Popular chat and streaming app Discord is making every single one of its users change their names, and you could be forgiven for wondering why make such a disruptive move at all. But the platform&#8217;s founders say it&#8217;s more necessary than you might think. Ordinarily, Discord users are identified by a name and random number [&#8230;]Why is Discord making you change your name? by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch

Why is Discord making you change your name?. Image Credits: DiscordIllustration showing before and after Discord username and display names.

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To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.Lauren Goode Tom SimoniteSan Francisco made history in 2019 when its Board of Supervisors voted to ban city agencies including the police department from using face recognition. About two dozen other US cities have since followed suit. But on Tuesday, San Francisco voters appeared to turn against the idea of restricting police technology, backing a ballot proposition that will make it easier for city police to deploy drones and other surveillance tools.Proposition E passed with 60 percent of the vote and was backed by San Francisco mayor London Breed. It gives the San Francisco Police Department new freedom to install public security cameras and deploy drones without oversight from the city’s Police Commission or Board of Supervisors. It also loosens a requirement that SFPD get clearance from the Board of Supervisors before adopting new surveillance technology, allowing approval to be sought any time within the first year.Matt Cagle, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, says those changes leave the existing ban on face recognition in place but loosen other important protections. “We’re concerned that Proposition E will result in people in San Francisco being subject to unproven and dangerous technology,” he says. “This is a cynical attempt by powerful interests to exploit fears about crime and shift more power to the police.”Mayor Breed and other backers have positioned it as an answer to concern about crime in San Francisco. Crime figures have broadly declined, but fentanyl has recently driven an increase in overdose deaths, and commercial downtown neighborhoods are still struggling with pandemic-driven office and retail vacancies. The proposition was also supported by groups associated with the tech industry, including the campaign group GrowSF, which did not respond to a request for comment.“By supporting the work of our police officers, expanding our use of technology, and getting officers out from behind their desks and onto our streets, we will continue in our mission to make San Francisco a safer city,” Mayor Breed said in a statement on the proposition passing. She noted that 2023 saw the lowest crime rates in a decade in the city—except for a pandemic blip in 2020—with rates of property crime and violent crime continuing to decline further in 2024.Proposition E also gives police more freedom to pursue suspects in car chases and reduces paperwork obligations, including when officers resort to use of force.Caitlin Seeley George, managing director and campaign director for Fight for the Future, a nonprofit that has long campaigned against the use of face recognition, calls the proposition “a blow to the hard-fought reforms that San Francisco has championed in recent years to rein in surveillance.”“By expanding police use of surveillance technology, while simultaneously reducing oversight and transparency, it undermines peoples’ rights and will create scenarios where people are at greater risk of harm,” George says.Although Cagle of the ACLU shares her concerns that San Francisco citizens will be less safe, he says the city should retain its reputation for having catalyzed a US-wide pushback against surveillance. San Francisco’s 2019 ban on face recognition was followed by about two dozen other cities, many of which also added new oversight mechanisms for police surveillance.Morgan MeakerBeth Mole, Ars TechnicaJennifer M. WoodDavid Gilbert“What San Francisco started by passing that ban and oversight legislation is so much bigger than the city,” Cagle says. “It normalized rejecting the idea that surveillance systems will be rolled out simply because they exist.”The San Francisco Mayor’s Office hasn’t said which type of drone, surveillance, or body-worn cameras police might use under the new rules. Anshel Sag, a principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, a tech research firm, notes that almost all newer drones on the market have forms of face recognition technology built in. Some of Insta360’s action cameras include this, he says, as well as drones made by DJI, the world’s largest commercial drone maker. “DJI’s cameras use it to track a person and stabilize the video capture,” he says.In some cases, the customer may be able to toggle off tracking options. And, Sag adds, the video-capture technology may be more coarse and not specifically track a face. But this isn’t always clear to users of the technology, he says, “because the object-tracking algorithms operate like a black box.”Saira Hussain, a senior staff attorney for the the Electronic Frontier Foundation, notes that San Francisco’ previous ban on face recognition allows the police