"A U.S.-backed consortium beat out one financed by China in a closely watched telecommunications auction in Ethiopia — handing Washington a victory in its push to challenge Beijing's economic influence around the world," reports the Wall Street Journal: The East African country said Saturday it tapped a group of telecommunications companies led by the U.K.'s Vodafone Group PLC to build a nationwide, 5G-capable wireless network. The group had won financial backing for the multibillion-dollar project from a newly created U.S. foreign-aid agency. The agency offers low-interest loans, but the financing comes with a condition: the money won't be used to buy telecom equipment from China's Huawei Technologies Co. and ZTE Corp. Washington considers both a spying threat, an accusation the companies deny... The telecom license auction in Ethiopia took on wider geopolitical significance amid heightened competition between the U.S. and China over key technological pursuits, from the rollout of 5G to chip manufacturing. "The U.S. and China are fighting a proxy war in Ethiopia for influence," said Zemedeneh Negatu, chairman of Fairfax Africa Fund LLC, a U.S.-based investment firm that focuses on Africa. After all but shutting out Huawei in the U.S., Washington has become more assertive about challenging Beijing's economic footprint overseas. It is using new financial tools to win influence and ensure that strategic assets in foreign countries stay in friendly hands... Backing the Vodafone bid was the International Development Finance Corp., or DFC. The U.S. government-funded agency was created in December 2019 with a goal of offering alternatives to cheap, Chinese financing for foreign infrastructure projects... U.S. law also prohibits its loan from being used to buy Huawei or ZTE equipment, though one person familiar with the matter said it is possible the Vodafone-led bid could still buy some Chinese gear because of the project's size and cost.

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The Guardian reports: At least 15 people died when torrents of lava poured into villages after dark in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo destroying more than 500 homes, officials and survivors said Sunday. The eruption of Mount Nyiragongo on Saturday night sent about 5,000 people fleeing from the city of Goma across the nearby border into Rwanda, while another 25,000 others sought refuge to the north-west in Sake, the UN children's agency said Sunday... Goma ultimately was largely spared the mass destruction it suffered the last time the volcano erupted back in 2002. Hundreds died then and more than 100,000 people were left homeless. But in outlying villages closer to the volcano, Sunday was marked by grief and uncertainty... The air remained thick with smoke because of how many homes had caught fire from the lava... Residents said there was little warning before the eruption. Smoke rose from smouldering heaps of lava in the Buhene area near Goma on Sunday... Witnesses said lava had engulfed one highway connecting Goma with the city of Beni. However, the airport appeared to be spared the same fate as 2002 when lava flowed on to the runways.

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"Technological advances are driving rapid change in the global payments landscape," says the U.S. federal reserve, the country's central banking system. They announced this week that they're "studying these developments" and exploring ways that the central bank "might refine its role as a core payment services provider and as the issuing authority for U.S. currency." Slashdot reader clubalien shares Engadget's argument that the Reserve "took a step toward developing a digital currency as it announced plans to publish a research paper on the subject," seeking public comment on its pros and cons for payments, financial inclusion, data privacy, and information security. But the Federal Reserve emphasizes that "before making any decision on whether and how to move forward with a U.S. central bank digital currency," their paper "represents the beginning of what will be a thoughtful and deliberative process" that has more than one possible outcome. "Irrespective of the conclusion we ultimately reach, we expect to play a leading role in developing international standards for central bank digital currencies, engaging actively with central banks in other jurisdictions as well as regulators and supervisors here in the United States throughout that process." Their announcement notes America's central bank has already been exploring the benefits and risks of issuing a digital currency "for the past several years," but emphasizes they're exploring it "as a complement to, and not a replacement of" current systems. And the Reserve also state pointedly that "To date, cryptocurrencies have not served as a convenient way to make payments, given, among other factors, their swings in value," before the announcement switches its attention to stablecoins pegged to the value of a non-virtual currency. But even there, the interest seems to be as much regulatory as it is monetary. "As stablecoins' use increases, so must our attention to the appropriate regulatory and oversight framework. "This includes paying attention to private-sector payments innovators who are currently not within the traditional regulatory arrangements applied to banks, investment firms, and other financial intermediaries."

