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Biden to push up nationwide vaccine eligibility to April 19

President Biden plans to announce Tuesday that he is moving up his target for all American adults to become eligible to receive a coronavirus vaccine by almost two weeks to April 19, according to a White House official. | The Hill

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Click the link below for five of today’s top Microsoft news stories:

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It’s September 1915 in Greenfield, Ohio, a small town located on the Paint Creek between Columbus and Cincinnati. At a time of year when summer’s warmth gives way to autumn’s chill, a change of another sort occurs in a small factory on N. Washington St.: the first Patterson-Greenfield Automobile is completed and readied for sale. It’s a major milestone, not just because this vehicle comes from a first-time automaker.

There have been more than 1,900 automobile manufacturers in the United States since the Duryea Motor Wagon Company sold its first automobile in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1896. Yet in the explosion of entrepreneurship that followed, only one American automaker has been founded and run by a Black individual: C.R. Patterson & Sons of Greenfield, Ohio.

In some ways, Patterson’s fate was typical of many small-town, small-time automotive manufacturers—the business found some modicum of success though never rose to the same heights as the auto brands we still know in 2021. Yet, in retrospect, this Black-owned business had quite a run. The team behind C.R. Patterson & Sons worked its way through 74 years, three generations, and multiple changes in business strategy at a time of technological change and extreme prejudice, making the company’s story all the more remarkable.

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Frederick Patterson standing beside a bare Patterson-Greenfield automobile chassis, probably for a larger touring car body.

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To get a handle on what’s happened to pickup trucks, it really helps to use a human body for scale.

In some nerdy Internet circles — specifically, bike and pedestrian advocacy — it has become trendy to take a selfie in front of the bumper of random neighborhood Silverados. Among the increasingly popular heavy-duty models, the height of the truck’s front end may reach a grown man’s shoulders or neck. When you involve children in this exercise it starts to become really disturbing. My four-year-old son, for example, barely cleared the bumper on a lifted F-250 we came across in a parking lot last summer.

Vehicles of this scale saddle their drivers with huge front and rear blind zones that make them perilous to operate in crowded areas. Even car guys have been sounding the alarm about the mega-truck trend recently. A few months ago, the Wall Street Journal’s Dan Neil complained about his close encounter in a parking lot with a 2020 GMC Sierra HD Denali: “The domed hood was at forehead level. The paramedics would have had to extract me from the grille with a spray hose.”

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Photographer: Sean Proctor/Bloomberg

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Security researchers have recently discovered a botnet with a novel defense against takedowns. Normally, authorities can disable a botnet by taking over its command-and-control server. With nowhere to go for instructions, the botnet is rendered useless. But over the years, botnet designers have come up with ways to make this counterattack harder. Now the content-delivery network Akamai has reported on a new method: a botnet that uses the Bitcoin blockchain ledger. Since the blockchain is globally accessible and hard to take down, the botnet’s operators appear to be safe.

It’s best to avoid explaining the mathematics of Bitcoin’s blockchain but to understand the colossal implications here, you need to understand one concept. Blockchains are a type of “distributed ledger”: a record of all transactions since the beginning, and everyone using the blockchain needs to have access to—and reference—a copy of it. What if someone puts illegal material in the blockchain? Either everyone has a copy of it, or the blockchain’s security fails.

To be fair, not absolutely everyone who uses a blockchain holds a copy of the entire ledger. Many who buy cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum don’t bother using the ledger to verify their purchase. Many don’t actually hold the currency outright, and instead, trust an exchange to do the transactions and hold the coins. But people need to continually verify the blockchain’s history on the ledger for the system to be secure. If they stopped, then it would be trivial to forge coins. That’s how the system works.

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Illustration: Sam Whitney; Getty Images

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