Just when you thought the saga of the Bitcoin wallet lost in a Welsh landfill was over, another chapter of the story appears to be starting. Regular readers will recall the years-long efforts of Bitcoin early adopter James Howells to recover a hard drive tossed out by his ex back in 2013. The disk, which contains a wallet holding about 8,000 Bitcoin, is presumed to be in a landfill overseen by the city council of Newport, which denied every request by Howells to gain access to the dump. The matter looked well and truly settled (last item) once a High Court judge weighed in. But the announcement that the Newport Council plans to cap and close the landfill this fiscal year and turn part of it into a solar farm has rekindled his efforts.
Howells and his investment partners have expressed interest in buying the property as-is, in the hopes of recovering the $780 million-ish fortune. We don’t think much of their odds, especially given the consistently negative responses he’s gotten over the last twelve years. Howells apparently doesn’t fancy his odds much either, since the Council’s argument that closing the landfill to allow him to search would cause harm to the people of Newport was seemingly made while they were actively planning the closure. It sure seems like something foul is afoot, aside from the trove of dirty diapers Howells seeks to acquire, of course.
When all else fails, blame the monkey. The entire nation of Sri Lanka suffered a blackout last Sunday, with a hapless monkey being fingered as the guilty party. The outage began when a transformer at a substation south of the capital city of Colombo went offline. Unconfirmed reports are that a troop of monkeys was fighting, as monkeys do, and unadvisedly brought their tussle over the fence and into the substation yard. At some point, one of the warring animals sought the high ground on top of a transformer, with predictable results. How turning one monkey into air pollution managed to bring down an entire country’s grid is another question entirely.
From the enshittification files comes this horrifying story of in-dashboard ads. Stellantis, maker of Jeep, Dodge, Chrysler, and other brands that can reliably be counted upon to be littered with bad grounds, has decided to start putting full-screen pop-up advertisements on infotainment systems. As if that’s not atrocious enough, the ads will run not just when the car is first started, but every time the vehicle comes to a stop in traffic. The ads will hawk things like extended warranties, at least initially, but we predict it won’t be long before other upsell attempts are made. It would be pretty easy to pull in other data to customize ads, such as an offer to unlock heated seats if the outside temperature gets a little chilly, or even flog a pumpkin spice latte when the GPS shows you’re near a Starbucks. The possibilities are endless, and endlessly revolting, because if one car company does it, the rest will quickly follow. Ad-blocking wizards, this may be your next big target.
And finally, calling all hams, or at least those of us with an interest in digital modes. Our own Al Williams will be making an appearance on the DMR Tech Net to talk about his Hackaday recent article on Digital Mobile Radio. The discussion will be on Monday, February 17 at 00:30 UTC (19:30 EST), on Brandmeister talk group 31266. If you’ve got a DMR-capable radio, DMR Tech Net has a handy guide to getting the talk group into your code plug. If none of that makes any sense, relax — you can still tune in online using this link and the Player button in the upper right. Or, if ham radio isn’t your thing, Al will be making a second appearance the next night but on a Zoom call to discuss “How to Become Rich and (almost) Famous on Hackaday,” which is his collection of tips and tricks for getting your project to catch a Hackaday writer’s eye.
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