An anonymous reader shares a report: When French telecommunications company Altice acquired U.S. cable companies Cablevision and Suddenlink, Chairman Patrick Drahi made a bold statement: Altice USA would rival Comcast and Charter in size, becoming one of the three dominant U.S. cable operators. Fast forward nearly six years, and Altice USA has about 5 million customer relationships, compared with about 31 million each for Comcast and Charter. (Altice USA did announce a $310 million acquisition of Morris Broadband on Monday, which will give it about 36,000 more customers.) CEO Dexter Goei explained to CNBC what prevented Altice USA's rapid expansion, why he thinks cable and wireless will eventually merge in the U.S., and why it's only a matter of time before cable TV becomes extinct. CNBC: So let me ask that question in a slightly different way. Do you envision a day where cable TV, as we know it, simply no longer exists? Goei: Yes. For sure. Everything is going to be IP-based, and then the question is because everything is IP based, and you have so many different choices...what the cable bundle is doing today is putting together everything that's available in the OTT world and providing it to you in a good format for you to be able to guide yourself through lots of different options in the way you watch television. As technology and integration technology continues to get better and better, you're going to be able to aggregate that on your OTT platforms, your smart TV. Your Samsung TV today already has, say, 20 apps, 30, 40 apps already there. The pain of it is you're always clicking between the apps, all the time. Once you can get the whole aggregation together and make it look very similar to what you do in a cable environment, then that interactivity becomes second nature and doesn't really matter who's doing the bundle. It could just be your set-box provider, your smart TV provider. CNBC:: So this idea that some media executives have that there's going to be a floor at 50 million subscribers, that's ultimately fantasy? Goei: I think so, because name me one person under 30 years old who has a cable video connection. I can't. So it's just a question of time. People grow up in a certain way. I tell my kids all day long, how could you spend 10 hours a day on your iPhone? And they're like, "Daddy, that's our life. We didn't go out in the woods and build bricks and castles and stuff like you. That stuff is boring. My whole life is on my phone." So, there's an evolution of technology and habits and the way people consume content thatâ(TM)s changed dramatically over the last ten years, and it's going to continue to change.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Bitcoin rose nearly 7% on Monday as risk assets rallied after last week's bond rout cooled, with Citi saying the most popular cryptocurrency was at a "tipping point" and could become the preferred currency for international trade. With the recent embrace of the likes of Tesla and Mastercard, bitcoin could be at the start of a "massive transformation" into the mainstream, the investment bank said. Goldman Sachs, meanwhile, has restarted its cryptocurrency trading desk and will begin dealing bitcoin futures and non-deliverable forwards for clients next week, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters. Bitcoin, which hit a record high of $58,354 in February, could in the future become the preferred currency for international trade or face a "speculative implosion," Citi said. "There are a host of risks and obstacles that stand in the way of bitcoin progress," Citi's analysts wrote. "But weighing these potential hurdles against the opportunities leads to the conclusion that bitcoin is at a tipping point." Bitcoin's recent performance has come with the growing involvement of institutional investors in recent years, contrasting with its heavy retail investor focus for most of the past decade, Citi said. If businesses and individuals gain access via digital wallets to planned central bank digital cash and so-called stablecoins, bitcoin's global reach, traceability and potential for quick payments would see it "optimally positioned" to become the preferred currency for international trade, Citi added. Such a dramatic transformation to the de facto currency of world trade -- a status currently held by the dollar -- would depend on changes to bitcoin's market to allow wider institutional participation and closer oversight by financial regulators, Citi said. Still, shifts in the macroeconomic environment could also make the demand for bitcoin less pressing, it added.

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AmiMoJo shares a report: Last month, the Linux Mint team published a post on the organization's official blog about the importance of installing security updates on machines running the Linux distribution. The essence of the post was that a sizeable number of Linux Mint devices was running outdated applications, packages or even an outdated version of the operating system itself. A sizeable number of devices run on Linux Mint 17.x, according to the blog post, a version of Linux Mint that reached end of support in April 2019. A new blog post, published yesterday, provides information on how the team plans to reduce the update reluctance of Linux Mint users. Next to showing reminders to users, Linux Mint's Update Manager may enforce some of the updates according to the blog post. "In some cases the Update Manager will be able to remind you to apply updates. In a few of them it might even insist." Upcoming versions will provide information on the implementation, how the "insisting" part may look like, and whether the installation of updates will be enforced. All of this boils down to a single question: how far should operating system developers go when it comes to updates? BetaNews adds: "And now, it seems the Linux Mint developers are taking a page out of Microsoft's playbook by planning to force some updates on its users. Yes, folks, Linux Mint is becoming more like Windows 10."

