The investor who helped direct the world's attention to GameStop, leading a horde of online followers in a bizarre market rally that made and lost fortunes from one day to the next, says he's just a normal guy. From his profile by The Wall Street Journal: "I didn't expect this," said Keith Gill, 34 years old, known as "DeepF-ingValue" by fans on Reddit's WallStreetBets forum and "Dada" by his 2-year-old daughter. He said he didn't set out to draw the attention of Congress, the Federal Reserve, hedge funds, the media, trading platforms and hundreds of thousands of investors. "This story is so much bigger than me," Mr. Gill told The Wall Street Journal in his first interview since the unboxing this week of a volatile new stock market game. "I support these retail investors, their ability to make a statement." To many of them, Mr. Gill -- who until recently worked in marketing for Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance -- is the force behind the triple-digit gains in shares of the videogame retailer GameStop, up more than 900% this year through Thursday. On Wednesday, the stock jumped 135% to $347.51, a record, before plunging to $194 a share Thursday as online brokerages clamped down. At the start of the year, GameStop shares went for around $18. Many online investors say his advocacy helped turn them into a force powerful enough to cause big losses for established hedge funds and, for the moment, turn the investing world upside down.

Mr. Gill posted a screenshot of his brokerage account Wednesday, showing a roughly $20 million daily gain on GameStop shares and options. "Your steady hand convinced many of us to not only buy, but hold. Your example has literally changed the lives of thousands of ordinary normal people. Seriously thank you. You deserve every penny," replied one Reddit user, reality_czech. The next day, Mr. Gill posted another screenshot -- showing about a $15 million loss. After Thursday's market close, his E*Trade brokerage account, viewed by the Journal, held around $33 million, including GameStop stock, options and millions in cash. "He always liked money," said Elaine Gill, his mother. As a child, she said, "he would get money from those scratch tickets that people didn't know they'd won. People would throw them on the ground... A lot of times there was still money on them." Mr. Gill's online persona -- he goes by "Roaring Kitty" on YouTube -- has drawn tens of thousands of fans and copycats who share screenshots of their own brokerage accounts. Mr. Gill said he wasn't a rabble-rouser out to take on the establishment, just someone who believes investors can find value in unloved stocks. He never expected to have a legion of fans debating his identity online, or millions of dollars in his trading account, he said. He was just a dad with an online hobby and a plastic kiddie slide on the front lawn of a Boston suburb.

New submitter wooloohoo shares a report from Ars Technica: The rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine means a ton of people are soon going to be looking for vaccination sites. As usual, Google wants to be at the center of getting people where they're going, and in a new blog post Google says it will start loading Search and Maps with information on vaccination sites. "In the coming weeks," the company writes, "COVID-19 vaccination locations will be available in Google Search and Maps, starting with Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, with more states and countries to come."

Soon you'll be able to search "COVID vaccine" and get location results showing access requirements, appointment information, and if a site has a drive-through. Google says it is partnering with the Boston Children's Hospital's VaccineFinder.org, government agencies, and retail pharmacies for the data. Elsewhere in the Google Empire, the company says it will open up various Google facilities as vaccine sites. "Google also says it plans on launching a 'Get the Facts' campaign across its services," the report adds. "The post says the initiative will run across Google and YouTube to 'get authoritative information out to the public about vaccines.'"

YouTube on Tuesday said it's again extending its suspension of former President Donald Trump, who's been banned from posting videos to his channel since Jan. 12. Comments on Trump's videos will also remain disabled indefinitely. CNET reports: "In light of concerns about the ongoing potential for violence, the Donald J. Trump channel will remain suspended," a YouTube spokesperson confirmed to CNET. "Our teams are staying vigilant and closely monitoring for any new developments." YouTube first extended Trump's suspension last week, saying it would reevaluate the situation in a week. The company gave no indication on Tuesday of how long the latest extension would last.

YouTube has a three-strikes policy when it comes to policing its platform. Three infractions within a 90-day period results in being permanently kicked off the platform. The first strike typically comes with a one-week ban that prohibits the posting of new content. A second strike comes with a two-week ban. YouTube also suspended Rudy Giuliani, former President Donald Trump's lawyer, from a program that allows partners to make money from ads on their videos, after Giuliani broke YouTube's rules by repeatedly sharing election misinformation.

