An anonymous reader shares a report: “To wake up to one of these things is pretty special — to have a Leonardo at home,” said Joe Kennedy, the director of the contemporary art dealership Unit London, enthusing recently about an elaborately framed LED screen with a digital replica of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Portrait of a Musician” glowing on his gallery wall. The original was 800 miles away in the Ambrosiana museum in Milan. The Leonardo was one of six ultra-high-resolution copies of famous paintings from across the centuries in Unit’s moodily lit “Eternalizing Art History” exhibition, which closed on Saturday. The show was the latest attempt by cash-poor museums to generate money by selling nonfungible tokens, or NFTs. Last year, NFTs, usually pegged to the high-flying but volatile Ethereum cryptocurrency, took the market for art and collectibles by storm, with sales estimated in the tens of billions.

Pandemic-related lockdowns and reprioritized government spending have put the world’s public museums under financial pressure. Yet so far, despite the formidable sales figures being achieved by NFTs, few institutions have explored this digital asset as a fund-raising mechanism. Unit and its Florence-based technology partner Cinello forged licensing agreements with several prominent Italian museums to create a hybrid offering of limited edition LED reproductions in period-style wooden frames, each accompanied by a unique NFT. Same-size digital versions of the Leonardo portrait, Caravaggio’s “Bowl of Fruit” (also in the Ambrosiana) and Raphael’s “Madonna of the Goldfinch” (in the Uffizi in Florence) were offered in editions of nine, ranging in price from 100,000 euros to $549,000 per piece (around $110,000 to $550,000). Fifty percent of sales proceeds went back to the licensing museums. By the Friday after the show closed, seven sales had been confirmed up to $274.5,000, which included at least one of the Leonardo NFTs.

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Source: Slashdot – Museums Are Cashing In on NFTs

The Finnish company played a key role in enabling Russia’s cyberspying, documents show, raising questions of corporate responsibility. From a report: Nokia said this month that it would stop its sales in Russia and denounced the invasion of Ukraine. But the Finnish company didn’t mention what it was leaving behind: equipment and software connecting the government’s most powerful tool for digital surveillance to the nation’s largest telecommunications network. The tool was used to track supporters of the Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny. Investigators said it had intercepted the phone calls of a Kremlin foe who was later assassinated. Called the System for Operative Investigative Activities, or SORM, it is also most likely being employed at this moment as President Vladimir V. Putin culls and silences antiwar voices inside Russia.

For more than five years, Nokia provided equipment and services to link SORM to Russia’s largest telecom service provider, MTS, according to company documents obtained by The New York Times. While Nokia does not make the tech that intercepts communications, the documents lay out how it worked with state-linked Russian companies to plan, streamline and troubleshoot the SORM system’s connection to the MTS network. Russia’s main intelligence service, the F.S.B., uses SORM to listen in on phone conversations, intercept emails and text messages, and track other internet communications. The documents, spanning 2008 to 2017, show in previously unreported detail that Nokia knew it was enabling a Russian surveillance system. The work was essential for Nokia to do business in Russia, where it had become a top supplier of equipment and services to various telecommunications customers to help their networks function. The business yielded hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue, even as Mr. Putin became more belligerent abroad and more controlling at home.

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Source: Slashdot – When Nokia Pulled Out of Russia, a Vast Surveillance System Remained

For the first time in more than a decade, a narrow majority in Japan now supports restarting idled nuclear reactors, according to a poll in the country’s top business newspaper. From a report: The survey result marks the first time since the Fukushima disaster in 2011 that an increasing role for nuclear energy has been favored. It comes amid surging power prices and warnings of electricity shortages in Tokyo. Some 53% of people said nuclear reactors should restart if safety can be ensured, while 38% said they should remain shut, according to the poll conducted by the Nikkei. That’s up from 44% support for the restarts in a similar survey in September. The newspaper has been conducting semiregular polls on the issue for more than a decade. Japanese public opinion moved decisively against atomic power after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami resulted in the meltdown of three reactors at Fukushima, with most of the country’s operable nuclear reactors remaining shut. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has pushed up energy prices globally, however, and a recent tremor in Japan took several gas- and coal-fired plants offline, leading to the first-ever electricity supply alert for Tokyo. “There is a strong tailwind for nuclear power at this moment,” Nobuo Tanaka, a former executive director of the International Energy Agency, said in an interview Monday. If Japan restarts nuclear, the country’s utilities could resell spare liquefied natural gas to Europe, he said.

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Source: Slashdot – Majority in Japan Backs Nuclear Power for First Time Since Fukushima