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As the moon blocked the view of the sun across parts of Mexico, the United States and Canada on Monday, the celestial event managed another magnificent feat: It got people offline. From a report: According to Cloudflare, a cloud-computing service used by about 20 percent of websites globally, internet traffic dipped along the path of totality as spellbound viewers took a break from their phones and computers to catch a glimpse of the real-life spectacle. The places with the most dramatic views saw the biggest dips in traffic compared with the previous week. In Vermont, Arkansas, Indiana, Maine, New Hampshire and Ohio -- states that were in the path of totality, meaning the moon completely blocked out the sun -- internet traffic dropped by 40 percent to 60 percent around the time of the eclipse, Cloudflare said. States that had partial views also saw drops in internet activity, but to a much lesser extent. At 3:25 p.m. Eastern time, internet traffic in New York dropped by 29 percent compared with the previous week, Cloudflare found. The path of totality made up a roughly 110-mile-wide belt that stretched from Mazatlan, Mexico, to Montreal. In the Mexican state of Durango, which was in the eclipse zone, internet traffic measured by Cloudflare dipped 57 percent compared with the previous week, while farther south, in Mexico City, traffic was down 22 percent. The duration of the eclipse's totality varied by location, with some places experiencing it for more than four minutes while for others, it was just one to two minutes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta Platforms is planning to launch two small versions of its forthcoming Llama 3 large-language model next week, The Information has reported [non-paywalled link]. From the report: The models will serve as a precursor to the launch of the biggest version of Llama 3, expected this summer. Release of the two small models will likely help spark excitement for the forthcoming Llama 3, which will be coming out roughly a year after Llama 2 launched last July. It comes as several companies, including Google, Elon Musk's xAI and Mistral, have released open-source LLMs. Meta hopes Llama 3 will catch up with OpenAI's GPT-4, which can answer questions based on images users upload to the chatbot. The biggest version will be multimodal, which means it will be capable of understanding and generating both texts and images. In contrast, the two small models to be released next week won't be multimodal, the employee said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Across the U.S., insurance companies are using aerial images of homes as a tool to ditch properties seen as higher risk [non-paywalled link]. From a report: Nearly every building in the country is being photographed, often without the owner's knowledge. Companies are deploying drones, manned airplanes and high-altitude balloons to take images of properties. No place is shielded: The industry-funded Geospatial Insurance Consortium has an airplane imagery program it says covers 99% of the U.S. population. The array of photos is being sorted by computer models to spy out underwriting no-nos, such as damaged roof shingles, yard debris, overhanging tree branches and undeclared swimming pools or trampolines. The red-flagged images are providing insurers with ammunition for nonrenewal notices nationwide.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Late last year the messaging app Beeper raised the ire of Apple when it found a way to recreate Apple's infamous "blue bubble" messaging on Android. Apple later hobbled Beeper, but it's not an entirely unhappy ending: The startup has been acquired in a deal valued at $125 million. From a report: Founded three years ago, Beeper is being snapped up by Automattic, the respected parent company of WordPress, the blogging and content management platform, as well as Tumblr, which it acquired in 2019. Beeper cofounder Eric Migicovsky said that the company will continue to exist as a stand-alone product within Automattic, and that all of Beeper's 27 employees -- who, like Automattic's employees, are entirely remote -- will be absorbed into the larger entity. Exact financial terms of the acquisition weren't disclosed. According to Migicovsky, Beeper will be part of Automattic's broader strategy to offer more messaging features. Automattic first invested in Beeper in 2022, and late last year snatched up another messaging app, Texts, for $50 million. The acquisition comes on the heels of a highly publicized battle between Beeper and Apple, in which Beeper tried to bridge the gap between Android messaging and iMessage but was ultimately thwarted. It was unable to monetize its app and, with 30,000 users as of writing, hadn't reached critical mass.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More than 200 chemical plants across the country will be required to curb the toxic pollutants they release into the air [non-paywalled link] under a regulation announced by the Biden administration on Tuesday. From a report: The regulation is aimed at reducing the risk of cancer for people living near industrial sites. This is the first time in nearly two decades that the government has tightened limits on pollution from chemical plants. The new rule, from the Environmental Protection Agency, specifically targets ethylene oxide, which is used to sterilize medical devices, and chloroprene, which is used to make rubber in footwear. The E.P.A. has classified the two chemicals as likely carcinogens. They are considered a top health concern in an area of Louisiana so dense with petrochemical and refinery plants that it is known as Cancer Alley. Most of the facilities affected by the rule are in Texas, Louisiana and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast as well as in the Ohio River Valley and West Virginia. Communities in proximity to the plants are often disproportionately Black or Latino and have elevated rates of cancer, respiratory problems and premature deaths.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gemini 1.5 Pro, Google's most capable generative AI model, is now available in public preview on Vertex AI, Google's enterprise-focused AI development platform. From a report: The company announced the news during its annual Cloud Next conference, which is taking place in Las Vegas this week. Gemini 1.5 Pro launched in February, joining Google's Gemini family of generative AI models. Undoubtedly its headlining feature is the amount of context that it can process: between 128,000 tokens to up to 1 million tokens, where "tokens" refers to subdivided bits of raw data (like the syllables "fan," "tas" and "tic" in the word "fantastic"). One million tokens is equivalent to around 700,000 words or around 30,000 lines of code. It's about four times the amount of data that Anthropic's flagship model, Claude 3, can take as input and about eight times as high as OpenAI's GPT-4 Turbo max context. A model's context, or context window, refers to the initial set of data (e.g. text) the model considers before generating output (e.g. additional text). A simple question -- "Who won the 2020 U.S. presidential election?" -- can serve as context, as can a movie script, email, essay or e-book.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Cloud on Tuesday joined AWS and Azure in announcing its first custom-built Arm processor, dubbed Axion. From a report: Based on Arm's Neoverse 2 designs, Google says its Axion instances offer 30% better performance than other Arm-based instances from competitors like AWS and Microsoft and up to 50% better performance and 60% better energy efficiency than comparable X86-based instances. [...] "Technical documentation, including benchmarking and architecture details, will be available later this year," Google spokesperson Amanda Lam said. Maybe the chips aren't even ready yet? After all, it took Google a while to announce Arm-chips in the cloud, especially considering that Google has long built its in-house TPU AI chips and, more recently, custom Arm-based mobile chips for its Pixel phones. AWS launched its Graviton chips back in 2018.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For decades, work has revolved around documents, spreadsheets, and slide decks. Word, Excel, PowerPoint; Pages, Numbers, Keynote; Docs, Sheets, Slides. Now Google is proposing to add another to that triumvirate: an app called Vids that aims to help companies and consumers make collaborative, shareable video more easily than ever. From a report: Google Vids is very much not an app for making beautiful movies... or even not-that-beautiful movies. It's meant more for the sorts of things people do at work: make a pitch, update the team, explain a complicated concept. The main goal is to make everything as easy as possible, says Kristina Behr, Google's VP of product management for the Workspace collaboration apps. "The ethos that we have is, if you can make a slide, you can make a video in Vids," she says. "No video production is required." Based on what I've seen of Vids so far, it appears to be roughly what you'd get if you transformed Google Slides into a video app. You collect assets from Drive and elsewhere and assemble them in order -- but unlike the column of slides in the Slides sidebar, you're putting together a left-to-right timeline for a video. Then, you can add voiceover or film yourself and edit it all into a finished video. A lot of those finished videos, I suspect, will look like recorded PowerPoint presentations or Meet calls or those now-ubiquitous training videos where a person talks to you from a small circle in the bottom corner while graphics play on the screen. There will be lots of clip art-heavy product promos, I'm sure. But in theory, you can make almost anything in Vids. ou can either do all this by yourself or prompt Google's Gemini AI to make a first draft of the video for you. Gemini can build a storyboard; it can write a script; it can read your script aloud with text-to-speech; it can create images for you to use in the video. The app has a library of stock video and audio that users can add to their own Vids, too.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Biden administration plans to announce it is awarding more than $6 billion to South Korea's Samsung next week to expand its chip output in Taylor, Texas, as it seeks to ramp up chipmaking in the U.S., Reuters reported Tuesday, citing sources. From the report: The subsidy, which will be unveiled by Commerce Department Secretary Gina Raimondo, will go toward construction of four facilities in Taylor, including one $17 billion chipmaking plant that Samsung announced in 2021, another factory, an advanced packaging facility and a research and development center, one of the sources said. It will also include an investment in another undisclosed location, the source said, adding that Samsung will more than double its U.S. investment to over $44 billion as part of the deal. One of the sources said it would be the third largest of the program, just behind Taiwan's TSMC, which was awarded $6.6 billion on Monday and agreed to expand its investment by $25 billion to $65 billion and to add a third Arizona factory by 2030.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Those taking public transport in the tech hub of San Francisco may be reassured to know that their rides will soon no longer be dependent on floppy disks. From a report: San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency's director of transportation Jeffrey Tumlin told ABC that the city's automatic light-rail control system is running on outdated tech and "relies on three five-inch floppy disks" to boot up. The reporter was holding a 3.5-inch disk in the broadcast, so may have just skipped the word "point." "It's a question of risk," Tumlin explained in a three-minute segment about the floppy replacement project. "The system is currently working just fine, but we know that with each increasing year the risk of data degradation on the floppy disks increases and that at some point there will be a catastrophic failure." The agency noted that its system was installed in 1998, when floppies were still in common use and, er, "computers didn't have hard drives."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