Over the last three years, YouTube's Partner Program paid out more than $30 billion to creators, artists, and media organizations.

YouTube has paid out more than $30 billion to creators, artists, and media organizations over the last three years, according to a new letter published by CEO Susan Wojcicki. From a report: In Wojcicki's first letter to creators of 2021, the CEO spent some time addressing YouTube's growth. The number of new channels that joined the company's Partner Program, which allows creators to earn advertising revenue, more than doubled in 2020. YouTube also "contributed approximately $16 billion to the U.S. GDP in 2019, supporting the equivalent of 345,000 full time jobs," according to an Oxford Economics report that Wojcicki highlights. The letter also focuses on the work YouTube's team still has in front of them. Mainly, transparency, especially where content strikes and advertising dollars are concerned. Wojcicki noted that at the "scale we operate, it's hard for creators to keep up with changing Community Guidelines." Wojcicki's letter states that YouTube wants to be better about communicating changes to avoid channel strikes. After three strikes within a 90-day period, a channel is terminated.

Jalopnik shares a story for our times: Adobe's Flash, the web browser plug-in that powered so very many crappy games, confusing interfaces, and animated icons of the early web like Homestar Runner is now finally gone, after a long, slow, protracted death. For most of us, this just means that some goofy webgame you searched for out of misplaced nostalgia will no longer run. For a select few in China, though, the death of Flash meant being late to work, because the city of Dalian in northern China was running their railroad system on it.

Yes, a railroad, run on Flash, the same thing used to run "free online casinos" and knockoff Breakout games in mortgage re-fi ads...

Hell, YouTube used to run on Flash until 2015. It wasn't all stupid little web games but, that said, I can't for the life of me fathom why anyone would want to run a freaking railroad network on it, with physical, multi-ton moving railcars full of human beings on it. So, when Adobe finally killed Flash-based content from running, this Tuesday Dalian's railroad network found itself ground to a halt for 20 hours.

The railroad's technicians did get everything back up and running, but the way they did this is fascinating, too. They didn't switch the rail management system to some other, more modern codebase or software installation; instead, they installed a pirated version of Flash that was still operational. The knockoff version seems to be known as "Ghost Version." This, along with installing an older version of the Flash player to work with the knockoff Flash server setup, "solved" the problem, and the railroad was back up and running.
UPDATE: ZDNet reports that "later reports from Chinese media clarified that railway traffic never stopped in Dalian because of the Flash end-of-life": However, the reports also admitted that there's some truth in the original report and that, indeed, some internal traffic statistics system had stopped working at the rail station on Jan. 12, when Adobe blocked Flash content from working.

Inside.com's developer newsletter spotted this code repository story: GitHub posted a DMCA notice it received from the Motion Picture Association (MPA) last week asking the platform to take down a repository associated with NYAA.si, a popular torrent site specializing in anime content. The DMCA captured attention as the code doesn't belong to the MPA. Rather, the MPA argues the code is used for the development of the site, which allows for copyright infringement, while the repo also makes it possible to create NYAA clones.

The news comes a few months after GitHub restored the youtube-dl repository and created a $1m legal defense fund to help open source developers fight unwarranted DMCA Section 1201 takedown claims. At the same time, the platform also announced it will be improving its Section 1201 claim review process to make it harder to take down repos.
But the next day, the newsletter reported GitHub had reversed the takedown: The company explains the notice didn't meet its DMCA Takedown Policy requirements as it failed to "establish that the code is preconfigured to infringe." GitHub adds that it also restored any content that was disabled because of the notice.
Some context from TorrentFreak: This isn't the first time the MPA has gone after the anime torrent site. Last November we reported that the anti-piracy group sent cease and desist letters to several people who are allegedly connected to the site, describing it as an "Anime Cartel".
TorrentFreak's latest update: A few weeks ago, the Motion Picture Association tried to shut the project down by going after several people who are allegedly linked to the site. Framing NYAA as an "Anime Cartel", the movie group demanded a total shutdown and tens of thousands of dollars in settlements...

