Bitcoin "fell dramatically in late April," writes The Street, "sinking from its mid-month high of around $64,000" to Sunday's current price of $47,600 — a drop of over 25% in less than two weeks.

So this week the Street spoke to Bobby Ong, the chief operating officer at the cryptocurrency data aggregator CoinGecko, asking "Was that just par for the course — normal volatility — of something else?" Ong: The recent bloodbath on April 18 saw a record of approximately $9.77 billion worth of futures contracts liquidated in just 24 hours. There was already a massive amount of leverage in the market in anticipation of the Coinbase initial public offering. The excitement of having the first crypto company IPO also led bitcoin's price to hit a new all-time high of $64,804.

However, the direct listing of Coinbase also had a lukewarm reception from stock investors. More recently, there was a lot of fear and uncertainty spreading on social media due to various factors, including (rumors of) the U.S. Treasury taking legal action against certain financial institutions for money laundering, which turned out to be false information. Other than that, CNBC was recirculating news about the crypto ban in India, Turkey banning crypto payments, President Biden proposing a higher capital gains tax, and China bitcoin miners losing power.

The selloff happened during the weekend when there were thinner order books. With high leverage and thin order books, even a small decrease in price will trigger a sharp drawdown and cause a downward spiral in price.

Naturally, the market also needs to correct itself, because there were many over-leveraged traders. It is also important to note that bitcoin options expire towards the end of every month, which usually causes increased volatility in the last week of each month.

TheStreet: Do you see the decline as a chance for people to get into it at a cheaper price?

Ong: It depends on that person and their goals. The profiles of buyers today are very different before, when it was mostly libertarians. Today. it's U.S. institutions, and soon it will be governments.

Amazon One is now testing its palm-scanning payment technology in Whole Foods, starting with a single store in Amazon's home city of Seattle. The Verge reports: The company has been using Amazon One payment technology in its Amazon-branded stores in the Seattle area (including Amazon Go and Amazon Books), but the Whole Foods rollout will make the most substantial expansion of the technology yet. The company says that thousands of customers have already signed up with Amazon One. According to an Amazon FAQ, the palm-scanning technology analyzes "the minute characteristics of your palm -- both surface-area details like lines and ridges as well as subcutaneous features such as vein patterns" in order to identify a customer, allowing them to use the biometric scan as an alternative (and, theoretically, faster) method of checking out than fumbling around with a credit card or cash.

Customers will be able to register their palms at kiosks in the supported Whole Foods stores, allowing them to associate a physical credit card to that palm scan. And of course, Amazon One users will be able to link their Prime accounts to their scans to get the subscription service's discounts when shopping. Amazon One will debut at the Madison Broadway Whole Foods in Seattle as an additional payment option for customers, with plans to expand it to seven other Whole Foods stores in the Seattle area over the next few months. Amazon hasn't announced plans to further build out the palm-scanning payment system outside of the Seattle area.

In an interview, San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly addressed Silicon Valley heavyweights like Elon Musk and others who have bemoaned California's COVID-19 restrictions and taxes and said they're taking their ball and moving to places like Miami or Brownsville, Texas, or the 140-square-foot Hawaiian island they own. Daly said: I've been working at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco since 1996 and when I arrived in 1996 there was a series of books written that said Silicon Valley was dead, it was over. People were going to move to Austin, Texas, and Portland, Oregon, and Boston and that was going to be the end of Silicon Valley. It had reached its peak and it was on the demise. Of course, it didn't happen. What happens is that absolutely tech firms move to other parts of the country, they relocate, and some of it is the business climate that they cite, some of it is that it's easier to get a workforce if you spread it around the United States than if you're all in one area. That concentration does raise housing values, and housing prices because people want to live here. All of these things are true and yet year after year, decade after decade, you see Silicon Valley robustly continuing to grow and continuing to thrive.