By becoming the official custodian of an entire nation's history for the first time, the Internet Archive is expanding its already outsize role in preserving the digital world for posterity. From a report: Aruba has long been a special place for Stacy Argondizzo. For years, her family has vacationed on the tiny Caribbean Island every July. More recently it's been more than just a place to take a break from her work as a digital archivist -- becoming wholly a part of that work. A project Argondizzo galvanized comes to full fruition this week. The Internet Archive is now home to the Aruba Collection, which hosts digitized versions of Aruba's National Library, National Archives, and other institutions including an archaeology museum and the University of Aruba. The collection comprises 101,376 items so far -- roughly one for each person who lives on the Island -- including 40,000 documents, 60,000 images, and seven 3D objects. The Internet Archive is mostly known for trying to back up online resources like websites that don't have a government body advocating for their posterity. Being tapped to back up an entire nation's history takes the nonprofit into new territory, and it is a striking endorsement of its mission to bring as much information online as possible. "What makes Aruba unique is they have cooperation from all the leading cultural heritage players in the country," says Chris Freeland, the Internet Archive's director of library services. "It's just an awesome statement." The project is funded wholly by the Internet Archive, in line with its policy of generally letting anyone upload content.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Magnetic switches are emerging as a potential game-changer for mechanical keyboards. By using magnets instead of physical contacts, these switches allow users to adjust the actuation point of each key. While still a nascent technology lacking standardization, magnetic switches could bring a new level of customization to keyboards, TechCrunch writes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Japan's largest telecommunications company and the country's biggest newspaper called for speedy legislation to restrain generative AI, saying democracy and social order could collapse if AI is left unchecked. From a report: Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, or NTT, and Yomiuri Shimbun Group Holdings made the proposal in an AI manifesto to be released Monday. Combined with a law passed in March by the European Parliament restricting some uses of AI, the manifesto points to rising concern among American allies about the AI programs U.S.-based companies have been at the forefront of developing. The Japanese companies' manifesto, while pointing to the potential benefits of generative AI in improving productivity, took a generally skeptical view of the technology. Without giving specifics, it said AI tools have already begun to damage human dignity because the tools are sometimes designed to seize users' attention without regard to morals or accuracy. Unless AI is restrained, "in the worst-case scenario, democracy and social order could collapse, resulting in wars," the manifesto said. It said Japan should take measures immediately in response, including laws to protect elections and national security from abuse of generative AI.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Despite investing billions in new streaming services, media giants have failed to dethrone old favorites, according to Nielsen data. The 21-year-old legal drama "NCIS" tops the list, with viewers streaming 11.4 million episodes per week. Netflix dominates the top 10, with eight shows owing most of their viewership to the platform. Reruns from CBS and other networks make up the majority of the list, with "Stranger Things" being the only original series. "Nine of the 10 most-watched streaming programs are reruns. In addition to the three from CBS, there is one from YouTube (CoComelon), one from Canada (Heartland), one from Australia (Bluey) and Suits. The only original series to crack the list is Stranger Things," Bloomberg writes. However: "While reruns dominate the top 10, that is not the case overall. Most of the 100 most popular titles of the last three years are original series," it added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The capability of new AI models will surpass human intelligence by the end of next year [non-paywalled link], so long as the supply of electricity and hardware can satisfy the demands of the increasingly powerful technology, according to Elon Musk. From a report: "My guess is that we'll have AI that is smarter than any one human probably around the end of next year," said the billionaire entrepreneur, who runs Tesla, X and SpaceX. Within the next five years, the capabilities of AI will probably exceed that of all humans, Musk predicted on Monday during an interview on X with Nicolai Tangen, the chief executive of Norges Bank Investment Management. Musk has been consistently bullish on the development of so-called artificial general intelligence, AI tools so powerful they can beat the most capable individuals in any domain. But Monday's prediction is ahead of schedules he and others have previously forecast. Last year, he predicted "full" AGI would be achieved by 2029. Some of Musk's boldest predictions, such as rolling out self-driving Teslas and landing a rocket on Mars, have not yet been fulfilled. A number of AI breakthroughs over the past 18 months, including the launch of video generation tools and more capable chatbots, have pushed the frontier of AI forward faster than expected. Demis Hassabis, the co-founder of Google's DeepMind, predicted earlier this year that AGI could be achieved by 2030. The pace of development has been slowed by a bottleneck in the supply of microchips, particularly those produced by Nvidia, which are essential for training and running AI models. Those constraints were easing, Musk said, but new models are now testing other data centre equipment and the electricity grid. "Last year it was chip constrained ... people could not get enough Nvidia chips. This year it's transitioning to a voltage transformer supply. In a year or two [the constraint is] just electricity supply," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Federal Communications Commission chair decided not to impose Universal Service fees on Internet service, rejecting arguments for new assessments to shore up an FCC fund that subsidizes broadband network expansions and provides discounts to low-income consumers. From a report: The $8 billion-a-year Universal Service Fund (USF) pays for FCC programs such as Lifeline discounts and Rural Digital Opportunity Fund deployment grants for ISPs. Phone companies must pay a percentage of their revenue into the fund, and telcos generally pass those fees on to consumers with a "Universal Service" line item on telephone bills. Imposing similar assessments on broadband could increase the Universal Service Fund's size and/or reduce the charges on phone service, spreading the burden more evenly across different types of telecommunications services. Some consumer advocates want the FCC to increase the fund in order to replace the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), a different government program that gives $30 monthly broadband discounts to people with low incomes but is about to run out of money because of inaction by Congress. The Universal Service funding question is coming up now because, on April 25, the FCC is scheduled to vote on reclassifying broadband as a telecommunications service in order to re-impose the net neutrality rules scrapped during the Trump era. Imposing Universal Service charges on broadband would likely result in ISPs adding those costs to monthly bills and would make the net neutrality proceeding even more of a political minefield than it already is. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel's net neutrality proposal takes the same stance against requiring Universal Service contributions that the FCC took in 2015 when it first imposed the net neutrality rules.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft is getting ready to fully unveil its vision for "AI PCs" next month at an event in Seattle. Sources familiar with Microsoft's plans tell The Verge that Microsoft is confident that a round of new Arm-powered Windows laptops will beat Apple's M3-powered MacBook Air both in CPU performance and AI-accelerated tasks. After years of failed promises from Qualcomm, Microsoft believes the upcoming Snapdragon X Elite processors will finally offer the performance it has been looking for to push Windows on Arm much more aggressively. Microsoft is now betting big on Qualcomm's upcoming Snapdragon X Elite processors, which will ship in a variety of Windows laptops this year and Microsoft's latest consumer-focused Surface hardware. Microsoft is so confident in these new Qualcomm chips that it's planning a number of demos that will show how these processors will be faster than an M3 MacBook Air for CPU tasks, AI acceleration, and even app emulation. Microsoft claims, in internal documents seen by The Verge, that these new Windows AI PCs will have "faster app emulation than Rosetta 2" -- the application compatibility layer that Apple uses on its Apple Silicon Macs to translate apps compiled for 64-bit Intel processors to Apple's own processors. App emulation has been a big problem for Windows on Arm over the past decade, but Microsoft did deliver x64 app emulation for Windows 11 more than two years ago. This helps ensure apps can run on Windows on Arm devices when there isn't a native ARM64 version. Native Arm apps are key for improved performance on upcoming Windows on Arm laptops, and Google has just recently released its own ARM64 version of Chrome ready for these upcoming devices.