with Ukraine, were entirely personal.

We are at a terrible moment. Until Trump was impeached and the articles delivered to the Senate, there was always something more to do. But this is the end. Trump, post-acquittal, will be the monarch, in control of a hugely powerful military, economy and lest we forget it, the people who make up all this power, Americans. With new tricks the Chinese are working on, and no doubt Silicon Valley is as well, quietly, an American monarch will be all-powerful, able to reach into personal relationships in ways the Soviet Union couldn't dream of. If by some miracle the Senate votes to turn back, then we will have just barely dodged a bullet. But it seems more likely we're going straight into the fire without even trying to hit the brakes.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: JetBrains (which makes IDEs and other tools for developers and project managers) just open sourced a new "typeface for developers." JetBrains Mono offers taller lowercase letters while keeping all letters "simple and free from unnecessary details... The easier the forms, the faster the eye perceives them and the less effort the brain needs to process them." There's a dot inside zeroes (but not in O's), and distinguishing marks have also been added to the lowercase L (to distinguish it from both 1's and a capital I). Even the shape of the comma has been made more angular so it's easier to distinguish from a period. "The shape of ovals approaches that of rectangular symbols. This makes the whole pattern of the text more clear-cut," explains the font's web site. "The outer sides of ovals ensure there are no additional obstacles for your eyes as they scan the text vertically." And one optional feature even lets you merge multi-character ligatures like -> and ++ into their corresponding symbol. (138 code-specific ligatures are included with the font.)

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You'll know we're totally over the line when congressional Democrats are arrested and tried for impeaching the Trump.