Up until now, all installs of Raspberry Pi OS have had a default user called “pi”. This isn’t that much of a weakness – just knowing a valid user name doesn’t really help much if someone wants to hack into your system; they would also need to know your password, and you’d need to have enabled some form of remote access in the first place. But nonetheless, it could potentially make a brute-force attack slightly easier, and in response to this, some countries are now introducing legislation to forbid any Internet-connected device from having default login credentials.

So with this latest release, the default “pi” user is being removed, and instead you will create a user the first time you boot a newly-flashed Raspberry Pi OS image. This is in line with the way most operating systems work nowadays, and, while it may cause a few issues where software (and documentation) assumes the existence of the “pi” user, it feels like a sensible change to make at this point.

E85 fuel—a mix of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline—rapidly fell out of favor. But 98 percent of US gas stations offer E10, a blend of 10 percent ethanol and 90 percent gasoline, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. At this concentration, the ethanol oxygenates the fuel and increases its octane rating; it also stretches the country's supply of gasoline by diluting it.

As the name suggests, E15 is a mix of 15 percent ethanol and 85 percent gasoline. It's much less common in the US due to the EPA's restriction on summer sales (because of the greater evaporation during hot weather), but in 2019, former President Donald Trump approved its use year-round. In 2021, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit ruled that the EPA had exceeded its authority in doing so. //

It's also bad news for anyone concerned about climate change. Although biofuel blends were supposed to save us, growing energy-intensive corn to dilute gasoline is probably worse than just burning the gas itself, as Ars' Tim de Chant covered in February. Last week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its latest report with the finding that we have to massively cut carbon emissions within the next three years if we want to have a chance at limiting warming to even just 2°C globally.

Storm Events Database
The Storm Events Database contains the records used to create the official NOAA Storm Data publication, documenting:

The occurrence of storms and other significant weather phenomena having sufficient intensity to cause loss of life, injuries, significant property damage, and/or disruption to commerce;
Rare, unusual, weather phenomena that generate media attention, such as snow flurries in South Florida or the San Diego coastal area; and
Other significant meteorological events, such as record maximum or minimum temperatures or precipitation that occur in connection with another event.

The database currently contains data from January 1950 to December 2021, as entered by NOAA's National Weather Service (NWS). Due to changes in the data collection and processing procedures over time, there are unique periods of record available depending on the event type. NCEI has performed data reformatting and standardization of event types but has not changed any data values for locations, fatalities, injuries, damage, narratives and any other event specific information. Please refer to the Database Details page for more information.