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UnknowingFool writes: Jurors on Friday, January 26, 2024 ruled in favor of celebrity tattoo artist Kat Von D (real name Katherine von Drachenberg) in a copyright lawsuit regarding a photo of Miles Davis in that her use of the photo was not copyright infringement. The photographer of the photo, Jeffrey Sedlik, sued Von D in February 2021 after she used the photo as the basis for a tattoo she inked on a friend. Kat Von D, who gained fame in the reality shows about tattoo artists "LA Ink" and "Miami Ink", put the tattoo on her friend's arm in 2017 as a gift. The jury found that the tattoo was not "substantially similar" to the photo and were also persuaded that the non-commercial nature of the work meant her use of the photo would be fair use. The plaintiff Sedilk said he is planning to appeal the ruling arguing it contradicts the Supreme Court ruling in Warhol Foundation vs Goldsmith (PDF) where the artist Andy Warhol made a silkscreen print of Lynn Goldsmith's photo of Prince. The main difference pointed out by Von D's lawyers is that Warhol charged $10,000 for his print whereas Von D did not charge her friend for the tattoo and that is was closer to "fan art".Read more of this story at Slashdot.

T-Mobile has tweaked its terms of service for its home broadband users to add a new clause: If you are a heavy internet user that passes 1.2TB of data in a monthly billing cycle, you may have your speeds slowed in "times of congestion" or when there is a lot of pressure on the network. CNET: As spotted by The Mobile Report, the change went into effect on Jan. 18. In its updated terms, the carrier says that these users "will be prioritized last on the network" in congestion situations, which could mean painfully slow speeds for however long the congestion persists. T-Mobile does note that since its Home Internet service is available only in "limited areas" and intended to be used in a "stationary" setting, as opposed to a phone that could be in a busy place like a packed stadium, "these customers should be less likely to notice congestion in general."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Spying used to be all about secrets. Increasingly, it's about what's hiding in plain sight [non-paywalled link] . From a report: A staggering amount of data, from Facebook posts and YouTube clips to location pings from mobile phones and car apps, sits in the open internet, available to anyone who looks. US intelligence agencies have struggled for years to tap into such data, which they refer to as open-source intelligence, or OSINT. But that's starting to change. In October the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees all the nation's intelligence agencies, brought in longtime analyst and cyber expert Jason Barrett to help with the US intelligence community's approach to OSINT. His immediate task will be to help develop the intelligence community's national OSINT strategy, which will focus on coordination, data acquisition and the development of tools to improve its approach to this type of intelligence work. ODNI expects to implement the plan in the coming months, according to a spokesperson. Barrett's appointment, which hasn't previously been reported publicly, comes after more than a year of work on the strategy led by the Central Intelligence Agency, which has for years headed up the government's efforts on OSINT. The challenge with other forms of intelligence-gathering, such as electronic surveillance or human intelligence, can be secretly collecting enough information in the first place. With OSINT, the issue is sifting useful insights out of the unthinkable amount of information available digitally. "Our greatest weakness in OSINT has been the vast scale of how much we collect," says Randy Nixon, director of the CIA's Open Source Enterprise division. Nixon's office has developed a tool similar to ChatGPT that uses AI to sift the ever-growing flood of data. Now available to thousands of users within the federal government, the tool points analysts to the most important information and auto-summarizes content. Government task forces have warned since the 1990s that the US was at risk of falling behind on OSINT. But the federal intelligence community has generally prioritized information it gathers itself, stymying progress.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Blackstone is betting big on AI, plowing billions into data centers after its $10 billion takeover of QTS last year. The private equity giant is bankrolling the development of massive computing bunkers on hundreds of acres in Phoenix and other key markets to meet exploding demand from tech titans like Microsoft. With AI taking hold, QTS has become North America's top provider of leased data center capacity. But the data crunch has strained power grids. QTS estimates its data centers will tap 6 gigawatts of electricity, equal to the needs of 5 million homes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft has introduced more protections to Designer, an AI text-to-image generation tool that people were using to make nonconsensual sexual images of celebrities. Microsoft made the changes after 404 Media reported that the AI-generated nude images of Taylor Swift that went viral last week came from 4chan and a Telegram channel where people were using Designer to make AI-generated images of celebrities. "We are investigating these reports and are taking appropriate action to address them," a Microsoft spokesperson told us in an email on Friday. "Our Code of Conduct prohibits the use of our tools for the creation of adult or non-consensual intimate content, and any repeated attempts to produce content that goes against our policies may result in loss of access to the service. We have large teams working on the development of guardrails and other safety systems in line with our responsible AI principles, including content filtering, operational monitoring and abuse detection to mitigate misuse of the system and help create a safer environment for users."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China has approved more than 40 AI models for public use in the first six months since authorities began the approval process, as the country strives to catch up to the U.S. in AI development, according to Chinese media. Reuters: Chinese regulators granted approvals to a total of 14 large language models (LLM) for public use last week, Chinese state-backed Securities Times reported. It marks the fourth batch of approvals China has granted, which counts Xiaomi, 4Paradigm and 01.AI among the recipients. Beijing started requiring tech companies to obtain approval from regulators to open their LLMs to the public last August. It underscored China's approach towards developing AI technology while striving to keep it under its purview and control. Beijing approved its first batch of AI models in August shortly after the approval process was adopted. Baidu, Alibaba and ByteDance were among China's first companies to receive approvals Chinese regulators then granted two more batches of approvals in November and December before another batch was given the greenlight this month. While the government has not disclosed the exact list of approved companies available for public checks, Securities Times said on Sunday more than 40 AI models have been approved.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon Prime Video has been a free perk for those who subscribe to the ecommerce giant's free shipping service, but if you're a US Prime subscriber, things change from today. We first learned of the planned change back in September of last year, with the implementation date announced in an email to customers in December. If you want to retain the ad-free experience, you have to hand over an extra $2.99 per month. The WSJ notes Amazon's claim that it has a lower ad-load than most ad-supported services. Amazon's presentation said the average ad load per hour is expected to be between two and three-and-half minutes, which would be meaningfully smaller than traditional television and most other streaming services. Some commercials would appear before a program begins playing, while others would interrupt it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The estate of George Carlin has filed a federal lawsuit against the comedy podcast Dudesy for an hour-long comedy special sold as an AI-generated impression of the late comedian. But a representative for one of the podcast hosts behind the special now admits that it was actually written by a human. In the lawsuit, filed by Carlin manager Jerold Hamza in a California district court, the Carlin estate points out that the special, "George Carlin: I'm Glad I'm Dead," (which was set to "private" on YouTube shortly after the lawsuit was filed) presents itself as being created by an AI trained on decades worth of Carlin's material. That training would, by definition, involve making "unauthorized copies" of "Carlin's original, copyrighted routines" without permission in order "to fabricate a semblance of Carlin's voice and generate a Carlin stand-up comedy routine," according to the lawsuit. Despite the presentation as an AI creation, there was a good deal of evidence that the Dudesy podcast and the special itself were not actually written by an AI, as Ars laid out in detail this week. And in the wake of this lawsuit, a representative for Dudesy host Will Sasso admitted as much to The New York Times. "It's a fictional podcast character created by two human beings, Will Sasso and Chad Kultgen," spokeswoman Danielle Del told the newspaper. "The YouTube video 'I'm Glad I'm Dead' was completely written by Chad Kultgen." Regardless of that admission, Carlin estate lawyer Josh Schiller told the Times that the lawsuit would move forward. "We don't know what they're saying to be true," he said. "What we will know is that they will be deposed. They will produce documents, and there will be evidence that shows one way or another how the show was created."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon will not move forward with a planned acquisition of vacuum-maker iRobot, the two said Monday, citing "no path to regulatory approval" as the deal-breaker. Amazon announced its plan to acquire iRobot for $1.7 billion in August 2022. iRobot said separately that it will lay off about 350 jobs, or 31% of its workforce.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Los Angeles Times reports that after more than 10 years of planning, "Barring weather delays, the space shuttle Endeavour will undergo its final, historic lift starting Monday night, a maneuver no other retired orbiter has undergone..."First, a pair of cranes will hoist the shuttle from a horizontal position to a vertical one; the spacecraft will be attached to a sling, a large metal frame that'll support it during the move. An 11-story crane will lift the tail of Endeavour, while a 40-story crawler crane - about the height of [Los Angeles'] City Hall - will lift the nose. Once the shuttle is pointed toward the stars, the shorter crane will be disconnected, leaving the taller crane to gently swing the orbiter to its final position and lowering it to be affixed with the giant orange external tank. The external tank is attached to twin solid rocket boosters, which are connected to the exhibit's foundation... Once the shuttle full stack is in place, the rest of the museum will be built around it. It could be a few years before it is open to the public, given the construction schedule and additional time needed to install exhibits. "Los Angeles will be home to the only retired space shuttle displayed in a full-stack arrangement as if ready for launch," the article points out. Officials hope to livestream the historic lift on Monday night at 9:30 p.m. PST.