Jeffrey Ullman and Alfred Aho developed many of the fundamental concepts that researchers use when they build new software. From a report: When Alfred Aho and Jeffrey Ullman met while waiting in the registration line on their first day of graduate school at Princeton University in 1963, computer science was still a strange new world. Using a computer required a set of esoteric skills typically reserved for trained engineers and mathematicians. But today, thanks in part to the work of Dr. Aho and Dr. Ullman, practically anyone can use a computer and program it to perform new tasks. On Wednesday, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest society of computing professionals, said Dr. Aho and Dr. Ullman would receive this year's Turing Award for their work on the fundamental concepts that underpin computer programming languages. Given since 1966 and often called the Nobel Prize of computing, the Turing Award comes with a $1 million prize, which the two academics and longtime friends will split. Dr. Aho and Dr. Ullman helped refine one of the key components of a computer: the "compiler" that takes in software programs written by humans and turns them into something computers can understand.

Over the past five decades, computer scientists have built increasingly intuitive programming languages, making it easier and easier for people to create software for desktops, laptops, smartphones, cars and even supercomputers. Compilers ensure that these languages are efficiently translated into the ones and zeros that computers understand. Without their work, "we would not be able to write an app for our phones," said Krysta Svore, a researcher at Microsoft who studied with Mr. Aho at Columbia University, where he was chairman of the computer science department. "We would not have the cars we drive these days." The researchers also wrote many textbooks and taught generations of students as they defined how computer software development was different from electrical engineering or mathematics. "Their fingerprints are all over the field," said Graydon Hoare, the creator of a programming language called Rust. He added that two of Dr. Ullman's books were sitting on the shelf beside him. After leaving Princeton, both Dr. Aho, a Canadian by birth who is 79, and Dr. Ullman, a native New Yorker who is 78, joined the New Jersey headquarters of Bell Labs, which was then one of the world's leading research labs.

Car and Driver magazine has over a million readers. This month they called Tesla's "full self driving" beta "laughably bad and potentially dangerous."

schwit1 shares their report on a 13-minute video posted to YouTube of a Model 3 with FSD Beta 8.2 "fumbling its way around Oakland." Quite quickly, the video moves from "embarrassing mistakes" to "extremely risky, potentially harmful driving." In autonomous mode, the Tesla breaks a variety of traffic laws, starting with a last-minute attempt to cross a hard line and execute an illegal lane change. It then attempts to make a left turn next to another car, only to give up midway through the intersection and disengage. It goes on to take another turn far too wide, landing it in the oncoming lane and requiring driver intervention. Shortly thereafter, it crosses into the oncoming lane again on a straight stretch of road with bikers and oncoming traffic. It then drunkenly stumbles through an intersection and once again requires driver intervention to make it through. While making an unprotected left after a stop sign, it slows down before the turn and chills in the pathway of oncoming cars that have to brake to avoid hitting it...

The Tesla attempts to make a right turn at a red light where that's prohibited, once again nearly breaking the law and requiring the driver to actively prevent it from doing something. It randomly stops in the middle of the road, proceeds straight through a turn-only lane, stops behind a parked car, and eventually almost slams into a curb while making a turn. After holding up traffic to creep around a stopped car, it confidently drives directly into the oncoming lane before realizing its mistake and disengaging. Another traffic violation on the books — and yet another moment where the befuddled car just gives up and leaves it to the human driver to sort out the mess...

Then comes another near collision. This time, the Tesla arrives at an intersection where it has a stop sign and cross traffic doesn't. It proceeds with two cars incoming, the first car narrowly passing the car's front bumper and the trailing car braking to avoid T-boning the Model 3. It is absolutely unbelievable and indefensible that the driver, who is supposed to be monitoring the car to ensure safe operation, did not intervene there. It's even wilder that this software is available to the public. But that isn't the end of the video. To round it out, the Model 3 nearly slams into a Camry that has the right of way while trying to negotiate a kink in the road. Once it gets through that intersection, it drives straight for a fence and nearly plows directly into it.