This takedown request initially succeeded as GitHub disabled the repository earlier this week. Before doing so, the platform reached out to the developers and gave them the option to respond or make changes, but that request went unanswered. Without a response from the developers, this is usually where things end. In this case, however, GitHub decided to carry out another review after the project was taken down, perhaps in part motivated by the news coverage. "While we didn't hear back from the maintainers, we chose to do another review ourselves to proactively see how we could resolve the issue," a GitHub spokesperson informs TorrentFreak...

[A]t the time of writing the NYAA repository is up and running again. The MPA still has the option to provide additional information about the allegedly-infringing nature of the code, which would then trigger another review.

GitHub stresses that it's their purpose to make sure that developers can host code within the boundaries of the law. Unless the entire repository is infringing, it's standard policy to allow developers to respond to DMCA claims before any content is removed.

NBC News reports: A number of pro-Trump extremists used Facebook to plan their attack on the U.S. Capitol, a watchdog organization has found, contradicting claims by Facebook's leadership that such planning was largely done on other sites.

Private Facebook groups spent months advising one another about how to "take down" the U.S. government, particularly after Joe Biden was elected president, according to a report from the nonprofit Tech Transparency Project, which tracked several of them. Many of the groups specifically talked about traveling to the Capitol on Jan. 6, the date Congress counted the electoral votes that affirmed Biden's victory."Calls to 'occupy Congress' were rampant on Facebook in the weeks leading up to the deadly Capitol riot, making no secret of the event's aims," the report found... A sample recruitment call by a page called "Florida Patriots" said, "We are actively seeking well armed citizens to join our emergency response unit in all zones."
BuzzFeed News notes the report contradicts earlier remarks from Sheryl Sandberg deflecting blame for the event: Last week, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said the company had acted appropriately to prevent election misinformation and the incitement of violence, and attempted to pin the blame on smaller websites and apps with less content moderation. "I think these events were largely organized on platforms that don't have our abilities to stop hate, don't have our standards, and don't have our transparency," Sandberg said in an interview with Reuters.

Facebook spokespeople have since tried to walk this statement back, noting that Sandberg made the point earlier in the interview that the platform played a role in fomenting the unrest.

As of December 8, Apple has been requiring developers to provide privacy label information to their apps, outlining the data that each app collects from users when it is installed. Many app developers have included the labels, but there's one notable outlier -- Google. schwit1 shares a report from MacRumors: Google has not updated its major apps like Gmail, Google Maps, Chrome, and YouTube since December 7 or before, and most Google apps have to date have not been updated with the Privacy Label feature. The Google Translate, Google Authenticator, Motion Stills, Google Play Movies, and Google Classroom apps do include privacy labels even though they have not been updated recently, but Google's search app, Google Maps, Chrome, Waze, YouTube, Google Drive, Google Photos, Google Home, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Assistant, Google Sheets, Google Calendar, Google Slides, Google One, Google Earth, YouTube Music, Hangouts, Google Tasks, Google Meet, Google Pay, PhotoScan, Google Voice, Google News, Gboard, Google Podcasts, and more do not display the information.

On January 5, Google told TechCrunch that the data would be added to its iOS apps "this week or the next week," but both this week and the next week have come and gone with no update. It has now been well over a month since Google last updated its apps. "To lightly paraphrase former Google CEO Eric Schmidt: If your data harvesting is something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place," adds schwit1.

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was sworn in as the 46th president of the United States on Wednesday, taking office at a moment of profound economic, health and political crises with a promise to seek unity after a tumultuous four years that tore at the fabric of American society. New York Times: With his hand on a five-inch-thick Bible that has been in his family for 128 years, Mr. Biden recited the 35-word oath of office swearing to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution" in a ceremony administered by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., completing the process at 11:49 a.m., 11 minutes before the authority of the presidency formally changes hands.