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope observed the smallest exoplanet where water vapor has been detected in the atmosphere," writes SciTechDaily. "At only approximately twice Earth's diameter, the planet GJ 9827d could be an example of potential planets with water-rich atmospheres elsewhere in our galaxy.""This would be the first time that we can directly show through an atmospheric detection, that these planets with water-rich atmospheres can actually exist around other stars," said team member Bjorn Benneke of the Trottier Institute for Research on Exoplanets at Universite de Montreal. "This is an important step toward determining the prevalence and diversity of atmospheres on rocky planets." "Water on a planet this small is a landmark discovery," added co-principal investigator Laura Kreidberg of Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. "It pushes closer than ever to characterizing truly Earth-like worlds." However, it remains too early to tell whether Hubble spectroscopically measured a small amount of water vapor in a puffy hydrogen-rich atmosphere, or if the planet's atmosphere is mostly made of water, left behind after a primeval hydrogen/helium atmosphere evaporated under stellar radiation... Because the planet is as hot as Venus, at 800 degrees Fahrenheit, it definitely would be an inhospitable, steamy world if the atmosphere were predominantly water vapor... "Observing water is a gateway to finding other things," said Thomas Greene, astrophysicist at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. "This Hubble discovery opens the door to future study of these types of planets by the James Webb Space Telescope.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Around three hours after its moon lander had touched down, Japan's space agency "decided to switch SLIM off with 12% power remaining to allow for a possible resumption when the sun's angle changed," reports Agence France-Presse. Today there was good news:Japan's Moon lander has resumed operations, the country's space agency said on Monday, indicating that power had been restored after it was left upside down during a slightly haphazard landing. The probe, nicknamed the "moon sniper", had tumbled down a crater slope during its landing on 20 January, leaving its solar batteries facing in the wrong direction and unable to generate electricity... The agency posted on X an image shot by Slim of "toy poodle", a rock observed near the lander.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Someday in the not too distant future, it might no longer be possible to drive a brand-new car faster than 80 mph in California," writes Car and Driver:That's because state senator Scott Wiener earlier this week proposed a new bill that aims to prevent certain new vehicles from going more than 10 mph over the speed limit. In California, the maximum posted speed limit is 70 mph, meaning anything north of 80 mph would be off limits. The Speeding and Fatality Emergency Reduction on California Streets - or SAFER California Streets, for short - is a package of bills that includes SB 961 that was published Tuesday, which essentially calls for speed governors on new cars and trucks built or sold in California starting with the 2027 model year. These vehicles would be required to have an "intelligent speed limiter system" that electronically prevents the driver from speeding above the aforementioned threshold. The speed-limiter tech wouldn't apply to emergency vehicles. There's also language in the bill that the passive device would have the ability to be temporarily disabled by the driver, however, it's unclear in what situations that might apply. The bill also states that automakers would be able to fully disable the speed-limiter, but presumably only for authorized emergency vehicles. The commissioner of the California Highway Patrol could authorize disabling the speed-limiter too at their discretion... The proposed legislation is said to be an attempt to address rising traffic fatalities, which in California have reportedly increased by 22 perecent from 2019 to 2022.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Halo - the TV series - launches its second season on February 8th. But today a trailer premiered during halftime of the pre-Super Bowl football playoff. Gizmodo reports:Even though the Covenant are the other side of Halo's ongoing conflict, the first season of Paramount+'s TV series largely represented them through a human proxy named Makee. With the upcoming second season, the coalition of alien races is set to become a more prominent threat, and that means they'll be getting more proper screentime. IGN had written that Season 1 "isn't a perfect adaptation of the games, but it ultimately succeeds in expanding the series' mythology and taking a more character-driven approach to Master Chief's adventures." This week Paramount+ also released a 28-minute compilation of "Epic Battle Scenes from Season 1, a season which reportedly cost $200 million to film. And now the entertainment site Collider reports on what comes next:While on the set for Halo Season 2, Collider's Steve Weintraub and some other reporters got the chance to sit down with stars Schreiber and Kate Kennedy to discuss how the show will further flesh out the Covenant in the upcoming episodes. Part of that involves expanding their arsenal with new vehicles like the corvette, a class of ships used in the Halo canon by the Covenant for reconnaissance, stealth, and much more. Kennedy placed it among her favorite Season 2 set designs, saying... "It's huge, and what the set guys did for it, and the art department, is really, really impressive. They turned it around so quickly, and it's, like, awe-inspiring, it's huge." Aside from making the Covenant more formidable, Season 2 will also focus on making them more understandable. Part of that involves diving into the thought process of key players within the alien faction, including two that Schreiber could tease. "Yeah, we definitely go into the Covenant mind-state, mentality," he said... In future seasons, Schreiber believes Halo will only continue to develop the Covenant, their motives, and the relationships and allegiances within the coalition as the story of intergalactic war unfolds.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The tech site IT Brew looks at an open-source tool that "uses AI to offer efficiency-minded suggestions to Python coders." Known as "Scalene," the profiler - a kind of debugger for performance issues - has been downloaded more than 900,000 times on GitHub. "It's awesome in general, and amazing for an academic project," UMass professor Emery Berger, who worked with PhD students Sam Stern and Juan Altmayer Pizzorno on the open-source tool, told IT Brew... Scalene measures how much time and memory is spent on each line of code - both on average and at peak, [and] how much time is spent in efficient libraries and how much is spent in Python... By selecting a lightning-bolt icon, a user can "leverage the engine that powers ChatGPT to get an optimization" suggestion, Berger said. In one demo he showed IT Brew, an output recommended a less-memory-intensive move to reduce a very large array created by the code... "If your Python code already runs fast enough, then you don't need a profiler. But if it's running slow, I think it's a very convenient profiler to reach for," Berger said. Link via Dev News .Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In Denver, Colorado, a pastor had a message for his congregation, reports CNN. "After months of prayers and cues from God, he was going to start selling cryptocurrency, he announced in a YouTube video last April."The Signature and Silvergate banks had collapsed weeks earlier, signaling the need to look into other investment options beyond financial institutions, he said. With divine wisdom, he said, he was "setting the rails for God's wealth transfer." Shortly afterward, Regalado and his wife, Kaitlyn Regalado, launched a cryptocurrency, INDXcoin, and began selling it to members of his Victorious Grace Church and other Christian communities in the Denver area. They sold it through the Kingdom Wealth Exchange, an online cryptocurrency marketplace he created, controlled and operated. The Regalados raised more than $3.2 million from over 300 investors, Tung Chang, Securities Commissioner for Colorado, said in a civil complaint. The couple's sales pitches were filled with "prayer and quotes from the Bible, encouraging investors to have faith that their investment ... would lead to 'abundance' and 'blessings,'" the complaint said. But Colorado state regulators say that INDXcoin was "essentially worthless." Instead of helping investors acquire wealth, the Regalados used around $1.3 million of the investment funds to bankroll lavish expenditures, including a Range Rover, jewelry, cosmetic dentistry and extravagant vacations, the complaint said. The money also paid for renovations to the Regalados' Denver home, the complaint said. In a stunning video statement posted online on January 19 - several days after the civil charges were filed - Eli Regalado did not dispute that he and his wife profited from the crypto venture. "The charges are that Kaitlyn and I pocketed 1.3 million dollars, and I just want to come out and say that those charges are true," he said, adding, "A few hundred thousand dollars went to a home remodel that the Lord told us to do...." Regalado also said that he and his wife used about half a million dollars of their investors' funds to pay taxes to the IRS. CNN reports that in videos Regalado explains how God "convinced him that it was a safe and profitable investment venture." ("You read it correctly. God's hand is on INDXcoin and we are launching!" explains the launch video's description.) "The Regalados used technical terms to confuse investors and misled them into believing that the coins were valued at between $10-$12 even though they were purchased for $1.50 or, at times, given away, the complaint said."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Wall Street Journal reports that "a motley crew of AM radio advocates," including conservative talk show hosts and federal emergency officials, are lobbying Congress to stop carmakers from dropping AM radio from new vehicles:Lawmakers say most car companies are noncommittal about the future of AM tuners in vehicles, so they want to require them by law to keep making cars with free AM radio. Supporters argue it is a critical piece of the emergency communication network, while the automakers say Americans have plenty of other ways, including their phones, to receive alerts and information. The legislation has united lawmakers who ordinarily want nothing to do with one another. Sens. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and Ed Markey (D., Mass.) are leading the Senate effort, and on the House side, Speaker Mike Johnson - himself a former conservative talk radio host in Louisiana - and progressive "squad" member Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan are among about 200 co-sponsors... A spring 2023 Nielsen survey, the most recent one available, showed that AM radio reaches about 78 million Americans every month. That is down from nearly 107 million in the spring of 2016, one of the earliest periods for which Nielsen has data... Automakers say the rise of electric vehicles is driving the shift away from AM, because onboard electronics create interference with AM radio signals - a phenomenon that "makes the already fuzzy analog AM radio frequency basically unlistenable," according to the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a car-industry trade group. Shielding cables and components to reduce interference would cost carmakers $3.8 billion over seven years, the group estimates. Markey and other lawmakers say they want to preserve AM radio because of its role in emergency communications. The Federal Emergency Management Agency says that more than 75 radio stations, most of which operate on the AM band and cover at least 90% of the U.S. population, are equipped with backup communications equipment and generators that allow them to continue broadcasting information to the public during and after an emergency. Seven former FEMA administrators urged Congress in a letter last year to seek assurances from automakers that they would keep broadcast radio available. The companies' noncommittal response spurred legislation, lawmakers said. Automakers increasingly want to put radio and other car features "behind a paywall," Markey said in an interview. "They see this as another profit center for them when the American driving public has seen it as a safety resource for them and their families...." He compared the auto industry's resistance to the bill to previous opposition to government mandates like seat belts and air bags. "Leaving safety decisions to the auto industry is very dangerous," Markey said. Lawmakers have heard from over 400,000 AM radio supporters, according to the president of the National Association of Broadcasters. But the article also cites an executive at the Consumer Technology Association, who says automakers and tech advocacy groups have told lawmakers that requiring AM radio "would be "inconsistent with the principles of a free market.... It's strange that Congress is focused on a 100-year-old technology."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Remember that cheery corporate video Internet Brands tried announcing their new (non-negotiable) hybrid return-to-office policy (with the festive song "Iko Iko" playing in the background)? They've now pulled the video from Vimeo. Could that signal a larger shift in attitudes about working from home? The Washington Post reports: Now, new research from the Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh suggests that office mandates may not help companies' financial performances, but they can make workers less satisfied with their jobs and work-life balance... "We will not get back to the time when as many people will be happy working from the office the way they were before the pandemic," said Mark Ma, co-author of the study and associate professor at the Katz Graduate School of Business. Additionally, mandates make workers less happy, therefore less productive and more likely to look for a new job, he said. The study analyzed a sample of Standard & Poor's 500 firms to explore the effects of office mandates, including average change in quarterly results and company stock price. Those results were compared with changes at companies without office mandates. The outcome showed the mandates made no difference. Firms with mandates did not experience financial boosts compared with those without. The sample covered 457 firms and 4,455 quarterly observations between June 2019 and January 2023... "There are compliance issues universally," said Prithwiraj Choudhury, a Harvard Business School professor who studies remote work. "Some companies are issuing veiled threats about promotions and salary increases ... which is unfortunate because this is your talent pool, your most valuable resource...." Rather than grappling with mandates as a means of boosting productivity, companies should instead focus on structuring their policies on a team basis, said Choudhury of Harvard. That means not only understanding the frequency and venue in which teams would be most productive in-person, but also ensuring that in-person days are structured for more collaboration. Requiring employees to work in-office to boost productivity in general has yet to prove itself out, he added. "Return-to-office is just a knee-jerk reaction trying to make the world go back to where it was instead of recognizing this as a point for fundamental transformation," he said. "I call them return-to-the-past mandates." The article cites US Bureau of Labor Statics showing movement in the other directionRoughly 78% of workers ages 16 and older "worked entirely on-site in December 2023, down from 81% a year earlier" - and for tech workers only 34% worked entirely on-site last month compared with 38% last year. "Still, some companies are going all in on mandates, reminding workers and sometimes threatening promotions and job security for noncompliance. Leaders are unlikely to backtrack on mandates once they have been implemented because that could be viewed as admitting they made a mistake, said Ma."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike shared this investigation by Time magazine's senior economics correspondent which argues that America's residential solar industry "is floundering."In late 2023 alone, more than 100 residential solar dealers and installers in the U.S. declared bankruptcy, according to Roth Capital Partners - six times the number in the previous three years combined. Roth expects at least 100 more to fail. The two largest companies in the industry, SunRun and Sunnova, both posted big losses in their most recent quarterly reports, and their shares are down 86% and 81% respectively from their peaks in January 2021... At the root of these struggles is the complicated financial engineering that helped companies raise money but that some investors and analysts say was built on a framework of lies - or at least exaggerations. Since at least 2016, big solar companies have used Wall Street money to fund their growth. This financialization raised the consumer cost of the panels and led companies to aggressively pursue sales to make the cost of borrowing Wall Street money worth it. National solar companies essentially became finance companies that happened to sell solar, engaging in calculations that may have been overly optimistic about how much money the solar leases and loans actually bring in. "I've often heard solar finance and sales compared to the Wild West due to the creativity involved," says Jamie Johnson, the founder of Energy Sense Finance, who has been studying the residential solar industry for a decade. "It's the Silicon Valley mantra of 'break things and let the regulators figure it out.'" Leasing the panels lets the companies claim green-energy tax credits (which they then sell to companies like Google). And meanwhile, bundles of solar-panel leases become asset-backed securities. By 2017, there were over $1 billion such securities...However, these financial innovations also increased the pressure on companies to grow quickly. Solar companies needed lots of new customers in order to package the loans into asset-backed securities and sell them to investors. Public companies especially faced intense scrutiny from investors who expected double-digit quarterly growth. And with upfront costs no longer a barrier for new customers, solar companies began to see almost every homeowner as a target, and they deployed expensive sales teams to go out and sell as aggressively as they could... Even today, about one-third of the upfront cost of a residential solar system goes to intermediaries like sales and financing people, says Pol Lezcano, an analyst with Bloomberg New Energy Finance. In Germany, where installation is done locally and there are fewer intermediaries, the typical residential system costs about 50% less than it costs in the U.S. "The upfront cost of these systems is stupidly high," says Lezcano, making residential solar not "scalable." After growing 31% in 2021 and 40% in 2022, residential solar will only grow by 13% in 2023 and then contract 12% in 2024, according to predictions from the research firm Wood Mackenzie... Meanwhile, the pressure for fast sales may have led some companies to look the other way when salespeople obscured the terms of the solar panel leases and loans they were selling in order to close a deal. One customer complains the solar panel company actually took out a lien on his house without his knowledge, according to the article. He's "one of a growing number of consumers now saying in courts and in arbitration that salesmen from solar-panel and solar-panel-finance companies - including some of the biggest in the U.S., like GoodLeap, Mosaic, Sunnova, and SunRun - tricked them into taking out onerous loans they didn't want - or that someone signed them up for a loan without their knowledge."Even some people who voluntarily signed up for financing products say they were misled about the actual cost of the solar panels. That's because loans from companies like GoodLeap and Mosaic often include an unexplained and significant "dealer fee." For example, a customer buying a $30,000 solar panel system with a low interest rate may not know that price includes a $10,000 loan-dealer fee. In other words, the cost of the panels, had they paid cash, would have been just $20,000; the extra 30% is the price they paid for the low-interest loan, though many consumers allege this was not explained to them... In some ways, the current situation in the residential solar market is analogous to the subprime lending crisis that set off the Great Recession, though on a smaller scale. Like in the subprime lending crisis, some companies issued loans to people who could not - or would not - pay them. Like in the subprime lending crisis, thousands of these loans - and in solar's case, also leases - were packaged and sold to investors as asset-backed securities with promised rates of return. The Great Recession was driven largely by the fact that people stopped paying their loans, and the asset-backed securities didn't deliver the promised rate of return to investors. Similar cracks may be forming in the solar asset-backed securities market. For instance, the rate of