As snowstorms sweep the East Coast of the United States this week, transportation officials have deployed a go-to solution for keeping winter roads clear: salt. From a report: But while pouring tons of salt on roads makes winter driving safer, it also has damaging environmental and health consequences, according to a growing body of research. As snow and ice melt on roads, the salt washes into soil, lakes and streams, in some cases contaminating drinking water reservoirs and wells. It has killed or endangered wildlife in freshwater ecosystems, with high chloride levels toxic to fish, bugs and amphibians, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. "It's an issue that requires attention now," said Bill Hintz, an assistant professor in the environmental sciences department at the University of Toledo and the lead author of a recent research review published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

"There's plenty of scientific evidence to suggest that freshwater ecosystems are being contaminated by salt from the use of things like road salt beyond the concentration which is safe for freshwater organisms and for human consumption," Dr. Hintz said. Salt has been used to de-ice roads in the United States since the 1930s, and its use across the country has tripled in the past 50 years, Dr. Hintz said. More than 20 million metric tons of salt are poured on U.S. roads each winter, according to an estimate by the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in New York, and the environmental costs are growing. Still, little has been done to address the environmental impact of road salt because it is cheap and effective, said Victoria Kelly, the environmental programming manager at the Cary Institute. By lowering the freezing temperature of water, salt prevents snow from turning to ice and melts ice that is already there.

Honda and Acura owners around the world are reporting that their clocks and calendars are getting stuck at a certain time in the year 2002. "The spread is impressive, impacting Honda and Acura models as old as 2004 and as new as 2012," reports Jalopnik. "There is no fix for the current issue. Honda says it's investigating and if it does not find a fix, the clocks should correct themselves sometime in August." From the report: As a number of Honda and Acura owners have noted on these forums, their clocks read correctly until what appeared to have been the first time update of 2022. Then, their navigation systems turned into time machines, leaving them behind as they went back to 2002. I asked Honda about the cause of the issue and received this back: "American Honda is aware of a potential concern related to the clock display on certain older Acura and Honda models equipped with navigation systems. We are currently investigating this issue to determine possible countermeasures and have no additional details to share at this time." Owners have also reached out and received different responses.

If you have experience coding or troubleshooting software, the possible cause of this time warp probably popped into your head early on. Drive Accord forum user Jacalar went into the navigation system's diagnostic menu on Sunday and discovered that the GPS date was set to May 19, 2002, or exactly 1024 weeks in the past. Global Positioning Systems measure time from an epoch, or a specific starting point used to calculate time. The date is broadcasted including a number representing the week, coded in 10 binary digits. These digits count from 0 to 1023 then roll over on week 1024. GPS weeks first started on January 6, 1980 before first zeroing out on midnight August 21, 1999. It happened again April 6, 2019. The next happens in 2038.

If software isn't coded to account for the rollover, weird stuff can happen, like a calendar going back exactly 1024 weeks. It's impossible to know for sure without being able to look at Honda's programming, but these navigation systems might be programmed so that the start of their week counter is a date 19.6 years in the past, but not in-line with GPS epoch. Owners should be able to turn off the automatic update function and set the date and time manually, but they're finding that the functionality doesn't work right now. Likewise, the clock resets back to the incorrect time every time the car is started.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The Cold War couldn't stop gaming from thriving in the Eastern Bloc. From the late 1980s through the early 1990s, a generation of young people living behind the Iron Curtain designed and released their own video games and arcade cabinets. Now, you can play English translations of some of these lost classics of early gaming. One is a text adventure where a Soviet military officer hunts and kills Rambo. The translated games all come from Slovakia and are a collaboration between the Slovak Game Developers Association and the Slovak Design Museum.

