Danish brewer Carlsberg and a Coca-Cola bottler shut their plants in Ukraine on Thursday following Russia's invasion while firms making goods from jet engines to semiconductors warned that supplies of key raw materials could suffer. From a report: Carlsberg, which has a 31% share of Ukraine's beer market, halted production at all three of its breweries in the country, while Coca-Cola said it had triggered its contingency plans which included shutting its bottling plant. Britain's biggest domestic bank Lloyds, meanwhile, warned that it was on heightened alert for cyberattacks from Russia while companies operating in Ukraine were looking at how to shield their staff from the conflict. Russian forces invaded Ukraine by land, air and sea on Thursday, confirming the worst fears of the West with the biggest attack by one state against another in Europe since World War Two. Many companies with significant exposure to Russia said they were still waiting to see the full force of Western sanctions before deciding on any action, although backers of the suspended Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline were already taking a hit. Washington imposed sanctions on the company behind Nord Stream 2 on Wednesday and European Union leaders are meeting later on Thursday to decide what punitive measures they will impose as retribution for Russia's attack

Thousands of people — included hundreds of men — were accused of witchcraft in Scotland, the Guardian reports, "from allegations of cursing the king's ships, to shape-shifting into animals and birds, or dancing with the devil."

Many were executed. Now, three centuries after the Witchcraft Act was repealed, campaigners are on course to win pardons and official apologies for the estimated 3,837 people — 84% of whom were women — tried as witches, of which two-thirds were executed and burned...

[W]ell-known cases include Lilias Adie, from Torryburn, Fife, who was accused of casting a spell to cause a neighbour's hangover; while Issobell Young, executed at Edinburgh Castle in 1629, was said by a stable boy to have shape-shifted into an owl and accused of having a coven....

The [pro-pardon advocacy site] Witches of Scotland notes that signs associated with witchcraft — broomsticks, cauldrons, black cats and black pointed hats — were also associated with "alewives", the name for women who brewed weak beer to combat poor water quality. The broomstick sign was to let people know beer was on sale, the cauldron to brew it, the cat to keep mice down, and the hat to distinguish them at market. Women were ousted from brewing and replaced by men once it became a profitable industry.
Wikipedia has a page with a list of people executed for witchcraft. Citing modern scholars, it places the total number of people executed for witchcraft in Europe and America between 40,000 and 50,000.

But the Guardian also notes a recent statement from the head of the pro-pardon advocacy group Witches of Scotland. "Per capita, during the period between the 16th and 18th century, we [Scotland] executed five times as many people as elsewhere in Europe, the vast majority of them women."

fahrbot-bot writes: The world is full of beautiful equations, numbers and calculations. From counting beads as toddlers to managing finances as adults, we use math every day. But scientists often go beyond these quotidian forms of counting, to measure, weigh and tally far stranger things in the universe. From the number of bubbles in a typical glass of beer to the weight of all the coronavirus particles circulating in the world, LiveScience notes the 10 weird things scientists calculated in 2021.

1. Number of bubbles in a half-pint glass of beer: up to 2 million bubbles, about twice as many as Champagne.
2. Weight of all SARS-CoV-2 particles: between 0.22 and 22 pounds (0.1 and 10 kilograms).
3. Counted African elephants from space for the first time -- Earth elephants (using satellites and AI) not Space Elephants.
4. Acceleration of a finger snap: maximal rotational velocities of 7,800 deg/s and a maximal rotational acceleration of 1.6 million deg/s squared -- in seven milliseconds, more than 20 times faster than the blink of an eye, which takes more than 150 milliseconds.
5. Calculated pi to 62.8 trillion decimal places.
6. Updated the "friendship paradox" equations.
7. Theoretical number and mass of all Black Holes: about 1% of all ordinary matter (not dark matter) in the universe.
8. How long would it take to walk around the moon? At 4 hours a day, it would take about 547 Earth days, or about 1.5 years.
9. How many active satellites currently orbit the planet? As of September 2021, there were around 7,500 active satellites in low Earth orbit.
10. The "absolute limit" on the human life span: probably 120 to 150 years.

wiredmikey shares a report from SecurityWeek: Security researchers at Google's Project Zero have picked apart one of the most notorious in-the-wild iPhone exploits and found a never-before-seen hacking roadmap that included a PDF file pretending to be a GIF image with a custom-coded virtual CPU built out of boolean pixel operations. If that makes you scratch your head, that was exactly the reaction from Google's premier security research team after disassembling the so-called FORCEDENTRY iMessage zero-click exploit used to plant NSO Group's Pegasus surveillance tool on iPhones.