department to possess devices with the technology built in if it’s a manufacturer-installed capability. (San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors had to update the law to make iPhones, which use face recognition technology to unlock, legal.) The law stipulates that these devices not be acquired for the basis of using them in policing functions.More concerning to the EFF specifically is how Proposition E allows for a certain level of secrecy around surveillance technologies trialed by SFPD, for as long as a year without being disclosed, Hussain says. "It’s about making sure the police stick to the contours of the law."Additional reporting by Amanda Hoover📨 Make the most of chatbots with our AI Unlocked newsletterRead WIRED’s exclusive 6-part excerpt of 2054, A NovelConfessions of an AI clickbait kingpinPolyamory has entered the chatThis website tracked hate crimes in India. Then the government took it offlineYouTube, Discord, and Lord of the Rings led police to a teen accused of a swatting spree🔌 Charge right into travel season with the best travel adapters, power banks, and USB hubsAarian MarshallMorgan MeakerBrian BarrettMatt ReynoldsReece RogersChris BaraniukParesh DaveAmanda HooverMore From WIREDReviews and Guides© 2024 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Ad Choices

5 Years After San Francisco Banned Face Recognition, Voters Ask for More Surveillance. "It’s about making sure the police stick to the contours of the law."Additional reporting by Amanda Hoover📨 Make the most of chatbots with our AI Unlocked newsletterRead WIRED’s exclusive 6-part excerpt of 2054, A NovelConfessions of an AI clickbait kingpinPolyamory has entered the chatThis website tracked hate crimes in India.

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5 Years After San Francisco Banned Face Recognition, Voters Ask for More Surveillance

A comprehensive list of 2023 & 2024 tech layoffs | TechCrunch. Announced March 20 that it has laid off at least 100 employees, about 2% of the company’s workforce

A comprehensive list of 2023 & 2024 tech layoffs

To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.Jennifer M. WoodChest-bursting aliens. Time-traveling DeLoreans. Dystopian futures. Galaxies far, far away. Science fiction is full of characters, set pieces, and scenarios that few other genres could ever get away with. Due to its often speculative nature, the most accomplished sci-fi movies can sometimes require a bit of work on the part of the viewer. Yet as fans of the genre understand, when it’s done right, a great sci-fi film is well worth the mental gymnastics that watching it might demand.Speaking of sci-fi done right: Whether you’re a lifelong genre devotee or have never even sat through a Star Wars movie to the end, a little guidance can go a long way—and that’s exactly what we’ve got for you. When you’re ready to take your mind on a cinematic journey, check out any one (or all) of our picks for the very best science fiction movies you can watch right now.If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more.“Tell them a messiah will come. They’ll wait. For centuries.” Chani (Zendaya) speaks those words early on in Dune: Part Two. She’s speaking about the prophecy that a savior will arrive to help her and her fellow Fremen, and whether or not Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) will be that messiah. She could also be talking about the wait for a truly epic adaptation of Frank Herbert’s award-winning sci-fi novel. Yes, David Lynch made one in the 1980s, and it’s a camp classic, but it is director Denis Villeneuve’s pair of films that truly bring Herbert’s story to life. Lushly designed, action-packed, and understandable even to people who’ve never touched the book, these Dunes are the real deal. If you know anything about the lore, you know there’s far too much to really get into it here, but let it be known: Villeneueve’s adaptations aren’t just mind-blowing sci-fi—they’re monumental works of art.While Denis Villeneuve has dabbled in a variety of genres since beginning his filmmaking career in the mid-1990s, a sci-fi milieu seems to suit him best. As if Enemy (2014) or his pair of Dune movies didn’t make that obvious, consider this: The man dared to make a sequel worthy of Ridley Scott’s genre-defining Blade Runner—and succeeded! Then there’s Arrival, which is basically a linguistics lesson wrapped in a sci-fi feature and all the more engrossing because of it. After the unexpected arrival of an alien species on Earth, linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is tasked with creating a universal language that will allow humans to speak with them, and vice versa. But she quickly comes to realize that effectively communicating with her human colleagues—who want results now—might be the bigger challenge. It’s a stark, and all too timely, reminder that progress takes time, and as such requires patience.Any cursory attempt to recreate the ’80s usually goes straight for the popped collars and neon-colored everything. But a quick review of some of the decade’s most popular movies reveals a deep sense of disillusionment. Case in point: In the same year that Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) was declaring “greed is good” in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, Paul Verhoeven was