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The electronic Chinese yuan is now being tested in cities such as Shenzhen, Shanghai and Beijing. No other major power is as far along with a homegrown digital currency. From a report: Annabelle Huang recently won a government lottery to try China's latest economics experiment: a national digital currency. After joining the lottery through the social media app WeChat, Ms. Huang, 28, a business strategist in Shenzhen, received a digital envelope with 200 electronic Chinese yuan, or eCNY, worth around $30. To spend it, she went to a convenience store near her office and picked out some nuts and yogurt. Then she pulled up a QR code for the digital currency from inside her bank app, which the store scanned for payment. "The journey of how you pay, it's very similar" to that of other Chinese payments apps, Ms. Huang said of the eCNY experience, though she added that it wasn't quite as smooth. China has charged ahead with a bold effort to remake the way that government-backed money works, rolling out its own digital currency with different qualities than cash or digital deposits. The country's central bank, which began testing eCNY last year in four cities, recently expanded those trials to bigger cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, according to government presentations. The effort is one of several by central banks around the world to try new forms of digital money that can move faster and give even the most disadvantaged people access to online financial tools. Many countries have taken action as cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, which has recently soared in value, have become more popular. But while Bitcoin was designed to be decentralized so that no company or government could control it, digital currencies created by central banks give governments more of a financial grip.

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Goldman Sachs Group has restarted its cryptocurrency trading desk and will begin dealing bitcoin futures and non-deliverable forwards for clients from next week, Reuters reported Monday, citing a source. From the report: The team will sit within the U.S. bank's Global Markets division, the person said. The desk is part of Goldman's activities within the fast-growing digital assets sector, which also includes projects involving blockchain technology and central bank digital currencies, the person said. As part of this work, the bank is also exploring the potential for a bitcoin exchange traded fund and has issued a request for information to explore digital asset custody, the source said. The trading desk reboot comes amid growing interest by institutions in bitcoin, which has soared more than 470% over the past year. The largest cryptocurrency is seen by investors and some companies as a hedge against inflation as governments and central banks turn on the stimulus taps.

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Ethan Zuckerman: "I love the Chevy Bolt. Probably the best car I’ve ever owned."

Catalin Cimpanu, reporting for The Record: A fully weaponized exploit for the Spectre CPU vulnerability was uploaded on the malware-scanning website VirusTotal last month, marking the first time a working exploit capable of doing actual damage has entered the public domain. The exploit was discovered by French security researcher Julien Voisin. It targets Spectre, a major vulnerability that was disclosed in January 2018. [...] The vulnerability, which won a Pwnie Award in 2018 for one of the best security bug discoveries of the year, was considered a milestone moment in the evolution and history of the modern CPU. Its discovery, along with the Meltdown bug, effectively forced CPU vendors to rethink their approach to designing processors, making it clear that they cannot focus on performance alone, to the detriment of data security. Software patches were released at the time, but the Meltdown and Spectre disclosures forced Intel to rethink its entire approach to CPU designs going forward. At the time, the teams behind the Meltdown and Spectre bugs published their work in the form of research papers and some trivial proof-of-concept code to prove their attacks. Shortly after the Meltdown and Spectre publications, experts at AV-TEST, Fortinet, and Minerva Labs spotted a spike in VirusTotal uploads for both CPU bugs. While initially there was a fear that malware authors might be experimenting with the two bugs as a way to steal data from targeted systems, the exploits were classified as harmless variations of the public PoC code published by the Meltdown and Spectre researchers and no evidence was found of in-the-wild attacks. But today, Voisin said he discovered new Spectre exploits -- one for Windows and one for Linux -- different from the ones before. In particular, Voisin said he found a Linux Spectre exploit capable of dumping the contents of /etc/shadow, a Linux file that stores details on OS user accounts.

