The city of Miami on Wednesday uploaded a copy of the Bitcoin white paper to its municipal website, joining a growing chorus of governments and companies now hosting bitcoin's original blueprint. From a report: Mayor Francis Suarez emphasized his commitment to "turn Miami into a hub for crypto innovation" in his tweet announcing the upload. He's been pumping the U.S. city's potential as a landing ground for California tech expats for weeks on social media. Miami is the "first municipal government to host Satoshi's white paper," Suarez asserted. Also see: Twitter thread on who else is participating.

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Oil and gas extraction will be paused and wind energy will expand under Joe Biden's climate plan.

Some major brokerage houses have begun to respond to a frenetic surge in the price of shares of companies that has been attributed to rabid buying by individual investors on social-media platforms. From a report: On Wednesday, TD Ameritrade said it was restricting trading for GameStop and AMC Entertainment Holdings, as well as other names, amid a triple-digit percentage surge in the price of those companies in recent days. "In the interest of mitigating risk for our company and clients, we have put in place several restrictions on some transactions in $GME, $AMC and other securities," a spokeswoman for TD Ameritrade told MarketWatch, referring to the ticker symbols of the companies. "We made these decisions out of an abundance of caution amid unprecedented market conditions and other factors," she said. Charles Schwab, which bought TD Ameritrade but is still operating as an independent retail brokerage platform, said that it has tightened margin requirements in some of those trading names, including GameStop. A Schwab spokeswoman said that the platform changed its margin requirements, or how much an investor can borrow, on Jan. 13 and said it has placed "restrictions in place on certain transactions in GME and other securities."

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Joe2020 shares a report: China has begun using anal swabs to test those it considers to be at high risk of contracting Covid-19, state TV has reported. Officials took anal swabs from residents of neighbourhoods with confirmed Covid-19 cases in Beijing last week, according to the state broadcaster CCTV, while those in designated quarantine facilities have also had the tests. Small, localised outbreaks in recent weeks have resulted in multiple cities in northern China being sealed off from the rest of the country and prompted mass testing campaigns, which had mostly been conducted using throat and nose swabs. The anal swabs method "can increase the detection rate of infected people" as traces of the virus linger longer in the anus than in the respiratory tract, Li Tongzeng, a senior doctor from Beijing's Youan hospital, told CCTV. CCTV said on Sunday anal swabs would not be used as widely as other methods, as the technique was "not convenient."

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Two Daily podcasts in the last two days, totally worth the time. One an interview with Donald McNeil, the NYT expert on the virus, and an interview with Fauci on his relationship with Trump.

Bill Gates and Melinda Gates write in their annual letter, shared by reader cusco: To prevent the hardship of this last year from happening again, pandemic preparedness must be taken as seriously as we take the threat of war. The world needs to double down on investments in R & D and organizations like CEPI that have proven invaluable with COVID-19. We also need to build brand-new capabilities that don't exist yet. Stopping the next pandemic will require spending tens of billions of dollars per year -- a big investment, but remember that the COVID-19 pandemic is estimated to cost the world $28 trillion. The world needs to spend billions to save trillions (and prevent millions of deaths). I think of this as the best and most cost-efficient insurance policy the world could buy. The bulk of this investment needs to come from rich countries. Low- and middle-income countries and foundations like ours have a role to play, but governments from high-income nations need to lead the charge here because the benefits for them are so huge. If you live in a rich country, it's in your best interest for your government to go big on pandemic preparedness around the world. Melinda wrote that COVID-19 anywhere is threat to health everywhere; the same is true of the next potential pandemic. The tools and systems created to stop pathogens in their tracks need to span the globe, including in low- and middle-income countries. To start, governments need to continue investing in the scientific tools that are getting us through this current pandemic -- even after COVID-19 is behind us. New breakthroughs will give us a leg up the next time a new disease emerges. It took months to get enough testing capacity for COVID-19 in the United States. But it's possible to build up diagnostics that can be deployed very quickly. By the next pandemic, I'm hopeful we'll have what I call mega-diagnostic platforms, which could test as much as 20 percent of the global population every week.