unleashing one of cinema’s most subversive sci-fi flicks, which sees the mayor of Detroit hand over control of the city to the evil Omni Consumer Products (OCP), which promptly turns Motor City into a testing ground for its latest technologies. One of those creations is RoboCop (Peter Weller), a law-enforcing cyborg who is programmed with the sole intent of eradicating the city’s crime problem—until memories of his human existence find their way back into his head. Hey, it happens. Especially when you recycle the corpse of a police officer murdered in the line of duty in order to make your robot cop thing work. The film’s extreme violence initially earned it the dreaded X rating, which Verhoeven skirted with some clever editing. But the real scares are in its statement on capitalism and the power that corporations wield, which is as true today as it was nearly 40 years ago.Anyone who has ever seen Inception knows that you probably need at least a second go-around—or 20—to fully understand its many complexities. If that is even possible. The less you know about the details of the story going into it the better, but the basics are this: Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is an “extractor”—a talented thief who steals his targets’ secrets by infiltrating their dreams with his trusty team of colleagues, which includes Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Elliot Page, and Tom Hardy. People still debate what happened in the film’s ending, which is just the kind of mindfuckery Christopher Nolan seems to revel in.There are only a handful of movie sequels that have somehow managed to be better than the film that spawned then, and The Empire Strikes Back is near the top of the list. The film reunites Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher), Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), and Han Solo (Harrison Ford)—the fearless threesome who made A New Hope an instant smash hit—as they yet again do their best to keep their world safe from the dastardly Darth Vader. While A New Hope dazzled with its ahead-of-its-time visual effects, The Empire Strikes Back was just as impressive—but took the Star Wars universe in a decidedly darker, and more adult, direction.Today, The Matrix is part of an enormously popular franchise that includes movies, video games, and even an animated feature (The Animatrix). While all those additional pieces of the puzzle may have diluted the impact of the original film, its one-of-a-kindness still stands. In a dystopian future (really, is there any other kind?), the world is living in a simulated reality without even realizing it—until a top-notch hacker named Neo (Keanu Reeves) sees what’s happening and works to separate fact from AI-created fiction. The Wachowskis’ visionary directing, thought-provoking script, and mind-bending action sequences still have the ability to make viewers’ jaws drop. Audiences haven’t looked at spoons—or Keanu Reeves—the same way since.In a different world, the studio could have won a casting argument with James Cameron, and The Terminator would star O.J. Simpson instead of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Through a fortuitous and circuitous turn of events, Cameron met with Schwarzenegger to pretend to consider him for the role of Kyle Reese in The Terminator and walked away knowing he had just found their eponymous cyborg, who time-travels from 2029 to 1984 in order to murder Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), a waitress and future mom to the kid who will save the world. Fortunately, she’s got Reese (Michael Biehn)—another time traveler—on her side. On paper, it may sound preposterous, but 40 years later The Terminator still manages to impress—and is still spawning new content.If The Terminator raised the bar for sci-fi films, Terminator 2: Judgment Day smashed it to pieces. Like so many cyborg movies that preceded it—including its 1984 parent film—T2 is as much a commentary on what it means to be human as it is a declaration of just how far is “too far” in the development of intelligent technology. If only early ’90s James Cameron knew what would lie ahead. The plot of this sequel essentially follows the same pattern as the original film: a Terminator (Robert Patrick) is sent to Los Angeles to kill John Connor (Edward Furlong), son of Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), before he can lead the human resistance. Once again, the Connors have a guardian angel—only this time it’s a kinder, gentler, familiar old Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) who is sent to protect John. Where T2 managed to supplant its predecessor is in its VFX. As he has done so many times throughout his career, Cameron essentially had to create new technology in order to see his vision to fruition and, in doing so, led the transition from practical effects to CGI (for better or worse). Even by today’s standards, T2’s liquid metal shots are incredible to witness.John Carpenter may be better known as a master of horror, but he’s no slouch in the sci-fi department. Set in the then future year of 1997, Escape From New York offers a version of America where the country is one big war zone and the island of Manhattan is one giant maximum security prison. That’s unfortunate for the president (Donald Pleasence), as New York City is exactly where Air Force One crash-lands after an attempted hijacking, and POTUS is taken hostage by one of the country’s most dangerous crime bosses. In order to ensure the president’s safe return, the government has no choice but to enlist the help of Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), a soldier-turned-criminal who might just be the only person who can save the country from total anarchy. Are there synth scores? You betcha. Carpenter would double down on his sci-fi prowess and reteam with Russell again, just one year later, with his equally awesome The Thing (1982).While the 1980s were undoubtedly a very good time for sci-fi, the new millennium has proven that there are still plenty of wholly unique stories to be told—and Ex Machina is one of them. Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson) is a programmer who is invited to the remote home of an eccentric tech billionaire (Oscar Isaac) for what he thinks is a gig helping to develop a truly groundbreaking humanoid robot. But when Caleb meets Ava (Alicia Vikander), the robot in question, it becomes clear that it is she, not the humans, who is in control. With its A-list cast, stellar directing, all-too-relevant storyline, and synchronized dance scene, Ex Machina just might be this millennium’s Blade Runner.Yes, Back to the Future is a comedy. And a family film too. Not to mention an ’80s classic. But at its heart, the time-traveling adventure of Marty McFly is sci-fi through and through. Marty (Michael J. Fox) is a cool ’80s teen who has a hot girlfriend yet somehow manages to spend most of his time hanging out with a middle-aged mad scientist (Christopher Lloyd), who turns a sweet DeLorean into a time machine. Hijinks ensue, as does a bizarre plotline involving Libyan terrorists, all of which land Marty back in 1955, where he meets the teen versions of his parents and desperately thwarts his mom’s attempts to seduce him. (That storyline could be its own movie, really.) But by interfering with the past, Marty is putting his own future at risk. Forcing him to find a way to get back to 1985—but not before inventing rock ’n’ roll as we know it.Ridley Scott has dabbled in virtually every genre, but the bars he has set in the sci-fi world are undeniable. Two years after making his feature directorial debut with the period film The Duellists, Scott changed the science fiction game with Alien. The film follows the crew of the spacecraft Nostromo, including warrant officer Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), who respond to a distress call as they’re making their way home to Earth. This turns out to be their first mistake—especially when they realize that they’re being stalked by an unknown alien species that seems determined to make sure none of the crewmembers ever leave the planetoid. Alien introduced audiences to an array of terrifying creatures—Xenomorphs and face-huggers and chestbursters, oh my—and kicked off a notable movie franchise that will continue later this year with Alien: Romulus.Two years after inventing the “summer blockbuster” with Jaws, Steven Spielberg made a quick pivot from vengeful sharks to mysterious extraterrestrials—a theme he would revisit again a few years later—with Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The film reunited the director with Richard Dreyfuss, who here plays a loving husband and father whose unexpected run-in with a UFO turns into an obsession that threatens to ruin the life he has built for himself. Nearly a half-century later, it remains one of the most smartly made alien movies Hollywood has ever seen by doing away with the “extra-terrestrial invasion” trope and instead focusing on the challenges that would come with the discovery of an alien life-form.Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is the sci-fi movie to end all sci-fi movies, with every genre flick that has followed owing the auteur a debt of gratitude. With its epic scope, gorgeous cinematography, and its somewhat prophetic—and deeply dystopian—narrative about the potential dangers of relying too much on technology, the film is as relevant today as it was upon its initial release nearly 60 years ago. Particularly with its main storyline, which focuses on a group of men taking part in a space mission with the help of HAL 9000, a piece of AI technology that decides to go rogue. It’s not a short film, and every one of its 189 minutes is packed with prescient storytelling and ahead-of-its-time technology, making it stand out as one of the most accomplished films in cinema history.Between The Last Duel (2021) and Napoleon (2023), Ridley Scott has been on more of a historical epic kick lately. But no amount of time away from the sci-fi world could ever threaten his place as a preeminent master of the genre. While he made his name with Alien, he achieved icon status with Blade Runner. The setting: Los Angeles, 2019. (Stick with us here.) Flying cars are a thing, as are bioengineered humanoids known as replicants, and that’s a bad thing. Which is why there are so-called “blade runners” like Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), whose job is to find and kill these nonhuman threats to society. But when everyone looks and often acts human, where do you draw the line? Blade Runner’s complex storyline led to Scott and Ford being