"We assess this to be one of the most technically sophisticated exploits we've ever seen," Google's Ian Beer and Samuel Grob wrote in a technical deep-dive into the remote code execution exploit that was captured during an in-the-wild attack on an activist in Saudi Arabia. In its breakdown, Project Zero said the exploit effectively created "a weapon against which there is no defense," noting that zero-click exploits work silently in the background and does not even require the target to click on a link or surf to a malicious website. "Short of not using a device, there is no way to prevent exploitation by a zero-click exploit," the research team said.

The researchers confirmed the initial entry point for Pegasus was Apple's proprietary iMessage that ships by default on iPhones, iPads and macOS devices. By targeting iMessage, the NSO Group hackers needed only a phone number of an AppleID username to take aim and fire eavesdropping implants. Because iMessage has native support for GIF images (especially those that loop endlessly), Project Zero's researchers found that this expanded the attack surface and ended up being abused in an exploit cocktail that targeted a security defect in Apple's CoreGraphics PDF parser. Within Apple's CoreGraphics PDF parser, the NSO exploit writers abused Apple's implementation of the open-source JBIG2, a domain specific image codec designed to compress images where pixels can only be black or white. Describing the exploit as "pretty terrifying," Google said the NSO Group hackers effectively booby-trapped a PDF file, masquerading as a GIF image, with an encoded virtual CPU to start and run the exploit. Apple patched the exploit in September and filed a lawsuit seeking to hold NSO Group accountable.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechRadar: BrewDog, one of the world's largest craft beer brewers, has exposed personally identifiable information (PII) belonging to more than 200,000 of its shareholders and customers, according to cybersecurity researchers. Cybersecurity consulting firm PenTest Partners discovered that a flaw in the official BrewDog app, which persisted for more than 18 months, made it easy for anyone to access the PII of other users. In its detailed report, PenTest Partners notes that the mobile app doled out the same hard coded API Bearer Token, which effectively rendered request authorization useless. The researchers say that, thanks to the flaw, any user could append the customerID of another user to the API endpoint URL to extract their PII and other details. In addition to being damaging to the user, the flaw could've also been used to adversely affect the company since the leaked details could've been used to generate QR codes to get discounted and even free beers. BrewDog started using hard-coded tokens with v2.5.5 of its app, launched in March 2020, before finally patching the flaw in v2.5.13 release in September 2021.

Last month U.S. President Biden issued "a mandate that all companies with more than 100 workers require vaccination or weekly testing," remembers the New York Times, and "also moved to mandate shots for health care workers, federal contractors and a vast majority of federal workers, who could face disciplinary measures if they refuse."

So what happened next? Until now, the biggest unknown about mandating COVID-19 vaccines in workplaces has been whether such requirements would lead to compliance or to significant departures by workers unwilling to get shots — at a time when many places were already facing staffing shortages. So far, a number of early mandates show few indications of large-scale resistance. "Mandates are working," said John Swartzberg, a physician and professor at the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. "If you define 'working' by the percentage of people getting vaccinated and not leaving their jobs in droves."

Unlike other incentives — "prizes, perks, doughnuts, beer, we've seen just about everything offered to get people vaccinated" — mandates are among the few levers that historically have been effective in increasing compliance, said Swartzberg, who has tracked national efforts to increase rates of inoculation...

[T]he pushback has been less dramatic than initially feared. At Houston Methodist Hospital, which mandated vaccines this summer for 25,000 employees, for example, only about 0.6% of employees quit or were fired. Dorit Reiss, a professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco who is tracking employer mandates, said that, despite their propensity for backlash and litigation, mandates generally increase vaccine compliance because the knowledge that an order is coming has often been enough to prompt workers to seek inoculation before courts even can weigh in. Mandates are becoming more commonplace as several other states have imposed requirements for workers. In New York, Rhode Island, Maine, Oregon and the District of Columbia, health care workers must get vaccinated to remain employed.
The Times's article (original URL here) provides statistics from specific examples:

• "When Tyson Foods announced Aug. 3 that it would require coronavirus vaccines for all 120,000 of its U.S. employees, less than half of its workforce was inoculated. Nearly two months later, 91% of the company's U.S. workforce is fully vaccinated, said Dr. Claudia Coplein, Tyson's chief medical officer."