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Slashdot reader esm88 shares the BBC's story about a couple who experienced "a knock on the door from the police" investigating child abuse images posted online. "The couple insisted they had nothing to do with it. But the next few months were 'utter hell' as they attempted to clear their names," before their case was finally dropped in March: In February, a conversation with a friend who worked in cyber-security alerted them to the possibility that their router, supplied by their broadband provider Vodafone, might hold clues to what had happened. They had not changed the default passwords for either the router itself or the admin webpage, leaving it susceptible to brute force attacks. "We think of ourselves as competent users but we are not IT experts," said Matthew. "No-one told us to change the password and the setting up of the router didn't require us to go on to the admin menu, so we didn't. "It came with a password, so we plugged it in and didn't touch anything." Ken Munro, a security consultant with Pen Test Partners, told the BBC that it can take "a matter of minutes" for criminals to piggyback on insecure wireless connections... "So what I guess has happened here, is that the hacker has cracked the wi-fi password and then made changes to the router configuration, so their illicit activities on the internet appear to be coming from the innocent party." In March, when the couple's devices were returned and the case closed, the police officer assigned to liaise with them seemed to corroborate that unauthorised use of their wi-fi was to blame. But it couldn't be proved... The problem is industry-wide, points out Mr Munro. "Internet service providers have started to improve matters to make these attacks harder, by putting unique passwords on each router. However, it will take years for all of the offending routers to be replaced," he said.

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"All over the world, countries are confronting population stagnation and a fertility bust, a dizzying reversal unmatched in recorded history..." reports the New York Times. There's already been some surprising results: Maternity wards are already shutting down in Italy. Ghost cities are appearing in northeastern China. Universities in South Korea can't find enough students, and in Germany, hundreds of thousands of properties have been razed, with the land turned into parks. Like an avalanche, the demographic forces — pushing toward more deaths than births — seem to be expanding and accelerating. Though some countries continue to see their populations grow, especially in Africa, fertility rates are falling nearly everywhere else. Demographers now predict that by the latter half of the century or possibly earlier, the global population will enter a sustained decline for the first time. A planet with fewer people could ease pressure on resources, slow the destructive impact of climate change and reduce household burdens for women. But the census announcements this month from China and the United States, which showed the slowest rates of population growth in decades for both countries, also point to hard-to-fathom adjustments. The strain of longer lives and low fertility, leading to fewer workers and more retirees, threatens to upend how societies are organized — around the notion that a surplus of young people will drive economies and help pay for the old. It may also require a reconceptualization of family and nation. Imagine entire regions where everyone is 70 or older. Imagine governments laying out huge bonuses for immigrants and mothers with lots of children. Imagine a gig economy filled with grandparents and Super Bowl ads promoting procreation. "A paradigm shift is necessary," said Frank Swiaczny, a German demographer who was the chief of population trends and analysis for the United Nations until last year. "Countries need to learn to live with and adapt to decline...." The ramifications and responses have already begun to appear, especially in East Asia and Europe. From Hungary to China, from Sweden to Japan, governments are struggling to balance the demands of a swelling older cohort with the needs of young people whose most intimate decisions about childbearing are being shaped by factors both positive (more work opportunities for women) and negative (persistent gender inequality and high living costs)... As women have gained more access to education and contraception, and as the anxieties associated with having children continue to intensify, more parents are delaying pregnancy and fewer babies are being born. Even in countries long associated with rapid growth, such as India and Mexico, birthrates are falling toward, or are already below, the replacement rate of 2.1 children per family. The change may take decades, but once it starts, decline (just like growth) spirals exponentially. With fewer births, fewer girls grow up to have children, and if they have smaller families than their parents did — which is happening in dozens of countries — the drop starts to look like a rock thrown off a cliff... Some countries, like the United States, Australia and Canada, where birthrates hover between 1.5 and 2, have blunted the impact with immigrants. But in Eastern Europe, migration out of the region has compounded depopulation, and in large parts of Asia, the "demographic time bomb" that first became a subject of debate a few decades ago has finally gone off... According to projections by an international team of scientists published last year in The Lancet, 183 countries and territories — out of 195 — will have fertility rates below replacement level by 2100... The article asks us to imagine a world where now-empty homes become "a common eyesore," noting that in regional towns Korea , already "it's easy to find schools shut and abandoned, their playgrounds overgrown with weeds, because there are not enough children."

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The Republican Party is being re-formed in the model of the Russian government. It's as if Putin owns one of the two parties in our two-party system. The problem is if this persists, it will not be a two-party system.