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Petaluma, California, has voted to outlaw new gas stations, the first of what climate activists hope will be numerous cities and counties to do so. From a report: The movement aims to accelerate the shift to electric vehicles. "This is not a ban on the existing gas stations, which are providing all the gas currently needed," Matt Krogh, U.S. oil and gas campaign director for the environmental group Stand.earth, tells Axios. "The problem with allowing new gas stations is we don't really need them and they're putting existing gas stations out of business." In Petaluma -- where neighborhood opposition to a new Safeway gas station prompted years of litigation -- the council voted unanimously last week to move forward with a permanent ban on new stations; a final vote will happen Monday. Existing stations won't be allowed to add new gas pumps, though they're encouraged to build electric charging bays. "The city of roughly 60,000 people is host to 16 operational gas stations, and city staff concluded there are multiple stations located within a 5-minute drive of every planned or existing residence within city limits," per the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. The city councilor who introduced the measure, D'Lynda Fischer, is quoted as saying: "The goal here is to move away from fossil fuels and to make it as easy as possible to do that."

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Interest rates have been negative in Europe for years. But it took the flood of savings unleashed in the pandemic for banks finally to charge depositors in earnest. From a report: Germany's biggest lenders, Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank, have told new customers since last year to pay a 0.5% annual rate to keep large sums of money with them. The banks say they can no longer absorb the negative interest rates the European Central Bank charges them. The more customer deposits banks have, the more they have to park with the central bank. That is creating an unusual incentive, where banks that usually want deposits as an inexpensive form of financing, are essentially telling customers to go away. Banks are even providing new online tools to help customers take their deposits elsewhere. Banks in Europe resisted passing negative rates on to customers when the ECB first introduced them in 2014, fearing backlash. Some did it only with corporate depositors, who were less likely to complain to local politicians. The banks resorted to other ways to pass on the costs of negative rates, charging higher fees, for instance. The pandemic has changed the equation. Savings rates skyrocketed with consumers at home. And huge relief programs from the ECB have flooded banks with excess deposits. Banks also have used the economic dislocation of the pandemic to make operational changes they have long resisted.

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Early last summer, Chinese and Indian troops clashed in a surprise border battle in the remote Galwan Valley, bashing each other to death with rocks and clubs. Four months later and more than 1,500 miles away in Mumbai, India, trains shut down and the stock market closed as the power went out in a city of 20 million people. Hospitals had to switch to emergency generators to keep ventilators running amid a coronavirus outbreak that was among India's worst. The New York Times: Now, a new study lends weight to the idea that those two events may well have been connected -- as part of a broad Chinese cybercampaign against India's power grid, timed to send a message that if India pressed its claims too hard, the lights could go out across the country. The study shows that as the standoff continued in the Himalayas, taking at least two dozen lives, Chinese malware was flowing into the control systems that manage electric supply across India, along with a high-voltage transmission substation and a coal-fired power plant. The flow of malware was pieced together by Recorded Future, a Somerville, Mass., company that studies the use of the internet by state actors. It found that most of the malware was never activated. And because Recorded Future could not get inside India's power systems, it could not examine the details of the code itself, which was placed in strategic power-distribution systems across the country. While it has notified Indian authorities, so far they are not reporting what they have found. Stuart Solomon, Recorded Future's chief operating officer, said that the Chinese state-sponsored group, which the firm named Red Echo, "has been seen to systematically utilize advanced cyberintrusion techniques to quietly gain a foothold in nearly a dozen critical nodes across the Indian power generation and transmission infrastructure." The discovery raises the question about whether an outage that struck on Oct. 13 in Mumbai, one of the country's busiest business hubs, was meant as a message from Beijing about what might happen if India pushed its border claims too vigorously.

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I am pissed that the press is going after Andrew Cuomo, who led us through some very dark times, when it helped to feel like someone was in charge. We may need that again, and thanks to this purge, he may not be available. But if you really want to nail him, learn about the 1977 campaign between his father and Ed Koch, for mayor of NYC. It was very mean-spirited, and Andrew was part of it. I find what the Cuomos did utterly abhorrent, but you know what, we still need people who can lead. Perfection is nice, if you can afford it. We can't.

Like many others I learned to live with an alcoholic parent. You try desperately not to provoke them. They drink and that's all the provocation they need. But they're the adult, and you're a kid so you believe them when they say you provoked them. But kids are not stupid, you can't see how.

Yes. The Knicks are surprisingly good this year, and fun to watch. Finally NYC has a real NBA team. Not like Brooklyn which was annointed by an itinerant group of star players. They'll be as hollow as Miami or Cleveland when they move on.

Not knowing what ideas will not be tolerated in the future must make it hard for people to write for the NYT now.