• "In New York, where some 650,000 employees at hospitals and nursing homes were to have received at least one vaccine dose by the start of this week, 92% were in compliance, state officials said. That was up significantly from a week ago, when 82% of the state's nursing home workers and at least 84% of its hospital workers had received at least one dose."

• "As California's requirement that all health care workers be vaccinated against the coronavirus took effect Thursday, major health systems reported that the mandate had helped boost their vaccination rates to 90% or higher."

"If you've ever dreamed of living 'a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,' now is your chance — as long as you've got a spare four to six thousand dollars sitting around," writes SFGate: This week, Walt Disney World announced more details about its new Galactic Starcruiser hotel opening in the spring, an immersive, two-day "Star Wars" experience that evokes the feeling of being in the movies. The tech will be more advanced than any other Disney experience, including Rise of the Resistance at Disneyland and the Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge lands... "Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser is a revolutionary new 2-night experience where you are the hero," according to Walt Disney World's website. "You and your group will embark on a first-of-its-kind Star Wars adventure that's your own. It's the most immersive Star Wars story ever created — one where you live a bespoke experience and journey further into a Star Wars adventure than you ever dreamed possible."

There are lightsaber experiences, interstellar entertainment, characters hanging around and an overall feeling that you're closer to being in Star Wars than you've ever been in your life. The idea is that you're staying on a luxury space cruise, so immersive that the hotel's windows look out into "space" and you never leave the property unless it's to "board a transport" to Batuu, the land where Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge takes place. Admission to Hollywood Studios is included in the price, as is all of your food and non-alcoholic beverages. But really, for $4,809 for two nights' accommodations for two guests in a studio, they could throw in a space beer or two...

But then again, for some Star Wars fans, you can't put a price on total immersion in the fandom, from cast members acting as though they're really intergalactic travelers to the ability to make infinite Wookee jokes free from the harsh judgements of people who wouldn't spend $4,000 to sleep in a "spaceship."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Well over 100 employees at Amazon Prime Air have lost their jobs and dozens of other roles are moving to other projects abroad as the company shutters part of its operation in the UK, WIRED understands. Insiders claim the future of the UK operation, which launched in 2016 to help pioneer Amazon's global drone delivery efforts, is now uncertain. Those working on the UK team in the last few years, who spoke on condition of anonymity, describe a project that was "collapsing inwards," "dysfunctional" and resembled "organized chaos," run by managers that were "detached from reality" in the years building up to the mass redundancies.

They told WIRED about increasing problems within Prime Air in recent years, including managers being appointed who knew so little about the project they couldn't answer basic work questions, an employee drinking beer at their desk in the morning and some staff being forced to train their replacements in Costa Rica. Amazon says it still has staff working for Prime Air in the UK, but has refused to confirm headcount. [...] An Amazon spokesperson says it will still have a Prime Air presence in the UK after the cuts, but refuses to disclose what type of work will take place. The spokesperson also refused to confirm, citing security reasons, if any of the test flights that once filled promotional videos will still take place in the UK. The spokesperson adds that the company has found positions in other parts of its business for some affected employees and that it will keep growing its presence in the region. The spokesperson did not confirm how many employees were offered other jobs internally.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: On a normally peaceful residential road outside The Hague, the Dutch city that serves as seat of government, the whine of a hoisting crane and welding tools heralds a not-so-quiet housing revolution. Four workers standing above me on a scissor lift next to an apartment complex guide a thermally insulated facade 40 feet wide and one story tall into place against the existing wall. Its brickwork pattern of muted brown, grey and beige, and the triple glazed windows, perfectly fit the building's existing frame and openings. The original windows and the very old brick walls had allowed cold drafts inside, and warm interior air to escape, wasting much of the energy used to heat the building. The new facade is primarily fire-resistant expanded polystyrene -- essentially, hollow spheres that trap air to create a thick insulation layer -- faced with hardened clay and sculpted into hundreds of very thin rectangles known as "brick slips."