The ritual transfer of power came shortly after Kamala Devi Harris was sworn in as vice president by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, her hand on a Bible that once belonged to Thurgood Marshall, the civil rights icon and Supreme Court justice. Ms. Harris's ascension made her the highest-ranking woman in the history of the United States and the first Black American and first person of South Asian descent to hold the nation's second highest office. The ceremony on a chilly, breezy day with a smattering of snowflakes brought to a close the stormy and divisive four-year presidency of Donald J. Trump. In characteristic fashion, Mr. Trump once again defied tradition by leaving Washington hours before the swearing in of his successor rather than face the reality of his own election defeat, although Mike Pence, his vice president, did attend. President Biden's speech: This is America's day. This is democracy's day. Few people in our nation's history have been more challenged or found a time more challenging or difficult than the time we're in now. To overcome these challenges, to restore the soul and secure the future of America, requires so much more than words and requires the most elusive of all things in a democracy: unity. Live coverage: YouTube.

Netflix has officially amassed 200 million subscribers, sending shares soaring 12%. As it continues to compete with rival services, Netflix says it's preparing to roll out a new feature that will allow the service to pick a title based on a user's preferences rather than requiring them to browse for something to watch. Gizmodo reports: Netflix said in its fourth-quarter shareholders letter released Tuesday that it managed to secure 8.5 million more paid subscriptions to help the streaming giant cross the 200 million mark. All told, the company added a total of 37 million paid subscriptions during 2020, no doubt helped by the surge in TV viewing and streaming that resulted from lockdown orders and quarantine measures amid the coronavirus pandemic. For some context, Netflix says memberships were up 23 percent from the previous year in the fourth quarter.

Even with the pandemic significantly delaying production timelines and release dates, Netflix says it's still on track to release at least one original film every week of 2021. Plus, the company said it has a staggering 500-plus titles either in post-production or ready to hit its service. Most surprising, though, was Netflix's claim that it is "every close" to being cash-flow positive and no longer needs to raise external financing. Additionally, the company plans "on repaying the bond at maturity out of cash on hand, as we are currently well above our minimum cash needs."

YouTube has taken action against President Donald Trump and barred new videos from being uploaded to his channel for at least seven days, citing violations of its policies and "concerns about the ongoing potential for violence." NBC News reports: It's the latest action against Trump after last week's deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. Twitter and Facebook have both also suspended or blocked the president's accounts. YouTube issued "a strike" to Trump's channel, and said comments would also be disabled indefinitely. The company also said it removed new content posted Tuesday.

For all the personal technology introduced and popularized in 2020 -- upscale fitness bikes, at-home Covid tests, game consoles new and old -- the personal computer lands on the list with a bit of a thud. PCs lack the novelty of other gadgets, but they're practical, essential even, in a year when work, school and social life have come to rely heavily upon them. From a report: While modern, ever more efficient computers are selling better than they have in years, vintage computers -- impractical old devices in need of repairs and out-of-production parts -- are also in demand on sites like eBay. Collectors also flock to message boards, subreddits and Discord servers to buy, sell and trade parts. People are buying these PCs not necessarily for daily use, but for the satisfaction they get from rebuilding them. It's a trend one might chalk up to quarantine boredom, though it's been gaining traction for years.

Retrocomputing, the hobby is called, is hardly just a way to pass the time. Instead, as enthusiasts see it, it's a means of communing with the past. "You get into this mind-set of what it must've been like to be somebody in the late '70s, having spent thousands of dollars on this thing that barely does anything more than a calculator," said Clint Basinger, 34, who runs the YouTube channel Lazy Game Reviews. (The devices do allow retrocomputers to make art and music using software unavailable on new computers and to play 8-bit games, but not much else beyond that.) "It's like a time machine to me," Mr. Basinger added. Before the pandemic, there were several vintage computing conventions located around the United States, to which collectors brought their computers to show off. Attendees bought and traded hardware at these events, as well as meet the friends they've made online.

An anonymous reader shares a report: WhatsApp has enjoyed unrivaled reach in India for years. By mid-2019, the Facebook-owned app had amassed over 400 million users in the country. Its closest app rival at the time was YouTube, which, according to the company's own statement and data from mobile insight firm App Annie, had about 260 million users in India then. Things have changed dramatically since. In the month of December, YouTube had 425 million monthly active users on Android phones and tablets in India, according to App Annie, the data of which an industry executive shared with TechCrunch. In comparison, WhatsApp had 422 million monthly active users on Android in India last month.

