The Observer reports:

For bitcoin enthusiasts in Kosovo with a breezy attitude to risk, it has been a good week to strike a deal on computer equipment that can create, or “mine”, the cryptocurrency. From Facebook to Telegram, new posts in the region’s online crypto groups became dominated by dismayed Kosovans attempting to sell off their mining equipment — often at knockdown prices. “There’s a lot of panic and they’re selling it or trying to move it to neighbouring countries,” said cryptoKapo, a crypto investor and administrator of some of the region’s largest online crypto communities.

The frenetic social media action follows an end-of-year announcement by Kosovo’s government of an immediate, albeit temporary, ban on all crypto mining activity as part of emergency measures to ease a crippling energy crisis….

Kosovo has the cheapest energy prices in Europe due in part to more than 90% of the domestic energy production coming from burning the country’s rich reserves of lignite, a low-grade coal, and fuel bills being subsidised by the government. The largest-scale crypto mining is thought to be taking place in the north of the country, where the Serb-majority population refuse to recognise Kosovo as an independent state and have consequently not paid for electricity for more than two decades…. Kosovans spent the final days of 2021 in darkness as domestic and international factors combined to cause energy shortages and rolling blackouts across the country….

Since the Kosovan authorities made the decision, police and customs officers have begun conducting regular raids, seizing hundreds of pieces of hardware. While a 60-day state of energy emergency remains in place, the prospect of upcoming regulation and energy bill price rises leaves the future anything but certain. “There are a lot of people who have invested in crypto mining equipment and it’s not a small investment,” cryptoKapo said. “People have even taken out loans to invest and the impact now is very bad on their lives.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – After Kosovo Suspends Cryptocurrency Mining, Miners Scramble to Sell Off Their Equipment

What happened after a New Hampshire state representative proposed legislation either encouraging or requiring free software in much of the state government? The Concord Monitor writes, “It’s been three decades since Linux launched the modern world of free, open-source software, but you’d hardly have known that at a state legislative hearing Tuesday.

One bill (HB 1273) from Eric Gallager, a Concord Democrat, is a sweeping effort that not only establishes a committee to study “replacing all proprietary software used by state agencies with free software” but also does such things as limit non-compete clauses that conflict with open-source development and forbid Javascript in state government websites. The other bill (HB 1581) from Lex Berezhny, a Grafton Republican, would reinstate a requirement that state agencies must use open-source software when it is “the most effective software solution.” That requirement existed in state law from 2012 to 2018, he said.

Gallager said the two bills were developed separately. “The fact that you’ve got people in both parties thinking about this issue independently shows there is a wide range of support for it,” he said.

The Executive Department and Administration committee sent both bills to subcommittee.

But what’s interesting is the arguments that were made — both for and against:

Tuesday’s hearing drew the state’s most prominent free software advocate, Jon Hall, a programmer whose legacy in the field dates back three decades… Among his arguments, Hall said that studies have shown that free and open-source software is cheaper in the long run than software from Microsoft or other vendors because you don’t have to buy regular licenses or be forced into software upgrades or have to ditch equipment like printers because they are no longer supported. Even when free and open-source software has higher costs due to training, he said, those costs have benefits. “Where does the money that you spend go? You can send millions of dollars to Redmond (Washington, home of Microsoft) or Silicon Valley, or pay local software developers,” Hall argued.

On the other hand, Denis Goulet, commissioner of the Department of Information Technology, said Gallager’s bill would put large and hard-to-quantify costs onto the state. “It would take a year, two years, to figure out what it would cost” due to training on new systems, he told the committee. “It wouldn’t be small.” Goulet, who opposed Gallager’s bill and did not speak on Berezhny’s, said the state already uses open-source systems as appropriate, pointing to its web content management system.

“I estimate 85 percent of systems contained one or more open-source libraries,” he said.

The lead developer and founder of Libreboot tweeted video of the hearing, where you can also hear the first opponent of the legislation — state representative Stephen Pearson.

Click here to read some of the highlights from Tuesday’s hearing:

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – What Happened at the Hearing for New Hampshire’s Free Software Law?

Slashdot reader DevNull127 shares a transcript from a recent segment on CNN:

CNN: Here’s a moral question peculiar to these days: Is it wrong to mock people who publicly crusade against the Covid vaccine, and then die of the disease?

Or does it drive home the message about saving lives?

There are entire web sites that are devoted to such mockery. Sorry Antivaxxer.com gleefully tales stories and photos of anti-vaccine advocates who end up in the ICU, intubated, or dead from the disease.

One recent case of this kind of tasteless taunting spurred two dueling opinion pieces in the Los Angeles Times. Orange County Republican Kelly Ernby, a former assistant D.A. and state assembly candidate who had lobbied publicly against the Covid vaccines, passed away earlier this month at age 46 from Covid complications. She was unvaccinated. Ernby’s death unleashed a torrent of reaction on the internet. On her own Facebook page under a Christmas collage that she had posted, there are now more than 4,600 comments. Some are sympathy notes; many other are not.