According to Stanislav Hrda, one of the programmers who created the games on offer, making video games was something only kids did. "The games were not sold in shops and the authors were not entitled to remuneration," he said in the post explaining the project. "Therefore, practically no one could engage in video game programming as a business activity, and adult programmers worked at most in state institutions on large mainframe computers. Thus, video game programmers became mainly teenagers." The computing power was limited and the teenagers' technological knowhow almost non-existent so many of these early games were text adventures. "These could also be programmed in the simpler Basic language that every home computer had built in," Hrda said. "Text-based games offered the opportunity to imprint one's fantasies into a world of characters, locations, descriptions of reality or fantasy at will. That is why hundreds of such video games were created in the 1980s in Czechoslovakia. The authors from the ranks of teenagers portrayed their friends, but also heroes from films that were distributed on VHS tapes or from the pop-cultural world of the West from the occasionally available comics, films, TV series and books."

Hrda loved American action movies and programmed the video game Satochin, a text adventure where a Soviet officer hunts John Rambo. "The game was very hard to win," Hrda told Ars Technica. "Whenever you made a small mistake, you would die. So before you win, you are killed ten times by Rambo." [...] The project has localized ten games for Western audiences, including Satochin, with plans to tackle more over the next few years. "The games translated over the next 2-3 years after the end of the project will represent almost the complete video game production from the period of 8-bit computers in Slovakia, with an emphasis on text adventure games," the site said. English versions are available here and can be played in the Fuse emulator. The Slovak versions can be played online through the project's website.

theodp writes: Slashdot has surveyed personal New Year's resolutions in the past. So this year, how about coming up with a list of New Year's resolutions you'd like to see tech companies keep in 2022?

As for me, I'd like to see the tech giants resolve to making their desktop software work in the Cloud (and not just for Business), include a programming language with their desktop and mobile OS, provide the capability to share 'meaningful' file names, and allow developers to cap their Cloud charges. Is that too much to ask for in 2022?

"While the lack of funding in open source is certainly a problem, could funding have prevented the Log4j vulnerabilities?" asks Mike Melanson's "This Week in Programming" column. "Would funding actually prevent similar vulnerabilities in the future...?"

Or is that an oversimplification? In a blog post for the Linux Foundation's Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), Brian Behlendorf argued that open source foundations must work together to prevent the next Log4Shell scramble, outlining seven points that OSS foundations could do to mitigate security risks. Among those seven points — which include security scanning, outside audits, dependency tracking, test frameworks, organization-wide security teams, and requiring projects to remove old, vulnerable code — not once was funding mentioned. Rather, Behlendorf precedes these points by saying that "Too many organizations have failed to apply raised funds or set process standards to improve their security practices, and have unwisely tilted in favor of quantity over quality of code."

Behlendorf continues after his list of seven suggested acts with a section that boils everything down perfectly:

"None of the above practices is about paying developers more, or channeling funds directly from users of software to developers. Don't get me wrong, open source developers and the people who support them should be paid more and appreciated more in general. However, it would be an insult to most maintainers to suggest that if you'd just slipped more money into their pockets they would have written more secure code. At the same time, it's fair to say a tragedy-of-the-commons hits when every downstream user assumes that these practices are in place, being done and paid for by someone else."

Behlendorf does go on to make some points about funds and fundraising, but his point is less on the lack of funding than the allocation of those funds and how they need to be focused on things like paid audits and "providing resources to move critical projects or segments of code to memory-safe languages, or fund bounties for more tests."

Behlendorf says that, in the new year, the OpenSSF will be working to "raise the floor" for security in open source.

"The only way we do this effectively is to develop tools, guidance, and standards that make adoption by the open source community encouraged and practical rather than burdensome or bureaucratic," he wrote. "We will be working with and making grants to other open source projects and foundations to help them improve their security game."
Behlendorf was a founding member of the Apache Group, which later became the Apache Software Foundation.

So as a long-time member of the Open Source community, he calls the Log4j vulnerabilities "a humbling reminder of just how far we still have to go."

theodp writes: Out of the box, does your programming language support Chemical Formulas & Chemical Reactions? Making Videos from Images & Videos? Integrals? Real Numbers? Graph Trees? Leap Seconds? Bio Sequences? Flight Data? Vector Displacement Plots? Lighting? Machine Learning? Tracking Robots? Notebooks? Creating, Deploying and Grading Quizzes? Analysis of Email Threads? Access to 2,249 User-Defined Functions? NFTs?