Both of these incidents required driver intervention to avoid.
Their conclusion? "Tesla's software clearly does a decent job of identifying cars, stop signs, pedestrians, bikes, traffic lights, and other basic obstacles. Yet to think this constitutes anything close to 'full self-driving' is ludicrous."

"40,000 lines of flawed code almost made it into FreeBSD's kernel," writes Ars Technica, reporting on what happened when the CEO of Netgate, which makes FreeBSD-powered routers, decided it was time for FreeBSD to enjoy the same level of in-kernel WireGuard support that Linux does. The issue arose after Netgate offered a burned-out developer a contract to port WireGuard into the FreeBSD kernel (where Netgate could then use it in the company's popular pfSense router distribution): [The developer] committed his port — largely unreviewed and inadequately tested — directly into the HEAD section of FreeBSD's code repository, where it was scheduled for incorporation into FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE. This unexpected commit raised the stakes for WireGuard founding developer Jason Donenfeld, whose project would ultimately be judged on the quality of any production release under the WireGuard name. Donenfeld identified numerous problems...but rather than object to the port's release, Donenfeld decided to fix the issues. He collaborated with FreeBSD developer Kyle Evans and with Matt Dunwoodie, an OpenBSD developer who had worked on WireGuard for that operating system...

How did so much sub-par code make it so far into a major open source operating system? Where was the code review which should have stopped it? And why did both the FreeBSD core team and Netgate seem more focused on the fact that the code was being disparaged than its actual quality?
There's more to the story, but ultimately Ars Technica confirmed the presences of multiple buffer overflows, printf statements that are still being triggered in production, and even empty validation function which always "return true" rather than actually validating the data. The original developer argued the real issue is an absence of quality reviewers, but Ars Technica sees a larger problem. "There seems to be an absence of process to ensure quality code review." Several FreeBSD community members would only speak off the record. In essence, most seem to agree, you either have a commit bit (enabling you to commit code to FreeBSD's repositories) or you don't. It's hard to find code reviews, and there generally isn't a fixed process ensuring that vitally important code gets reviewed prior to inclusion. This system thus relies heavily on the ability and collegiality of individual code creators.
Ars Technica published this statement from the FreeBSD Core Team: Core unconditionally values the work of all contributors, and seeks a culture of cooperation, respect, and collaboration. The public discourse over WireGuard in the past week does not meet these standards and is damaging to our community if not checked. As such, WireGuard development for FreeBSD will now proceed outside of the base system. For those who wish to evaluate, test, or experiment with WireGuard, snapshots will be available via the ports and package systems.

As a project, we remain committed to continually improving our development process. We'll also continue to refine our tooling to make code reviews and continuous integration easier and more effective. The Core Team asks that the community use these tools and work together to improve FreeBSD.
Ars Technica applauds the efforts — while remaining concerned about the need for them. "FreeBSD is an important project that deserves to be taken seriously. Its downstream consumers include industry giants such as Cisco, Juniper, NetApp, Netflix, Sony, Sophos, and more. The difference in licensing between FreeBSD and Linux gives FreeBSD a reach into many projects and spaces where the Linux kernel would be a difficult or impossible fit."

New submitter dkoneill writes: A soon-to-be-released, crowdfunded book based on the personal archives of Douglas Adams (author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, episodes of Doctor Who and other beloved science fiction), reveals that he occasionally found writing torturous. In a "General note to myself" the author states, "Writing isn't so bad really when you get through the worry. Forget about the worry, just press on. Don't be embarrassed about the bad bits. Don't strain at them." "Writing can be good...You can get pleasure out of it."

His sister Jane responded to the General note, "I love it, but I just wish he'd read it to himself more often. I think it [writing] was a tortuous process for him, not all the time, but when it was difficult for him it was really difficult." When stuck, the author would even tear down his own work. On another page of notes, he wrote, "Arthur Dent is a burk. He does not interest me. Ford Prefect is a burk. He does not interest me. Zaphod Beeblebrox is a burk. He does not interest me. Marvin is a burk. He does not interest me. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a burk. It does not interest me."