Python's creator Guido van Rossum shared his opinions on other programming languages during a new hour-long interview with Microsoft's principle cloud advocate manager. Some of the highlights: Rust: "It sounds like it's a great language — for certain things. Rust really improves on C++ in one particular area — it makes it much harder to bypass the checks in the compiler. And of course it solves the memory allocation problem in a near perfect way... if you wrote the same thing in C++, you could not be as sure, as compared to Rust, that you've gotten all your memory allocation and memory management stuff right. So Rust is an interesting language." Go and Julia: "I still think that Go is a very interesting language too. Of all the new languages, Go is probably the most Python-ic — or at least the general-purpose new languages. There's also Julia, which is sort of an interesting sort of take on something Python-like. It has enough details that look very similar to Python that then when you realize, 'Oh, but all the indexing is one-based and ranges are inclusive instead of exclusive,' you think, 'Argh!' Nobody should ever try to code in Julia and in Python on the same day. "My understanding is that Julia is sort of much more of a niche language, and if you're in that niche, it is superior because the compiler optimizes your code for you in a way that Python probably never will. On the other hand, it is much more limited in other areas, and I wouldn't expect that anybody ever is going to write a web server in Julia and get a lot of mileage out of it. And I'm sure in five minutes that will be on Hacker News with a counterexample." TypeScript: "TypeScript is a great language. You might have noticed that in the past six or seven years, we've been adding optional static typing to Python, also known as gradual typing. I wasn't actually aware of TypeScript when we started that project, so I can't say that we were inspired by TypeScript initially. TypeScript, because it sort of jumped on the JavaScript bandwagon — and because Anders is a really smart guy — TypeScript did a few things that Python is still waiting to figure out. So nowadays, we definitely look at TypeScript for examples. We have a typing SIG where we discuss extensions of the typing syntax and semantics and the type system in general for Python, and we definitely sometimes propose new features because we know that certain features were also originally initially lacking in TypeScript, and then added to TypeScript based on user demand, and [became] very successful in TypeScript. And so now we can see we are in that same situation. "Because JavaScript and Python are relatively similar... Much more so than Python and say C++ or Rust or Java. So we are learning from TypeScript, and occasionally, from my conversations with Anders, it sounds like TypeScript is also learning from Python, just like JavaScript has learned from Python in a few areas."

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Fast Company's technology editor harrymcc writes: In the 1940s, IBM tried to market a typewriter capable of handling all 5,400 Chinese characters. The catch was that using it required memorizing a 4-digit code for each character. But a young woman named Lois Lew tackled the challenge and demoed the typewriter for the company in presentations from Manhattan to Shanghai. More than 70 years later, Lew, now in her 90s, told her remarkable story to Thomas S. Mullaney for Fast Company.

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An anonymous reader quotes Reuters: India's information technology (IT) ministry has written to all social media companies asking them to take down any content that refers to an "Indian variant" of the coronavirus, according to a letter issued on Friday which was seen by Reuters. The World Health Organization said on May 11 that the coronavirus variant B.1.617, first identified in India last year, was being classified as a variant of global concern. The Indian government a day later issued a statement saying media reports using the term "Indian Variant" were without any basis, saying the WHO had classified the variant as just B.1.617. In a letter to social media companies on Friday, the IT ministry asked the companies to "remove all the content" that names or implies "Indian variant" of the coronavirus. "This is completely FALSE. There is no such variant of Covid-19 scientifically cited as such by the World Health Organisation (WHO). WHO has not associated the term 'Indian Variant' with the B.1.617 variant of the coronavirus in any of its reports," stated the letter, which is not public. A senior Indian government source told Reuters the notice was issued to send a message "loud and clear" that such mentions of "Indian variant" spread miscommunication and hurt the country's image.

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The Telegraph reports: Video-sharing platform YouTube has announced changes in its terms of services, which confer the company the right to monetise all content on its platform by placing advertisements along its videos from channels that are not covered by its partner programme. From June onwards, content created by those who have not enrolled for the YouTube partner programme will also run advertisements curated by YouTube. The creators/uploaders will not earn any revenue from these promotions... "You grant YouTube the right to monetise your content on the service (and such monetisation may include displaying ads on or within content or charging users a fee for access)," said the updated terms of service. "This agreement does not entitle you to any payments...." This was already in effect in the U.S. from November last year and will now be extended across other geographies effective from June. According to industry observers, the change in terms of service is motivated by the fast growing revenue channels from YouTube advertisements. For the March quarter of 2021, Alphabet, Google's parent, earned a revenue of $6 billion from YouTube advertising, posting a year on year growth of 49 per cent... Philipp Schindler, senior vice president and chief business officer, Google explained to the analysts on what is driving such growth... "Advertisers are using YouTube now to reach the audiences they can't find anywhere else. And remember, more 18-to-49-year-olds are actually watching YouTube than all linear TV combined...." According to official figures, over 2 billion logged in users visit YouTube every month and every day people watch over a billion hours of video on the platform... "Today there are two models in place - either the subscriber pays or the advertiser pays. It is inevitable that all platforms will follow one or the other and viewers and content creators have to accept that," said a media and entertainment industry analyst requesting anonymity. YouTube reminds users that its Terms of Service also "already state that you cannot collect any information that might identify a person without their permission. While this has always included facial recognition information, the new Terms make that explicitly clear."