forced to record and attach a voice-over, which they both hated, to the film’s original release. The film has subsequently been rereleased, both theatrically and in home versions, a number of times and in different iterations. In 1992, Scott finally got to release a director’s cut of the film, which did away with the voiceover (and other elements he didn’t love), but even he didn’t have final say over that cut. Finally, in 2007, he got the chance to be the last word on every element with Blade Runner: The Final Cut. Watch ’em all and see where you land.Andy GreenbergCaroline HaskinsMatt SimonAmanda Hoover📨 Make the most of chatbots with our AI Unlocked newsletterRead WIRED’s exclusive 6-part excerpt of 2054, A NovelConfessions of an AI clickbait kingpinPolyamory has entered the chatThis website tracked hate crimes in India. Then the government took it offlineYouTube, Discord, and Lord of the Rings led police to a teen accused of a swatting spree🔌 Charge right into travel season with the best travel adapters, power banks, and USB hubsMatt KamenJennifer M. WoodMarah EakinJason ParhamJennifer M. WoodAngela WatercutterJennifer M. Wood Elizabeth MinkelMore From WIREDReviews and Guides© 2024 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Ad Choices

The 16 Sci-Fi Movies You Need to Watch Before You Die. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is the sci-fi movie to end all sci-fi movies, with every genre flick that has followed owing the auteur a debt of gratitude.

The 16 Sci-Fi Movies You Need to Watch Before You Die

This is the Worst Thing a DevRel Team Could Do - This Dot Labs - This Dot Labs. Their focus is getting the job done, and they talk to companies to solve problems in their development lifecycle, not to be on the receiving end of a pitch. But DevRel is none of these things.. At its core, a successful DevRel program builds strong bonds within their target market to ensure that developers can interface with a company or organization behind the product they’re using.. Instead of prioritizing numbers and eyes that contribute to a sales funnel, it focuses on enhancing developer satisfaction.. Instead, they incorporate a number of technologies within their product’s technical ecosystem to demonstrate its value to a developer’s workflow.. I had the pleasure of working with Doron Sherman during his tenure at Cloudinary as VP of Developer Relations.. We were able to attract non-Cloudinary users as well as organic search traffic of those looking for media use cases who would have otherwise gotten lost in the Cloudinary docs and/or could not find help through the Cloudinary blog or knowledge base.”. In order to support the adoption and retention of developers using a product, companies must have a space where developers can interface with them.. By creating open lines of communication, developers can provide immediate feedback about a product in a productive way to product and engineering teams thereby shortening the feedback loop and improving the speed at which a team is able to innovate based on user needs.. These forums also provide synergistic opportunities for developers that are using a product to learn from each other.. They are on Discord, jumping on calls with developers, answering questions, and doing office hours, all of which are super valuable in building that community.. Contributors and developers that have supported us since before we were a company are what led us to where we are now.. On the other hand, internal programs build communities around their product, facilitating direct communication between developers and the company.. Do they simply distribute discount codes and free swag, or are they reaching out to their users, and providing them a platform to learn, collaborate with others, and contribute?. And if you ever have any questions or want to connect with a DevRel specialist, do not hesitate to reach out!...Nov 22, 20235 minsAlthough Developer Relations (DevRel) defies traditional marketing strategies, prioritizing enhancing developer satisfaction ahead of promoting numbers that contribute to a sales funnel, it is still possible for DevRel teams to fail at delivering desired business objectives.. Without buy-in, being able to work cross-functionally across the organization, get access to data needed for measuring success, have the ability to influence change within the organization, or get the budget for necessary activities to engage developers will be impossible.. By not doing so, the DevRel team will not be able to justify their work to leadership, which will lead to those positions being cut first when budget cuts come around.. These are the holy grails of DevRel, and because they do not understand, they will always be the first teams to let go if management can’t see the actual return or how it affects the bottom line.”. But, DevRel is about breaking barriers and building bridges, so, in leading by example, we demonstrated our technical knowledge and now have a strong impact on all the teams.”