The CBC Radio show Quirks and Quarks shares an interesting theory: If you find yourself pondering the marvel of aerodynamics when you fly on a plane, or if you concentrate on the structure of music as it plays, rather than simply listening, you may score high on measures of "systemization," according to University of Cambridge neuroscientist Simon Baron-Cohen.

And if so this may reflect abilities that he thinks may have first evolved in humans between 70,000 and 100,000 years ago, when our human ancestors took a cognitive leap forward. This new capacity enabled them to analyze and understand patterns in the world that would, among other things, facilitate the invention of complex tools from bows to musical instruments. In Baron-Cohen's new book, he argues that humans became "the scientific and technological masters of our planet" because of our brain's "systemizing mechanism."

Also, some individuals — particularly those with Autism Spectrum Disorder, are the "hyper-systemizers" of our world. He suggests this should cause us to re-evaluate the capacities and strengths of people with autism... "[F]or the longest time, autism has been really just characterized as a disability, which it is, but with a focus on all the things that autistic people find difficult, what they struggle with. But we know that autism is more than just a disability, that autistic people think differently. Sometimes they have strengths...

"The fact that we can now see a link between those strengths in autism and human invention may change the way we look at autistic people. We might want to see them for who they are, people who think differently and have contributed to human progress."

Amazon is withholding ebook and audiobook versions of works it publishes through its in-house publishing arms from US libraries, according to a new report from The Washington Post. The Verge: In fact, Amazon is the only major publisher that's doing this, the report states. It's doing so because the company thinks the terms involved with selling digital versions of books to libraries, which in turn make them available to local residents for free through ebook lending platforms like Libby, are unfavorable. "It's not clear to us that current digital library lending models fairly balance the interests of authors and library patrons," Mikyla Bruder, the global marketing chief at Amazon Publishing, told The Washington Post's Geoffrey Fowler in an emailed statement. "We see this as an opportunity to invent a new approach to help expand readership and serve library patrons, while at the same time safeguarding author interests, including income and royalties."

At the heart of the issue is a debate over whether libraries, which often pay far higher than retail price for physical and ebook copies of books, ultimately harm publisher sales by letting people check out copies for free. In the age of mobile apps and widespread Kindle usage, borrowing an ebook is now easier than ever -- you need a library card and the Libby app, and you can then place holds and eventually check out ebooks that can be sent directly to your Kindle e-reader or app to access for a limited time.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Amazon One, the technology that lets customers pay in shops by scanning their palm, is expanding to more stores in the greater Seattle area. The company says it's available starting today in its 4-star store in Lynnwood, and in the coming weeks, Amazon One is also coming to its Amazon Books store in Bellevue and its 4-star and Pop Up stores in South Lake Union. In total, 12 of Amazon's physical stores will soon feature the technology.

The e-commerce giant announced its palm recognition Amazon One system last year. It works by scanning your hand and identifying its unique characteristics like surface area details and vein patterns. Palm scanning technology has been around for a few years, and it's pretty secure as biometric security methods go, though there are concerns about how Amazon might use the data gathered as part of the system. So far, Amazon has made Amazon One available as a payment option across a number of its own-branded physical stores around Seattle. But in the longer term, the company hopes the convenience factor of being able to confirm your identity using just your hand will convince third-party businesses to use the service, too.

Tim Wu coined the phrase "net neutrality". He's the author of The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age , and Bloomberg calls him an "outspoken advocate for aggressive antitrust enforcement against U.S. technology giants."

They add that now the Columbia University media law professor "is joining the White House an adviser, signaling that the Biden administration is preparing to square off against the industry's biggest companies." Wu will join the National Economic Council as a special assistant on technology and competition policy, the White House said Friday. Wu's appointment elevates to a senior position in the administration a leading antitrust expert, favored by progressives, who has assailed the power of dominant tech companies like Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Facebook Inc. Both companies were sued by U.S. antitrust enforcers last year for allegedly abusing their monopoly power...