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Tools for thought. That's what the new category, with outliners at the core, is called. I endorse the name. Our first product at Living Videotext, shipped in 1983, was called ThinkTank. Pour your your thinking into the outline structure, and then as time goes by reorganize the outline to reflect what's happened with these ideas. Right off the bat, that's a different use-case from the ones used by the TFT people. There are others.

Our first ads had a big title: See what you think. That's who we sold to, people who understood that they think, were self-aware enough to have ideas about how they think, and were interested in tools that could make that more efficient, as a spreadsheet makes financial planning more powerful. Or a database makes running a business less expensive and more personal. We were applying the power of a personal computer to the act of thinking. And it worked!

• The first review of ThinkTank -- ever. In the NYT, in 1983.
• The back cover of the first commercial release in ThinkTank, the one that was reviewed in the NYT.

It's weird for me, because I'm sure I come off as arrogant, a know-it-all, but the truth is that I've been far down the road these young people are just starting down. I believe I know how a lot of this turns out.

For example, one of the TFT thought leaders last night compared this stuff to the beginning of blogging, something I also know a lot about. If he knew the truth it would blow him away. The first blogging tools were outliners, because that's what I use to write. And I still think that blogging and outlining are basically the same thing. I'm using my outliner right now to write this post.

Anyway there's so much more to say. I'm glad to have the opportunity. And I want to be clear, I want to help the young folk. I wan to make sure we don't lose all the progress that's already in the bank. I want the interfaces to be open, simple, steady, efficient and most important, compatible. Creating 18 different silos will waste decades of future development. It's still very early and the interfaces mostly don't exist, so it's not too late to make this more like the blogging world and less like Facebook (more likely a dozen Facebooks, btw).

The three basic components that make up the TFT world.

1. Outliners, of course.
2. Databases which store the outlines, and maybe do discovery on what's stored there, and
3. Renderers which view the outliner as an authoring tool, and produce a visualization of an outline or a section of an outline, as a bullet chart (presentation), tree chart or the display that the VCs love, the connected graph where you can zoom in on stuff and the blocks re-arrange.

But there are other views of this world. Outlines are great structures for programming! Python started off in that direction, but stopped before they got to the good stuff imho. We went much futher with Frontier. We also used the outliner to manage the object database and user interface structures. You used the same outliner to browse through the data kept by the runtime kernel.

But, even that's just the beginning. Something I haven't seen explored in any of the TFT products is the idea of an outline as a file system. With the outlines being a permanent container for all kinds of work. File systems are of course outlines. Instead of the mediocre tools for managing file systems on the major OSes, why not have a great one! That was the idea behind ThinkTank.

How do you know this is right? Pop up and look at the structures in your computer and on the net. They are all outlines. So if you're thinking of an outline as an inherently small thing, you're not seeing the full picture.

Again, I'm aware that this could come off as arrogant. But what do you do when a group of brilliant young visionaries discover what you discovered when you were one of them, in the mid 1970s, and spent the rest of your career exploring and developing, while the rest of the computer world pretty much ignored you? First you celebrate! It's not a lost cause after all. Then you ask yourself as I am, how do you approach this. What I've decided so far is that I am going to continue to develop Drummer, and I'm going to push in every way I can for zero lock-in, user choice everywhere, and clean simple and extensible APIs for each of the components. And of course I will be writing all through this process, as long as I can, because that's the other thing I do -- blog. Not only do I create the software for this stuff, I create it for myself because this is how I think, it's why I knew to develop this stuff in the first place.