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A jailed trader accused of stealing $110 million on the Mango Markets exchange faces a criminal trial this week that will test the reach of a US crackdown on cryptocurrencies. From a report: Prosecutors charged Avraham Eisenberg with manipulating Mango Markets futures contracts on Oct. 11, 2022, to boost the price of swaps by 1,300% in 20 minutes. He then "borrowed" from the exchange against the inflated value of those contracts, a move the government claims was a theft. Jury selection begins Monday in New York federal court, where groundbreaking crypto cases have played out. FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced there last month to 25 years in prison for orchestrating a multibillion-dollar scheme, while Terraform Labs Pte. and co-founder Do Kwon were found liable Friday for fraud in civil trial over the firm's 2022 collapse, which wiped out $40 billion in investor assets. Eisenberg, a self-described "applied game theorist," claims his actions weren't theft at all. Rather, he says, he legally exploited a weakness in the decentralized finance application. The trial will apparently be the first time a US criminal jury will weigh what type of "DeFi" transactions are legal. In the crypto world, where digital blockchains govern who owns what, the virtual ecosystem is built around the notion that "code is law." It means that if something isn't explicitly forbidden by terms of a crypto platform, then government can't intercede. But prosecutors say those rules can't protect traders against possible criminal charges for market manipulation or fraud.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is moving "full speed ahead" on its next generation console, an internal email from Xbox president Sarah Bond has revealed. From a report: The email, obtained by Windows Central and verified to be genuine by Microsoft, also announced the formation of a game preservation team at Xbox. "We are moving full speed ahead on our next generation hardware, focused on delivering the biggest technological leap ever in a generation," Bond said, reiterating comments made in February when the console's existence was officially announced. No further information was shared regarding the hardware itself, nor when fans might be able to buy it, but documents leaked in 2023 suggested Microsoft plans to release the next Xbox in 2028. Regardless, with Microsoft seemingly making its development a priority, it will likely be available sooner rather than later. Alongside it looking to the future, Xbox also appears committed to the past and present. "We have formed a new team dedicated to game preservation, important to all of us at Xbox and the industry itself," Bond said in the email. "We are building on our strong history of delivering backwards compatibility to our players, and we remain committed to bringing forward the amazing library of Xbox games for future generations of players to enjoy."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Commerce Department said on Monday it would award Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co's unit a $6.6 billion subsidy for advanced semiconductor production in Phoenix, Arizona and up to $5 billion in low-cost government loans. From a report: TSMC agreed to expand its planned investment by $25 billion to $65 billion and to add a third Arizona fab by 2030, Commerce said in announcing the preliminary award. The Taiwanese company will produce the world's most advanced 2 nanometer technology at its second Arizona fab expected to begin production in 2028, the department said. "These are the chips that underpin all artificial intelligence, and they are the chips that are necessary components for the technologies that we need to underpin our economy, but frankly, a 21st century military and national security apparatus," Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said in a statement.TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker and a major supplier to Apple and Nvidia had previously announced plans to invest $40 billion in Arizona. TSMC expects to begin high-volume production in its first U.S. fab there by the first half of 2025, Commerce said. The $65 billion-plus investment by TSMC is the largest foreign direct investment in a completely new project in U.S. history, the department said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Seattle Times has a Pulitzer Prize-winning aerospace journalist named Dominic Gates. Sunday he published an expose on "a yearslong decline of safety standards" at Boeing. After a 1997 merger, its new executive leaders "treated experienced engineers and machinists as expendable, ignoring the potential damage to Boeing's essential mission of designing and building high-quality airplanes...."The arc of Boeing's fall can be traced back a quarter century, to when its leaders elevated the interests of shareholders above all others, said Richard Aboulafia, industry analyst with AeroDynamic Advisory. "Crush the workers. Share price. Share price. Share price. Financial moves and metrics come first," was Boeing's philosophy, he said. It was, he said, "a ruthless effort to cut costs without any realization of what it could do to capabilities...." Its leaders outsourced work, sold off whole divisions and discarded key capabilities such as developing avionics, machining parts and building fuselages. On the 787, they even outsourced the jet's wings to Japan. They moved work away from Boeing's highly skilled, unionized base in the Puget Sound region. They weakened unions and extorted state government with repeated threats to build future airplanes elsewhere. They squeezed suppliers by demanding price cuts every year that in turn forced the suppliers into ruinous cost-cutting and left them vulnerable to collapse during shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic.... Belatedly, Boeing's current leaders, overwhelmed by criticism, mockery and outrage since January, have finally admitted publicly that some key strategies they pursued for decades were flawed. "Boeing, more than 20 years ago, probably got a little too far ahead of itself on the topic of outsourcing," Chief Financial Officer Brian West said last month. And in January, on CNBC, Boeing Chief Executive Dave Calhoun conceded: "Did it go too far? Yeah, probably did." Both were speaking about major supplier Spirit AeroSystems of Wichita, Kan., part of Boeing until it was sold off two decades ago, part of a broad divestment of assets to please Wall Street and boost the stock. Following a litany of quality lapses in Wichita, Boeing is now admitting a mistake and trying to buy Spirit back - "for safety and for quality," said West. Another mistake belatedly recognized: With annual bonuses for Boeing's factory managers based largely on meeting cost and schedule targets, it was long a cardinal sin to stop the assembly line. That meant unfinished jobs piled up on aircraft as they moved forward down the line, what Boeing calls "traveled work." Done out of sequence, this work is more difficult and takes much longer. If too much traveled work piles up, it creates chaos. That's what happened in Renton on the 737 assembly line. "For years, we prioritized the movement of the airplane through the factory over getting it done right, and that's got to change," West said. "Once you reduce traveled work, your quality gets better...." Speaking of how Spirit might be fixed, West said: "It's really about focus and running it, not as a business, as a factory. Run it as a factory and stay focused on safety and quality and stability." Phil Chandler, a highly skilled Boeing machinist for more than 42 years (retiring in 2020), saw a "dictatorial" approach on the factory floor, according to the article. "Whereas in the past, first-level and even second-level managers in the factory had come up through the ranks as mechanics and had deep knowledge of the work, after [Boeing president Harry] Stonecipher came in those jobs shifted to white-collar people with degrees, often with MBAs." And a former Boeing physicist also complains about the "shoot-the-messenger" management approach when developing their 787, according to the article: "Engineers who raised technical doubts were told: 'Follow the plan. If you can't do your job, I'll fire you and get someone who can.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When Disneyland opened in 1955, its car-themed attraction Autopia "represented the future of what would become America's multilane limited-access highways," according to Wikipedia, " which were still being developed. President Eisenhower had yet to sign the Interstate Highway legislation..." Wikipedia adds that the cars "generate a moderate level of exhaust from the Honda GX gasoline engines that propel the cars." But that may change, according to a climate-oriented newsletter from the Los Angeles Times:If anyone could get away with defending the toxic odor, it might be Bob Gurr. He designed the original Autopia cars in the mid-1950s, working closely with Walt himself. He's proud of what they built together. But today the 92-year-old Disney legend says the polluting motors need to go. "Get rid of those God-awful gasoline fumes," he told me. Disney is finally preparing to do just that. In news shared exclusively with The Times ahead of this column's publication - after several weeks of my prodding the company for answers on the future of Autopia - Disney officials revealed that pure gasoline engines are on their way out... "As the industry moves toward alternative fuel sources, we have developed a roadmap to electrify this attraction and are evaluating technology that will enable us to convert from gas engines in the next few years," spokesperson Jessica Good said in an email. Good wouldn't confirm whether that means electric vehicles, or if hybrids are a possibility... [Gurr] also expressed a grander vision for Tomorrowland as a hub for stories about renewable energy, public transit and other sustainable technologies that will help us create a better tomorrow... [H]ow about using the former Innoventions building, which once displayed futuristic technologies but is now closed to most guests, to showcase solar panels, lithium-ion batteries and other clean energy devices that guests might want in their homes...? Why not switch to electric cooking at the Alien Pizza Planet restaurant, and offer induction stove demos for diners? Maybe start screening some National Geographic films (Disney owns NatGeo) at the largely unused Magic Eye Theater...? Add some infotainment-style signs and voice-overs about the wonders of clean energy and public transit, and boom, you've got a Tomorrowland that should leave kids and their parents excited to help build a safer, happier, more sustainable world... [Gurr] told me that if he could, he'd tear out everything in Tomorrowland except the Monorail and rebuild it as a version of the public transit-oriented futuristic city that Walt once planned for Florida - only with clean energy at the core of its storytelling... At the very least, he said it's time for an Autopia where guests "don't smell the fumes, don't hear that racket of the little motor going putt-putt-putt." The newsletter agrees electric vehicles for Autopia are "the obvious starting point" for remodeling Tomorrowland with "a buzz of optimism and futuristic energy." ("Solar-panel shade structures over the line would be great too.") They even add that "it's not that it's my job to make money for Disney, but I'm sure the company could find sponsors for this vision of Tomorrowland. There are plenty of renewable energy companies, electric utilities and environmental groups eager to tout their causes and their credentials." And it shares this observation from climate scientist and communicator Katharine Hayhoe (paraphrasing another scientist who studies climate communications): "Showing people what climate solutions look like is one of the most effective ways to get them to support action." The newsletter's conclusion? "This is where Tomorrowland could prove especially valuable in the fight to save the planet." Some additional context... Disney's current CEO once said he was "particuarly proud" of the 270-acre, 50+-megawatt solar facility the company brought online in Orlando." And the Washington Post reports that Disney's plans to electrify Autopia "comes as the park is taking steps to decarbonize as part of an effort to reach a goal of net-zero emissions by 2030."