These are just some of the feature upgrades Stephen Wolfram touched upon as announced the launch of Version 13 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica in a Dec. 13th blog post (for more, see What's New in Mathematica 13). Sign up for free access to Wolfram Cloud Basic here, kids! So, is Wolfram the "smartest programming language in the room"?

The Log4Shell exploit "exposes how a vulnerability in a seemingly simple bit of infrastructure code can threaten the security of banks, tech companies, governments, and pretty much any other kind of organization," writes VentureBeat. But the incident also raises some questions: Should large deep-pocketed companies besides Google, which always seems to be heavily involved in such matters, be doing more to support the cause with people and resources?
Long-time Slashdot reader frank_adrian314159 shares a related article from a programming author on Dev.To, who'd read hot takes like "Open source needs to grow the hell up." and "Open source' is broken". [T]he log4j developers had this massive security issue dumped in their laps, with the expectation that they were supposed to fix it. How did that happen? How did a group of smart, hard-working people get roped into a thankless, high-pressure situation with absolutely no upside for themselves...?

It is this communal mythology I want to talk about, this great open source brainwashing that makes maintainers feel like they need to go above and beyond publishing source code under an open source license — that they need to manage and grow a community, accept contributions, fix issues, follow vulnerability disclosure best practices, and many other things...

In reality what is happening, is that open source maintainers are effectively unpaid outsourcing teams for giant corporations.
The log4j exploit was first reported by an engineer at Alibaba — a corporation with a market capitalization of $348 billion — so the article wonders what would happen if log4j's team had sent back a bill for the time they'd spend fixing the bug.

Some additional opinions (via the "This Week in Programming" column):

• PuTTY maintainer Andrew Ducker: "The internet (and many large companies) are dependent on software maintained by people in their spare time, for free. This may not be sustainable."

• Filippo Valsorda, a Go team member at Google: "The role of Open Source maintainer has failed to mature from a hobby into a proper profession... The status quo is unsustainable.... GitHub Sponsors and Patreon are a nice way to show gratitude, but they are an extremely unserious compensation structure."

Valsorda hopes to eventually see "a whole career path with an onramp for junior maintainers, including training, like a real profession."

Apple announced that it has officially released Swift Playgrounds 4. The tech giant first announced the upcoming launch of the new software at WWDC earlier this year. From a report: With this latest launch, the software now lets users build iPhone and iPad apps with SwiftUI directly on their iPad. It also allows you to preview apps in real time as you make changes to your app. Apple notes that developers are now able to upload their finished app to the App Store with its "App Store Connect" integration. "Swift Playgrounds is the best and easiest way to learn how to code," Apple said in a blog post. "Code is immediately reflected in the live preview as you build apps, and you can run your apps full screen to test them out. A new open project format based on Swift packages can be opened and edited in Swift Playgrounds for iPad, as well as within Xcode on Mac, offering you even more versatility to develop apps across iPad and Mac."

New submitter segaboy81 writes: In 2001 the Manifesto for Agile Software Development was born, and it took the software engineering world by storm. Linux, Windows, Facebook, AAA games, and just about everything else, adheres to this manifesto in some form or another. It is a paradigm that allows teams to work collaboratively on projects in the most effective and streamlined way possible. However, EA may not have gotten the memo. According to a blogpost by former EA developer Adam Berg, different teams take very different approaches to development with one team in particular being especially slow to progress. Adam recounts his experience on the FIFA team where he worked on the Wii, PS Vita, and Nintendo 3DS ports of the game: "I often worked in the realm of competition logic. Testing changes here could mean progressing through several seasons of career mode in order to test out a change. No joke, it would take an entire day to change 3 lines of code and know that it actually worked correctly."

Melania Trump is getting in on the latest crypto craze -- NFTs. From a report: The former first lady announced Thursday that she is selling an NFT, or a non-fungible token, titled "Melania's Vision" -- her first public endeavor since leaving office almost one year ago. The NFT is the first digital art to be sold on her newly launched platform, which will release NFTs regularly and is powered by Parler. "I am proud to announce my new NFT endeavor, which embodies my passion for the arts, and will support my ongoing commitment to children through my Be Best initiative," Trump said in a statement. "Through this new technology-based platform, we will provide children computer science skills, including programming and software development, to thrive after they age out of the foster community."