This new building skin, prebuilt in a factory, was one of a dozen such facades to be attached to local buildings when I visited the suburb on a rainy day in early summer, each structure measured to millimeter precision. The installation is part of a concerted effort to transform energy-inefficient public housing into a set of ultralow-emission homes -- without having to open a wall or remake an attic. The building was being wrapped in the equivalent of a winter jacket -- or summer beer koozie -- avoiding the need to insert insulation inside dozens of walls, lofts and attics. A similarly premade, lightweight, highly insulating material, complete with solar panels, would be installed on the roof, too. The report notes that the average cost to retrofit a family home in the Netherlands is "about $94,000," but it's "comparable to the cost of other routine renovations that deliver no energy savings."

"In one neighborhood in the city of Utrecht, more than a dozen houses and some 250 separate apartments retrofitted in 2019 saw their energy requirements fall from 225 kilowatt-hours per square meter to just 50 kilowatt-hours per square meter, on average. The remaining demand for energy was met with solar power."

Alcohol is terrible for the human body, yet we've developed a strong taste for it, suggesting that it may bring other kinds of benefits. From a report: Alcoholic intoxication is an abnormal mental state characterized by reduced self-control and various degrees of euphoria or depression, brought about by the temporary impairment of a pretty big chunk of the brain. As the term suggests, it involves the ingestion of a chemical toxin, ethanol, which in small doses makes us happy, more sociable and better at thinking creatively and defusing conflicts. In progressively higher doses, it can lead to degraded motor coordination, slurred speech, violent arguments, maudlin expressions of love, inappropriate touching, injuries, blackouts, property damage and even karaoke. Why do we do it? Historically, scientists have written off our affinity for intoxication as an evolutionary mistake, a method that we've developed for tricking our biological reward system into releasing little shots of pleasure for no good reason. But this is not a satisfying explanation. It should puzzle us more than it does that humans have devoted so much ingenuity and effort to getting drunk.

[...] If alcohol were merely hijacking pleasure centers in the brain, evolution should have figured it out by now and put a firm end to this nonsense. Other vices can plausibly be seen as necessary appetites gone wrong, such as our taste for pornography or junk food. But alcohol is mind-bogglingly dangerous, both physiologically and socially. The fact that our supposedly accidental taste for it has not been eradicated by genetic or cultural evolution means that the cost of indulging in alcohol must be offset by benefits. Evidence from archaeology, history, cognitive neuroscience, psychopharmacology, social psychology, literature and genetics suggests what some of these benefits might be. For instance, the ancient and cross-cultural view of alcohol as a muse is supported by modern psychology: Our ability to think outside the box is enhanced by one or two drinks. This is why artists, poets and writers have long turned to drink. The name of the Anglo-Saxon god of artistic inspiration, Kvasir, literally means "strong ale." This is also why some modern companies that rely upon innovation, like Google, judiciously mix work with alcohol -- by, for instance, providing whiskey rooms where frustrated coders can relax and expand their minds when struggling with a challenging problem.

There is no such thing as a "safe" level of drinking, with increased consumption of alcohol associated with poorer brain health, according to a new study. CNN reports: In an observational study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, researchers from the University of Oxford studied the relationship between the self-reported alcohol intake of some 25,000 people in the UK, and their brain scans. The researchers noted that drinking had an effect on the brain's gray matter -- regions in the brain that make up "important bits where information is processed," according to lead author Anya Topiwala, a senior clinical researcher at Oxford. "The more people drank, the less the volume of their gray matter," Topiwala said via email. "Brain volume reduces with age and more severely with dementia. Smaller brain volume also predicts worse performance on memory testing," she explained. "Whilst alcohol only made a small contribution to this (0.8%), it was a greater contribution than other 'modifiable' risk factors," she said, explaining that modifiable risk factors are "ones you can do something about, in contrast to aging."

The team also investigated whether certain drinking patterns, beverage types and other health conditions made a difference to the impact of alcohol on brain health. They found that there was no "safe" level of drinking -- meaning that consuming any amount of alcohol was worse than not drinking it. They also found no evidence that the type of drink -- such as wine, spirits or beer -- affected the harm done to the brain. However, certain characteristics, such as high blood pressure, obesity or binge-drinking, could put people at higher risk, researchers added.

After pouring beer into a glass, streams of little bubbles appear and start to rise, forming a foamy head. As the bubbles burst, the released carbon dioxide gas imparts the beverage's desirable tang. But just how many bubbles are in that drink? The American Chemical Society: By examining various factors, researchers reporting in ACS Omega estimate between 200,000 and nearly 2 million of these tiny spheres can form in a gently poured lager. Worldwide, beer is one of the most popular alcoholic beverages. Lightly flavored lagers, which are especially well-liked, are produced through a cool fermentation process, converting the sugars in malted grains to alcohol and carbon dioxide. During commercial packaging, more carbonation can be added to get a desired level of fizziness. That's why bottles and cans of beer hiss when opened and release micrometer-wide bubbles when poured into a mug.