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's the world's most widely used vulnerability database, reports SC Magazine, offering standards-based data on CVSS severity scores, impacted software and platforms, contributing weaknesses, and links to patches and additional resources. But "there is a growing backlog of vulnerabilities" submitted to America's National Vulnerability Database and "requiring analysis", according to a new announcement from the U.S. Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards. "This is based on a variety of factors, including an increase in software and, therefore, vulnerabilities, as well as a change in interagency support." From SC Magazine: According to NIST's website, the institute analyzed only 199 of 3370 CVEs it received last month. [And this month another 677 came in - of which 24 have been analyzed.] Other than a short notice advising it was working to establish a new consortium to improve the NVD, NIST had not provided a public explanation for the problems prior to a statement published [April 2]... "Currently, we are prioritizing analysis of the most significant vulnerabilities. In addition, we are working with our agency partners to bring on more support for analyzing vulnerabilities and have reassigned additional NIST staff to this task as well." NIST, which had its budget cut by almost 12% this year by lawmakers, said it was committed to continuing to support and manage the NVD, which it described as "a key piece of the nation's cybersecurity infrastructure... We are also looking into longer-term solutions to this challenge, including the establishment of a consortium of industry, government and other stakeholder organizations that can collaborate on research to improve the NVD," the statement said. "We will provide more information as these plans develop..." A group of cybersecurity professionals have signed an open letter to Congress and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo in which they say the enrichment issue is the result of a recent 20% cut in NVD funding. The article also cites remarks from NVD program manager Tanya Brewer (reported by Infosecurity Magazine) from last week's VulnCon conference on plans to establish a NVD consortium. "We're not going to shut down the NVD; we're in the process of fixing the current problem. And then, we're going to make the NVD robust again and we'll make it grow." Thanks to Slashdot reader spatwei for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Varda Space Industries has closed a massive tranche of funding," reports TechCrunch, "just weeks after its first drug manufacturing capsule returned from orbit." Varda has now raised $145 million to date, the article points out, and the $90 million in new Series B funding "marks an inflection point for the company, which is now gearing up to scale from the initial demonstration mission to a regular set of missions carrying customer payloads, Varda founder Delian Asparouhov told TechCrunch."El Segundo-based Varda was founded in 2021 by Asparouhov, who is also a partner at Founders Fund, and Will Bruey, a spacecraft engineer who cut his teeth at SpaceX. The pair had an audacious goal to commercialize what until very recently was promising but ultimately small-scale research into the effects of microgravity on pharmaceutical crystals... Astronauts have been conducting protein crystallization experiments in space for decades on the International Space Station and before that, the Space Shuttle. But the business case for expanding this research has never materialized - until now... Part of the reason Varda is possible today is due to the availability of regular, low-cost rideshare launches from SpaceX and Rocket Lab's innovations in satellite bus manufacturing. Even beyond these external partnerships, the startup has made significant headway in its own right, as the success of the first mission showed: Their reentry capsule appears to have performed flawlessly and the experiment to reformulate the HIV medicine ritonavir was executed without a hitch, it says. Varda has also started publishing the results of its internal R&D efforts, including a scientific paper on its hyper-gravity (as opposed to microgravity) crystallization platform, which the startup developed as a sort of screening method prior to sending drugs to space. [The paper is titled "Gravity as a Knob for Tuning Particle Size Distributions of Small Molecules."] It's an entirely new field of research that takes advantage of the ability to truly unlock gravity as a variable in scientific experiments. "Over time, we will be able to generate data sets between both hyper-gravity and microgravity and start to show correlations," he said.... In a recent podcast appearance, he specified that the all-in initial mission cost around $12 million, which will drop to $5-6 million by mission 4 and $2.5 million or less by mission 10.) Larger capsules are also in the longer-term pipeline, though also not until the 2027 time frame. Asparouhov also confirmed that pharmaceuticals will be Varda's sole focus for the next 10-20 (or more) years, based on the company's conviction that pharmaceutical products will generate more economic value compared to other materials. A lot of that comes down to the fact that there are a significant set of drugs that require only a "seed" of the material that can only be made in microgravity, and the rest of the drug formulation can be completed here on Earth... The company is also aiming to improve the processing capabilities of the on-board pharmaceutical reactor. The first mission carried just one drug protein, but in the future the company hopes to process multiple drug products that could be run through different processing regimes. In the future, other missions could carry larger reactors for drugs that do need more than the "seed" crystal, and those mission profiles would be closer to something like mass manufacturing. Varda already has "a handful" of signed contracts with biotech companies, according to the article - and Varda's next manufacturing mission "will launch later this year."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CNN revisits 2003's disastrous landing of the Space Shuttle Columbia tonight with two "immersive" specials co-produced by BBC and Mindhouse Productions "featuring exclusive interviews and revealing never-before-broadcast footage," according to an announcement - with two more specials airing next week. You can watch a trailer here.Across four episodes, the story of the ticking-clock of Columbia's final mission is told in dramatic detail, beginning months before the troubled launch, unfolding across the sixteen days in orbit, and concluding with the investigation into the tragic loss of the seven astronauts' lives. Weaving together intimate footage shot by the astronauts themselves inside the orbiter, exclusive first-hand testimony from family members of the Shuttle's crew, key players at NASA - some of whom have never spoken before - and journalists who covered the story on the ground, the series paints an intimate portrait of the women and men onboard and uncovers in forensic detail the trail of events and missed opportunities that ultimately led to disaster. CNN says the first two episodes will livestream tonight at 9 p.m. EST (time-delayed on the west coast until 9 p.m.PST) - and then be available on-demand starting Monday - "for pay TV subscribers via CNN.com, CNN connected TV and mobile apps." CNN's web site offers a "preview" of its live TV offerings here. They're promising "the inside story of one America's most iconic institutions, uncovering how financial pressures and a culture of complacency may have contributed to the events of February 1, 2003. The series also reflects on the legacy of the Space Shuttle era, serving as a timely exploration of the challenges and inherent dangers that remain relevant to space travel today." On its web site CNN has also published two companion articles - one by Rice history professor Douglas Brinkley arguing that NASA "was America's crown jewel. After the Columbia disaster it was never quite the same."Because other shuttle missions had returned safely with "shredded" surface tiles - and because the stalwart Columbia had brought astronauts home from 27 previous flights - many NASA officials were lulled into complacency. They went so far as to assure the pilot and commander via email that "there is no concern ... We have seen the same phenomenon on several other flights and there is absolutely no concern for entry." NASA officials also decided against enlisting spy satellite photography to examine the shuttle damage more thoroughly. If they had, it's possible that the astronauts could have repaired the spaceplane or at least abandoned it for refuge on the International Space Station... As the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) noted in its final report, "the NASA organizational culture had as much to do with this accident as the foam." All of NASA's launches were suspended for two years. While the shuttles eventually flew again, post-Columbia, the program was stunted and curtailed. The article notes that since then SpaceX, Blue Origin, and the United Launch Alliance (Lockheed Martin and Boeing) "are thriving today in the space industry," along with Virgin Galactic and Axiom Space. "NASA, far from feeling threatened, has encouraged many of the private companies with massive contracts. The agency already had a long history of dealing with sub-contractors, using its pocketbook to steer aerospace development; that tradition has adjusted seamlessly to the current space economy." In the other article CNN Space & Science writer Jackie Wattles notes that when America later retired its Space Shuttle program in 2011, "no U.S. astronaut would travel to space on an American-made rocket for nearly a decade."