The official autopsy of the great Texas winter blackout of February 2021 quickly established a clear timeline of events: Electric utilities cut off power to customers and distributors as well as natural gas producers, which in turn triggered a negative feedback loop that sunk the state deeper and deeper into frigid darkness. It's now becoming clear that while millions of Texans endured days of power cuts, the state's gas producers contributed to fuel shortages, allowing pipelines and traders to profit handsomely off them. From a report: Interviews with energy executives and an analysis of public records by Bloomberg News show that natural gas producers in the Permian shale basin began to drastically reduce output days before power companies cut them off. As the flow of gas cratered, everyone scrambled to secure enough supply, sparking one of the wildest price surges in history. Power producers were forced to pay top dollar in the spot market for whatever gas they could find. Soon customers will be saddled with the bill. And it's a big one: The total comes to about $11.1 billion for a storm that lasted for just five days, according to estimates by BloombergNEF analysts Jade Patterson and Nakul Nair. The cost of gas for power generation alone was about $8.1 billion, or 75 times normal levels. A further $3 billion was spent by utilities providing gas for cooking, heating and fireplaces. The BNEF estimate is based on spot prices at major hubs assessed by S&P Global Platts rather than private contracts, so is likely an upper limit of the total cost. Millions of Texans are now faced with the prospect of paying higher gas prices for years as utilities seek to spread the cost over a decade or more. Texas lawmakers have set aside $10 billion to help natural gas utilities cover their natural gas costs from the storm through low-interest, state-backed bonds. A special legislative session convened Thursday but the agenda did not include any measures to fix the power grid. This week, Governor Greg Abbott appeared to double down on his early assessment that wind and solar were prime culprits of the freeze. Even though gas failed in its role as a reliable backup fuel during the freeze, Abbott pushed regulators in a letter to strengthen incentives for fossil fuel and nuclear generators while increasing "reliability costs" for intermittent renewable power sources. What Abbott didn't mention was the massive windfall key industry players made during the freeze. Energy Transfer posted its highest quarterly net income on record, more than three times its previous best quarter.

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Executives at the social network have clashed over CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned data tool that revealed users' high engagement levels with right-wing media sources. From a report: One day in April, the people behind CrowdTangle, a data analytics tool owned by Facebook, learned that transparency had limits. Brandon Silverman, CrowdTangle's co-founder and chief executive, assembled dozens of employees on a video call to tell them that they were being broken up. CrowdTangle, which had been running quasi-independently inside Facebook since being acquired in 2016, was being moved under the social network's integrity team, the group trying to rid the platform of misinformation and hate speech. Some CrowdTangle employees were being reassigned to other divisions, and Mr. Silverman would no longer be managing the team day to day. The announcement, which left CrowdTangle's employees in stunned silence, was the result of a yearlong battle among Facebook executives over data transparency, and how much the social network should reveal about its inner workings. On one side were executives, including Mr. Silverman and Brian Boland, a Facebook vice president in charge of partnerships strategy, who argued that Facebook should publicly share as much information as possible about what happens on its platform -- good, bad or ugly. On the other side were executives, including the company's chief marketing officer and vice president of analytics, Alex Schultz, who worried that Facebook was already giving away too much. They argued that journalists and researchers were using CrowdTangle, a kind of turbocharged search engine that allows users to analyze Facebook trends and measure post performance, to dig up information they considered unhelpful -- showing, for example, that right-wing commentators like Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino were getting much more engagement on their Facebook pages than mainstream news outlets. These executives argued that Facebook should selectively disclose its own data in the form of carefully curated reports, rather than handing outsiders the tools to discover it themselves. Team Selective Disclosure won, and CrowdTangle and its supporters lost. An internal battle over data transparency might seem low on the list of worthy Facebook investigations. But the CrowdTangle story is important, because it illustrates the way that Facebook's obsession with managing its reputation often gets in the way of its attempts to clean up its platform. And it gets to the heart of one of the central tensions confronting Facebook in the post-Trump era. The company, blamed for everything from election interference to vaccine hesitancy, badly wants to rebuild trust with a skeptical public. But the more it shares about what happens on its platform, the more it risks exposing uncomfortable truths that could further damage its image.