. I've had to push for them to include me in design meetings, and get them to understand that I'm the Lorax--I speak for the community!. DevRel requires a collaborative approach and alignment and synergy with other teams.. Francesco Ciulla, Developer Advocate at daily.dev, a professional network for developers that provides the latest tech news and articles, shares his thoughts on how DevRel organizations can be successful within larger organizations: “DevRel organizations can thrive within larger organizations by establishing clear communication channels and fostering meaningful collaborations.. There will not be a clear vision the team can drive towards, leading to wasted efforts and the inability to produce tangible outcomes.. If DevRel does not have any goals set, they can only do their best to assume what efforts they should invest in to provide value to the organization.. Expectations left open to interpretation often lead to a poor impression of the performance of the DevRel team by decision-makers, and those teams are never able to establish a sense of trust or direction within that organization.. Generally, that DevRel hire is someone relatively new in the industry, so you can coax them to start at a new company without clear goals or objectives.. Without free access to cross-functional team data, it is difficult to show the value and ROI of DevRel.. This is just one example of and a subset of metrics a DevRel team should consider tracking, but what you track and how you track it is dependent on your goals and the product.. Since there were no metrics, there were no objectives to measure against to say what was good and what was bad.. Once metrics began to be implemented, the company started pushing her to do more, and she had nothing to push back with because the high-level goals were not there.. The current strategy is sponsoring local meetups for a few months and seeing what the result is.. The reason for the relaxed nature of the testing phase is that they don’t want to be pushy to the meetup organizer to find something out or measure something.. DevRel is naturally iterative and requires a team to experiment, test, and refine their strategies.. Experimentation and iteration help teams refine their knowledge, identify patterns, and develop strategies that resonate with developers.. It’s also important to acknowledge that building domain expertise within a segment as well as building relationships and trust with developers in that segment takes time.. Beyond this, in a recent conversation that Core Team Member Mark Thompson had with the Modern Web Podcast, he expressed the team’s unequivocal support for third-party and community tools for supercharging the Angular framework to best serve developers.. NGX-Bootstrap is an open source library brought to the community by the team at Valor Software, and allows developers to quickly integrate all of the v3 through v5 Bootstrap components under Angular into their application.. This is not an exhaustive list, and there are so many amazing tools and libraries being built every day.. They explore the evolution of engineering management over the past decade, reflecting on the shifts in technology, team dynamics, and project management approaches.. They explore the balance between process and people, noting the importance of daily meetings for accountability and productivity.

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This is the Worst Thing a DevRel Team Could Do

To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.Joel KhaliliThree years ago, bitcoin miners flocked to the state of Texas. The Lone Star State offered cheap power, plentiful supplies of renewable energy, and an accommodating regulatory climate. Some mining companies already operated there, but when China banned crypto mining in May 2021, a mass migration began. Texas was fast becoming “a Mecca for bitcoin miners,” said Greg Abbott, the state governor. But lately, the mood has shifted.Texas residents have complained that industrial-scale bitcoin mines are driving up energy prices and destroying the quality of life of those living nearby. Meanwhile, politicians are demanding clarity over crypto mining’s impact on both the environment and the stability of the ailing Texas energy grid. The industry has been forced onto the defensive.On February 22, the Texas Blockchain Council (TBC), a pro-mining lobbying group, filed a lawsuit against three parts of the federal government: the US Department of Energy, US Energy Information Administration (EIA), and the White House Office of Management and Budget. It objects to an “emergency” data request initiated in January that required mining firms in Texas to disclose details about their energy usage. Riot Platforms, which operates North America’s largest bitcoin mining facility in Rockdale, Texas, is a coplaintiff.The complaint alleges that the federal government concocted illegitimate reasons for expediting the survey, forgoing a process that would have allowed mining companies to object. The disclosure of “highly proprietary” information, the suit claims, would “immediately and irreparably harm” the affected businesses. The survey, says TBC president Lee Bratcher, unfairly singled out an “out of favor” industry.On February 23, the judge in the case issued an order preventing the government from collecting further data. Less than a week later, the case was stayed indefinitely: The government had withdrawn its survey and agreed to destroy all data it had gathered.The lawsuit is just the latest flareup of a broader fight over bitcoin mining in Texas. Detractors and government agencies trying to understand the industry’s full