delinquencies of loans in one of Sunnova's asset-backed securities was approaching 5% in the fall of last year, according to an October 2023 report issued by KBRA, a bond ratings agency. Historically, delinquencies in solar asset-backed securities had been around 1%. The firms that grade these asset-backed securities have long said delinquencies would be low because rooftop-solar customers had high credit scores. The problem is that they appear not to have considered that even customers with good credit scores may not want to pay for solar panels that they were told would be free - or that salesmen could be signing people up without their knowledge. Besides consumer cases in court, there's the possibility that regulators may act against solar companies that used inflated projections to juice their tax credits. "As early as 2016, a researcher at MIT's Energy Initiative estimated that such companies were overstating this value by as much as 50%."The broad problems facing residential solar and financing companies are already causing some pain in the forms of layoffs - California alone lost 17,000 solar jobs in 2023, according to the California Solar and Storage Association. There are ripple effects in the industry; Enphase Energy, which makes microinverters for solar panels, said in December it was laying off 10% of its workforce amidst softening demand. It could get a lot worse before it gets better, with not just lost jobs, but near-total collapse of the current system. Some analysts, like Lezcano of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, think that the big, national players are going to have to fall apart for residential solar to become affordable in the U.S., and that in the future, the solar industry in the U.S. will look more like it does in Germany, where installations are done locally and there's fewer door-to-door sales. "Over the past few years, a handful of people got rich off of Americans who were told they could simultaneously save money and save the planet. For example, Hayes Barnard, GoodLeap's founder and chairman, was named by Forbes as one of the 400 richest people in the world in 2023..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Guardian reports that "Hundreds of thousands of EU citizens were wrongly fined for driving in London's Ulez clean air zone, according to European governments..."The Guardian can reveal Transport for London (TfL) has been accused by five EU countries of illegally obtaining the names and addresses of their citizens in order to issue the fines, with more than 320,000 penalties, some totalling thousands of euros, sent out since 2021... Since Brexit, the UK has been banned from automatic access to personal details of EU residents. Transport authorities in Belgium, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands have confirmed to the Guardian that driver data cannot be shared with the UK for enforcement of London's ultra-low emission zone (Ulez), and claim registered keeper details were obtained illegally by agents acting for TfL's contractor Euro Parking Collection. In France, more than 100 drivers have launched a lawsuit claiming their details were obtained fraudulently, while Dutch lorry drivers are taking legal action against TfL over 6.5m of fines they claim were issued unlawfully. According to the Belgian MP Michael Freilich, who has investigated the issue on behalf of his constituents, TfL is treating European drivers as a "cash cow" by using data obtained illegitimately to issue unjustifiable fines. Freilich describes the situation as "possibly one of the largest privacy and data breaches in EU history," according to the article. Some drivers have even received penalties of up to five-figure sums - for compliant vehicles which had simply not yet been registered. And "some low-emission cars have been misclassed as heavy goods diesel vehicles and fined under the separate low-emission zone scheme, which incurs penalties of up to 2,000 a day." Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: IBM mainframes were the original onsite private cloud," begins retired software engineer Billy Newport in Is Cloud the New Mainframe? And while there were many things to like about the mainframe (including "crazy high availability numbers which today's cloud vendors can only dream of"), cost was not one of them. "As the application usage grows," Newport explains, "the bill grows and the control of the bill is largely in IBM's hands. You use more, you pay more [...] Unfortunately, while compute is elastic, budgets are not [...] Inevitably, customers try to migrate workloads from the mainframe to 'cheaper' platforms but these projects can be very expensive to do and they do fail more often than people realize." "Today's Cloud kind of looks exactly the same as the mainframe scenario," Newport warns. "Companies have rushed to get on the cloud with the cool kids. I predict many companies will try to rush to reduce cloud expenditure and will find migrating onsite to be an expensive proposition if it's even possible.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Oracle's plans to evolve Java in 2024 involve OpenJDK projects," writes InfoWorld, citing a recent video by Oracle Java developer relations representative Nicolai Parlog. (Though many improvements may not be usable until 2025 or later...)- For Project Babylon, Parlog cited plans for code reflection, expanding the reflection API, and allowing transformation of Java code inside a method. The goal is to allow developers to write Java code that libraries then can interpret as a mathematical function, for example. The Babylon team in coming weeks plans to publish work on use cases such as auto-differentiating, C# LINQ emulation, and GPU programming. - In Project Leyden, which is aimed at improving startup times, plans for 2024 involve refining the concept of condensers and working toward the production-readiness of prototype condensers. - In Project Amber, current features in preview include string templates, a simplified main method, and statements before this() and super(). "I expect all three to finalize in 2024," said Parlog. Under exploration are capabilities such as primitive types in patterns and with expressions. - In Project Valhalla, work will focus on value classes and objects, which provide class instances that have only final instance fields and lack object identity [to] significantly reduce the run time overhead of boxed Integer, Double, and Byte objects... - In Project Lilliput, aimed at downsizing Java object headers in the HotSpot JVM and reducing Java's memory footprint, work now centers on polishing a fast-locking scheme. - Project Panama, for interconnecting JVM and native C code, "has three irons in the fire," Parlog said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Indonesia has been clearing tens of thousands of acres of densely vegetated peatland for farming, releasing massive amounts of carbon that had been sequestered below for centuries," reports the Washington Post, "and destroying one of the Earth's most effective means of storing greenhouse gases."The country is home to as much as half of the planet's tropical peatland, a unique ecosystem that scientists say is vital to averting the worst results of climate change. Government leaders have made halting efforts to protect peatlands over the last two decades, but three years ago, when the pandemic disrupted food supply chains, officials launched an ambitious land-clearance operation in a push to expand the cultivation of crops and cut Indonesia's reliance on expensive imports. By transforming 2,000 to 4,000 square miles of what environmental groups say is predominantly peatland into fields of rice, corn and cassava, the government projects that it will achieve self-sufficiency in food... But disrupting the peatlands comes with devastating, likely irreversible costs for the climate, say environmental experts and activists. "To restore these vast areas of peat forest being destroyed will take years and huge investments in labor and funds," said David Taylor, a professor of tropical environmental change at the National University of Singapore who has researched peatlands in Asia and Africa. To do it on the timeline that global leaders have set for the world to achieve net-zero emissions? "Near impossible," Taylor said... While peatlands make up just 3 percent of the Earth's land, they store twice as much carbon as all the world's forests combined, according to the United Nations. When peatlands are drained, layers of aged biomass that are exposed to oxygen-rich air decay at an accelerated rate, releasing carbon from bygone eras into the atmosphere. Even worse, when the weather turns hot, unprotected peat dries out, becoming combustible. Already, environmental activists and villagers in Kalimantan, the Indonesian portion of the island of Borneo, say peatlands cleared by the government are fueling more-intense wildfires... Left intact, peatlands are naturally protected against fire. Once degraded, however, they produce infernos that are notoriously difficult to put out because they can travel underground, feeding on dried biomass yards below the surface. Tropical peatlands are also threatened by development in Peru and Africa's Congo Basin, according to the article. But they add that there's something especially ironic about Indonesia's government project. "Research shows that tropical peatlands tend to be too acidic to grow crops. "Indonesian environmental groups, including Pantau Gambut and WALHI, said they have documented widespread crop failures in areas targeted by the government's project. Rice planted in some peat-rich areas has had less than a third of the yield of rice planted in mineral soil, according to the groups' analysis."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"A photo of Japan's robotic moon lander shows that though the spacecraft did make the quarter-million-mile journey to the lunar surface, it landed upside down..." reports Mashable.Because of the lander's now-apparent inverted position, its solar panels weren't oriented correctly to generate power, according to the space agency. The team elected to conserve power by shutting down the spacecraft about 2.5 hours after landing. What's perhaps as surprising as the photo of the lander is how it was taken. Two small rovers separated from the crewless mothership just prior to touchdown. It was one of these baseball-sized robots that was able to snap the image of the spacecraft with its head in the moondust. The rover, built with the help of Japanese toy maker Takara Tomy, is a sphere that splits in half to expose a pair of cameras that point front and back. The two hemispheres also become the rover wheels. "The company is perhaps most famous for originally creating the Transformers, the alien robots that can disguise themselves as machines," said Elizabeth Tasker, who provided commentary on the moon landing in English on Jan. 20. The space agency still isn't entirely sure what went wrong. At about 55 yards above the ground, the spacecraft performed an obstacle avoidance maneuver, part of the pinpoint-landing demonstration. Just prior to this step, one of the two main engines stopped thrusting, throwing the lander's orientation off. JAXA is continuing to investigate what caused the engine problem... Despite the fact that the spacecraft is now sleeping, the SLIM team hasn't lost hope for a recovery. With solar panels facing west, the lander still has a chance of catching some rays and generating power. If the angle of sunlight changes, SLIM could still be awakened, mission officials said. That would have to happen soon, though. Night will fall on the moon on Feb. 1, bringing about freezing temperatures. The spacecraft was not built to withstand those conditions. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft has now passed over the landing site at an altitude of about 50 miles (80 km) - and snapped their own photograph which they say shows "the slight change in reflectance around the lander due to engine exhaust sweeping the surface."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader Bruce66423 shared this report from the BBC:A Spanish court has cleared a British man of public disorder, after he joked to friends about blowing up a flight from London Gatwick to Menorca. Aditya Verma admitted he told friends in July 2022: "On my way to blow up the plane. I'm a member of the Taliban." But he said he had made the joke in a private Snapchat group and never intended to "cause public distress"... The message he sent to friends, before boarding the plane, went on to be picked up by UK security services. They then flagged it to Spanish authorities while the easyJet plane was still in the air. Two Spanish F-18 fighter jets were sent to flank the aircraft. One followed the plane until it landed at Menorca, where the plane was searched. Mr Verma, who was 18 at the time, was arrested and held in a Spanish police cell for two days. He was later released on bail... If he had been found guilty, the university student faced a fine of up to 22,500 (19,300 or $20,967) and a further 95,000 (81,204 or $103,200) in expenses to cover the cost of the jets being scrambled. But how did his message first get from the encrypted app to the UK security services?One theory, raised in the trial, was that it could have been intercepted via Gatwick's Wi-Fi network. But a spokesperson for the airport told BBC News that its network "does not have that capability"... A spokesperson for Snapchat said the social media platform would not "comment on what's happened in this individual case". richi (Slashdot reader #74,551) thinks it's obvious what happened: SnapChat's own web site says they scan messages for threats and passes them on to the authorities. ("We also work to proactively escalate to law enforcement any content appearing to involve imminent threats to life, such as...bomb threats...." "In the case of emergency disclosure requests from law enforcement, our 24/7 team usually responds within 30 minutes."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"As important as its historically underhanded business dealings were for its success, Microsoft didn't have to cheat to win," argues a new article in the Register. "The Unix companies were doing a great job of killing themselves off."You see, while there were many attempts to create software development standards for Unix, they were too general to do much good - for example Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) - or they became mired in the business consortium fights between the Open Systems Foundation and Unix International, which became known as the Unix wars. While the Unix companies were busy ripping each other to shreds, Microsoft was smiling all the way to the bank. The core problem was that the Unix companies couldn't settle on software standards. Independent Software Vendors (ISV) had to write applications for each Unix platform. Each of these had only a minute desktop market share. It simply made no business sense for programmers to write one version of an application for SCO OpenDesktop (also known as OpenDeathtrap), another for NeXTStep, and still another one for SunOS. Does that sound familiar? That kind of thing is still a problem for the Linux desktop, and it's why I'm a big fan of Linux containerized desktop applications, such as Red Hat's Flatpak and Canonical's Snap. By the time the two sides finally made peace by joining forces in The Open Group in 1996, it was too late. Unix was crowded out on the conventional desktop, and the workstation became pretty much a Sun Microsystems-only play. Linux's GPL license created an "enforced" consortia that allowed it to take over, according to the article - and with Linus Torvalds as Linux's single leader, "it avoided the old Unix trap of in-fighting...I've been to many Linux Plumbers meetings. There, I've seen him and the top Linux kernel developers work with each other without any drama. Today's Linux is a group effort... The Linux distributors and developers have learned their Unix history lessons. They've realized that it takes more than open source; it takes open standards and consensus to make a successful desktop operating system. And the article also points out that one of those early Unix desktops "is still alive, well, and running in about one in four desktops."That operating system, of course, is macOS X, the direct descendent of NeXT's NeXTSTEP. You could argue that macOS, based on the multi-threaded, multi-processing microkernel operating system Mach, BSD Unix, and the open source Darwin, is the most successful of all Unix operating systems.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the The New York Times:Over his 54 years as a financial analyst, Richard X. Bove perfected the art of grabbing attention... American Banker once called him "the country's most quotable bank analyst." Last week, a few hours after completing a spot on Bloomberg television, the 83-year-old announced his retirement. He took that weekend off - and then jumped right back in. In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Bove (pronounced "boe-VAY"), who goes by Dick, shared a dire outlook on the U.S. economy and his former profession. "The dollar is finished as the world's reserve currency," Mr. Bove said matter-of-factly, perched in an armchair outside his home office just north of Tampa, from which he predicted that China will overtake the U.S. economy. No other analysts will say the same because they are, as he put it, "monks praying to money," unwilling to speak out on the mainstream financial system that employs them... As he spoke, a technician was trying to restore his home internet after his final employer, the boutique brokerage Odeon Capital, pulled the plug on his last day... He sees the offshoring of American manufacturing as the ultimate threat to the financial sector and the dollar, because "the people making the goods elsewhere are getting greater and greater control of the means of production and therefore greater and greater control of the world economy and therefore greater and greater control of money." The article notes that Bove was once called "The Loneliest Analyst." "One way that's still true is that he endorses cryptocurrency - an area that few other financial analysts will touch - which he sees as a natural beneficiary of the decline of the dollar."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UPI reports:New research published Friday offers hope that the sediment samples picked up by the Mars rover Perseverance could reveal traces of life - if it ever existed on the Red Planet. The rover already has confirmed an ancient lake on Mars. The new research published in Science Advances shows the Jezero Crater, where Perseverance verified lake sediments, is theorized to have been filled with water that deposited layers of sediments on the crater floor. "The delta deposits in Jezero Crater contain sedimentary records of potentially habitable conditions on Mars," the research article's abstract stated. "NASA's Perseverance rover is exploring the Jezero western delta with a suite of instruments that include the RIMFAX ground penetrating radar, which provides continuous subsurface images that probe up to 20 meters below the rover." The research by UCLA and the University of Oslo shows the lake subsequently shrank and the sediments carried by a river formed a large delta... [R]adar images revealed sediments shaped like lake deposits on Earth. Their existence was confirmed by the new research.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this report from CNBC:The S&P 500 is trading at a record and the Nasdaq is at its highest in two years. Alphabet shares reached a new pinnacle on Thursday, as did Meta and Microsoft, which ran past $3 trillion in market cap. Don't tell that to the bosses. While Wall Street cheers on Silicon Valley, tech companies are downsizing at an accelerating clip. So far in January, some 23,670 workers have been laid off from 85 tech companies, according to the website Layoffs.fyi. That's the most since March, when almost 38,000 people in the industry were shown the exits. Activity picked up this week with SAP announcing job changes or layoffs for 8,000 employees and Microsoft cutting 1,900 positions in its gaming division. Additionally, high-valued fintech startup Brex laid off 20% of its staff and eBay slashed 1,000 jobs, or 9% of its full-time workforce... Earlier in the month, Google confirmed that it cut several hundred jobs across the company, and Amazon has eliminated hundreds of positions spanning its Prime Video, MGM Studios, Twitch and Audible divisions. Unity said it's cutting about 25% of its staff, and Discord, which offers a popular messaging service used by gamers, is shedding 17% of its workforce... Investors lauded the cost-cutting measures that companies put in place last year in response to rising inflation, interest rates hikes, recession concerns and a brutal market downturn in 2022. Even with an improving economic outlook, the thriftiness continues. Layoffs peaked in January of last year, when 277 technology companies cut almost 90,000 jobs, as the tech industry was forced to reckon with the end of a more than decade-long bull market. Most of the rightsizing efforts took place in the first quarter of 2023, and the number of cuts proceeded to decline each month through September, before ticking up toward the end of the year. One explanation for the January surge as companies budget for the year ahead: They've learned they can do more with less... Nigel Vaz, CEO of consulting firm Publicis Sapient, told CNBC that some companies are probably looking at the boon that Meta and Salesforce got after their hefty cost-cutting measures last year... At the large publicly traded companies, there's an "intense focus" on profitability, margins and cost cutting, said Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA, which tracks trends across the tech sector. CNBC emphasizes that layoff numbers are much lower than last year, according to the CEO of the company that owns the tech-recruiting site Dice - and that the layoffs aren't limited to the tech industry. But the article also argues that "AI demand is so great that some tech companies are cutting headcount in parts of the business to invest more heavily in developing AI products." (SAP specifically said its restructuring aimed to boost "focus on key strategic growth areas, in particular Business AI.") And elsewhere CNBC writes that "As tech firms prioritize investments into artificial intelligence and go on a hiring spree, other segments are likely to see layoffs continue into 2024, according to industry experts."