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Microsoft is threatening to bring back its loveable / annoying Clippy character. A post adds: The software giant claims it will replace the paperclip emoji in Microsoft Office with Clippy if one of its tweets gets 20,000 likes. The tweet has already passed 19,500 likes, so Clippy could be about to return as a more innocent emoji. Born in Office 97, Clippy originally appeared as an assistant to offer help and tips for using Microsoft Office. You either loved or hated its Groucho eyebrows and persistence, and Microsoft eventually killed off Clippy in Office XP in 2001.

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Twitter saw a surge in government demands worldwide in 2020 to take down content posted by journalists and news outlets, according to data released by the social media platform. From a report: In its transparency report published on Wednesday, Twitter said verified accounts of 199 journalists and news outlets on its platform faced 361 legal demands from governments to remove content in the second half of 2020, up 26% from the first half of the year. The biannual report on Twitter's enforcement of policy rules and the information and removal requests it receives comes as social media companies including Facebook and Alphabet's YouTube face government scrutiny worldwide over the content allowed on their platforms. Twitter ultimately removed five tweets from journalists and news publishers, the report said. India submitted most of the removal requests, followed by Turkey, Pakistan and Russia.

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Backblaze CEO Gleb Budman, writing on the company blog: Over the last 14 years, we have worked diligently to keep our costs low and pass our savings on to customers. We've invested in deduplication, compression, and other technologies to continually optimize our storage platform and drive our costs down -- savings which we pass on to our customers in the form of storing more data for the same price. However, the average backup size stored by Computer Backup customers has spiked 15% over just the last two years. Additionally, not only have component prices not fallen at traditional rates, but recently electronic components that we rely on to provide our services have actually increased in price. The combination of these two trends, along with our desire to continue investing in providing a great service, is driving the need to modestly increase our prices. The new monthly plan now costs $7, while the yearly plan will set you back by $70.

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Say goodbye to Fleets, the row of fullscreen tweets at the top of the Twitter timeline that expire after 24 hours. The ephemeral tweet format is shutting down due to low usage after launching widely just eight months ago. From a report: Starting on August 3rd, users will instead just see active Spaces -- Twitter's live audio chat rooms -- at the top of their timelines. And the composer for traditional tweets will be updated with more camera editing features from Fleets, like text-formatting and GIF stickers over photos. Twitter's decision to axe Fleets is not just an admission that the feature didn't work but that the company still hasn't figured out how to get people tweeting more. For years, Twitter has struggled to get new users to post regularly and not just consume other people's tweets. Fleets was its shot at using Stories, the popular social media format invented by Snapchat and further popularized by Instagram, to lower the pressure around tweeting. "We hoped Fleets would help more people feel comfortable joining the conversation on Twitter," Ilya Brown, Twitter's vice president of product, said in a statement. "But, in the time since we introduced Fleets to everyone, we haven't seen an increase in the number of new people joining the conversation with Fleets like we hoped."

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Inside the World Wide Web Consortium, where the world's top engineers battle over the future of your data. From a report: One of the web's geekiest corners, the W3C is a mostly-online community where the people who operate the internet -- website publishers, browser companies, ad tech firms, privacy advocates, academics and others -- come together to hash out how the plumbing of the web works. It's where top developers from companies like Google pitch proposals for new technical standards, the rest of the community fine-tunes them and, if all goes well, the consortium ends up writing the rules that ensure websites are secure and that they work no matter which browser you're using or where you're using it. The W3C's members do it all by consensus in public GitHub forums and open Zoom meetings with meticulously documented meeting minutes, creating a rare archive on the internet of conversations between some of the world's most secretive companies as they collaborate on new rules for the web in plain sight. But lately, that spirit of collaboration has been under intense strain as the W3C has become a key battleground in the war over web privacy. Over the last year, far from the notice of the average consumer or lawmaker, the people who actually make the web run have converged on this niche community of engineers to wrangle over what privacy really means, how the web can be more private in practice and how much power tech giants should have to unilaterally enact this change. On one side are engineers who build browsers at Apple, Google, Mozilla, Brave and Microsoft. These companies are frequent competitors that have come to embrace web privacy on drastically different timelines. But they've all heard the call of both global regulators and their own users, and are turning to the W3C to develop new privacy-protective standards to replace the tracking techniques businesses have long relied on. On the other side are companies that use cross-site tracking for things like website optimization and advertising, and are fighting for their industry's very survival. That includes small firms like Rosewell's, but also giants of the industry, like Facebook.

