Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo reached a major milestone in its 12-year-old history last week when it recorded on Monday its first-ever day with more than 100 million user search queries. From a report: The achievement comes after a period of sustained growth the company has been seeing for the past two years, and especially since August 2020, when the search engine began seeing more than 2 billion search queries a month on a regular basis. The numbers are small in comparison to Google's 5 billion daily search queries but it's a positive sign that users are looking for alternatives. DuckDuckGo's popularity comes after the search engine has expanded beyond its own site and now currently offers mobile apps for Android and iOS, but also a dedicated Chrome extension. More than 4 million users installed these apps and extension, the company said in a tweet in September 2020.

New submitter shoor writes: Seeed Studios -- the makers of the Odyssey mini-PC -- have teamed up with well-known SBC vendor BeagleBoard to produce an affordable RISC-V system designed to run Linux. The new BeagleV (pronounced "Beagle Five") system features a dual-core, 1GHz RISC-V CPU made by StarFive -- one of a network of RISC-V startups created by better-known RISC-V vendor SiFive. The CPU is based on two of SiFive's U74 Standard Cores -- and unlike simpler microcontroller-only designs, it features a MMU and all the other trimmings necessary to run full-fledged modern operating systems such as Linux distributions. StarFive's VIC7100 processor design is aimed at edge AI tasks as well as general-purpose computing. In addition to the two RISC-V CPU cores, it features a Tensilica Vision VP6 DSP for machine-vision applications, a Neural Network Engine, and a single-core NVDLA (Nvidia Deep Learning Accelerator) engine.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange cannot be extradited to the United States, a court in London has ruled. From a report: The judge blocked the request because of concerns over Mr Assange's mental health and risk of suicide in the US. The 49-year-old is wanted over the publication of thousands of classified documents in 2010 and 2011. The US claims the leaks broke the law and endangered lives. Mr Assange has fought the extradition and says the case is politically motivated. The US authorities have 14 days in which to lodge an appeal and are expected to do so. Mr Assange will now be taken back to Belmarsh Prison -- where he is being held -- and a full application for his bail will be made on Wednesday. His lawyer Ed Fitzgerald QC told the court there will be evidence to show Mr Assange will not abscond. District Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled that while US prosecutors met the tests for Mr Assange to be extradited for trial, the US was incapable of preventing him from attempting to take his own life.

Fast Company's technology editor harrymcc writes: After years of growing technical irrelevance and security concerns, the Flash browser plug-in will reach the end of the road on January 12 when Adobe blocks its ability to display content. The web will survive just fine. But there's a huge library of old Flash games — some of them quirky, interesting, and worth preserving. Over at Fast Company, Jared Newman wrote about several grassroots initiatives that will allow us to continue to enjoy these artifacts of the Flash era even after Flash is history.
Some tips from the article:

• If you have a Windows PC, the best way to replay old Flash content is with FlashPoint, a free program with more than 70,000 web games and 8,000 animations, most of which are Flash-based. (Experimental Mac and Linux versions are also available, but are complicated to set up....)

• Conifer lets you run a legacy browser with Flash support on a remote machine, insulating you from any security issues...

• The Internet Archive has made thousands of Flash games and animations playable online in modern web browsers through emulation, so you can play the Helicopter Game or watch Peanut Butter Jelly Time in their original forms.

• Ruffle is the underlying emulation software that The Internet Archive is using. You can also install it as a standalone program or browser extension...

• Newgrounds has released its own Flash Player for Windows that safely loads content from its website, so you still get the full experience of using Newgrounds proper.

But the article opens with a sentence reminding us that "After all the challenges of 2020, there's one thing we can all look forward to in the new year: Adobe Flash Player will finally be dead."

Long-time Slashdot reader reminds us that in 1999 scientists discovered the asteroid Ryugu flying 300 million kilometres (or 186,411,357 miles) from earth. In 2014, Japan launched a probe to collect samples from it.

Today those samples returned to earth.

The International Business Times shares pictures and report: In a streak of light across the night sky, samples collected from a distant asteroid arrived on Earth after being dropped off by Japanese space probe Hayabusa-2. Scientists hope the precious samples, which are expected to amount to no more than 1 gram of material, could help shed light on the origin of life and the formation of the universe. [That's 0.00220462262185 pounds.]

The capsule carrying samples entered the atmosphere just before 2:30 am Japan time (1730 GMT Saturday), creating a shooting-star-like fireball as it entered Earth's atmosphere. "Six years and it has finally come back to Earth," an official narrating a live broadcast of the arrival said, as images showed officials from Japan's space agency JAXA cheering and pumping their fists in excitement... The capsule was recovered in the southern Australian desert, and will now be processed before being sent to Japan...

The probe collected both surface dust and pristine material from below the surface that was stirred up by firing an "impactor" into the asteroid. The material collected from the asteroid is believed to be unchanged since the time the universe was formed...

Scientists are especially keen to discover whether the samples contain organic matter, which could have helped seed life on Earth.