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"According to one study, homeowners are three times more likely than renters to own an electric vehicle," writes the Washington Post. But others still have options:Drivers who park on the street have found novel ways to charge their vehicles, using extension cords running over the sidewalk or even into the branches of a nearby tree... [S]ome municipalities explicitly allow over-the-sidewalk charging as part of a broader strategy to cut transportation emissions... In some areas, homeowners can also hire an electrician to run power under the sidewalk to a curbside charging port. But homeowners should check local rules and permitting requirements for curbside charging. In some highly EV-friendly cities, local governments will cover the costs. In Seattle, a pilot program is installing faster curbside charging to residents who opt in to the program... If home charging simply isn't an option, some drivers rely on public charging - either using workplace chargers or charging occasionally on DC fast chargers, which can bring an EV battery from 0 to 80 percent in around 20 minutes. The problem is that public charging is more expensive than charging at home - although in most places, still less expensive than gas... For drivers who have access to Tesla superchargers, public charging might still be a solid option - but for non-Tesla drivers, it's still a challenge. Many fast chargers can be broken for days or weeks on end, or can be crowded with other drivers. The popular charging app PlugShare can help EV owners find available charging ports, but relying on public fast charging can quickly become a pain for drivers used to quickly filling up on gas. In those situations, a plug-in hybrid or regular hybrid car might be a better option. And beyond that, "experts say that there are a key few steps that renters or condo owners can take to access charging," according to the article:The first is looking up local "right-to-charge" laws - regulations that require homeowners' associations or landlords to allow residents to install Level 1 or Level 2 charging. Ten states have "right-to-charge" laws on the books. In California and Colorado, for example, renters or homeowners have the right to install charging at their private parking space or, in some cases, in a public area at their apartment building. Other states, including Florida, Hawaii and New Jersey, have similar but limited laws. Residents can also reach out to landlords or property owners directly and make the case for installing charging infrastructure. All of this "puts a fair amount of onus on the driver," said Ben Prochazka, the executive director of the Electrification Coalition. But, he added, many EV advocacy groups are working on changing building codes in cities and states so that all multifamily homes with parking have to be "EV-ready." Ingrid Malmgren, policy director at the EV advocacy group Plug In America, tells the newspaper that "communities all over the country are coming up with creative solutions. And it's just going to get easier and easier."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the last 90 seconds of a recent Disney Parks video, there's a demonstration of a new technology called a HoloTile floor. Disney research fellow/R&D "imagineerer" Lanny Smoot specifies that "we don't know yet where it will be used" - though noting multiple people could walk in place during a shared virtual reality experience. It's an "omnidirectional floor" which can "automatically do whatever it needs to" so those walkers stay in the same place. "Imagine a number of people being in a room, being able to be somewhere else collaboratively and moving around, doing sightseeing." Video also shows objects gliding smoothly along its surface, with its direction apparently controlled remotely by hand motions ("like telekinesis," as one design blog describes it). Smooth says in the video "There are just so many applications for this type of technology." But IGN believes that it "just may be a game changer for VR and could bring us ever closer to experiencing the Holodeck from Star Trek."For those Star Trek fans out there, this sounds a lot like the promise of the Holodeck, a smallish-room that could virtually take our favorite crews wherever they wanted for some fun and relaxation between missions when it wasn't malfunctioning and trying to murder them... The applications of the HoloTile floor also extend beyond virtual reality, as Disney notes "The HoloTile floor can also be an insert in a theatrical stage, allowing performers to move and dance in new ways, or stage props and structures to move around or appear to set themselves up."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Exercising for 25 minutes a week, or less than four minutes a day, could help to bulk up our brains," reports the Washington Post, "and improve our ability to think as we grow older." A new study, which involved scanning the brains of more than 10,000 healthy men and women from ages 18 to 97, found that those who walked, swam, cycled or otherwise worked out moderately for 25 minutes a week had bigger brains than those who didn't, whatever their ages. Bigger brains typically mean healthier brains. The differences were most pronounced in parts of the brain involved with thinking and memory, which often shrink as we age, contributing to risks for cognitive decline and dementia... The results have practical implications, too, about which types of exercise seem best for our brain health and how little of that exercise we may really need. The article notes that the researchers used AI to assess brain scans from 10,125 "mostly healthy adults of all ages who'd come to the university medical center for diagnostic tests... A clear pattern quickly emerged." Men and women, of any age, who exercised for at least 25 minutes a week showed mostly greater brain volume than those who didn't. The differences weren't huge but were significant, said Cyrus A. Raji, an associate professor of radiology and neurology at Washington University in St. Louis, who led the new study, especially when the researchers looked deeper inside the organ. There, they found that exercisers possessed greater volume in every type of brain tissue, including gray matter, made up of neurons, and white matter, the brain's wiring infrastructure, which supports and connects the thinking cells. More granularly, the exercisers tended to have a larger hippocampus, a portion of the brain essential for memory and thinking. It usually shrinks and shrivels as we age, affecting our ability to reason and recall. They also showed larger frontal, parietal and occipital lobes, which, together, signal a healthy, robust brain... Exactly how exercise might be altering brains is impossible to say from this study. But Raji and his colleagues believe exercise reduces inflammation in the brain and also encourages the release of various neurochemicals that promote the creation of new brain cells and blood vessels. In effect, exercise seems to help build and bank a "structural brain reserve," he said, a buffer of extra cells and matter that could protect us somewhat from the otherwise inevitable decline in brain size and function that occurs as we age. Our brains may still shrink and sputter over the years. But, if we exercise, this slow fall starts from a higher baseline...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Companies that once serviced the boom in cryptocurrency mining are pivoting to take advantage of the latest data gold rush," reports the Guardian.Canadian company Hive Blockchain changed its name in July to Hive Digital Technologies and announced it was pivoting to AI. "Hive has been a pioneering force in the cryptocurrency mining sector since 2017. The adoption of a new name signals a significant strategic shift to harness the potential of GPU Cloud compute technology, a vital tool in the world of AI, machine learning and advanced data analysis, allowing us to expand our revenue channels with our Nvidia GPU fleet," the company said in its announcement at the time. The company's executive chairman, Frank Holmes, told Guardian Australia the transition required a lot of work. "Moving from mining Ethereum to hosting GPU cloud services involves buying powerful new servers for our GPUs, upgrading networking equipment and moving to higher tier data centres," he said. "The only commonality is that GPUs are the workhorses in both cases. GPU cloud requires higher end supporting hardware and a more secure, faster data centre environment. There's a steep learning curve in the GPU cloud business, but our team is adapting well and learning fast." For others, like Iris Energy, a datacentre company operating out of Canada and Texas, and co-founded by Australian Daniel Roberts, it has been the plan all along. Iris did not require any changes to the way the company operated when the AI boom came along, Roberts told Guardian Australia. "Our strategy really has been about bootstrapping the datacentre platform with bitcoin mining, and then just preserve optionality on the whole digital world. The distinction with us and crypto-miners is we're not really miners, we're datacentre people." The company still trumpets its bitcoin mining capability but in the most recent results Iris said it was well positioned for "power dense computing" with 100% renewable energy. Roberts said it wasn't an either-or situation between bitcoin mining and AI. "I think when you look at bitcoin versus AI, the market will just reach equilibrium based on the market-based demands for each product," he said... Holmes said Hive also saw the two industries operating in parallel. "We love the bitcoin mining business, but its revenue is rather unpredictable. GPU cloud services should complement it well," he said. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Parched conditions have crippled a waterway that handles $270 billion a year in global trade," reports Bloomberg. "And there are no easy solutions. "The Panama Canal Authority is weighing potential fixes that include an artificial lake to pump water into the canal and cloud seeding to boost rainfall, but both options would take years to implement, if they're even feasible. "With water levels languishing at six feet (1.8 meters) below normal, the canal authority capped the number of vessels that can cross. The limits imposed late last year were the strictest since 1989... Some shippers are paying millions of dollars to jump the growing queue, while others are taking longer, costlier routes around Africa or South America. The constraints have since eased slightly due to a rainier-than-expected November, but at 24 ships a day, the maximum is still well below the pre-drought daily capacity of about 38. As the dry season takes hold, the bottleneck is poised to worsen again... The canal's travails reflect how climate change is altering global trade flows. Drought created chokepoints last year on the Mississippi River in the US and the Rhine in Europe. In the UK, rising sea levels are elevating the risk of flooding along the Thames. Melting ice is creating new shipping routes in the Arctic. Under normal circumstances, the Panama Canal handles about 3% of global maritime trade volumes and 46% of containers moving from Northeast Asia to the US East Coast... In the long term, the primary solution to chronic water shortages will be to dam up the Indio River and then drill a tunnel through a mountain to pipe fresh water 8 kilometers (5 miles) into Lake Gatun, the canal's main reservoir. The project, along with additional conservation measures, will cost about $2 billion, Erick Cordoba, the manager of the water division at the canal authority estimates. He says it will take at least six years to dam up and fill the site. The US Army Corps of Engineers is conducting a feasibility study. The Indio River reservoir would increase vessel traffic by 11 to 15 a day, enough to keep Panama's top moneymaker working at capacity while guaranteeing fresh water for Panama City... The country will need to dam even more rivers to guarantee water through the end of the century.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Security experts expect many more companies to disclose that they've been hacked by Russian intelligence agents who stole emails from executives," reports the Washington Post, "following disclosures by Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise in the past week."Microsoft said late Thursday that it had found more victims and was in the process of notifying them. A spokesperson declined to say how many. But three experts in and out of government said that the attack was deeper and broader than the disclosures to date reveal. Two said that more than 10 companies, and perhaps far more, are expected to come forward... The Securities and Exchange Commission last year strengthened the rules that require companies to notify their stockholders of computer intrusions that could have a material impact on company results. That helped spur the recent disclosures. A spokesperson for America's Department of Homeland Security said "at this time we are not aware of impacts to Microsoft customer environments or products," according to the article. (Although the Washington Post adds that "The Microsoft and HPE breaches are especially concerning because so many other companies and agencies rely on them for cloud services, including email.") The attackers were potentially spying on Microsoft's senior leadership team "for weeks or months," reports the Verge, citing a newly-published analysis by Microsoft:Crucially, the non-production test tenant account that was breached didn't have two-factor authentication enabled. [A cyber-breaching group named Nobelium from Russia's foreign intelligence service] "tailored their password spray attacks to a limited number of accounts, using a low number of attempts to evade detection," says Microsoft. From this attack, the group "leveraged their initial access to identify and compromise a legacy test OAuth application that had elevated access to the Microsoft corporate environment...." This elevated access allowed the group to create more malicious OAuth applications and create accounts to access Microsoft's corporate environment and eventually its Office 365 Exchange Online service that provides access to email inboxes... Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) revealed earlier this week that the same group of hackers had previously gained access to its "cloud-based email environment." HPE didn't name the provider, but the company did reveal the incident was "likely related" to the "exfiltration of a limited number of [Microsoft] SharePoint files as early as May 2023."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a change that reflects AI's growing influence -- and potentially disruptive power -- in Hollywood, Netflix added generative AI to the list of potential risk factors on its annual report filed with the SEC. From a report: In Netflix's 10-K report filed Friday, it added this new section to the long section of risk factors (which are required under SEC rules) in the section about video competition: "[N]ew technological developments, including the development and use of generative artificial intelligence, are rapidly evolving. If our competitors gain an advantage by using such technologies, our ability to compete effectively and our results of operations could be adversely impacted." Netflix also added this wording: "In addition, the use or adoption of new and emerging technologies may increase our exposure to intellectual property claims, and the availability of copyright and other intellectual property protection for AI-generated material is uncertain." Aside from those two sections, the risk factors on Netflix's 10-K for 2023 -- totaling some 10,000 words -- remained largely the same. To be sure, the changes here are very small, in the grand scheme of things. And keep in mind that these are all the potential risk factors that companies like Netflix must communicate to investors.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bank of America is cracking down on employees who aren't following its return-to-office mandate, sending "letters of education" warnings of disciplinary action to employees who have been staying home. The Guardian: Some employees at the bank received letters that said they had failed to meet the company's "workplace excellence guidelines" despite "requests and reminders to do so," according to the Financial Times. The letter warned employees that failure to follow return-to-office expectations could lead to "further disciplinary action."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fossil Group has decided to call it quits on smartwatches. The company announced Friday that it would leave the smartwatch business and redirect resources to its less-smart goods instead. From a report: The company has been one of the most prolific makers of Wear OS smartwatches over the years, and its absence will leave a large gap in the market. "As the smartwatch landscape has evolved significantly over the past few years, we have made the strategic decision to exit the smartwatch business," Fossil spokesperson Amanda Castelli tells The Verge. "Fossil Group is redirecting resources to support our core strength and the core segments of our business that continue to provide strong growth opportunities for us: designing and distributing exciting traditional watches, jewelry, and leather goods under our own as well as licensed brand names." This means that the Gen 6, which first launched in 2021, will be the last Fossil smartwatch. Castelli says the company will continue to keep existing Wear OS watches updated "for the next few years."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The creator of an audio deepfake of US President Joe Biden urging people not to vote in this week's New Hampshire primary has been suspended by ElevenLabs, according to a person familiar with the matter. ElevenLabs' technology was used to make the deepfake audio, according to Pindrop Security, a voice-fraud detection company that analyzed it. ElevenLabs was made aware this week of Pindrop's findings and is investigating, the person said. Once the deepfake was traced to its creator, that user's account was suspended, said the person, asking not to be identified because the information isn't public. ElevenLabs, a startup that uses artificial intelligence software to replicate voices in more than two dozen languages, said in a statement that it couldn't comment on specific incidents. But added, "We are dedicated to preventing the misuse of audio AI tools and take any incidents of misuse extremely seriously."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cargo theft from freight trains in the Los Angeles area has surged, with detectives estimating over 90 containers being opened daily and that theft on their freight trains in the Union Pacific area was up some 160 percent from the previous year. Nationally, cargo theft neared $1 billion in losses last year. Companies decline comment but California's governor publicly questioned the widespread railroad theft. Most arrested were not organized; many were homeless people nearby opportunistically taking fallen boxes off tracks. Theft stems largely from e-commerce boom that reshaped freight shipping to meet consumer demand, opening vulnerabilities. Railroad police forces and online retailers aim to combat this but concede difficulty tracking stolen goods resold anonymously online. Some products stolen from containers even get resold back on Amazon. The New York Times Magazine: Sometimes products stolen out of Amazon containers are resold by third-party sellers back on Amazon in a kind of strange ouroboros, in which the snakehead of capitalism hungrily swallows its piracy tail. Last June, California's attorney general created what was touted as a first-of-its-kind agreement among online retailers that committed them to doing a better job tracking, reporting and preventing stolen items from being resold on their platforms. While declining to comment on specific cases, a spokesperson for Amazon told me that the company is working to improve the process of vetting sellers: The number of "bad actor attempts" to create new selling accounts on Amazon decreased to 800,000 in 2022 from six million in 2020.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple is widely expected to unveil major new artificial intelligence features with iOS 18 in June. Code found by 9to5Mac in the first beta of iOS 17.4 shows that Apple is continuing to work on a new version of Siri powered by large language model technology, with a little help from other sources. In fact, Apple appears to be using OpenAI's ChatGPT API for internal testing to help the development of its own AI models. According to this code, iOS 17.4 includes a new SiriSummarization private framework that makes calls to the OpenAI's ChatGPT API. This appears to be something Apple is using for internal testing of its new AI features. There are multiple examples of system prompts for the SiriSummarization framework in iOS 17.4 as well. This includes things like "please summarize," "please answer this questions," and "please summarize the given text." Apple is unlikely to use OpenAI models to power any of its artificial intelligence features in iOS 18. Instead, what it's doing here is testing its own AI models against ChatGPT. For example, the SiriSummarization framework can do summarization using on-device models. Apple appears to be using its own AI models to power this framework, then internally comparing its results against the results of ChatGPT. In total, iOS 17.4 code suggests Apple is testing four different AI models. This includes Apple's internal model called "Ajax," which Bloomberg has previously reported. iOS 17.4 shows that there are two versions of AjaxGPT, including one that is processed on-device and one that is not.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple's new rules in the European Union mean browsers like Firefox can finally use their own engines on iOS. Although this may seem like a welcome change, Mozilla spokesperson Damiano DeMonte tells The Verge it's "extremely disappointed" with the way things turned out. From a report: "We are still reviewing the technical details but are extremely disappointed with Apple's proposed plan to restrict the newly-announced BrowserEngineKit to EU-specific apps," DeMonte says. "The effect of this would be to force an independent browser like Firefox to build and maintain two separate browser implementations -- a burden Apple themselves will not have to bear." In iOS 17.4, Apple will no longer force browsers in the EU to use WebKit, the underlying engine that powers Safari. The change opens the door for other popular engines, such as Blink, which is used by Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, as well as Gecko, the engine used by Firefox. It also means third-party browsers could become fully functional on iOS without any of the limitations that come along with WebKit.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

