Bloomberg's William Turton and Joshua Brustein have published a profile of the 23-year-old proprietor of VanwaTech, an internet provider in Vancouver, Wash. that "provides tech support to the U.S. networks of White nationalists and conspiracy theorists banned by the likes of Amazon." An anonymous Slashdot reader shares an excerpt from the report: Two and a half months before extremists invaded the U.S. Capitol, the far-right wing of the internet suffered a brief collapse. All at once, in the final weeks of the country's presidential campaign, a handful of prominent sites catering to White supremacists and adherents of the QAnon conspiracy movement stopped functioning. To many of the forums' most devoted participants, the outage seemed to prove the American political struggle was approaching its apocalyptic endgame. "Dems are making a concerted move across all platforms," read one characteristic tweet. "The burning of the land foreshadows a massive imperial strike back in the next few days."

In fact, there'd been no conspiracy to take down the sites; they'd crashed because of a technical glitch with VanwaTech, a tiny company in Vancouver, Wash., that they rely on for various kinds of network infrastructure. They went back online with a simple server reset about an hour later, after the proprietor, 23-year-old Nick Lim, woke up from a nap at his mom's condo. Lim founded VanwaTech in late 2019. He hosts some websites directly and provides others with technical services including protection against certain cyberattacks; his annual revenue, he says, is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Although small, the operation serves clients including the Daily Stormer, one of America's most notorious online destinations for overt neo-Nazis, and 8kun, the message board at the center of the QAnon movement, whose adherents were heavily involved in the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Lim exists in a singularly odd corner of the business world. He says he's not an extremist, just an entrepreneur with a maximalist view of free speech. "There needs to be a me, right?" he says, while eating pho at a Vietnamese restaurant near his headquarters. "Once you get to the point where you look at whether content is safe or unsafe, as soon as you do that, you've opened a can of worms." At best, his apolitical framing comes across as naive; at worst, as preposterous gaslighting. In interviews with Bloomberg Businessweek early in 2020, Lim said he didn't really know what QAnon was and had no opinion about Donald Trump. What's undeniable is the niche Lim is filling. His blip of a company is providing essential tech support for the kinds of violence-prone hate groups and conspiracists that tend to get banned by mainstream providers such as Amazon Web Services.

Ford has revealed that it spent last year conducting the "mother of all road trips" for its upcoming BlueCruise system, sending five Mustang Mach-E crossovers and five F-150 trucks on a collective 110,000-mile journey across the US and Canada. Engadget reports: The aim, to no one's surprise, was to gauge how BlueCruise handled in a wide range of realistic road and traffic conditions. Ford had already racked up 500,000 miles of development testing, but these were shorter, narrowly-focused dry runs. The road trips helped Ford look for changes in everything from road signs to weather while traveling cross-country.

BlueCruise will reach 2021 Mustang Mach-E and F-150 models later in the second half of the year through a software update, although you'll need the Co-Pilot360 Active 2.0 Prep Package. Like Super Cruise, it relies on looking for "prequalified" highway sections and verifies that you're paying attention to the road. You really can take your hands off the wheel, but you'll have to be ready to intervene when you either leave the BlueCruise-ready area or face an unexpected issue on the road.

Dogecoin, the virtual currency that originally started as an internet meme more than seven years ago, has surged more than 85% in the last 24 hours and is trading at $0.13. Its market cap is now over $17 billion. CNN reports: The currency has soared more than 2,000% from the start of the year, and has a big fan in Tesla CEO Elon Musk, whose tweets about it have on occasion driven up Dogecoin's value. Dogecoin has also enjoyed something of a cult status on Reddit, where a popular group -- not unlike the WallStreetBets group behind GameStop's rally -- decided earlier this year to propel its value "to the moon." Dogecoin soared over 600% in the wake of that push. The latest surge in crypto prices comes as Coinbase became the first major cryptocurrency company to list its shares on a U.S. stock exchange.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: South Koreans must learn how to work alongside machines if they want to thrive in a post-pandemic world where many jobs will be handled by artificial intelligence and robots, according to the country's labor minister. "Automation and AI will change South Korea faster than other countries," Minister of Employment and Labor Lee Jae-kap said in an interview Tuesday. "Not all jobs may be replaced by machines, but it's important to learn ways to work well with machines through training."

While people will have to increase their adaptability to work in a fast-changing high-tech environment, policy makers will also need to play their part, Lee said. The government needs to provide support to enable workers to move from one sector of the economy to another in search of employment and find ways to increase the activity of women in the economy, he added. The minister's remarks underline the determination of President Moon Jae-in's government to press ahead with a growth strategy built around tech even if it risks alienating the country's unions -- an important base of support for the ruling camp -- in the short term. "New jobs will be created as technology advances," Lee said. "What's important in policy is how to support a worker move from a fading sector to an emerging one." The government is looking to help with this transition by expanding its employment insurance program to 21 million people, or more than 40% of the population, by 2025. "The program is part of a government initiative to provide financial support in the form of insurance for every worker in the country, whether they are artists, freelancers or deliverymen on digital platforms," adds Bloomberg.