After the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general sued Facebook in December, Wu wrote a column in the New York Times comparing Facebook's strategy of buying competitors to Standard Oil's tactics in the 19th century. "What the federal government and states are doing is reasserting a fundamental rule for all American business: You cannot simply buy your way out of competition," Wu wrote. "Facebook, led by its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has taken that strategy to a smirking and egregious extreme, acquiring multiple companies to stifle the competitive threat they pose."

Wu joins the Biden administration as tech giants are grappling with a reckoning in Washington that could transform the industry. The Facebook lawsuit could lead to the breakup of the company, while the Justice Department's complaint against Google targets the heart of its business — Internet search. Antitrust enforcers have also opened investigations of Apple Inc. and Amazon... Wu argued in his book, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age, that rising concentration across the economy has led to concentrated wealth and power as well as radicalized politics that threatens American democracy.
A White House press briefing Friday included this response to a question about Biden's plans for big tech companies: The President has been clear — on the campaign, and, probably, more recently — that he stands up to the abuse of power, and that includes the abuse of power from big technology companies and their executives. And Tim will help advance the President's agenda, which includes addressing the economic and social challenges posed by the growing power of tech platforms; promoting competition and addressing monopoly and market power issues; expanding access to broadband for low-income and rural communities across the country...

We don't have new policy to announce here... Just that the President believes, as he's talked about before, that it's important to promote competition and address monopoly and market power issues.
Interestingly, last August Wu also wrote an op-ed in the New York Times titled "A TikTok Ban is Overdue," arguing that China's "extensive blocking, censorship and surveillance violate just about every principle of internet openness and decency. China keeps a closed and censorial internet economy at home while its products enjoy full access to open markets abroad..." The asymmetry is unfair and ought no longer be tolerated. The privilege of full internet access — the open internet — should be extended only to companies from countries that respect that openness themselves...

[China] bans not only most foreign competitors to its tech businesses but also foreign sources of news, religious instruction and other information, while using the internet to promote state propaganda and engage in foreign electoral interference... Few foreign companies are allowed to reach Chinese citizens with ideas or services, but the world is fully open to China's online companies...

The idealists who thought the internet would automatically create democracy in China were wrong. Some think that it is a tragic mistake for the United States to violate the principles of internet openness that were pioneered in this country. But there is also such a thing as being a sucker. If China refuses to follow the rules of the open internet, why continue to give it access to internet markets around the world...?

We need to wake up to the game we are playing when it comes to the future of the global internet. The idealists of the 1990s and early '00s believed that building a universal network, a kind of digital cosmopolitanism, would lead to world peace and harmony. No one buys that fantasy any longer. But if we want decency and openness to survive on the internet — surely a more attainable goal — the nations that hold such values need to begin fighting to protect them.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Reddit, the social network and online bulletin, said on Thursday that it had appointed its first chief financial officer, Drew Vollero, in a move toward tidying up the company's books before an eventual public offering of its stock. Mr. Vollero, 55, previously ran financial operations for Mattel, Snap and Allied Universal. His task at Reddit will be building out the financial, audit and accounting functions and leading the company through the process of going public.

"Is Reddit going public?" Steve Huffman, Reddit's chief executive, said in an interview. "We're thinking about it. We're working toward that moment." Mr. Huffman said Reddit did not have a timeline, but Mr. Vollero's appointment indicated that the 15-year-old company was developing its financial operations to be more similar to those of publicly traded peers like Twitter and Facebook. More than 52 million people visit Reddit every day, and it is home to more than 100,000 topic-based communities, or subforums.

Reddit has also added to its executive ranks in recent months, hiring a head of security and appointing a new member to its board. In December, the company acquired Dubsmash, a video-focused social app that competes with TikTok. Last month, Reddit raised $250 million in new capital, its largest venture round, valuing the company at $6 billion. Reddit plans to use the funding to expand its business, including its financial team, Mr. Huffman said. He also wants to make Reddit more mainstream by improving the product or making other investments, he said.

