Mulling

Bad news: A new peer-reviewed study finds that Bitcoin’s energy footprint is on track to be using up .5 percent of the world’s electricity by the end of the year, about as much as the Netherlands, Eric Holthaus reports for Grist. At this rate, by the the end of next year Bitcoin could erase decades of progress on renewable energy, he notes.

Good news: Two of the owners of Mugshots.com, a site that puts online pictures of people who have been arrested and then charges them to have the photos removed, have been arrests for extortion, ArsTechnica’s Cyrus Farivar reports. The two men’s mugshots are now online.

Bad news: Journalists using Storyful’s Verify plugin may have thought they were just getting a heads-up when videos or images they were interested in were verified by the company’s in-house team, but as Paul Lewis and Jim Waterson report for The Guardian, Storyful itself was monitoring what those journalists were looking at in order to get an inside track on monetizable social media content. Storyful denies that this constitutes spying or a data breach.

News goods: Corey Binns reports for the Stanford Social Innovation Review on Civil, a new journalism platform built on blockchain technology.

This is civic tech: Leslie Martinez of FWD.us asked on Twitter if Bay Area folk could recommend a “Civic Hall equivalent out here” and she got a great list of answers.

Life in Facebookistan: Wired’s Jessi Hempel offers a detailed and nuanced review of what has happened to the boy king’s ambitious “Internet.org/Free Basics” program to bring internet access to the developing world.

Socially responsible funds are starting to dump their Facebook stocks, Ross Kerber reports for Reuters.

Facebook is partnering with the Atlantic Council and its Digital Forensic Research Lab, which will work with its security, policy and product teams “to get Facebook real-time insights and updates on emerging threats and disinformation campaigns from around the world,” Katie Harbath, the company’s global politics and government outreach director, posts. Here’s more from the Atlantic Council on the partnership.

In a newly released report, Facebook says it removed 2.5 million pieces of “hate speech” content from the platform in the first quarter of 2018, up from 1.6 million the last quarter of 2017.

The founder of Kik, Ted Livingston, is trying to build a “Rebel Alliance” of Facebook competitors to oppose the “Death Star” using….wait for it…a blockchain currency his company started, Erin Griffith reports for Wired.