These bubbles are important sensory elements of beer tasting, similar to sparkling wines, because they transport flavor and scent compounds. The carbonation also can tickle the drinker's nose. Gerard Liger-Belair had previously determined that about 1 million bubbles form in a flute of champagne, but scientists don't know the number created and released by beer before it's flat. So, Liger-Belair and Clara Cilindre wanted to find out. The researchers first measured the amount of carbon dioxide dissolved in a commercial lager just after pouring it into a tilted glass, such as a server would do to reduce its surface foam. Next, using this value and a standard tasting temperature of 42 F, they calculated that dissolved gas would spontaneously aggregate to form streams of bubbles wherever crevices and cavities in the glass were more than 1.4 um-wide. Then, high-speed photographs showed that the bubbles grew in volume as they floated to the surface, capturing and transporting additional dissolved gas to the air above the drink. As the remaining gas concentration decreased, the bubbling would eventually cease. The researchers estimated there could be between 200,000 and 2 million bubbles released before a half-pint of lager would go flat.

"Coca-Cola is to test a paper bottle as part of a longer-term bid to eliminate plastic from its packaging entirely," reports the BBC: The prototype is made by a Danish company from an extra-strong paper shell that still contains a thin plastic liner. But the goal is to create a 100% recyclable, plastic-free bottle capable of preventing gas escaping from carbonated drinks. The barrier must also ensure no fibres flake off into the liquid...

Coca-Cola was ranked the world's number one plastic polluter by charity group Break Free From Plastic last year, closely followed by other drink-producers Pepsi and Nestle... Part of the challenge has been to create a structure capable of withstanding the forces exerted by fizzy drinks — such as cola and beer — which are bottled under pressure. On top of that, the paper needs to be mouldable, to create distinct bottle shapes and sizes for different brands, and take ink for printing their labels.

After more than seven years of lab work, the firm is now ready to host a trial in Hungary this summer of Coca-Cola's fruit drink Adez. Initially, this will involve 2,000 bottles distributed via a local retail chain. But it is also working with others. Absolut, the vodka-maker, is due to test 2,000 paper bottles of it own in the UK and Sweden of its pre-mixed, carbonated raspberry drink. And beer company Carlsberg is also building prototypes of a paper beer bottle.

Dan Goodin, writing for ArsTechnica: Earlier this year, Apple patched one of the most breathtaking iPhone vulnerabilities ever: a memory corruption bug in the iOS kernel that gave attackers remote access to the entire device -- over Wi-Fi, with no user interaction required at all. Oh, and exploits were wormable -- meaning radio-proximity exploits could spread from one nearby device to another, once again, with no user interaction needed. This Wi-Fi packet of death exploit was devised by Ian Beer, a researcher at Project Zero, Google's vulnerability research arm. In a 30,000-word post published on Tuesday afternoon, Beer described the vulnerability and the proof-of-concept exploit he spent six months developing single-handedly. Almost immediately, fellow security researchers took notice.

"This is a fantastic piece of work," Chris Evans, a semi-retired security researcher and executive and the founder of Project Zero, said in an interview. "It really is pretty serious. The fact you don't have to really interact with your phone for this to be set off on you is really quite scary. This attack is just you're walking along, the phone is in your pocket, and over Wi-Fi someone just worms in with some dodgy Wi-Fi packets." Beer's attack worked by exploiting a buffer overflow bug in a driver for AWDL, an Apple-proprietary mesh networking protocol that makes things like Airdrop work. Because drivers reside in the kernel -- one of the most privileged parts of any operating system -- the AWDL flaw had the potential for serious hacks. And because AWDL parses Wi-Fi packets, exploits can be transmitted over the air, with no indication that anything is amiss.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: While setting fire to an iron ingot is probably more trouble than it's worth, fine iron powder mixed with air is highly combustible. When you burn this mixture, you're oxidizing the iron. Whereas a carbon fuel oxidizes into CO2, an iron fuel oxidizes into Fe2O3, which is just rust. The nice thing about rust is that it's a solid which can be captured post-combustion. And that's the only byproduct of the entire business -- in goes the iron powder, and out comes energy in the form of heat and rust powder. Iron has an energy density of about 11.3 kWh/L, which is better than gasoline. Although its specific energy is a relatively poor 1.4 kWh/kg, meaning that for a given amount of energy, iron powder will take up a little bit less space than gasoline but it'll be almost ten times heavier. It might not be suitable for powering your car, in other words. It probably won't heat your house either. But it could be ideal for industry, which is where it's being tested right now.