Watching the Nets game last night, I felt sad for the Celtics, which is a milestone because I generally hate the Celtics, but I hate the Nets so much more. They filled Barclay's with fans. Where did they come from? Every city has fair-weather-fans, New York is no exception. The Yankees fans who root for the Mets when they're in the World Series, for example. Mets fans root against the Yankees no matter what. We like the Red Sox, because they torment the Yankees. These New Yorkers like that three carpetbaggers, KD, Kyrie and Harden decided they wanted to own an NBA team, and Brooklyn was available. This has nothing to do with New York, or even the Nets. It's just three players in the prime of their careers, all headed for the Hall of Fame, and all of them total fucking assholes. Which usually isn't a bad thing in NY, except that the Knicks are the team we actually love, and they're rising to the occasion. Their series with Atlanta, which starts tonight at the Garden, is probably going to turn out to be much better basketball than the coming rout by the top-seeded Nets of the low-seeded Celtics.

Brad Silverberg, who I was just thinking about, wrote a tweet on a subject I was getting ready to write about, in response to something Jay Rosen tweeted earlier. The question is does any news about Matt Gaetz really matter? He's a nobody. Obviously he did a lot of awful things, and he should be expelled from Congress, for that, and for voting to overturn a legal election (the latter being more in line with the news I care about). Same with Marjorie Three Names (a term coined by Silverberg). That they are tolerated by Repubs is news, but not super important. What matters is why aren't we actively trying to head off the looming permanent hijacking of American democracy? Why are our news channels content in reporting the points on the curve instead of the curve itself. When the 2022 election comes and the Repubs take over the House, then, when it is too late, will they report on how the next presidential election is meaningless because the Republican House will never let the election stand, if the Republican candidate should lose. That Democrats will never win another election. Whose fault will it be when it's too late? We have an incredible chance right now to get ahead of the history that the Repubs are trying to write. Why are we giving up? Maybe, Jay, the people who can't watch the news as we drive off the cliff, are right?

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes Ars Technica: Texas Governor Greg Abbott's office knew of looming natural gas shortages on February 10, days before a deep freeze plunged much of the state into blackouts, according to documents obtained by E&E News and reviewed by Ars. Abbott's office first learned of the likely shortfall in a phone call from then-chair of the Public Utility Commission of Texas DeAnne Walker. In the days leading up to the power outages that began on February 15, Walker and the governor's office spoke 31 more times. Walker also spoke with regulators, politicians, and utilities dozens of times about the gas curtailments that threatened the state's electrical grid. The PUC chair's diary for the days before the outage shows her schedule dominated by concerns over gas curtailments and the impact they would have on electricity generation. Before and during the disaster, she was on more than 100 phone calls with various agencies and utilities regarding gas shortages. After the blackouts began, Abbott appeared on Fox News to falsely assert that wind turbines were the driving force behind the outages.

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"Decades of research have consistently shown that extroverts have a significant happiness edge over introverts," writes Harvard professor/PhD social scientist Arthur C. Brooks. Extroverts "report higher levels of general well-being as well as more frequent moments of joy." "COVID-19, however, has given us extroverts our comeuppance..." Research published in March in the scientific journal PLOS One studied the impact of the pandemic on people with various personality characteristics. The authors found that mood worsened for extroverts but improved for introverts... In ordinary times, American introverts are like cats living in Dogland: underappreciated, uncomfortable, and slightly out of place. A side effect of shutting down the world was to turn it into Catland, at least for a little while. That gave the introverts a chance to lord their solitary comfort over the rest of us, for once... But the temporary shift has also created a kind of social-science field experiment, highlighting all the ways in which introverts and extroverts can learn from each other. If we take the lessons to heart, we can all benefit... Extroversion is highly rewarded in American society, and predicts a significant edge in earning power — on average, extroverts make about $12,000 more per year than introverts. Extroverts attain other advantages in the workplace as well, such as promotions to leadership positions and high performance evaluations. Some resent these patterns, and believe they show a lack of cultural depth. In her book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, Susan Cain lists the many advances made by introverts — from the theory of gravity to Google — and argues that admiring and rewarding extroversion is not just unfair, but hinders progress... The pandemic's pause in life's rhythms has left society's dogs in a state of social withdrawal, explaining the current happiness inversion. But it also presents an opportunity for extroverts to cultivate more real friendships like introverts have... Beyond the specifics of introversion and extroversion, there is one important lesson in all this: Watching and learning from people very different from you is a great way to learn to be happier. Each group can teach the other a lesson that can improve all of our well-being. The article argues that while extroverts "should work on deep friendships, which introverts tend to have more of," introverts "should focus more on the future, like extroverts do."

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