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Unite -- the UK's largest trade union, with some 1.4 million members -- has accused Amazon of inflating prices for items such as hand sanitiser and other health products during the pandemic. From a report: Working with competition lawyers Preiskel & Co LLP, Unite has submitted a formal complaint to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) over alleged "abuse of its market position in relation to price gouging at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic." Unite claims that the price hikes hit vulnerable and older people, who had no choice but to stay at home and minimise their risk of infection. It has called on Amazon to "repay the overcharges." It claims to have uncovered 50 different items -- including soap, antibacterial spray, face masks, and toilet paper -- that were sold on Amazon "for at least double their usual price at the height of the pandemic last year."

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Microsoft is putting Windows in the cloud. Windows 365 is a new service that will let businesses access Cloud PCs from anywhere, streaming a version of Windows 10 or Windows 11 in a web browser. From a report: While virtualization and remote access to PCs has existed for more than a decade, Microsoft is betting on Windows 365 to offer Cloud PCs to businesses just as they shift toward a mix of office and remote work. Windows 365 will work on any modern web browser or through Microsoft's Remote Desktop app, allowing users to access their Cloud PC from a variety of devices. "Windows 365 provides an instant-on boot experience," according to Wangui McKelvey, a general manager for Microsoft 365. This instant access lets workers stream their Windows session with all of their same apps, tools, data, and settings across Macs, iPads, Linux machines, and Android devices. "You can pick up right where you left off,âbecause the state of your Cloud PC remains the same, even when you switch devices," explains McKelvey.

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Brandon has broken through, a total server-land neophyte, broke through via pure persistence. He followed the example of my PagePark installation on Glitch, is using the mirrors feature in PP to render outlines from LO2. He is motivated and I am inspired.

Rising heat and deforestation cause eastern parts of the Amazon to become carbon sources, not sinks.

The race to develop satellite internet includes some pretty big players like SpaceX, Amazon, Softbank and Facebook. However, Facebook has now essentially thrown in the towel in that business, selling its internet satellite team to Amazon, The Information has reported. From a report: For Amazon, it's a significant step in its effort to develop its Project Kuiper satellite network and catch up with SpaceX's Starlink broadband constellation. Like Starlink, Project Kuiper is designed to provide low-latency, high-speed broadband connectivity to users around the world. Amazon aims to have a 3,236-satellite constellation in orbit by 2029, with half of it launched by 2026. It also plans to build 12 ground stations around the world to transmit data to and from the satellites.

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Facebook filed a petition Wednesday to have Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan recused from the ongoing antitrust lawsuit the agency brought against the company. From a report: Facebook argued in its petition that Khan "has consistently made public statements" accusing the company of bad conduct that constitutes a violation of antitrust law. The company said her past work has made clear Khan has already made up her mind on Facebook's liability in the pending antitrust case, which should be grounds for recusal. The FTC must decide in the coming weeks whether to file an amended complaint in its antitrust case against Facebook in federal court after a judge dismissed its initial claims. Alternatively, the FTC could decide to try the case internally before its administrative law judge. Facebook's petition follows a similar move by Amazon, which sought Khan's recusal from antitrust probes into its business based on her past criticism of its power. Khan rose to scholarly fame after publishing "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox" in the Yale Law Journal while a student in 2017.

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Our ancestors were slaves, no matter your skin color, or where your ancestors came from. This is a mind bomb that has yet to go off in the brains of white Americans. But it must.

My tweet about GitHub yesterday got a fair amount of attention. I'm glad, because the idea is powerful and works. Further if GitHub/Microsoft made this a business priority, it could be streamlined for end-users, and be a revenue source, and an incredible developer platform, beyond what it already does. I would love to begin a conversation with MS, privately if they want, to figure out what's possible here.