Dogecoin has seen its price rise by a factor of five over the last week. Yesterday, it was trading at $0.13. Today, it's one of the world's 10 most valuable cryptocurrencies, with a market capitalization of $45 billion. Ars Technica's Timothy B. Lee writes: Dogecoin's price tripled over the next 36 hours. My editor suggested that I write about whether Dogecoin's rise is a sign of an overheated crypto market, but for a coin like Dogecoin, I'm not sure that's even a meaningful concept. Dogecoin isn't a company that has revenues or profits. And unlike bitcoin and ether, no one seriously thinks it's going to be the foundation of a new financial system. People are trading Dogecoin because it's fun to trade and because they think they might make money from it. The rising price is a sign that a lot of people have decided it would be fun to speculate in Dogecoin.

Of course, the fact that lots of people have money to spend on joke investments might itself be a result of larger macroeconomic forces. The combination of stimulus spending, low interest rates, and pandemic-related saving means that a lot of people have more money than usual sitting in their bank accounts. And restrictions on travel and nightlife mean that many of those same people have a lot of time on their hands.

wiredmikey shares a report from SecurityWeek: Security response professionals are scrambling to measure the fallout from a software supply chain compromise of Codecov Bash Uploader that went undetected since January and exposed sensitive secrets like tokens, keys and credentials from organizations around the world. The hack occurred four months ago but was only discovered in the wild by a Codecov customer on the morning of April 1, 2021, the company said. Codecov is considered the vendor of choice for measuring code coverage in the tech industry. The company's tools help developers understand and measure lines of codes executed by a test suite and is widely deployed in big tech development pipelines. The company claims that more than 29,000 enterprises use its code coverage insights to check code quality and maintain code coverage. Codecov did not say how many customers were impacted or had data stolen in the incident.

According to Codecov, the altered version of the Bash Uploader script could potentially affect:
- Any credentials, tokens, or keys that our customers were passing through their CI runner that would be accessible when the Bash Uploader script was executed.
- Any services, datastores, and application code that could be accessed with these credentials, tokens, or keys.
- The git remote information (URL of the origin repository) of repositories using the Bash Uploaders to upload coverage to Codecov in CI.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Associated Press: The U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee formally approved a report accusing Big Tech companies of buying or crushing smaller firms, Representative David Cicilline's office said in a statement on Thursday. With the approval during a marathon, partisan hearing, the more than 400-page staff report will become an official committee report, and the blueprint for legislation to rein in the market power of the likes of Alphabet's Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook. The report was approved by a 24-17 vote that split along party lines. The companies have denied any wrongdoing.

Suggested legislation in the report ranged from the aggressive, such as potentially barring companies like Amazon.com from operating the markets in which they also compete, to the less controversial, like increasing the budgets of the agencies that enforce antitrust law -- the Justice Department's Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission. The report also urged Congress to allow antitrust enforcers more leeway in stopping companies from purchasing potential rivals, something that is now difficult.

Facebook has reached a key environmental goal early: The social media company now purchases enough renewable energy to run all of its operations around the world, it announced this week. CBS News reports: Facebook joins a handful of tech companies that have committed to ambitious green energy goals, including Microsoft, Apple and Alphabet, the parent company of Google. Over the past few years, Facebook has cut its greenhouse gas emissions significantly. Since 2017, carbon emissions from the company's operations have fallen by 94%, surpassing its goals of reducing emissions by three-quarters, according to its sustainability report. Emissions were cut primarily by focusing on the massive data centers that power the servers running Facebook's services, as well as its office locations.

"Data centers for us are the primary sources of electricity consumption and the primary footprint we've been thinking about," said Urvi Parekh, the company's director of renewable energy. Cutting down emissions meant "making our data centers as efficient as possible and reducing the amount of electricity that's consumed" as well as purchasing enormous amounts of wind and solar power to run those centers. Last year, when most of its employees started working remotely, Facebook said it purchased enough clean energy to match the amount used by employees working at home. The company still emits some carbon from its construction activity and natural-gas use in some locations where it has no other energy options, Parekh said. Last year, that was the equivalent of 38,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide (or about as much carbon as is emitted from 8,900 cars driving for one year). Facebook is offsetting those emissions by investing in reforestation and other carbon-removal projects, Parekh said. The company has set a new goal of reaching net-zero emissions across its entire supply chain by 2030.

Google is all alone with its proposed advertising technology -- FLoC-- to replace third-party cookies. Every major browser that uses the open source Chromium project has declined to use it, and it's unclear what that will mean for the future of advertising on the web. Firefox, Safari, Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi, and Brave have said they are not implementing Google's FLoC into their browsers.

The Internet of Secure Things Alliance, an IoT security certification body (a.k.a. ioXt), has launched a new security certification for mobile apps and VPNs. From a report: The new ioXt compliance program includes a 'mobile application profile' -- a set of security-related criteria against which apps can be certified. The profile or mobile app assessment includes additional requirements for virtual private network (VPN) applications. Google and Amazon had a hand in shaping the criteria, along with number of certified labs such as NCC Group and Dekra, and mobile app security testing vendors such as NowSecure. Google's VPN within the Google One service is one of the first to be certified against the criteria. Mobile app makers can get their apps certified against a set of security and privacy requirements. The ioXt Alliance has a broad cross-section of members from the tech industry, with its board comprising execs from Amazon, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Legrand, Resideo, Schneider Electric, T-Mobile, the Zigbee Alliance, and the Z-Wave Alliance. About 20 industry figures helped write the requirements for the mobile app profile, including Amit Agrawal, a principal security architect at Amazon, and Brooke Davis from the Strategic Partnerships team at Google Play. Both are vice-chairs of the mobile app profile group.

Amazon tried to use its power to coerce Ecobee into using its smart home products to collect user data by threatening Ecobee's ability to sell its products on Amazon, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. The Verge reports: As of now, Ecobee's products can still be purchased on Amazon, but the WSJ claims that negotiations between Ecobee and Amazon are ongoing. According to the WSJ, the online retail giant asked Ecobee to share data from its Alexa-enabled smart thermostats, even when the customer wasn't actively using the voice assistant. Ecobee reportedly refused to have its devices constantly report back to Amazon about the state of the user's home, including data on which doors were locked or unlocked and the set temperature. The reasoning being that enabling its devices to report this data to Amazon would be a violation of its customer's trust.

Ecobee may have also been concerned that Amazon wanted the data to build competing products. The retail giant has a reputation for taking non-public sales data and using it to develop products -- something that's come up in antitrust investigations in the US and EU. Amazon has also been accused of using this sales data to directly copy and compete with other companies using its Amazon Basics brand.