Online retailer eBay has announced it is working to remove sales of some books from Dr. Seuss over offensive imagery. The Hill reports: A spokesperson for the company told The Wall Street Journal that it is "currently sweeping our marketplace to remove these items." The spokesperson further told the newspaper that it would take time to review seller listings, and the company was monitoring new listings.

The move comes after Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced on Tuesday, which was the late author's birthday, that it will stop the publication of 46 books over racially insensitive imagery. The company told the Associated Press that ending the publications was a move to "preserve the author's legacy." The books reportedly include "McElligot's Pool," "On Beyond Zebra!," "Scrambled Eggs Super!," "The Cat's Quizzer," "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street" and "If I Ran the Zoo."

"The impressive performance and battery life gains of the new M1 MacBooks have created a historic discontinuity in the normally placid resale market," reports ZDNet: Should you spend $800 for a one year old MacBook Air when for $200 more you could get a MacBook Air with several times the performance and 50 percent better battery life? That's a question savvy buyers are asking themselves. Not surprisingly, the most common answer seems to be "Nope...!"

Unless buyers check out a site like Everymac they won't know what they're missing. The bottom-of-the-line M1 MacBook Air has a Geekbench 5 multiprocessor score that is almost 2.5x that of the early 2020, top-of-the-line quad-core I7. For 80 percent of the price. And most users won't need to spend the extra cash for the 16GB version since the memory management and page swapping is so efficient. The contrast is even more striking when comparing MacBook Pros. Not only is the 13" MacBook Pro faster on the Geekbench 5 single and multiprocessor benchmarks than the top-of-the-line 16" MacBook Pro Intel I9, it's less than half the price. And it isn't just a single benchmark. Search on "M1 MacBook Pro vs 16 MacBook Pro" on YouTube to see multiple videos testing real world workloads on both machines.
The article also makes a prediction: "The best deals on Intel 'Books are yet to come, assuming Apple offers retailers price protection.

"There seems to be a large inventory of Intel based MacBooks, and they have to clear them out before the end of 2021."

Fake reviews for products sold on Amazon's Marketplace are being sold online "in bulk", according to Which? The consumer group found 10 websites selling fake reviews from $7 each and incentivising positive reviews in exchange for payment or free products. From a report: It suggested the firm was facing an "uphill struggle" against a "widespread fake reviews industry". An Amazon spokesman said: "We remove fake reviews and take action against anyone involved in abuse." The retail giant's Marketplace allows other retailers to sell their goods via the Amazon website. Which? identified websites offering review services for goods for sale on Amazon Marketplace that violated the firm's terms and conditions. These included "packages" of fake reviews available for sellers to buy for about $21 individually, as well as bulk packages starting at $862 for 50 reviews and going up to $11,130 for 1,000. The group also suggested that five of the businesses it looked at had more than 702,000 "product reviewers" on their books. Product reviewers are offered small payments ranging from a few pounds up to more than $14, alongside free or discounted products. They can even take part in "loyalty schemes" and earn themselves premium goods, from children's toys to exercise equipment.

Morgan Housel, on the art and power of storytelling: C. R. Hallpike is a respected anthropologist who once wrote a review of a young author's recent book on the history of humans. It states: "It would be fair to say that whenever his facts are broadly correct they are not new, and whenever he tries to strike out on his own he often gets things wrong, sometimes seriously ... [It is not] a contribution to knowledge."

Two things are notable here.

One is that the book's author doesn't seem to disagree with the assessment.

Another is that the author, Yuval Noah Harari, has sold over 27 million books, making him one of the bestselling contemporary authors in any field, and his book Sapiens -- which Hallpike was reviewing -- the most successful anthropology book of all time.

Harari recently said about writing Sapiens: "I thought, 'This is so banal!' ... There is absolutely nothing there that is new. I'm not an archeologist. I'm not a primatologist. I mean, I did zero new research... It was really reading the kind of common knowledge and just presenting it in a new way.