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week America's Department of Energy announced "a comprehensive plan to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from buildings by 65% by 2035 and 90% by 2050."The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) led the Blueprint's development in collaboration with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Environmental Protection Agency, and other federal agencies. The Blueprint is the first sector-wide strategy for building decarbonization developed by the federal government... "America's building sector accounts for more than a third of the harmful emissions jeopardizing our air and health..." said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. "As part of a whole-of-government approach, the Department of Energy is outlining for the first time ever a comprehensive federal plan to reduce energy in our homes, schools, and workplaces - lowering utility bills and creating healthier communities while combating the climate crisis." Buildings account for more than one third of domestic climate pollution and $370 billion in annual energy costs... The Blueprint projects reductions of 90% of total greenhouse gas emissions from the buildings sector, which will save consumers more than $100 billion in annual energy costs and avoid $17 billion in annual health costs. Just for example, the Department of Energy's Affordable Home Energy Shot program "aims to reduce the upfront cost of upgrading a home by at least 50% and reduce energy bills by 20% within a decade." (Meanwhile, the federal government's role in making more change happen faster includes financing, funding R&D on lower-cost technologies, expanding markets, and "supporting the development and implementation of emissions-reducing building codes and appliance standards.") Besides the national blueprint, the Department also announced an expansion of its Better Buildings Commercial Building Heat Pump Accelerator initiative. In this program, "manufacturers will produce higher efficiency and life cycle cost-effective heat pump rooftop units and commercial organizations will evaluate and adopt next-generation heat pump technology." U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm said the program "builds on more than a decade of public-private partnerships to get cutting edge clean technologies from lab to market, helping to slash harmful carbon emissions throughout our economy."On average, between 20% and 30% of the nation's energy is wasted, presenting a significant opportunity to increase energy efficiency. Through the Better Buildings Initiative, DOE partners with public and private sector stakeholders to pursue ambitious portfolio-wide energy, waste, water, and/or emissions reduction goals and publicly share solutions. By improving building design, materials, equipment, and operations, energy efficiency gains can be achieved across broad segments of the nation's economy. The Accelerator initiative was developed with commercial end users like Amazon, IKEA, and Target, and already includes manufacturers AAON, Carrier Global Corp., Lennox International, Rheem Manufacturing Co., Trane Technologies, and York International Corp. The Accelerator aims to bring more efficient, affordable next-generation heat pump rooftop units to market as soon as 2027 - which will slash both emissions and energy costs in half compared to natural gas-fueled heat pumps. If deployed at scale, they could save American businesses and commercial entities $5 billion on utility bills every year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"It appears the live-service shooter Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League is, once again, suffering from a hacker problem," reports Kotaku: Instead of doing absolutely absurd amounts of damage, this time hackers have figured out how to gain access to unreleased characters and skins. And publisher WB Games is reportedly issuing DMCA takedown notices against any assets that have found their way online. As reported by IGN, one hacker discovered how to play as Deathstroke, one of the four characters developer Rocksteady Studios teased for an upcoming Suicide Squad season... There were also unreleased skins for The Joker and King Shark that folks have somehow accessed, all of which began circulating on Reddit and X/Twitter on April 4. Not long after, the assets were removed, with folks believing WB Games was behind the strikes. YouTuber TrixRidiculous, who primarily covers DC- and Marvel-related RPGs, had their posts on X/Twitter swiftly taken down by a DMCA strike."I posted three pics to Twitter," TrixRidiculous told Kotaku over email. "Within probably 30 minutes, I received a DMCA strike from WB Games [Kotaku saw a screenshot of this notice]. Please just bring attention to the fact that the leaderboard is riddled with hackers/cheaters that have gone unbanned since launch, as that's all I was trying to do anyway." This sentiment is shared across the game's official subreddit, with folks posting about "losing interest" in Suicide Squad due to hackers flooding the leaderboards.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The foundations behind Rust, Python, Apache, Eclipse, PHP, OpenSSL, and Blender announced plans to create "common specifications for secure software development," based on "existing open source best practices." From the Eclipse Foundation:This collaborative effort will be hosted at the Brussels-based Eclipse Foundation [an international non-profit association] under the auspices of the Eclipse Foundation Specification Process and a new working group... Other code-hosting open source foundations, SMEs, industry players, and researchers are invited to join in as well. The starting point for this highly technical standardisation effort will be today's existing security policies and procedures of the respective open source foundations, and similar documents describing best practices. The governance of the working group will follow the Eclipse Foundation's usual member-led model but will be augmented by explicit representation from the open source community to ensure diversity and balance in decision-making. The deliverables will consist of one or more process specifications made available under a liberal specification copyright licence and a royalty-free patent licence... While open source communities and foundations generally adhere to and have historically established industry best practices around security, their approaches often lack alignment and comprehensive documentation. The open source community and the broader software industry now share a common challenge: legislation has introduced an urgent need for cybersecurity process standards. The Apache Foundation notes the working group is forming partly "to demonstrate our commitment to cooperation with and implementation of" the EU's Cyber Resilience Act. But the Eclipse Foundation adds that even before it goes into effect in 2027, they're recognizing open source software's "increasingly vital role in modern society" and an increasing need for reliability, safety, and security, so new regulations like the CRA "underscore the urgency for secure by design and robust supply chain security standards." Their announcement adds that "It is also important to note that it is similarly necessary that these standards be developed in a manner that also includes the requirements of proprietary software development, large enterprises, vertical industries, and small and medium enterprises." But at the same time, "Today's global software infrastructure is over 80% open source... [W]hen we discuss the 'software supply chain,' we are primarily, but not exclusively, referring to open source." "We invite you to join our collaborative effort to create specifications for secure open source development," their announcement concludes," promising initiative updates on a new mailing list. "Contribute your ideas and participate in the magic that unfolds when open source foundations, SMEs, industry leaders, and researchers combine forces to tackle big challenges." The Python Foundation's announcement calls it a "community-driven initiative" that will have "a lasting impact on the future of cybersecurity and our shared open source communities."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Scary moments for passengers on a Southwest flight from Denver to Houston," tweets an ABC News transportation reporter, "when the engine cover ripped off during flight, forcing the plane to return to Denver Sunday morning." "Think that big circular metal panel surrounding the engine," writes QZ - adding that after it ripped off, the engine cowling "struck the 737-800's wing flap." It happened during takeoff, so the plane was towed back to the gate after returning to the airport. All passengers and crew were safe, and passengers boarded a replacement plane for their flight to Houston:Southwest was already having a rough few weeks before this event occurred. Last Thursday, an engine on one of its Boeing 737-800 planes caught fire before taking off from an airport in Texas, and before that, two FAA-scrutinized Southwest flights were disrupted by turbulence [One last month in New York City and the other in Florida on Wednesday. "Two hours later, an All Nippon Airways Boeing 787 reported an oil leak on arrival at Naha Airport, Japan," adds Newsweek.]. "We apologize for the inconvenience of their delay," Boeing said in a statement, adding that they "place our highest priority on ultimate Safety for our Customers and Employees. "Our Maintenance teams are reviewing the aircraft."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A professor at Ithaca College runs part of each student's essay through ChatGPT, "asking the AI tool to critique and suggest how to improve the work," reports CNN. (The professor said "The best way to look at AI for grading is as a teaching assistant or research assistant who might do a first pass ... and it does a pretty good job at that.") And the same professor then requires their class of 15 students to run their draft through ChatGPT to see where they can make improvements, according to the article:Both teachers and students are using the new technology. A report by strategy consultant firm Tyton Partners, sponsored by plagiarismadetection platform Turnitin, found half of college students used AI tools in Fall 2023. Meanwhile, while fewer faculty members used AI, the percentage grew to 22% of faculty members in the fall of 2023, up from 9% in spring 2023. Teachers are turning to AI tools and platforms - such as ChatGPT, Writable, Grammarly and EssayGrader - to assist with grading papers, writing feedback, developing lesson plans and creating assignments. They're also using the burgeoning tools to create quizzes, polls, videos and interactives to up the ante" for what's expected in the classroom. Students, on the other hand, are leaning on tools such as ChatGPT and Microsoft CoPilot - which is built into Word, PowerPoint and other products. But while some schools have formed policies on how students can or can't use AI for schoolwork, many do not have guidelines for teachers. The practice of using AI for writing feedback or grading assignments also raises ethical considerations. And parents and students who are already spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on tuition may wonder if an endless feedback loop of AI-generated and AI-graded content in college is worth the time and money. A professor of business ethics at the University ofaVirginia "suggested teachers use AI to look at certain metrics - such as structure, language use and grammar - and give a numerical score on those figures," according to the article. ("But teachers should then grade students' work themselves when looking for novelty, creativity and depth of insight.") But a writer's workshop teacher at the University of Lynchburg in Virginia "also sees uploading a student's work to ChatGPT as a 'huge ethical consideration' and potentially a breach of their intellectual property. AI tools like ChatGPT use such entries to train their algorithms..." Even the Ithaca professor acknowledged to CNN that "If teachers use it solely to grade, and the students are using it solely to produce a final product, it's not going to work."