Here’s an interesting tidbit from The Wall Street Journal:
ICQ was a pioneering, mid-1990s internet messaging service then used on bulky PCs on dial-up. It was a precursor to AOL Instant Messenger, and was last in vogue when the TV show “Friends” was in its prime and PalmPilots were cutting edge.

It’s been modernized over the years, and now is an app for smartphones. Lately it has skyrocketed up Hong Kong’s app charts, with downloads jumping 35-fold in the week ending Jan. 12.

“It recalls my childhood memories,” said 30-year-old risk consultant Anthony Wong, who used ICQ when he was in grade school. He has since connected with more than two dozen friends on the platform after some bristled this month at a privacy policy update by WhatsApp that would allow some data to be stored on parent Facebook Inc.’s servers.

Back in 1998 Slashdot’s CmdrTaco wrote a story about ICQ being ported to Palm Pilot, and linked to a Wired story about ICQ security flaws.
In fact, you can almost tell the history of ICQ just with Slashdot headlines.

– AIM and ICQ to be Integrated (2002)
– Russian Company Buys ICQ (2010)

What’s happened since? ICQ’s entry on Wikipedia cites a 2018 article in a Russia newspaper.

According to a Novaya Gazeta article published in May 2018, Russian intelligence agencies have access to online reading of ICQ users’ correspondence. The article examined 34 sentences of Russian courts, during the investigation of which the evidence of the defendants’ guilt was obtained by reading correspondence on a PC or mobile devices. Of the fourteen cases in which ICQ was involved, in six cases the capturing of information occurred before the seizure of the device.

The reason for the article was the blocking of the Telegram service and the recommendation of the Advisor to the President of the Russian Federation Herman Klimenko to use ICQ instead.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Dropping WhatsApp? Despite Security Concerns, Nostalgia Drives Users to ICQ

In March Andrew Yang’s nonprofit gave $1,000 one-time grants to a thousand residents in the Bronx. This week a new article in the New Yorker asks one of those grant recipients how they feel about Yang’s newest proposal as he runs to be New York’s mayor: to give the city’s public-housing residents billions of dollars in a “Borough Bucks” currency that would hopefully recirculate in the community:

“I was like, you know, am I the only person here that would love to live in a society where we can actually barter our talents and skills, instead of depending on this economy that’s not working for us?”

Yang made a similar point when I asked him about the origins of the Borough Bucks proposal. “If you’re going to invest resources in a community, your preference is that the resources circulate within the community, particularly if you can serve multiple goals,” he said. “They’re just imaginative ways for communities to unlock resources.”
The article also notes that in an earlier run for the U.S. presidency, “his pitch was that the economy needed to be modernized to account for automation and other technological advances. In his mayoral run, his pitch is that New York City should become the ‘anti-poverty’ city.” But they explored the larger question of whether Yang sees a growing acceptance for universal basic incomes:

I asked Yang about the debate, now happening in Congress, about whether Biden should push for fourteen-hundred-dollar stimulus checks in the next bailout package, or two-thousand-dollar checks, or two thousand dollars a month until the economy rebounds. Yang said that he favored the last proposal.

I asked him how he felt about the fact that even as other candidates in the race were attacking him, several — Eric Adams, the former nonprofit executive Dianne Morales, and the City Council member Carlos Menchaca — had expressed interest in the U.B.I. policies he had championed. “I would love to check out their plans,” Yang said. “It’s an idea whose time has come. I’m certainly very proud to have contributed to the idea’s popularity, but anyone who wants to adapt a version of it, like, fantastic.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Andrew Yang Proposes a Local Currency, Sees Growing Support for Universal Basic Income

“Microsoft Corp. was wrapped into a massive cybersecurity attack late last year,” reports MarketWatch, “but the unprecedented intrusion may actually end up being a positive for the company’s bottom line.”

UBS analyst Karl Keirstead, who has a buy rating and a $243 price target, said while Microsoft products were leveraged by hackers in the attack on SolarWinds Corp.’s Orion IT management software, because they are commonplace, “the broader cyber-security community are not pointing fingers at Microsoft.”

Keirstead noted that the attack actually drove more customers into public cloud infrastructures like Azure, Amazon.com Inc.’s and Alphabet Inc.’s Google Cloud “given a view that cloud data centers are more secure and that constantly patching/updating on-premise software like Orion presents a security risk that can be transferred to Microsoft, Amazon or Google.”

“Bottom line, we believe this cyber-security attack could be a modest net positive for Microsoft,” Keirstead said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Despite SolarWinds Cyberattack, Microsoft’s Azure Business Predicted to Benefit

This week Digital Reality data center services announced it was also relocating its headquarters from the San Francisco Bay Area to Texas, citing factors like a low cost of living and “supportive business climate”. (Though it will still maintain a “significant” presence in the Bay Area.)