What Sapiens does have is excellent writing. Beautiful writing. The stories are captivating, the flow is effortless. Harari took what was already known and wrote it better than anyone had done before. The result was fame greater than anyone before him could imagine. Best story wins.

It's nothing to be ashamed of, because so many successes work this way.

The Civil War is probably the most well-documented period in American history. There are thousands of books analyzing every conceivable angle, chronicling every possible detail. But in 1990 Ken Burns' Civil War documentary became an instant phenomenon, with 39 million viewers and winning 40 major film awards. As many Americans watched Ken Burns' Civil War in 1990 as watched the Super Bowl that year. And all he did -- not to minimize it, because it's such a feat -- is take 130-year-old existing information and wove it into a (very) good story.

Bill Bryson is the same. His books fly off the shelves, which I understand drives the little-known academics who uncovered the things he writes about crazy. His latest work is basically an anatomy textbook. It has no new information, no discoveries. But it's so well written -- he tells such a good story -- that it became an instant New York Times bestseller and the Washington Post's Book of the Year. Charles Darwin didn't discover evolution, he just wrote the first and most compelling book about it. John Burr Williams had more profound insight on the topic of valuing companies than Benjamin Graham. But Graham knew how to write a good paragraph, so he became the legend.

The Internet Archive: The Internet Archive has reached a new milestone: 2 million. That's how many modern books are now in its lending collection -- available free to the public to borrow at any time, even from home. "We are going strong," said Chris Freeland, a librarian at the Internet Archive and director of the Open Libraries program. "We are making books available that people need access to online, and our patrons are really invested. We are doing a library's work in the digital era." The lending collection is an encyclopedic mix of purchased books, ebooks, and donations from individuals, organizations, and institutions. It has been curated by Freeland and other librarians at the Internet Archive according to a prioritized wish list that has guided collection development. The collection has been purpose-built to reach a wide base of both public and academic library patrons, and to contain books that people want to read and access online -- titles that are widely held by libraries, cited in Wikipedia and frequently assigned on syllabi and course reading lists.

"The Internet Archive is trying to achieve a collection reflective of great research and public libraries like the Boston Public Library," said Brewster Kahle, digital librarian and founder of the Internet Archive, who began building the diverse library more than 20 years ago. "Libraries from around the world have been contributing books so that we can make sure the digital generation has access to the best knowledge ever written," Kahle said. "These wide ranging collections include books curated by educators, librarians and individuals, that they see are critical to educating an informed populace at a time of massive disinformation and misinformation." The 2 million modern books are part of the Archive's larger collection of 28 million texts that include older books in the public domain, magazines, and documents. Beyond texts, millions of movies, television news programs, images, live music concerts, and other sound recordings are also available, as well as more than 500 billion web pages that have been archived by the Wayback Machine. Nearly 1.5 million unique patrons use the Internet Archive each day, and about 17,000 items are uploaded daily.

An anonymous Slashdot reader warns of a possible miscalculation: 20 years ago today, cobolreport.com published an article, according to which there are 30 billion Customer Information Control System/COBOL transactions per day. This number has since been cited countless times... [T]his number is still to be found in the marketing of most COBOL service providers, compiler vendors (IBM, Micro-Focus and others) and countless articles about how relevant COBOL supposedly still was. The article originally reported 30 billion "CICS transactions", but within 2 years it had already been turned into "COBOL transactions"...

The "30 billion" likely originates from a DataPro survey in 1997, in which they still reported 20 billion transactions per day. Only 421 companies participated in that survey. They actually scaled the results from such a small survey up to the IT-market of the entire world!

That same survey is also the source of many other numbers that are still to be found in the marketing of COBOL compiler vendors and articles:

- There are 200 billion lines of COBOL Code

- That's 60-80% of all the source codes in the world [sic]

- 5 billion lines of COBOL code are newly written each year

- There are 2 million COBOL developers in the world

- COBOL processes 95% of all "in person transactions", "ATM swipes" or similar

DataPro was bought by Gartner Inc. in 1997. Since then, all the numbers are reported to come "from Gartner". Only very early sources quote DataPro as their source.