In response to the piling on, Los Angeles Times columnist Nicholas Goldberg wrote, “I don’t understand how crowing over the death of others furthers useful debate — or increases vaccination rates.” But a few days later, Goldberg’s colleague Michael Hiltzik published a column expressing the exact opposite. “Mocking anti-vaxxers’ Covid deaths is ghoulish, yes — but may be necessary.” Michael Hiltzik joins me now, he’s the L.A. Times’ business columnist. He’s also a Pulitzer Prize winner. Michael let’s make clear at the outset: you are not talking about the everyday people who don’t get vaxxed, sadly contract Covid, and die. You’re talking about people with a platform, right?

Michael Hiltzik: That’s correct… In my column, I pointed out that the unvaccinated really fall into three categories. There are those who can’t get vaccinated for legitimate reasons — small children, people with genuine medical contra-indications of vaccination. Then there’s a fairly large group of people who I think have been duped into resisting the vaccine, duped by misinformation and disinformation about the vaccines, and sort of nonsense about preserving our freedoms in the face of this pandemic.

The real targets who are important here are those who spent the last few months or years of their lives crusading against sensible, safe policies such as vaccination and social distancing and what have you — and ended up paying the ultimate price for their own — basically, their own folly.

[CNN puts a pargraph on the screen, highlighting Hiltzik’s comment that “Mockery is not necessarily the wrong reaction to those who publicly mocked anti-Covid measures and encouraged others to follow suit, before they perished of the disease the dangers of which they belittled.”]

Michael Hiltzik: You know, we have sort of a cultural habit of not speaking ill of the dead, of treating the good deceased — looking at the good that they’ve done during their lives. I’m not sure that in this case that’s entirely appropriate, because so many of them actually have promoted reckless, dangerous policies.

And as I wrote there, they took innocent people along with them.

So is mockery the only response? Well, I don’t know — but as I wrote, every one of these deaths is a teachable moment. And unfortunately we haven’t been learning from the lesson that we should be hearing from them.

In his column, Hiltzik had argued that “[P]leas for ‘civility’ are a fraud.

“Their goal is to blunt and enfeeble criticism and distract from its truthfulness. Typically, they’re the work of hypocrites.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Is It Wrong To Mock People Who’d Opposed Covid Vaccines and Then Died of Covid?

Last weekend a developer intentionally corrupted two of his libraries which collectively had more than 20 million weekly downloads and thousands of dependent projects.

Eight days later, one of those libraries has become a community controlled project.

Some highlights from the announcement at fakerjs.dev:

We’re a group of engineers who were using Faker in prod when the main package was deleted. We have eight maintainers currently….

What has the team done so far?

1. Created a GitHub org [repository] for the new Faker package under @faker-js/faker.
2. Put together a team of eight maintainers.
3. Released all previous versions of Faker at @faker-js/faker on npm.
4. Released the Version 6 Alpha
5. Almost completed migrating to TypeScript so that DefinitelyTyped no longer needs to maintain its external @types/faker package.
6. Created a public Twitter account for communicating with the community.
7. Released the first official Faker documentation website….

Faker has never had an official docs website and the awesome Jeff Beltran has been maintaining a project called “Un-Official faker.js Documentation” for the last 3 years.

He gave us permission to re-use his work to create fakerjs.dev

8. Cleaned up tooling like Prettier, CI, Netlify Deploy Previews, and GitHub Actions.

9. Done a TON of issue triage and many, many PR reviews.
10. We’ve gotten in contact with the Open Collective and discussed a transition plan for the project.

We fully intend to extend Faker, continuously develop it, and make it even better.

As such, we will work on a roadmap after we release 6.x and merge all of the TypeScript Pull Requests in the next week….

We’re now turning Faker into a community-controlled project currently maintained by eight engineers from various backgrounds and companies….

We’re excited to give new life to this idea and project.

This project can have a fresh start and it will become even cooler.

We felt we needed to do a public announcement because of all of the attention the project received in the media and from the community.

We believe that we have acted in the way that is best for the community.

According to the announcement, they’ve now also forked the funding so the project’s original sponsors can continue to support the community-driven development in the future, while the original developers Marak and Brian “were able to retain the $11,652.69 USD previously donated to the project.”

Friday the official Twitter account for the new community project announced “It’s been a week. We’ve merged all of the active forks. Currently at 1532 stars. Looks like everything is settling.” [It’s now up to over 1,800 stars.]

One of the new maintainers has posted on Twitter, “I’m just grateful to the faker community that willed itself into existence and stepped up.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Library Intentionally Corrupted by Developer Relaunches as a Community-Driven Project