Factoring in the traction both these apps have garnered on iOS devices, WhatsApp still assumes a lead in India with 459 million active users, but YouTube is not too far behind with 452 million users. With China keeping its doors closed to U.S. tech giants, India emerged as the top market for Silicon Valley and Chinese companies looking to continue their growth in the last decade. India had about 50 million internet users in 2010, but it ended the decade with more than 600 million. Google and Facebook played their part to make this happen.

Video-sharing site Rumble accused Google in a lawsuit of abusing the power of its search engine and mobile operating system to boost its YouTube video service over rivals, the latest allegation of anticompetitive conduct against the Alphabet unit. From a report: Toronto-based Rumble, which has become popular among conservative pundits, on Monday filed an antitrust suit in federal court in California arguing that Google is "unfairly rigging its search algorithms" to place YouTube above Rumble in its search results. Rumble said Google's behavior cost it significant numbers of viewers and advertising dollars. The lawsuit also argues that Google's deals to pre-install a YouTube app on mobile devices running Google's Android operating system have unfairly deprived Rumble of viewers. "Google, through its search engine, was able to wrongfully divert massive traffic to YouTube, depriving Rumble of the additional traffic, users, uploads, brand awareness and revenue it would have otherwise received," the lawsuit states. "We will defend ourselves against these baseless claims," a Google spokeswoman said.

Not a single one of Google's iOS apps have been updated in almost a month -- an unusually long period for a tech behemoth not to release, at the very least, even a minor bug fix or stability update for one of its dozens of insanely popular iPhone and iPad apps. From a report: And after reviewing the latest release dates for all of Google's iOS apps, one reason for this lack of updates seems more likely than others: It could be related to Apple's new App Store privacy labels. The last time any Google iOS app was updated was on December 7. This includes updates to major Google apps like Google Drive, YouTube, Google Docs, Google Sheets, YouTube Music, Google Duo, Google Authenticator, and Gboard. Why is December 7 a significant date? Because starting on December 8, Apple mandated that any new apps or app updates submitted to the App Store would require the developer to fill out the privacy label information for the app it was submitting. This privacy label reveals exactly what data the app is collecting about the user and how that user data is being used. The label can then be viewed on an app's App Store listing page. The feature is part of Apple's push to make developers be more transparent in the ways they collect and use user data, so users can make more informed choices about the apps they choose to download.

The reason why the Windows UI has a 32GB limit on the formatting of FAT32 volumes is because retired Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer "said so." The confession comes "in the latest of a series of anecdotes hosted on his YouTube channel Dave's Garage," reports The Register. From the report: In the closing years of the last century, Plummer was involved in porting the Windows 95 shell to Windows NT. Part of that was a redo of Windows Format ("it had to be a replacement and complete rewrite since the Win95 system was so markedly different") and, as well as the grungy lower-level bits going down to the API, he also knocked together the classic, stacked Format dialog over the course of an hour of UI creativity. As he admired his design genius, he pondered what cluster sizes to offer the potential army of future Windows NT 4.0 users. The options would define the size of the volume; FAT32 has a set maximum number of clusters in a volume. Making those clusters huge would make for an equally huge volume, but at a horrifying cost in terms of wasted space: select a 32-kilobyte cluster size and even the few bytes needed by a "Hello World" file would snaffle the full 32k.

"We call it 'Cluster Slack'," explained Plummer, "and it is the unavoidable waste of using FAT32 on large volumes." "How large is too large? At what point do you say, 'No, it's too inefficient, it would be folly to let you do that'? That is the decision I was faced with." At the time, the largest memory card Plummer could lay his hands on for testing had an impossibly large 16-megabyte capacity. "Perhaps I multiplied its size by a thousand," he said, "and then doubled it again for good measure, and figured that would more than suffice for the lifetime of NT 4.0. I picked the number 32G as the limit and went on with my day."

While Microsoft's former leader may have struggled to put clear water between himself and the infamous "640K" quote of decades past, Plummer was clear that his decision process was aimed at NT 4.0 and would just be a temporary thing until the UI was revised. "That, however, is a fatal mistake on my part that no one should be excused for making. With the perfect being the enemy of the good, 'good enough' has persisted for 25 years and no one seems to have made any substantial changes to Format since then..." ... However, as Plummer put it: "At the end of the day, it was a simple lack of foresight combined with the age-old problem of the temporary solution becoming de-facto permanent."