Some of these numbers are obvious nonsense. The explanation for this is that DataPro had only surveyed mainframe owners. So it only says that 60-80% of all the source codes on mainframes are written in COBOL (which is plausible at least for 1997). And only 95% of all credit companies that have mainframes use their mainframes for processing credit card transactions. Considering the low participation, we are probably talking about 19 of 20 credit companies here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg, which is "based on interviews with more than 30 current and former Amazon employees, most of whom spoke under the condition of anonymity citing fears of litigation or career repercussions." From the report: Mike Frazzini had never made a video game when he helped start Amazon Game Studios. Eight years later, he has released two duds, withdrew both from stores after a torrent of negative reactions and canceled many more. For a company that dominates countless areas of retail, consumer electronics and enterprise computing, the multiple failures in gaming show one realm that may be impervious toAmazon.com's distinctive business philosophy. It tried to make games the Amazon way, instead of simply making games people would want to play.

Frazzini is an Amazon lifer who came up in the books section of the website, where he endeared himself to Jeff Bezos as a manager there. Conventional wisdom inside the company is that if you can run one business, you can run any other. Amazon's deep financial resources certainly help. As head of the games division, Frazzini has acquired established development studios and pushed the company to spend nearly $1 billion for the live video streaming website Twitch. Frazzini recruited some of the top names in the video game industry, including creators of the critically acclaimed franchises EverQuest and Portal, as well as executives fromElectronic Arts Inc.and other big publishers.

Then, according to numerous current and former employees of Frazzini's game studios, he ignored much of their advice. He frequently told staff that every Amazon game needed to be a "billion-dollar franchise" and then understaffed the projects, they say. Instead of using industry-standard development tools, Frazzini insisted Amazon build its own, which might have saved the company money if the software ever worked properly. Executives under Frazzini initially rejected charges that New World, an Amazon game that would ask players to colonize a mythical land and murder inhabitants who bear a striking resemblance to Native Americans, was racist. They relented after Amazon hired a tribal consultant who found that the portrayal was indeed offensive, say two people who worked on the project. The game, previously planned for release last year, is now scheduled for this spring.

Amazon.com and the "Big Five" publishers -- Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster -- have been accused of colluding to fix ebook prices, in a class action filed by the law firm that successfully sued Apple and the Big Five on the same charge 10 years ago. The Guardian reports: The lawsuit, filed in district court in New York on Thursday by Seattle firm Hagens Berman, on behalf of consumers in several US states, names the retail giant as the sole defendant but labels the publishers "co-conspirators." It alleges Amazon and the publishers use a clause known as "Most Favored Nations" (MFN) to keep ebook prices artificially high, by agreeing to price restraints that force consumers to pay more for ebooks purchased on retail platforms that are not Amazon.com. The lawsuit claims that almost 90% of all ebooks sold in the US are sold on Amazon, in addition to over 50% of all print books. The suit alleges that ebook prices dropped in 2013 and 2014 after Apple and major publishers were successfully sued for conspiring to set ebook prices, but rose again after Amazon renegotiated their contracts in 2015.

"In violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act, Defendant and the Big Five Co-conspirators agreed to various anti-competitive MFNs and anti-competitive provisions that functioned the same as MFNs," the complaint states. "Amazon's agreement with its Co-conspirators is an unreasonable restraint of trade that prevents competitive pricing and causes Plaintiffs and other consumers to overpay when they purchase ebooks from the Big Five through an ebook retailer that competes with Amazon. That harm persists and will not abate unless Amazon and the Big Five are stopped." The suit seeks compensation for consumers who purchased ebooks through competitors, damages and injunctive relief that would require Amazon and the publishers to "stop enforcing anti-competitive price restraints."