impact have so far been forced to scrape together only “piecemeal information,” says Adrian Shelley, an energy policy expert and branch director of consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.Riot Platforms did not respond to requests for comment.In February 2021, Governor Abbott found himself in a political bind. A powerful winter storm had knocked out some of the state’s aging fossil fuel power plants, triggering a blackout that pitched 4.5 million homes into darkness. By the time the storm had abated and power was restored, 246 people had died. Abbott needed a way to shore up the grid. He saw an opportunity in the crypto mining industry.Cryptocurrency mining is a process whereby computers race to solve a mathematical puzzle and the victor is rewarded with a batch of freshly minted crypto tokens. Today, the competition among miners is such that large fleets of specialized, energy-guzzling hardware are necessary to stand a chance of winning.Andy GreenbergCaroline HaskinsMatt SimonAmanda HooverIt may seem harebrained to invite industrial-scale consumers of power onto an already-creaking grid, but bitcoin miners, Abbott hoped, could act as a failsafe of sorts. When demand was low they would pull from renewable energy sources—thus improving the profitability of wind and solar plants and incentivizing new development—and in periods of high demand they would switch off in exchange for a fee. This kind of arrangement is known as demand response. Separately, mining companies could further temper shortfalls in supply by selling back to the grid energy that they had pre-purchased in bulk.In June 2021, Abbott signed a new law that established a formal legal definition for virtual currency and set clear rules for businesses handling it, which he described as part of a “master plan” to attract crypto firms to the state. The following November, in an interview with the TBC, Abbott declared his intention to turn Texas into the “centerpiece” of the bitcoin industry.In the period since, some of the world’s largest mining firms—among them Riot, Marathon Digital, Galaxy Digital, and Core Scientific—have either expanded existing facilities or opened new ones in Texas. The latest estimates from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the grid operator, from November 2022 suggest crypto miners are using around 2 gigawatts (GW) of energy in Texas, which equates to roughly 2.5 percent of the state’s peak load. But a long queue of companies, representing around an additional 32 GW of consumption, are either awaiting approval for new mining installations or beginning construction. ERCOT declined to provide up-to-date figures.The prospect of more miners tapping the Texas grid has sparked concern among stakeholders who believe, variously, that the influx of mining activity will lead to blackouts, increase the price of energy for consumers, drive up carbon emissions, and damage Texans’ quality of life.Recently, state residents that live near large-scale mining facilities have begun to complain about adverse second-order effects, particularly noise pollution generated by the elaborate cooling systems required to keep mining hardware from overheating. “There is a tremendous amount of vibration that goes through the air. It goes through the walls of people’s homes,” says Lyndon Laird, a candidate for state representative for Texas’ 58th district, home to a mine operated by Marathon. “They cannot sleep at night. Some are having adverse health effects.”Laird claims the noise generated by the mining facility has “severely disrupted” livestock and other fauna, too. “Many chickens have stopped laying eggs,” he claims. “Much of the natural wildlife that used to be in the area has vanished.”On March 1, in a letter seen by WIRED, Laird put these complaints to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the Public Utilities Commission of Texas, and other state regulators. An accompanying petition was signed by 88 local residents. Marathon declined a request for an interview, but in an open letter published in a local paper said it had “initiated an independent sound study” in response to complaints.Andy GreenbergCaroline HaskinsMatt SimonAmanda HooverOthers argue the state’s strategy of paying bitcoin miners not to mine when the grid is under heavy load is nonsensical. “The most important thing a regulator can do is match assets and liabilities—match supply and demand,” says Ed Hirs, an energy fellow at the University of Houston. With the deterioration of the state’s fleet of fossil fuel plants, he says, allowing large-scale mining facilities to increase demand on the grid can only “exacerbate the situation” and invite further instability.In Texas, claims Hirs, crypto mining is primarily an energy arbitrage business, the profitability of which is dependent on the ability to purchase energy cheaply in bulk and sell it back to the grid at a premium when demand is high. These operations are effectively double-subsidized by residents, says Hirs, whose taxes provide both the funds for buying energy from the miners in periods of peak demand and the fees paid to miners for participating in demand response. Hirs likens miners to parasites, calling them “the tapeworm on the ERCOT grid.”Before the recent surge in the price of bitcoin, which has made mining more profitable, news