YouTube TV yesterday warned that it could lose all Disney-owned channels after Friday because of a contract dispute and said it will temporarily reduce its price by $15 a month if that happens. Ars Technica reports: "We're now in negotiations with Disney to continue distributing their content on YouTube TV so you can continue watching everything from your favorite teams on ESPN to The Bachelor to Good Morning America. Our deal expires on Friday, December 17, and we haven't been able to reach an equitable agreement yet, so we wanted to give you an early heads up so that you can understand your choices," the Google-owned YouTube wrote in a blog post.

"[I]f we are unable to reach a deal by Friday, the Disney-owned channels will no longer be available on YouTube TV and we will decrease our monthly price by $15, from $64.99 to $49.99 (while this content remains off our platform)," the blog post said. YouTube noted that users can pause or cancel their YouTube TV subscriptions at any time and subscribe to the Disney Bundle for $13.99 a month.

YouTube's statement that it wants "equitable" terms indicates that it is seeking a most-favored-nation (MFN) clause from Disney. "Our ask to Disney, as with all our partners, is to treat YouTube TV like any other TV provider -- by offering us the same rates that services of a similar size pay, across Disney's channels for as long as we carry them. If Disney offers us equitable terms, we'll renew our agreement with them," YouTube wrote. When contacted by Ars, Disney said that the contract is scheduled to expire on Friday at 11:59 pm ET and covers "the ABC Owned Television Stations, the ESPN networks, the Disney channels, Freeform, the FX networks, and the National Geographic channels." In an email to Ars, Disney expressed confidence that the companies can get a deal done: "Disney Media and Entertainment Distribution has a highly successful track record of negotiating such agreements with providers of all types and sizes across the country and is committed to working with Google to reach a fair, market-based agreement. We are optimistic that we can reach a deal and continue to provide their YouTube TV customers with our live sporting events and news coverage, plus kids, family, and general entertainment programming."

The vacancies at cable news companies are piling up as networks and journalists begin to eye streaming alternatives. Axios reports: Why it matters: Primetime cable slots and the Sunday shows are no longer the most opportunistic placements for major TV talent.

Driving the news: Long-time "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace is leaving the network after nearly two decades, he announced Sunday. He will be joining CNN as an anchor for its new streaming service, CNN+. Wallace will anchor a new weekday show and will contribute to the network's daily live programming, per CNN. It was his decision not to renew his contract with the network, which expired this year, CNN's Brian Stelter reported.

The big picture: Wallace marks the latest in a string of cable news host departures and shakeups in the past few weeks and months. There are now several holes cable bosses will need to fill in coming weeks. [...] Major networks are investing heavily to lure talent to streaming alternatives in light of the decline of linear television. CNN hired NBC News veteran Kasie Hunt as an anchor and analyst for CNN+, reportedly for a salary of over $1 million. It's hiring hundreds of new roles for the streaming service, set to launch next quarter. NBC News has already hired the majority of the 200+ new jobs it announced over the summer for its new streaming service and digital team, a top executive confirmed to Axios last month. One of its linear TV anchors, Joshua Johnson, moved full-time to host a primetime streaming show for NBC News Now. Fox News launched a new weather-focused streaming service in October. A Fox executive said last week the company is prepared to migrate Fox News to a streaming platform when the time is right. CBS News changed the name of its streaming service recently from CBSN to "CBS News" to represent a new streamlined vision for streaming. "TV networks won't stop seriously investing in linear news programs until sports move out of the cable bundle, and that won't be for another few years," adds Axios.

"In 2022 we will very likely see the experimental Rust programming language support within the Linux kernel mainlined," writes Phoronix, citing patches sent out Monday "introducing the initial support and infrastructure around handling of Rust within the kernel."

This summer saw the earlier patch series posted for review and discussion around introducing Rust programming language support in the Linux kernel to complement its longstanding C focus. In the months since there has been more progress on enabling Rust for the Linux kernel development, Linus Torvalds is not opposed to it, and others getting onboard with the effort. Rust for the Linux kernel remains of increasing interest to developers over security concerns with Rust affording more memory safety protections, potentially lowering the barrier to contributing to the kernel, and other related benefits....