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Mozilla's blog, engineer Martin Thomson explores Google's "Privacy Sandbox" initiative (which proposes sharing a subset of private user information - but without third-party cookies). The blog post concludes that Google's Protected Audience "protects advertisers (and Google) more than it protects you." But it's not all bad - in theory:The idea behind Protected Audience is that it creates something like an alternative information dimension inside of your (Chrome) browser... Any website can push information into that dimension. While we normally avoid mixing data from multiple sites, those rules are changed to allow that. Sites can then process that data in order to select advertisements. However, no one can see into this dimension, except you. Sites can only open a window for you to peek into that dimension, but only to see the ads they chose... Protected Audience might be flawed, but it demonstrates real potential. If this is possible, that might give people more of a say in how their data is used. Rather than just have someone spy on your every action then use that information as they like, you might be able to specify what they can and cannot do. The technology could guarantee that your choice is respected. Maybe advertising is not the first thing you would do with this newfound power, but maybe if the advertising industry is willing to fund investments in new technology that others could eventually use, that could be a good thing. But here's some of the blog post's key criticisms:"[E]ntities like Google who operate large sites, might rely less on information from other sites. Losing the information that comes from tracking people might affect them far less when they can use information they gather from their many services... [W]e have a company that dominates both the advertising and browser markets, proposing a change that comes with clear privacy benefits, but it will also further entrench its own dominance in the massively profitable online advertising market..." "[T]he proposal fails to meet its own privacy goals. The technical privacy measures in Protected Audience fail to prevent sites from abusing the API to learn about what you did on other sites.... Google loosened privacy protections in a number of places to make it easier to use. Of course, by weakening protections, the current proposal provides no privacy. In other words, to help make Protected Audience easier to use, they made the design even leakier...""A lot of these leaks are temporary. Google has a plan and even a timeline for closing most of the holes that were added to make Protected Audience easier to use for advertisers. The problem is that there is no credible fix for some of the information leaks embedded in Protected Audience's architecture... In failing to achieve its own privacy goals, Protected Audience is not now - and maybe not ever - a good addition to the Web."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While the European Parliament passed a wide-ranging "AI Act" in March, "Leaders from Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI have all called for AI regulations in the U.S.," writes CIO magazine. Even the Chamber of Commerce, "often opposed to business regulation, has called on Congress to protect human rights and national security as AI use expands," according to the article, while the White House has released a blueprint for an AI bill of rights. But even though the U.S. Congress hasn't passed AI legislation - 16 different U.S. states have, "and state legislatures have already introduced more than 400 AI bills across the U.S. this year, six times the number introduced in 2023."Many of the bills are targeted both at the developers of AI technologies and the organizations putting AI tools to use, says Goli Mahdavi, a lawyer with global law firm BCLP, which has established an AI working group. And with populous states such as California, New York, Texas, and Florida either passing or considering AI legislation, companies doing business across the US won't be able to avoid the regulations. Enterprises developing and using AI should be ready to answer questions about how their AI tools work, even when deploying automated tools as simple as spam filtering, Mahdavi says. "Those questions will come from consumers, and they will come from regulators," she adds. "There's obviously going to be heightened scrutiny here across the board." There's sector-specific bills, and bills that demand transparency (of both development and output), according to the article. "The third category of AI bills covers broad AI bills, often focused on transparency, preventing bias, requiring impact assessment, providing for consumer opt-outs, and other issues." One example the article notes is Senate Bill 1047, introduced in the California State Legislature in February, "would require safety testing of AI products before they're released, and would require AI developers to prevent others from creating derivative models of their products that are used to cause critical harms." Adrienne Fischer, a lawyer with Basecamp Legal, a Denver law firm monitoring state AI bills, tells CIO that many of the bills promote best practices in privacy and data security, but said the fragmented regulatory environment "underscores the call for national standards or laws to provide a coherent framework for AI usage." Thanks to Slashdot reader snydeq for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader sciencehabit shares this report from Science magazine:Fifty years ago, famed physicist Stephen Hawking wrote down an equation that predicts that a black hole has entropy, an attribute typically associated with the disordered jumbling of atoms and molecules in materials. The arguments for black hole entropy were indirect, however, and no one had derived the famous equation from the fundamental definition of entropy - at least not for realistic black holes. Now, one team of theorists claims to have done so, although some experts are skeptical. Reported in a paper in press at Physical Review Letters, the work would solve a homework problem that some theorists have labored over for decades. "It's good to have it done," says Don Marolf, a gravitational theorist at the University of California, Santa Barbara who was not involved in the research. It "shows us how to move forward, that's great."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader sciencehabit shares this report from Science magazine:Fifty years ago, famed physicist Stephen Hawking wrote down an equation that predicts that a black hole has entropy, an attribute typically associated with the disordered jumbling of atoms and molecules in materials. The arguments for black hole entropy were indirect, however, and no one had derived the famous equation from the fundamental definition of entropy - at least not for realistic black holes. Now, one team of theorists claims to have done so, although some experts are skeptical. Reported in a paper in press at Physical Review Letters, the work would solve a homework problem that some theorists have labored over for decades. "It's good to have it done," says Don Marolf, a gravitational theorist at the University of California, Santa Barbara who was not involved in the research. It "shows us how to how to move forward, that's great."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Four months ago long-time Slashdot reader Shayde tried restoring a 1986 DEC PDP-11 minicomputer. But now he's gone even further back in time. Shayde writes:In 1984, Apple II's were at the top of their game in the 8 bit market. A company in New Jersey decided to get in on the action and built an exact clone of the Apple. The Franklin Ace was chip and ROM compatible with the Apple II, and that led to it's downfall. In this video we resurrect and old Franklin Ace and not only boot ProDOS, but also get the Z80 coprocessor up and running, and relive what coding in Turbo Pascal in the 80s was like. Why Turbo Pascal? "Some of my earliest professional programming was done in this environment," Shayde says in the video, "and I was itching to play with it again."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"America's honeybee population has rocketed to an all-time high," reports the Washington Post: We've added almost 1 million bee colonies in the past five years. We now have 3.8 million, the census shows. Since 2007, the first census after alarming bee die-offs began in 2006, the honeybee has been the fastest-growing livestock segment in the country! And that doesn't count feral honeybees, which may outnumber their captive cousins several times over... Much of the explosion of small producers came in just one state: Texas. The Lone Star State has gone from having the sixth-most bee operations in the country to being so far ahead of anyone else that it out-bees the bottom 21 states combined... [A]ll 254 Texas counties adopted bee rules requiring, for example, six hives on five acres plus another hive for every 2.5 acres beyond that to qualify for the tax break... When the census was taken in December 2022, California had more than four times as many bees as any other state. We emailed pollination expert Brittney Goodrich at the University of California at Davis, who explained that pollinating the California almond crop "demands most of the honeybee colonies in the U.S. each year... Sadly, however, this does not mean we've defeated colony collapse. One major citizen-science project found that beekeepers lost almost half of their colonies in the year ending in April , the second-highest loss rate on record. For now, we're making up for it with aggressive management. The Texans told us that they were splitting their hives more often, replacing queens as often as every year and churning out bee colonies faster than the mites, fungi and diseases can take them down. But this may not be good news for bees in general. "It is absolutely not a good thing for native pollinators," said Eliza Grames, an entomologist at Binghamton University, who noted that domesticated honeybees are a threat to North America's 4,000 native bees, about 40% of which are vulnerable to extinction... Many of the same forces collapsing managed beehives also decimate their native cousins, only the natives don't usually have entire industries and governments pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into supporting them. So while Texas bee exemptions "have become big business," the article ends with this quote from Mace Vaughan, who leads pollinator and agricultural biodiversity at Xerces, an expanding insect-conservation outfit. "The way you support both honeybees and beekeepers - and the way you save native pollinators - is to go out there and create beautiful flower-rich habitat on your farm or your garden."