"Separately, the government is providing stipends for young people to encourage them to keep searching for work, as their struggle to stay employed amid slowing economic growth has been made tougher by the pandemic."

Nearly a year after the Internet Engineering Task Force took up a plan to replace words that could be considered racist, the debate is still raging. The New York Times: What started as an earnest proposal has stalled as members of the task force have debated the history of slavery and the prevalence of racism in tech. Some companies and tech organizations have forged ahead anyway, raising the possibility that important technical terms will have different meanings to different people -- a troubling proposition for an engineering world that needs broad agreement so technologies work together. While the fight over terminology reflects the intractability of racial issues in society, it is also indicative of a peculiar organizational culture that relies on informal consensus to get things done.

The Internet Engineering Task Force eschews voting, and it often measures consensus by asking opposing factions of engineers to hum during meetings. The hums are then assessed by volume and ferocity. Vigorous humming, even from only a few people, could indicate strong disagreement, a sign that consensus has not yet been reached. The I.E.T.F. has created rigorous standards for the internet and for itself. Until 2016, it required the documents in which its standards are published to be precisely 72 characters wide and 58 lines long, a format adapted from the era when programmers punched their code into paper cards and fed them into early IBM computers. "We have big fights with each other, but our intent is always to reach consensus," said Vint Cerf, one of the founders of the task force and a vice president at Google. "I think that the spirit of the I.E.T.F. still is that, if we're going to do anything, let's try to do it one way so that we can have a uniform expectation that things will function."

Huawei has blamed the U.S. for the chip crunch rocking the global tech industry, saying Washington's sanctions against Chinese companies have spurred panic buying of semiconductors and other supplies. From a report: "Because of the U.S. sanctions against Huawei, we have seen panic stockpiling among global companies, especially the Chinese ones. In the past, companies were barely stockpiling, but now they are building up three or six months' worth of inventory ... and that has disrupted the whole system," Rotating Chairman Eric Xu said at the company's 18th Huawei Analyst Summit. The U.S. has placed Huawei and other Chinese tech companies on trade blacklists that restrict their access to American technology, citing national security risks. "Clearly the unwarranted U.S. sanctions against Huawei and other [Chinese] companies are creating an industry-wide supply shortage, and this could even trigger a new global economic crisis," Xu added. Xu's remarks come hours before the White House plans to host a summit aimed at addressing the chip shortage, with an emphasis on its impact on the automotive industry. Dozens of executives from U.S., Asian and European tech companies and automakers -- including General Motors, Ford, Google, Intel, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Samsung Electronics, and NXP -- are slated to attend the event. White House officials have already acknowledged that the chip shortage may be difficult to solve in the short term.

According to a new report from Light Reading, the three major U.S. carriers (four at the time) have reportedly abandoned their joint venture to launch a new Cross Carrier Messaging Initiative (CCMI), that promised interoperability for an RCS Universal Profile-based messaging standard. It was originally set to be launched in 2020. [For a detailed explanation of RCS Messaging, we recommend this article.] Android Police reports: Although the company handling the logistics behind the cross-carrier effort claims that it's still "continuing to move forward with preparations," a Verizon spokesperson told Light Reading that "the owners of the Cross Carrier Messaging Initiative decided to end the joint venture effort." [...] This may seem like bad news, but things have changed since 2019. In the time since the CCMI was announced, Google leapfrogged the carrier's selfish dithering and rolled out its own RCS messaging solution via the Messages app, all connected to its Jibe network (though it will use your carrier network if it's Universal Profile-compatible). It's a move that means customers don't have to wait on their carriers to start the work they should have done five years ago. More recently, T-Mobile has essentially handed the reins for its whole network messaging solution to Google by adopting Messages as the default SMS app for all T-Mobile phones, connecting all its customers to Google's RCS network.

Given what has and hasn't succeeded when it comes to RCS messaging, what we'd like to see is for Verizon and AT&T to follow T-Mobile, give up on their own stupid standards, and simply adopt Google's RCS Messaging -- either by connecting their chat apps to Google's Jibe network somehow or by adopting the Messages app as sanctioned solutions, as T-Mobile did. But in the meantime, there's nothing to prevent customers on either network from just installing the Messages app themselves and bypassing the carrier mess altogether -- especially since it sounds like the carriers have given up on fixing it.