Miguel Ojeda sent out the "v2" patches for Rust support in the kernel. With these updated packages, the Rust code is now relying on stable Rust releases rather than the beta compiler state previously, new modularization options added, stricter code enforcements, extra Rust compiler diagnostics enabled, new abstractions for in-kernel use, and other low-level code improvements.

Red Hat is also now joining Arm, Google, and Microsoft in voicing their support for Rust code within the Linux kernel.
ZDNet contributing editor Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols also expects the first Rust code in Linux's kernel sometime in 2022: As Ryan Levick, a Microsoft principal cloud developer advocate, explained, "Rust is completely memory safe." Since roughly two-thirds of security issues can be traced back to handling memory badly, this is a major improvement. In addition, "Rust prevents those issues usually without adding any runtime overhead," Levick said.

I Programmer writes: December 1st is much anticipated among those who like programming puzzles. It is time to start collecting stars by solving small puzzles on the Advent of Code website with the goal of amassing 50 stars by Christmas Day, December 25th. Raku has also opened its advent calendar and there's a brand new Bekk Christmas blog with informational content on multiple topics... At the time of writing we are only 10.5 hours into Advent of Code's Day 1, almost 50,000 users have completed both puzzles and another 8,484 have completed the first. [Some programmers are even livestreaming their progress on Twitch, or sharing their thoughts (and some particuarly creative solutions) in the Advent of Code subreddit.]

We can credit Perl with pioneering the idea of a programming advent calendar with daily articles with a festive theme and the Raku Advent Calendar now continues the tradition. Now in its 13th year, but only the third with its new name this year's first advent post solves a problem faced by Santa of creating thumbnails of approaching 2 billion images...
Smashing magazine has pulled together its own exhaustive list of additional geek-themed advent calendars. Some of the other highlights:

• The beloved site "24 Pull Requests" has relaunched for 2021, daring participants to make 24 pull requests before December 24th. (The site's tagline is "giving back to open source for the holidays.") Over the years 26,465 contributors (as well as 25,738 organizations) have already participated through the site.

• The Advent of JavaScript and Advent of CSS sites promise 24 puzzles delivered by email (though you'll have to pay if you also want them to email you the solutions!)

• This year also saw daily challenges from the sixth annual Code Security advent calendar being announced on Twitter, while TryHackMe.com has its own set of cybersecurity puzzles (and even a few prizes).

On Monday JetBrains (creators of the Kotlin programming language and makers of the integrated development environment IntelliJ IDEA) made an announcement: a preview for a lightweight new multi-language IDE called Fleet using IntelliJ's code-processing engine with a distributed IDE architecture and a reimagined UI.

By Friday they'd received an "overwhelming" number of requests, and announced the preview program had stopped accepting new requests. ("To subscribe for updates and the public preview announcement at jetbrains.com/fleet or follow @JetBrains_Fleet on Twitter.")

They'd received 80,000 requests in just the first 30 hours, reports Visual Studio magazine: Although JetBrains didn't even mention VS Code in its Nov. 28 announcement, many media pundits immediately characterized it along the lines of an "answer to Visual Studio Code," a "response to Visual Studio Code," a "competitor to Visual Studio Code" and so on...

"When you first launch Fleet, it starts up as a full-fledged editor that provides syntax highlighting, simple code completion, and all the things you'd expect from an editor," JetBrains said. "But wait, there's more! Fleet is also a fully functional IDE bringing smart completion, refactorings, navigation, debugging, and everything else that you're used to having in an IDE — all with a single button click."
"It starts up in an instant so you can begin working immediately..." boasts the Fleet web page, adding that Fleet "is designed to automatically detect your project configuration from the source code, maximizing the value you get from its smart code-processing engine while minimizing the need to configure the project in the IDE." And it also offers "project and context aware code completion, navigation to definitions and usages, on-the-fly code quality checks, and quick-fixes..."