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Arthur Levitt Jr., a former chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, writes at Bloomberg Opinion: They say history occurs first as tragedy, then as farce -- I fear we're about to see that in U.S. financial markets. Two decades ago, U.S. financial markets were riding all-time records. Day traders were using chat rooms to swap what they thought were reliable tips about stocks that were about to pop. Stocks with negative earnings were trading at astronomical valuations by almost any measure. People without any experience in stock market trading -- no less any understanding of how to read a financial statement or earnings report -- were confidently pouring dollars saved for college tuition or rent into short-term bets on companies they knew little to nothing about. And the surest sign of mania was this: People found stock market investing terribly entertaining. I remember high school students asking me for stock tips. It all came to a crashing end as the dot-com bubble burst, blowing up a few companies and several billion dollars of investor savings. And in retrospect, it seemed so obvious. All the signs of a market bubble were there. People chose not to pay attention. [...] By all indications, today's investors are repeating the same mistakes. Consider the following: Significant stock movements are now spurred by social-media-driven gossip about the company and short squeezes (when an investor betting against a stock is forced to pay up for shares to cover their position). Novice investors are learning about investing not through fundamental rules of the road (study the company and its leadership, read its filings, study its markets, consider its price-to-earnings ratios, evaluate its cash generation versus its debt load, review its earnings expectations versus reality, etc.) but rather through a casino-like focus on ticker symbols alone. It's quite common for novice investors on day-trading platforms to buy a stock for the same reason they might choose a specific color of sweater -- for aesthetic purposes only. This is all terribly familiar.[...] Now, with the benefit of hindsight and history, how do we not repeat the dot-com experience as a dark comedy? [...] WH Press Secretary said moments ago at a briefing that Biden team is "monitoring the situation" around GameStop.

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A major vulnerability impacting a large chunk of the Linux ecosystem has been patched today in Sudo, an app that allows admins to delegate limited root access to other users. From a report: The vulnerability, which received a CVE identifier of CVE-2021-3156, but is more commonly known as "Baron Samedit," was discovered by security auditing firm Qualys two weeks ago and was patched earlier today with the release of Sudo v1.9.5p2. In a simple explanation provided by the Sudo team today, the Baron Samedit bug can be exploited by an attacker who has gained access to a low-privileged account to gain root access, even if the account isn't listed in /etc/sudoers -- a config file that controls which users are allowed access to su or sudo commands in the first place.

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Nintendo faces a complaint from BEUC, a European consumer group, over what it calls "systematic problems" with the controllers for the company's popular Switch games console. BEUC said it filed a complaint with the European Union and national consumer protection organizations after evidence from users showed that in 88% of cases, "the game controllers broke within the first two years." A report adds: The group said some 25,000 gamers and other consumers across Europe, including France, Belgium and the Netherlands, complained about a "recurring technical problem with Nintendo Switch controllers, commonly referred to as 'Joy-Con Drift,' according to a statement on Wednesday. The problem causes a glitch where characters can move within games without any input from the user.

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There's a report of a problem with the RT feature on Scripting News. I was not able to reproduce. Help much appreciated.

The government faces legal action over its decision to allow the use of a pesticide that harms bees.

Teenagers' mental health is being damaged by heavy social media use, a report has found. From a report: Research from the Education Policy Institute and The Prince's Trust said wellbeing and self-esteem were similar in all children of primary school age. Boys and girls' wellbeing is affected at the age of 14, but girls' mental health drops more after that, it found. A lack of exercise is another contributing factor - exacerbated by the pandemic, the study said. According to the research: One in three girls was unhappy with their personal appearance by the age of 14, compared with one in seven at the end of primary school. The number of young people with probable mental illness has risen to one in six, up from one in nine in 2017. Boys in the bottom set at primary school had lower self-esteem at 14 than their peers. The wellbeing of both genders fell during adolescence, with girls experiencing a greater decline, the report said.

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Apple has prioritized user privacy over targeted advertising, and Google is spelling out today what that means for itself as well as game and app developers. From a report: Apple is advocating its App Tracking Transparency (ATT) policy, which will require developers to ask for permission when they use personal data from other companies' apps and websites for advertising purposes, even if they already have user consent. It will ask users to opt-in if they will allow advertisers to use their data via the Identifier for Advertisers, or IDFA. Many tests show that many users won't allow it, and that means they won't be so easily tracked for advertising purposes. This change could have a huge impact on the mobile advertising ecosystem, as it could make it harder to target users efficiently with advertising. Eric Seufert, a user acquisition expert, said on Monday that he believes that Facebook could suffer a 7% revenue hit -- a loss of tens of billions of dollars over time -- as a result of the IDFA changes, and it's no secret that Facebook isn't happy about the impact on itself as well as small businesses. At our Driving Game Growth event on Tuesday, Facebook leaders pointed to the IDFA changes as creating uncertainty for mobile games in 2021. Google, which could also be impacted by the policy change, has stayed out of the fray -- until today. "Today we're sharing how Google is helping our community prepare, as we know that developers and advertisers in the iOS ecosystem are still figuring out how to adapt," said Christophe Combette, group product manager for Google Ads in a blog post.

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If you live in the US and subscribe to cable TV it's almost certain that you are finanically supporting Fox News which is primarily responsible for the rise of Trump and downfall of democracy in the US. If I were you (and I am) I would want to do something about this, like demand that your cable company stop giving your money to Fox.

Scientists say sharks and rays are disappearing from the world's oceans at an "alarming" rate.