Researchers from TU Eindhoven have been developing iron powder as a practical fuel for the past several years, and last month they installed an iron powder heating system at a brewery in the Netherlands, which is turning all that stored up energy into beer. Since electricity can't efficiently produce the kind of heat required for many industrial applications (brewing included), iron powder is a viable zero-carbon option, with only rust left over. So what happens to all that rust? This is where things get clever, because the iron isn't just a fuel that's consumed -- it's energy storage that can be recharged. And to recharge it, you take all that Fe2O3, strip out the oxygen, and turn it back into Fe, ready to be burned again. It's not easy to do this, but much of the energy and work that it takes to pry those Os away from the Fes get returned to you when you burn the Fe the next time. The idea is that you can use the same iron over and over again, discharging it and recharging it just like you would a battery.

To maintain the zero-carbon nature of the iron fuel, the recharging process has to be zero-carbon as well. There are a variety of different ways of using electricity to turn rust back into iron, and the TU/e researchers are exploring three different technologies based on hot hydrogen reduction (which turns iron oxide and hydrogen into iron and water). [...] Both production of the hydrogen and the heat necessary to run the furnace or the reactors require energy, of course, but it's grid energy that can come from renewable sources. [...] Philip de Goey, a professor of combustion technology at TU/e, told us that he hopes to be able to deploy 10 MW iron powder high-temperature heat systems for industry within the next four years, with 10 years to the first coal power plant conversion.

Many industries use heat-intensive processes that generally require the burning of fossil fuels, but a surprising green fuel alternative is emerging in the form of metal powders. Ground very fine, cheap iron powder burns readily at high temperatures, releasing energy as it oxidizes in a process that emits no carbon and produces easily collectable rust, or iron oxide, as its only emission. From a report: If burning metal powder as fuel sounds strange, the next part of the process will be even more surprising. That rust can be regenerated straight back into iron powder with the application of electricity, and if you do this using solar, wind or other zero-carbon power generation systems, you end up with a totally carbon-free cycle. The iron acts as a kind of clean battery for combustion processes, charging up via one of a number of means including electrolysis, and discharging in flames and heat. Recently, Swinkels Family Brewers in the Netherlands has become the first business in the world to put this process to work at an industrial scale. The company has been working with the Metal Power Consortium and researchers at TU Eindhoven to install a cyclical iron fuel system at its Brewery Bavaria that's capable of providing all the heat necessary for some 15 million glasses of beer a year.

Apple has poached a key member of Google's Project Zero, a hacking team at Google that has found dozens of critical vulnerabilities in Apple's iOS and other critical Apple software. From a report: Last year, Apple and Google fought over a series of vulnerabilities that Project Zero discovered in iOS, with Apple suggesting that Google was overselling the vulnerabilities. About a year later, Brandon Azad announced on Twitter at the beginning of October that he was leaving Google's elite team of hackers to join Apple. "My teammates at Project Zero have been among the kindest and smartest people I've met, and I've learned so much from them," Azad wrote. "I'll really miss working alongside everyone on the team. Thank you all for these wonderful experiences, and keep on hacking!" Azad has been widely considered one of the best iPhone hackers who didn't work for Apple, being named by Apple in countless security advisories, and presenting highly technical findings on Apple's products at major cybersecurity conferences around the world. Last year, Motherboard profiled Project Zero and revealed that Apple had been trying to poach a colleague of Azad, Ian Beer.

Last week open-source advocate Eric S. Raymond argued Microsoft was quietly switching over to a Linux kernel that emulates Windows. "He's on to something," says ZDNet's contributing editor Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: I've long thought that Microsoft was considering migrating the Windows interface to running on the Linux kernel. Why...? [Y]ou can run standard Linux programs now on WSL2 without any trouble.