Fleet also offers a collaborative environment allowing developers to work together — not just sharing the editor, but also terminals and debugging sessions. (There's even a diff view for reviewing changes.) "Others can connect to a collaboration session you initiate on your machine, or everyone can connect to a shared remote dev environment," explains Fleet's web page. "It supports a number of remote work scenarios and can be run locally on the developer's computer, in the cloud, or on a remote server," reports SD Times. (And Fleet's home page says soon it will even run in Docker containers configured with an appropriate environment for your project.)

SD Times adds that Fleet "currently supports Java, Kotlin, Go, Python, Rust, and JavaScript. The company plans to extend support to cover PHP, C++, C#, and HTML, which are the remaining languages that have IntelliJ IDEs." It's multi-platform — running on Linux, MacOS, or Windows — and Fleet's web page promises "a familiar and consistent user experience" offering one IDE for the many different technologies you might end up using.

And yes, there's a dark theme.

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales is selling a non-fungible token (or NFT) based on his first edit of the free encyclopedia. From a report: Auction house Christie's will hold a sale of the token from December 3rd to 15th, auctioning it alongside the Strawberry iMac Wales was using around Wikipedia's launch. The funds will go toward charitable causes and WT.Social, a donation-backed social network that Wales launched in 2019. Wales' NFT is effectively the keys to a very early version of Wikipedia, which debuted in January of 2001.

"What you see displayed is what Wikipedia looked like at the moment that I set up the software," he tells The Verge. The single page will be launched publicly on the web, and much like Wikipedia itself, anyone will be able to see and edit it. But all changes will revert after five minutes, returning it to its original state: a single edit reading "Hello, World!" following a long-held tradition of programming. The NFT, which is written to the Ethereum blockchain, encodes a smart contract that grants its buyer control over that website. The buyer can change the window for reverting edits, and if they really want, they can turn off editing or shut down the page. They can also take a completely hands-off approach and let Wales manage the page for them.

How many members of your team are so irreplaceable that if they were hit by a bus, your project would grind to a halt?

For PHP, that number is: two. (According to a post by PHP contributor Joe Watkins earlier this year that's now being cited in Mike Melanson's "This Week in Programming" column.) "Maybe as few as two people would have to wake up this morning and decide they want to do something different with their lives in order for the PHP project to lack the expertise and resources to move it forward in its current form, and at current pace," Watkins wrote at the time, naming Dmitry Stogov and Nikita Popov as those two. Well, last week, Nikita Popov was thankfully not hit by a bus, but he did decide to move on from his role with PHP to instead focus his activities on LLVM.

Also thankfully, Watkins' article earlier this year opened some eyes to the situation at hand and, as he writes in a follow-up article this week, JetBrains (Popov's employer) reached out to him at the time regarding starting a PHP Foundation. This week, with Popov's departure, the PHP Foundation was officially launched with the goal of funding part/full-time developers to work on the PHP core in 2022. At launch, the PHP Foundation will count 10 companies — Automattic, Laravel, Acquia, Zend, Private Packagist, Symfony, Craft CMS, Tideways, PrestaShop, and JetBrains — among its backers, with an expectation to raise $300,000 per year, and with JetBrains contributing $100,000 annually. Alongside that, the foundation is being launched using foundation-as-a-service provider Open Collective, and just under 700 contributors have already raised more than $40,000 for the foundation.

One of the key benefits to creating a foundation, rather than sticking with the status quo, goes beyond increasing the bus factor — it diversifies the influences on PHP. Watkins points out that, for much of the history of PHP, Zend, the employer of Dmitry Stogov, has been a primary financial backer, and as such has had some amount of influence on the language's direction. Similarly, JetBrains had increased influence during its time employing Popov on PHP."To say they have not influenced the direction of the language as a whole would just not be true...." While Watkins says that everything has been above board and gone through standard processes to ensure so, influence is nonetheless indisputable, and that "The Foundation represents a new way to push the language forward..."

The current RFC process, JetBrains writes, "will not change, and language decisions will always be left to the PHP Internals community."
And in addition, Watkins adds, "It provides us the mechanism by which to raise the bus factor, so that we never face the problems we face today, and have faced in the past."