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Windows Report speculates on what Microsoft may be working on next based on a recently-published patent for "performant sound recognition AI technologies" (dated April 2, 2024):Microsoft's new technology can recognize different types of sounds, from doorbells to babies crying, or dogs barking, but not limited to them. It can also recognize sounds of coughing or breathing difficulties, or unusual noises, such as glass breaking. Most intriguing, it can recognize and monitor environmental sounds, and they can be further processed to let users know if a natural disaster is about to happen... The neural network generates scores and probabilities for each type of sound event in each segment. This is like guessing what type of sound each segment is and how sure it is about the guess. After that, the system does some post-processing to smooth out the scores and probabilities and generate confidence values for each type of sound for different window sizes. Ultimately, this technology can be used in various applications. In a smart home device, it can detect when someone breaks into the house, by recognizing the sound of glass shattering, or if a newborn is hungry, or distressed, by recognizing the sounds of baby crying. It can also be used in healthcare, to accurately detect lung or heart diseases, by recognizing heartbeat sounds, coughing, or breathing difficulties. But one of its most important applications would be to prevent casual users of upcoming natural disasters by recognizing and detecting sounds associated with them. Thanks to Slashdot reader John Nautu for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The San Francisco Giants are one of four teams in Major League Baseball this season offering fans a free shortcut through the gates into the ballpark," writes SFGate. "The cost? Signing up for the league's 'facial authentication' software through its ticketing app."The Giants are using MLB's new Go-Ahead Entry program, which intends to cut down on wait times for fans entering games. The pitch is simple: Take a selfie through the MLB Ballpark app (which already has your tickets on it), upload the selfie and, once you're approved, breeze through the ticketing lines and into the ballpark. Fans will barely have to slow down at the entrance gate on their way to their seats... The Philadelphia Phillies were MLB's test team for the technology in 2023. They're joined by the Giants, Nationals and Astros in 2024... [Major League Baseball] says it won't be saving or storing pictures of faces in a database - and it clearly would really like you to not call this technology facial recognition. "This is not the type of facial recognition that's scanning a crowd and specifically looking for certain kinds of people," Karri Zaremba, a senior vice president at MLB, told ESPN. "It's facial authentication. ... That's the only way in which it's being utilized." Privacy advocates "have pointed out that the creep of facial recognition technology may be something to be wary of," the article acknowledges. But it adds that using the technology is still completely optional. And they also spoke to the San Francisco Giants' senior vice president of ticket sales, who gushed about the possibility of app users "walking into the ballpark without taking your phone out, or all four of us taking our phones out."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The European Space Agency has a Planetary Defence Office, which includes its Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre. "It has come to our attention," they wrote in the April edition of their monthly newsletter, "that a recent trend among journalists has been to come up with creative comparisons to convey the size of an asteroid to the public." So then, as explained by RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) "they propose a number of standardised units of comparison for journalists describing 'death from the skies'". An excerpt from that April 1 newsletter: In the absence of a handy skyscraper, animals commonly used have included giraffes, corgis and an entire colony of penguins. But how do these comparisons stack up? Let's look at some of our favourite unusual suspects: - Corgi: At around 30 cm tall, a space rock the size of a corgi wouldn't pose much ofa threat. - Half a giraffe: An adult giraffe can reach up to 5.5 metres in height, so half a giraffewould be about 2.75 metres. While not as impressive as a full skyscraper, anasteroid that size could certainly destroy a building or two... - Elephants: An adult African elephant can reach 7 metres at the shoulder. Ninetyelephants stacked on top of each other would form a staggering pile over 630metres high, creating a devastating but probably not planet-ending event. As this menagerie of animals can cause a lot of confusion, we at the NEOCCrecommend the use of a Standardised Giraffe Unit (SGU, 1 SGU = 5 penguins) for easeof comparison. RockDoctor shares this additional thought in his original submission about the newly proposed standardized unit. "The world may be turtles all the way down, but it's giraffes all the way up."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thursday America's Environmental Protection Agency "awarded $20 billion to help finance clean-energy projects across the country," reports the Washington Post.The money comes from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund established by President Biden's signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act. The fund seeks to leverage public and private dollars to invest in clean-energy technologies such as solar panels, heat pumps and more. The program is potentially one of the most consequential - yet least understood - parts of the climate law... Simply put, the program allows people to access low-interest loans for clean-energy projects that they might not otherwise have received. Imagine a community group that wants to install electric vehicle charging stations at its neighborhood recreation center but can't get a loan from a bank or a lender. As is often the case, potential lenders say they're hesitant to support a novel green technology or a business without a track record of success. Low-income and minority communities have long encountered such obstacles in trying to attract private capital. The program aims to overcome this problem by providing a huge influx of federal cash - $27 billion in total - for nonprofit organizations to dole out to clean-energy projects nationwide. Each nonprofit will serve as a "green bank" that offers more favorable lending rates than commercial banks. "It's just really hard to get banks to bring capital into low-income communities, especially for these new projects that they're not used to financing," said Adrian Deveny, the founder of the firm Climate Vision and the former director of energy and environmental policy for Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), a key architect of the Inflation Reduction Act.... The EPA is awarding money to eight nonprofits, which have committed to leverage nearly $7 in private capital for every $1 of federal investment. The nonprofits have also pledged to ensure that at least 70 percent of the funds will benefit disadvantaged communities, and that the financed projects will reduce up to 40 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year - equivalent to the annual emissions of nearly 9 million gasoline-powered cars... [The nonprofit] Coalition for Green Capital, will use a $5 billion award to establish a "national green bank," co-founder and CEO Reed Hundt said. "We're going to be able to cause about $100 billion of total additional investment over a seven-year time period with that number, because we can leverage it," Hundt said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Disneyland is a proposing part of its park be dedicated to James Cameron's Avatar, reports SFGate."The rendering isn't a carbon copy of the Pandora land in Disney World's Animal Kingdom; instead, it's themed more closely to the recent sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water."The teaser was dropped as part of Wednesday's company shareholders meeting. The concept art shows a large lake in the middle of the land, surrounded by the signature floating mountains that loom over Animal Kingdom's Pandora. Boats filled with guests can be seen in the water, suggesting some sort of ride. No attractions have been announced for the land yet. Animal Kingdom has two: the spectacular flight simulator Flight of Passage and bucolic indoor boat ride Na'vi River Journey... There's no timeline for construction to begin. Disney officials have consistently referred to it as a "potential" project, often calling it an "experience" rather than a land.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In Communication of the ACM, Google's VP of Education notes how calculators impacted math education - and wonders whether generative AI will have the same impact on CS education:Teachers had to find the right amount of long-hand arithmetic and mathematical problem solving for students to do, in order for them to have the "number sense" to be successful later in algebra and calculus. Too much focus on calculators diminished number sense. We have a similar situation in determining the 'code sense' required for students to be successful in this new realm of automated software engineering. It will take a few iterations to understand exactly what kind of praxis students need in this new era of LLMs to develop sufficient code sense, but now is the time to experiment." Long-time Slashdot reader theodp notes it's not the first time the Google executive has had to consider "iterating" curriculum:The CACM article echoes earlier comments Google's Education VP made in a featured talk called The Future of Computational Thinking at last year's Blockly Summit. (Blockly is the Google technology that powers drag-and-drop coding IDE's used for K-12 CS education, including Scratch and Code.org). Envisioning a world where AI generates code and humans proofread it, Johnson explained: "One can imagine a future where these generative coding systems become so reliable, so capable, and so secure that the amount of time doing low-level coding really decreases for both students and for professionals. So, we see a shift with students to focus more on reading and understanding and assessing generated code and less about actually writing it. [...] I don't anticipate that the need for understanding code is going to go away entirely right away [...] I think there will still be at least in the near term a need to understand read and understand code so that you can assess the reliabilities, the correctness of generated code. So, I think in the near term there's still going to be a need for that." In the following Q&A, Johnson is caught by surprise when asked whether there will even be a need for Blockly at all in the AI-driven world as described - and the Google VP concedes there may not be.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Leaders from two key committees in the U.S. Congress "are nearing an agreement on a national framework aimed at protecting Americans' personal data online," reports the Washington Post. They call the move "a significant milestone that could put lawmakers closer than ever to passing legislation that has eluded them for decades, according to a person familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the talks."The tentative deal is expected to broker a compromise between congressional Democrats and Republicans by preempting state data protection laws and creating a mechanism to let individuals sue companies that violate their privacy, the person said. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) and Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), the chairs of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Senate Commerce Committee, respectively, are expected to announce the deal next week... Lawmakers have tried to pass a comprehensive federal privacy law for more than two decades, but negotiations in both chambers have repeatedly broken down amid partisan disputes over the scope of the protections. Those divides have created a vacuum that states have increasingly looked to fill, with more than a dozen passing their own privacy laws... [T]heir expected deal would mark the first time the heads of the two powerful commerce committees, which oversee a broad swath of internet policy, have come to terms on a major consumer privacy bill... The federal government already has laws safeguarding people's health and financial data, in addition to protections for children's personal data, but there's no overarching standard to regulate the vast majority of the collection, use and sale of data that companies engage in online.