That's because Linux is well on its way to becoming a first-class citizen on the Windows desktop. Multiple Linux distros, starting with Ubuntu, Red Hat Fedora, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED), now run smoothly on WSL2. That's because Microsoft has replaced its WSL1 translation layer, which converted Linux kernel calls into Windows calls, with WSL2. With WSL2 Microsoft's own Linux kernel is running on a thin version of the Hyper-V hypervisor. That's not all. With the recent Windows 10 Insider Preview build 20211, you can now access Linux file systems, such as ext4, from Windows File Manager and PowerShell. On top of that, Microsoft developers are making it easy to run Linux graphical applications on Windows...

[Raymond] also observed, correctly, that Microsoft no longer depends on Windows for its cash flow but on its Azure cloud offering. Which, by the way, is running more Linux instances than it is Windows Server instances. So, that being the case, why should Microsoft keep pouring money into the notoriously trouble-prone Windows kernel — over 50 serious bugs fixed in the last Patch Tuesday roundup — when it can use the free-as-in-beer Linux kernel? Good question. He thinks Microsoft can do the math and switch to Linux.

I think he's right. Besides his points, there are others. Microsoft already wants you to replace your existing PC-based software, like Office 2019, with software-as-a-service (SaaS) programs like Office 365. Microsoft also encourages you to move your voice, video, chat, and texting to Microsoft's Azure Communication Services even if you don't use Teams. With SaaS programs, Microsoft doesn't care what operating system you're running. They're still going to get paid whether you run Office 365 on Windows, a Chromebook, or, yes, Linux.

I see two possible paths ahead for Windows. First, there's Linux-based Windows. It simply makes financial sense. Or, the existing Windows desktop being replaced by the Windows Virtual Desktop or other Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) offerings.... Google chose to save money and increase security by using Linux as the basis for Chrome OS. This worked out really well for Google. It can for Microsoft with — let's take a blast from the past — and call it Lindows as well.

Americans reported drinking alcohol more frequently and in higher quantities since last year, according to a study published in JAMA. From a report: Excessive alcohol consumption may cause or worsen mental health problems, such as anxiety or depression. Experts have also warned the stress of the pandemic has fomented alcohol and drug abuse. The greatest changes were among women and people 30 to 59 years old. On average, alcohol was consumed one day more per month by three of four adults. Frequency of alcohol consumption for women increased by 17%. Heavy drinking among women -- four or more drinks within a few hours -- spiked 41% since 2019. Adults aged 30 to 59 years increased their drinking by 19% since last year.

Long-time Slashdot reader leathered shares an investigation from the Correspondent about blockchain -- and " what's so terribly revolutionary about it? What problem does it solve...? I can tell you upfront, it's a bizarre journey to nowhere. I've never seen so much incomprehensible jargon to describe so little... And I've never seen so many people searching so hard for a problem to go with their solution...." [Y]ou can't do much with bitcoin. But blockchain, on the other hand: it's the technology behind bitcoin, which makes it cool. Blockchain generalises the bitcoin pitch: let's not just get rid of banks, but also the land registry, voting machines, insurance companies, Facebook, Uber, Amazon, the Lung Foundation, the porn industry and government and businesses in general. They are superfluous, thanks to the blockchain. Power to the users...!

The only thing is that there's a huge gap between promise and reality. It seems that blockchain sounds best in a PowerPoint slide. Most blockchain projects don't make it past a press release, an inventory by Bloomberg showed... Out of over 86,000 blockchain projects that had been launched, 92% had been abandoned by the end of 2017, according to consultancy firm Deloitte. Why are they deciding to stop? Enlightened — and thus former — blockchain developer Mark van Cuijk explained: "You could also use a forklift to put a six-pack of beer on your kitchen counter. But it's just not very efficient...."

[I]nformation and communications technology is like the rest of the world — a big old mess. And that's something that we — outsiders, laypeople, non-tech geeks — simply refuse to accept. Councillors and managers think that problems — however large and fundamental they are — evaporate instantaneously thanks to technology they've heard about in a fancy PowerPoint presentation. How will it work? Who cares! Don't try to understand it, just reap the benefits!

This is the market for magic, and that market is big. Whether it's about blockchain, big data, cloud computing, AI or other buzzwords...

Maybe this is blockchain's greatest merit: it's an awareness campaign, albeit an expensive one. "Back-office management" isn't an item on the agenda in board meetings, but "blockchain" and "innovation" are... Yes, it took a few wild, unmet promises, but the result is that administrators are now interested in the boring subjects that help make the world run a bit more efficiently — nothing spectacular, just a bit better.