reports noted that some firms made more money by switching off and collecting fees when the grid was under pressure than they were through mining bitcoin. In August 2023, when a Texas heatwave led to a surge in energy demand, Riot said it earned $31.7 million through its participation in grid stabilization programs and only around $10 million from mining.Opponents of inviting more mining facilities into Texas have been stymied by the absence of data showing the extent of the additional burden on the grid. Other than the miners themselves, nobody currently knows quite how much energy is devoted to mining in the state or the wider US. The EIA says it has “developed general estimates,” but can’t piece together an accurate picture due to the “difficulty of identifying cryptocurrency mining activity among millions of US end-use customers.”In March 2023, Texas state senators Lois Kolkhorst, Donna Campbell, and Robert Nichols, all Republicans, proposed bill SB 1751, which would have limited participation of crypto miners in demand response, withdrawn certain tax rebates, and imposed data reporting requirements. The bill passed the Senate unanimously, but died when the relevant congressional committee failed to hear it before the end of the session.The emergency survey filed by the EIA in January, prompted at least in part by the efforts of US senator Elizabeth Warren, was designed to fill in the gaps and “develop more rigorous estimates of electricity use by US cryptocurrency miners,” the EIA said. But in the face of the lawsuit brought by the TBC and Riot, it proved to be short-lived.Critics of the mining industry have interpreted the move to squash the EIA survey as a cynical attempt to preserve a shroud of secrecy. “The last thing a parasite wants you to know is how bad it is going to become,” says Hirs. But the mining industry says it had every reason to object, as evinced by the sympathy of the judge, who stated in a ruling that the government’s justifications for expediting the survey—that a rise in crypto prices would incentivize more mining activity and, if the weather were to turn, destabilize power grids—“fall far short” of the necessary level of risk.Andy GreenbergCaroline HaskinsMatt SimonAmanda HooverIn principle, mining companies are not opposed to providing the government with information about energy consumption, claims Bratcher. Their objection related to the scope of the survey—which included data on the precise location of facilities, types of hardware contained therein, and the firms supplying the energy—and to sensitive information being released publicly.The fear is that politicians with an anti-crypto stance might use that data to “bully commercial partners into not doing business with crypto miners,” says Bratcher. “It’s not hard to imagine a situation in which a large energy company gets a threatening letter from Senator Warren.”As for concerns about the destabilizing impact of crypto mining, Bratcher claims that “the grid is in a far better place now” than in 2021, when it was devastated by the winter storm. “The miners are filling in the troughs of demand and staving off the peaks,” he says.Until the miners volunteer data on their present and projected energy consumption and terms of their power contracts, those who disagree with Bratcher’s analysis must build their case on top of projections and anecdotal evidence.The TBC expects the federal government to put forward another survey at some point in the future. Bratcher says miners would not object to providing regionalized data on “aggregate energy usage.” In response to a request for data from WIRED, ERCOT said it “does not comment on specific facilities’ power usage.” In a statement, the EIA said it hoped in the future to “provide the American public with a clear understanding of energy use from cryptocurrency mining.”In a pro-business state like Texas, says Shelley, even full access to data is unlikely to help activists campaigning for a blanket ban on mining. “It’s a high bar to convince Texas regulators to start restricting an industry,” he says. However, it could help them to achieve more “modest” objectives, says Shelley, like limiting miners’ participation in demand response.Shelley hopes the bill that promised to cap profits for miners taking part in grid stabilization programs and impose stricter reporting requirements will be revived next year in the state’s next legislative session. “The public interest in understanding this industry is just too great,” he says.📨 Make the most of chatbots with our AI Unlocked newsletterRead WIRED’s exclusive 6-part excerpt of 2054, A NovelConfessions of an AI clickbait kingpinPolyamory has entered the chatThis website tracked hate crimes in India. Then the government took it offlineYouTube, Discord, and Lord of the Rings led police to a teen accused of a swatting spree🔌 Charge right into travel season with the best travel adapters, power banks, and USB hubsAarian MarshallAmanda HooverChris BaraniukJoel KhaliliJoel KhaliliVittoria ElliottAarian MarshallWill KnightMore From WIREDReviews and Guides© 2024 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Ad Choices

For Bitcoin Mines in Texas, the Honeymoon Is Over. Critics of the mining industry have interpreted the move to squash the EIA survey as a cynical attempt to preserve a shroud of secrecy.