And Align Technology (makers of the Invisalign orthodontic dental aligners) also announced it had relocated its global corporate headquarters from San Jose, California to Tempe, Arizona, citing a “favorable corporate operating environment, low cost of living and overall quality of life.”

NBC News writes that “while Silicon Valley is by no means ceasing to be the center of the technology industry,” there’s still an “undeniable migration” that’s happening:

Shervin Pishevar, a venture capitalist, bought a house in Miami Beach in 2018. In late 2020, Jonathan Oringer, who founded Shutterstock and became an investor, moved to Miami, as did other notable venture capitalists, including Keith Rabois and David Blumberg. It’s not just Miami experiencing this migration. Last month, Oracle, the tech giant, announced it is moving its corporate headquarters from Redwood City, California, to Austin, Texas. Other such moves include Palantir, which decamped for Denver, while Elon Musk said last month he had moved himself to Austin. Hewlett Packard Enterprise also announced last month it was moving its headquarters from San Jose, California, in favor of a Houston suburb…

It’s significant enough that while the San Francisco Bay Area continues to gain tech workers, the rate of increase is down by over 35 percent — the single largest drop of any tracked metropolitan area — according to self-reported data tracked by LinkedIn. Experts following this migration predict these numbers may grow. “There’s a mini-exodus of tech companies leaving the Valley, and I think that’s going to accelerate in 2021,” said Dan Ives, a financial analyst with Wedbush Securities. But the reasons many businesses are moving are more complex than people may think. Tax experts say companies aren’t moving their corporate headquarters necessarily for business tax incentives. Instead, it may be a long-term play to help them pay workers relatively less where the cost of living is lower… “You’re going to always have the vast majority of tech companies coming out of the Valley, and you can’t create that anywhere else,” Ives said. “But when you look at an Austin: It’s creating a mini Silicon Valley at half the cost for an average employee…”

Tax experts suspect Oracle and its peers may over time phase out higher-paid employees in California in favor of lower-paid employees in Texas. These companies can also ease off giving employees raises because they are living somewhere with a lower cost of living. “Even though a lot of companies are saying they can let people work from anywhere, most are saying we’re not going to cut salary, but we’re going to slow the rate of increase of salary,” said Brian Kropp, an analyst with the IT service management company Gartner. Kropp said he spoke with high-level representatives from several “Fortune 200 type companies” who are exploring moving their corporate headquarters. In short, shifting employees from California to Texas could represent long-term corporate cost savings, which means larger payouts for these companies’ top executives.

“The compounding effect translates to a 3 or 5 percent margin that moves straight to profit,” Kropp said…
Kropp says some companies are also worried about the increase in state laws targeting businesses and executives. But there could be another culprit, argues Darien Shanske, a law professor at the University of California, Davis who NBC identiies as an expert on state and local taxation.

“California has blown it, but not because of tax policy — its decades-long problem of not producing enough housing,” he said. “It’s probably cheaper and easier to build that in Austin.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – More Companies Are Joining ‘Tech Exodus’ From California

“We messed up today,” the Xbox Live Gold team wrote late Friday night, “and you were right to let us know.” Their blog post’s new title? “No Changes to Xbox Live Gold Pricing, Free-to-Play Games to be Unlocked.”

Forbes reports:

It has been a very strange few days for Microsoft and Xbox fans. On Friday, Microsoft announced that for effectively no real reason, it was doubling the price of Xbox Live Gold from $60 a year to $120 a year. Immediately, this generated massive pushback from both players, who would bear those costs, and the press, who dubbed Xbox Live Gold suddenly “the worst deal in gaming.”

It took all of maybe 14 hours for Microsoft to come back and…kill the entire idea. Not only that, as in addition to reverting the planned price increase, they also announced that they were working on making all free-to-play games able to be played without needing Xbox Live Gold, a long-requested change, which would roll out over the next few months…

Microsoft is trying very hard to push people into signing up for Ultimate and Game Pass, and this price increase was meant to be a win-win for them. Either people were now close enough to the yearly price of Ultimate where they’d just do that instead, or they would be paying twice as much for Gold which meant more sub revenue anyways. What could go wrong? What is not clear, however, is why Microsoft did not anticipate the reaction….

Citing a Twitter thread from analyst Daniel Ahmad, the article concludes that “Microsoft knows that it is losing the console sales battle, and they will likely continue to lose it to Sony.

“So their main desire is to increase Game Pass adoption as much as possible to essentially be the definitive game subscription service in the market before others catch up.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – ‘We Messed Up’. Microsoft Rescinds Xbox Live Gold Price Hike