This weekend Forbes ran a thought-provoking article by "a digital marketer of 25 years" who now helps marketers audit their digital campaigns for ad fraud: When P&G turned off $200 million of their digital ad spending, they saw NO CHANGE in business outcomes. When Chase reduced their programmatic reach from 400,000 sites showing its ads to 5,000 sites (a 99% decrease), they saw NO CHANGE in business outcomes. When Uber turned off $120 million of their digital ad spending meant to drive more app installs, they saw NO CHANGE in the rate of app installs. When big brands stopped spending on digital ads, nothing happened. Even further back in time, in 2012, eBay turned off their paid search ad spending, and saw NO CHANGE in sales coming from those sources...

Big brands turned off millions of dollars of digital ad spending, and saw no change in business outcomes. Small businesses tuned their digital marketing and reduced the number of ad impressions, clicks, and traffic to their sites, but saw business activity go up, instead of down. Much of the problem with digital advertising today stems from marketers' obsession with big numbers. But big numbers of ads and clicks do not translate into more business activity and sales. They are just large numbers in dashboards and spreadsheets. Marketers could be spending far fewer dollars and getting the same levels of business outcomes; or spending the dollars more smartly in digital and getting even more business outcomes than they are now.

Heading into the new year, the Atlantic's executive editor penned a scathing warning that vast social networks like Facebook "can harm society just by existing..." Even as Facebook has insisted that it is a value-neutral vessel for the material its users choose to publish, moderation is a lever the company has tried to pull again and again. But there aren't enough moderators speaking enough languages, working enough hours, to stop the biblical flood of shit that Facebook unleashes on the world, because 10 times out of 10, the algorithm is faster and more powerful than a person. At megascale, this algorithmically warped personalized informational environment is extraordinarily difficult to moderate in a meaningful way, and extraordinarily dangerous as a result...

We're still in the infancy of this century's triple digital revolution of the internet, smartphones, and the social web, and we find ourselves in a dangerous and unstable informational environment, powerless to resist forces of manipulation and exploitation that we know are exerted on us but remain mostly invisible. The Doomsday Machine offers a lesson: We should not accept this current arrangement. No single machine should be able to control so many people...

Anyone who is serious about mitigating the damage done to humankind by the social web should, of course, consider quitting Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and any other algorithmically distorted informational environments that manipulate people. But we need to adopt a broader view of what it will take to fix the brokenness of the social web. That will require challenging the logic of today's platforms — and first and foremost challenging the very concept of megascale as a way that humans gather. If megascale is what gives Facebook its power, and what makes it dangerous, collective action against the web as it is today is necessary for change. The web's existing logic tells us that social platforms are free in exchange for a feast of user data; that major networks are necessarily global and centralized; that moderators make the rules. None of that need be the case. We need people who dismantle these notions by building alternatives. And we need enough people to care about these other alternatives to break the spell of venture capital and mass attention that fuels megascale and creates fatalism about the web as it is now.

I still believe the internet is good for humanity, but that's despite the social web, not because of it. We must also find ways to repair the aspects of our society and culture that the social web has badly damaged. This will require intellectual independence, respectful debate, and the same rebellious streak that helped establish Enlightenment values centuries ago.

We may not be able to predict the future, but we do know how it is made: through flashes of rare and genuine invention, sustained by people's time and attention. Right now, too many people are allowing algorithms and tech giants to manipulate them, and reality is slipping from our grasp as a result. This century's Doomsday Machine is here, and humming along.

It does not have to be this way.

As part of its "Year in Review" series, the EFF shares their dramatic behind-the-scenes details about 2020's fight over the future of .org domains. It begins when the Internet Society (ISOC) announced plans to sell the Public Interest Registry — which manages the .org top-level domain (TLD) — to private equity firm Ethos Capital.

"If you come at the nonprofit sector, you'd best not miss." EFF and other leaders in the NGO community sprung to action, writing a letter to ISOC urging it to stop the sale. What follows was possibly the most dramatic show of solidarity from the nonprofit sector of all time. And we won.