On Monday morning the moderation team for the Rust programming language "resigned effective immediately," reports The New Stack: The resignation was tendered via a pull request on GitHub, wherein team member Andrew Gallant wrote that the team resigned "in protest of the Core Team placing themselves unaccountable to anyone but themselves."

According to the page describing Rust governance, the moderation team's purpose is to do just that — to help "uphold the code of conduct and community standards" — and according to the resignation letter, they are unable to do so, with the Core Team seemingly being outside of those bounds. "As a result of such structural unaccountability, we have been unable to enforce the Rust Code of Conduct to the standards the community expects of us and to the standards we hold ourselves to," Gallant continues, before making four specific recommendations to the Rust community as to how to move forward.

First, Gallant writes that the Rust community should "come to a consensus on a process for oversight over the Core Team," which he says is currently "answerable only to themselves." Next, the outgoing team recommends that the "replacement for the Mod Team be made by Rust Team Members not on the Core Team," and that this future team "with advice from Rust Team Members, proactively decide how best to handle and discover unhealthy conflict among Rust Team Members," with "professional mediation" also suggested. The final point, which they say is unrelated, is that the next team should "take special care to keep the team of a healthy size and diversity, to the extent possible," something they failed to do themselves. To that point, the outgoing team is just three members, Andre Bogus, Andrew Gallant, and Matthieu M...

The former team concludes their resignation letter, writing that "we have avoided airing specific grievances beyond unaccountability" because they are choosing "to maintain discretion and confidentiality" and that the Rust community and their replacements "exercise extreme skepticism of any statements by the Core Team (or members thereof) claiming to illuminate the situation."
"Our relationship with Core has been deteriorating for months," they add in a thread on Reddit (where the subReddit's moderators have since locked out comments "in light of the volatile nature of this thread.")

There's just one more official update. Thursday former Rust moderation team member Andrew Gallant tweeted the URL to a new post which has now appeared on the "Inside Rust blog" — titled "In response to the moderation team resignation." The post reads: As top-level team leads, project directors to the Foundation, and core team members, we are actively collaborating to establish next steps after the statement from the Rust moderation team. While we are having ongoing conversations to share perspectives on the situation, we'd like to collectively state that we are all committed to the continuity and long term health of the project.

Updates on next steps will be shared with the project and wider community over the next few weeks. In the meantime, we are grateful to the interim moderators who have stepped up to provide moderation continuity to the project.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Next Web: YouTube's decision to hide dislike counts on videos has sparked anger and derision. One inventive programmer has attempted to restore the feature in a browser extension. The plugin currently uses the Google API to generate the dislike count. However, this functionality will be removed from December 13. "I'll try to scrape as much data as possible until then," the extension's creator said on Reddit. "After that -- total dislikes will be estimated using extension users as a sample."

The alpha version isn't perfect. It currently only works on videos for which the Youtube API returns a valid dislike count. The calculations could also be skewed by the userbase, which is unlikely to represent the average YouTube viewer. The developer said they're exploring ways to mitigate this, such as comparing the downvotes collected through the public of extension users to a cache of real downvotes. The results should also improve as uptake grows. The plugin could provide a useful service, but its greatest value may be as a potent symbol of protest. You can try it out here -- but proceed at your own risk. If you want to check out the code, it's been published on GitHub. Further reading: YouTube Co-Founder Predicts 'Decline' of the Platform Following Removal of Dislikes

theodp writes: Leading entrepreneurs and luminaries representing a swath of the technology sector are uniting to voice their support for Code.org and Hour of Code in a call for increased computer science access and equitable representation of women and people of color across the industry," Code.org announced Thursday. "For a limited time from November 9 through December 2, a collective of leaders -- including Marc Benioff, Stacy Brown-Philpot, Mark Cuban, Reid Hoffman, Ashton Kutcher, Ellen Pao, Jennifer Tejada, and more -- are offering supporters the unique opportunity to receive an elusive Twitter "follow" from one of them, and at the same time, make a meaningful impact in advancing computer science education, particularly for young women and students from groups underrepresented in computer science." Valued at $2,500-$5,000, the tech billionaires and others' Twitter 'follows' are being auctioned by Charitybuzz.