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Tesla "is poised to roll out its version of a robotaxi later this year, according to CEO Elon Musk." ("Musk made the announcement on social media saying 'Tesla Robotaxi unveil on 8/8.' His cryptic post contained no other details about the forthcoming line of autonomous vehicles.") Electrek thinks they know what it'll look like. "Through Walter Issacson's approved biography of Musk, we learned that Tesla Robotaxi will be 'Cybertruck-like'." 8/8 (of the year 2024) would be a Thursday - although CNBC adds one additional clarification:At Tesla, "unveil" dates do not predict a near-future date for a commercial release of a new product. For example, Tesla unveiled its fully electric heavy-duty truck, the Semi, in 2017 and did not begin deliveries until December 2022. It still produces and sells very few Semis to this day. "Tesla shares rose over 3% in extended trading after Musk's tweet."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader Mononymous writes: The latest release of OpenBSD, the FOSS Unix-like operating system focused on correctness and security over features and performance, has been released. This version includes newer driver support, performance improvements, stability fixes, and lots of package updates. One highlight is a complete port of KDE Plasma 5. You can view the announcement and get the bits at OpenBSD.org. Phoronix reports that with OpenBSD 7.5 "there is a number of improvements for ARM (AArch64) hardware, never-ending kernel optimizations and other tuning work, countless package updates, and other adjustments to this popular BSD platform."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TechCrunch reports this week that Meta "is denying that it gave Netflix access to users' private messages..."The claim references a court filing that emerged as part of the discovery process in a class-action lawsuit over data privacy practices between a group of consumers and Facebook's parent, Meta. The document alleges that Netflix and Facebook had a "special relationship" and that Facebook even cut spending on original programming for its Facebook Watch video service so as not to compete with Netflix, a large Facebook advertiser. It also says that Netflix had access to Meta's "Inbox API" that offered the streamer "programmatic access to Facebook's user's private message inboxes...." Meta's communications director, Andy Stone, reposted the original X post on Tuesday with a statement disputing that Netflix had been given access to users' private messages. "Shockingly untrue," Stone wrote on X. "Meta didn't share people's private messages with Netflix. The agreement allowed people to message their friends on Facebook about what they were watching on Netflix, directly from the Netflix app. Such agreements are commonplace in the industry...." Beyond Stone's X post, Meta has not provided further comment. However, The New York Times had previously reported in 2018 that Netflix and Spotify could read users' private messages, according to documents it had obtained. Meta denied those claims at the time via a blog post titled "Facts About Facebook's Messaging Partnerships," where it explained that Netflix and Spotify had access to APIs that allowed consumers to message friends about what they were listening to on Spotify or watching on Netflix directly from those companies' respective apps. This required the companies to have "write access" to compose messages to friends, "read access" to allow users to read messages back from friends, and "delete access," which meant if you deleted a message from the third-party app, it would also delete the message from Facebook. "No third party was reading your private messages, or writing messages to your friends without your permission. Many news stories imply we were shipping over private messages to partners, which is not correct," the blog post stated. In any event, Messenger didn't implement default end-to-end encryption until December 2023, a practice that would have made these sorts of claims a non-starter, as it wouldn't have left room for doubt.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader DrunkenTerror shares a report from AnandTech: SK hynix this week announced plans to build its advanced memory packaging facility in West Lafayette, Indiana. The move can be considered as a milestone both for the memory maker and the U.S., as this is the first advanced memory packaging facility in the country and the company's first significant manufacturing operation in America. The facility will be used to build next-generation types of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) stacks when it begins operations in 2028. Also, SK hynix agreed to work on R&D projects with Purdue University. The facility will handle assembly of HBM known good stacked dies (KGSDs), which consist of multiple memory devices stacked on a base die. Furthermore, it will be used to develop next-generations of HBM and will therefore house a packaging R&D line. However, the plant will not make DRAM dies themselves, and will likely source them from SK hynix's fabs in South Korea. The plant will require SK hynix to invest $3.87 billion, which will make it one of the most advanced semiconductor packaging facilities in the world. Meanwhile, SK hynix held the investment agreement ceremony with representatives from Indiana State, Purdue University, and the U.S. government, which indicates parties financially involved in the project, but this week's event did not disclose whether SK hynix will receive any money from the U.S. government under the CHIPS Act or other funding initiatives.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA engineers have traced the Voyager 1 spacecraft's transmitted gibberish to corrupted memory hardware in its flight data system (FDS). "The team suspects that a single chip responsible for storing part of the affected portion of the FDS memory isn't working," NASA wrote in an update. Gizmodo reports: FDS collects data from Voyager's science instruments, as well as engineering data about the health of the spacecraft, and combines them into a single package that's transmitted to Earth through one of the probe's subsystems, the telemetry modulation unit (TMU), in binary code. FDS and TMU have been having trouble communicating with one another. As a result, TMU has been sending data to mission control in a repeating pattern of ones and zeroes. NASA's engineers aren't quite sure what corrupted the FDS memory hardware; they think that either the chip was hit by an energetic particle from space or that it's just worn out after operating for 46 years. [...] The engineers are hoping to resolve the issue by finding a way for FDS to operate normally without the corrupted memory hardware, enabling Voyager 1 to begin transmitting data about the cosmos and continue its journey through deep space.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Whenever a rocket launch occurs, air traffic controllers ensure the safety of commercial flights by managing airspace closures and monitoring rocket debris, without receiving compensation from commercial space companies like SpaceX for these services. The Biden administration's budget proposal aims to change this by suggesting that for-profit space companies begin paying for their use of government air traffic control resources. The New York Times reports: Commercial space companies are exempt from aviation excise taxes that fill the coffers of the Airport and Airway Trust Fund, which pays for the F.A.A.'s work and will get roughly $18 billion in tax revenues for the current fiscal year. The taxes are paid primarily by commercial airlines, which are charged 7.5 percent of each ticket price and an additional fee of about $5 to $20 per passenger, depending on the destination of each flight. Mr. Biden's budget proposal vows to work with Congress to overhaul the tax structure and split the cost of operating the nation's air traffic control system. His promise is based in part on an independent safety review report commissioned by the F.A.A., which advises that the federal government update the excise taxes to charge commercial space companies. Mr. Biden's call for revising the decades-old excise tax structure is part of his push to make richer Americans and wealthy corporations "pay their fair share." In his State of the Union speech last month, Mr. Biden also called for raising taxes on private and corporate jet users, including increasing the tax that they pay on jet fuel to $1.06 per gallon from 21.8 cents per gallon over five years. That tax on fuel currently makes up around 3 percent of the annual revenue of the trust fund, which depends heavily on what commercial airlines and its passengers pay. Yet commercial space companies do not contribute to that fund or share any of the cost that the public bears when rockets are launched, said William J. McGee, a former F.A.A.-licensed aircraft dispatcher and a senior fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project, a consumer advocacy group. "This is a question of fundamental fairness," Mr. McGee said. "It would be the equivalent of having a toll system on a highway and waving through certain users and not others."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Daily Hive: It is now the third consecutive day a major housing funding announcement has been made by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Friday's announcement entails over $600 million in investments targeted to help lower the construction cost of homes and speed up building timelines, with a new focus on creating new building innovation technologies. This includes a new $50 million Homebuilding Technology and Innovation Fund, which the federal government aims to leverage an additional $150 million from the private sector and other levels of government. Another $50 million will be invested in ideas and technology such as prefabricated housing factories, mass timber production, panelization, 3D printing, and pre-approved home design catalogues -- specifically projects already funded. As well, $11.6 million will go towards the federal government's previously announced Housing Design Catalogue to create a standardized home structure design for simplicity as well as construction and cost efficiencies. The vast majority of today's announced funding will go into the federal Apartment Construction Loan Program, which provides low-cost financing to support new rental housing projects using innovative construction techniques from prefabricated and modular housing manufacturers as well as other homebuilders. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in a statement: "We're changing the way we build homes in Canada. In Budget 2024, we're supporting a new approach to construction, with a focus on innovation and technology. This will make it easier and more cost-effective to build more homes, faster. You should be able to live in the community you love, at a price you can afford."Read more of this story at Slashdot.