Prior to the announcement, EFF had spent six months voicing our concerns to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) about the 2019 .ORG Registry Agreement, which gave the owner of .ORG new powers to censor nonprofits' websites (the agreement also lifted a longstanding price cap on .ORG registrations and renewals)... Throughout that six-month process of navigating ICANN's labyrinthine decision-making structure, none of us knew that ISOC would soon be selling PIR. With .ORG in the hands of a private equity firm, those fears of censorship and price gouging became a lot more tangible for nonprofits and NGOs. The power to take advantage of .ORG users was being handed to a for-profit company whose primary obligation was to make money for its investors....

More NGOs began to take notice of the .ORG sale and the danger it posed to nonprofits' freedom of expression online. Over 500 organizations and 18,000 individuals had signed our letter by the end of 2019, including big-name organizations like Greenpeace, Consumer Reports, Oxfam, and the YMCA of the USA. At the same time, questions began to emerge (PDF) about whether Ethos Capital could possibly make a profit without some drastic changes in policy for .ORG. By the beginning of 2020, the financial picture had become a lot clearer: Ethos Capital was paying $1.135 billion for .ORG, nearly a third of which was financed by a loan. No matter how well-meaning Ethos was, the pressure to sell "censorship as a service" would align with Ethos' obligation to produce returns for its investors...

Six members of Congress wrote a letter to ICANN in January urging it to scrutinize the sale more carefully. A few days later, EFF, nonprofit advocacy group NTEN, and digital rights groups Fight for the Future and Demand Progress participated in a rally outside of the ICANN headquarters in Los Angeles. Our message was simple: stop the sale and create protections for nonprofits. Before the protest, ICANN staff reached out to the organizers offering to meet with us in person, but on the day of the protest, ICANN canceled on us. That same week, Amnesty International, Access Now, the Sierra Club, and other global NGOs held a press conference at the World Economic Forum to tell world leaders that selling .ORG threatens civil society. All of the noise caught the attention of California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who wrote to ICANN (PDF) asking it for key information about its review of the sale...
Click through to read the conclusion...

An anonymous reader writes: So on New Year's Eve, the "jam" rock band Phish re-broadcast their legendary 1995 performance on New Year's Eve -- while playing a game of chess against the audience. (Just as they'd done in 1995 -- although during that tour they'd made two just moves during each show.) In a video promoting this year's event, a chess "historian" remembers "No single band in the '90s was playing better chess against their audience" and shares an alleged conspiracy theory that they were being coached by Garry Kasparov. And yet, "Midway through the second of two nights at Madison Square Garden, the audience takes Phish's queen" -- and the band resigned.

This had left their ongoing audience-versus-band match with a score (one game apiece). So 25 years later, for New Year's Eve, Phish finally staged the great re-match.

"However, just as it was time to begin the game (and as the show kicked off with opener "Punch You In The Eye"), Chess.com, the popular chess site hosting the online game, crashed," reports JamBands.com.
Thinking quickly, the band announced on Twitter that "We're making a quick pivot, 2020 style, to live chess mode. We will be using a moderator from Chess.com who will take feedback on the move within the chat and then complete the audience move."

JamBands.com explains how the long-awaited match finally culminated: In between sets, the broadcast cut to a live zoom call between all four band members, during which they discussed their next moves in the game and chatted. At various points, Gordon and Anastasio picked up guitars, and Gordon had a surreal projection of a chess board floating behind him at times. During the first break, McConnell referenced the technical difficulties. "I'm sorry this didn't work out to plan, but nothing this year did," he said with a laugh.

During the break between the second and third sets, the shenanigans increased, with drummer Jon Fishman following through on an off-hand promise to shave his head. (At first, the other three band members didn't even notice.) Ultimately, the band defeated the audience... Down to just their king, queen and a few pawns, the audience resigned as the band was up a pawn and still had a rook and queen on the board...

Phish raised funds for a charity during the broadcast. "For this final webcast of the year, our beneficiary will be none other than The WaterWheel Foundation itself," the band wrote prior to the stream. "Since 1997, the band and their fans have collaborated on a nationwide charitable endeavor by raising funds and donating the proceeds across the country. This year alone, collectively we have raised and donated nearly $750,000 to 27 different nonprofits during the Dinner And A Movie series. Join us in continuing to support those in need...."
You can watch the entire four-and-a-half-hour webcast on YouTube.