California lawmakers are drawing up multiple plans to require watermarks on content created by AI to curb the abuses within the emerging technology, which has affected sectors from political races to the stock market. From a report: At least five lawmakers have promised or are considering different proposals that would require AI companies to implement some type of verification that a video, photo, or written work was made by the technology. The activity comes as advanced AI has rapidly evolved to create realistic images or audio on an unprecedented level. Advocates worry the technology could be ripe for abuse and lead to a wider proliferation of deepfakes, where a person's likeness is digitally manipulated to typically misrepresent them -- with it already being used in the presidential race. But such measures are likely to face scrutiny by the tech sector. Amid a pivotal election year and an online world full of disinformation, the ability to know what's real or not is crucial, said Drew Liebert, director of the California Initiative for Technology and Democracy. The harm from AI is already happening, with Liebert noting the aftermath of an AI-generated photo that went viral in May of last year that falsely portrayed another terrorist attack in the US. "The famous photograph now that was put on the internet that alleged that the Pentagon was attacked, that actually caused momentarily a [$500 billion] dollar loss in the stock market," he said. The loss would not as been as severe, he said, "if people would have been able to instantly determine that it was not a real image at all." Ask Slashdot:Could a Form of Watermarking Prevent AI Deep Faking?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Global regulators, aviation security specialists and manufacturers failed to reach an agreement on a quick technical fix to the problem of GPS spoofing near war zones, instead calling for better training of pilots to deal with the issue, Reuters reports, citing sources briefed on the talks. From the report: Airlines have been urging quick action after a series of incidents where navigation systems were disrupted to show a false location or wrong time, though aircraft flight controls remained intact. Spoofing might involve one country's military sending false Global Positioning System signals to an enemy plane or drone to hinder its ability to function, which has a collateral effect on nearby airliners. GPS jamming and spoofing have grown worse in Eastern Europe, the Black Sea and the Middle East, according to industry group OpsGroup. GPS is a growing part of aviation infrastructure as it replaces traditional radio beams used to guide planes towards landing. The first international meeting bringing together the sector was held on Thursday in Cologne, Germany, organized by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and international trade group the International Air Transport Association (IATA). GPS interference "can pose significant challenges to aviation safety," and requires that airlines increase data-sharing on jamming and spoofing events, EASA and IATA said in a joint statement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm can relate to Americans' anxiety over electric vehicles. The former governor of Michigan and longtime EV owner (who currently drives a Ford Mach-E) says she has experienced her own challenges with public charging on road trips. She has heard from drivers who are reluctant to give up their eight-cylinder engines and large trucks and SUVs for an electric model. But she is convinced that more Americans will soon realize the benefits of owning one, helping to change the current anti-EV rhetoric in this country.[...] "All of those factories that I was talking about regarding building electric vehicles and electric vehicle batteries, 60% of them are going into red states. So, you know, people in red states love their EVs, too, and are working at these factories," Granholm said. "I just think that over time, the political nonsense about it will die down and people's experience will speak much more loudly."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple faces strong action if changes to its App Store do not meet incoming European Union regulations, the bloc's industry chief said on Friday. Reuters: In a move designed to comply with the EU's incoming Digital Markets Act (DMA), the company will soon allow software developers to distribute their apps to Apple devices via alternative stores. From early March, developers will be able to offer alternative app stores on iPhones and opt out of using Apple's in-app payment system, which charges commissions of up to 30%. However, critics have said the changes do not go far enough, arguing Apple's fee structure remains unfair, and that the changes may be in violation of the DMA. Asked about Apple's plans, EU industry chief Thierry Breton exclusively told Reuters: "The DMA will open the gates of the internet to competition so that digital markets are fair and open. Change is already happening. As from 7 March we will assess companies' proposals, with the feedback of third parties." He added: "If the proposed solutions are not good enough, we will not hesitate to take strong action."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

prisoninmate shares a 9to5linux report: Flathub is currently one of the most popular app stores for Linux serving 1.6 billion downloads of over 2,400 apps in the Flatpak format, of which more than 850 apps have been verified by their original authors. And now, Flathub proudly announced today that it surpassed 1 million active users of Flatpak apps. The team believes that the recent growth in users comes from several factors, including the availability of some very popular apps (e.g. Firefox, Thunderbird, VLC, Spotify, OBS Studio, Google Chrome, Telegram), support for new and verified apps, the inclusion of Flathub as the default app source for the Steam Deck's desktop mode, as well as the growing adoption among many popular GNU/Linux distributions like Fedora Linux, Linux Mint, KDE neon, and others.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Astronomers have discovered a mysterious group of giant elderly stars at the heart of the Milky Way that are emitting solar system-sized clouds of dust and gas. The stars, which have been named "old smokers," sat quietly for many years, fading almost to invisibility, before suddenly puffing out vast clouds of smoke. The discovery was made during the monitoring of almost a billion stars in infrared light during a 10-year survey of the night sky. The Guardian: The astronomers had set out to capture rarely seen newborn stars -- known as protostars -- while undergoing the equivalent of a stellar growth spurt. During these periods, young stars rapidly acquire mass by gorging on surrounding star-forming gas, leading to a sudden increase in luminosity. The team tracked hundreds of millions of stars and identified 32 erupting protostars that increased in brightness at least 40-fold and in some cases more than 300-fold. Another group of red giant stars near the centre of the Milky Way unexpectedly showed up in the analysis, however. When they were studied in more detail using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, seven of the stars were deemed to be a new type of red giant star, which the researchers named "old smokers." Convection currents and instabilities within the star could trigger the release of enormous columns of smoke, Prof Philip Lucas of the University of Hertfordshire, who led the observations, suggested.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nintendo plans to launch a new 8-inch LCD-equipped Switch game console this year, well-regarded analyst firm Omdia said Friday [unpaywalled-link]. Bloomberg: The new device from the Kyoto-based games maker will be responsible for a doubling in shipments of so-called amusement displays in 2024, Hayase said in Tokyo on Friday. His research focuses on small and medium displays and he bases annual forecasts on checks with companies in the supply chain. Nintendo's seven-year-old Switch has sold over 132 million units and is approaching the end of its life cycle. The company has been tight-lipped about any potential successor, but expectations have narrowed to this year's holiday period for the release of the next generation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In response to new EU regulations, Apple on Thursday outlined plans to allow iOS developers to distribute apps outside the App Store starting in March, though developers must still submit apps for Apple's review and pay commissions. Now critics say the changes don't go far enough and Apple retains too much control. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney: They are forcing developers to choose between App Store exclusivity and the store terms, which will be illegal under DMA (Digital Markets Act), or accept a new also-illegal anticompetitive scheme rife with new Junk Fees on downloads and new Apple taxes on payments they don't process. 37signals's David Heinemeier Hansson, who is also the creator of Ruby on Rails: Let's start with the extortion regime that'll befell any large developer who might be tempted to try hosting their app in one of these new alternative app stores that the EU forced Apple to allow. And let's take Meta as a good example. Their Instagram app alone is used by over 300 million people in Europe. Let's just say for easy math there's 250 million of those in the EU. In order to distribute Instagram on, say, a new Microsoft iOS App Store, Meta would have to pay Apple $11,277,174 PER MONTH(!!!) as a "Core Technology Fee." That's $135 MILLION DOLLARS per year. Just for the privilege of putting Instagram into a competing store. No fee if they stay in Apple's App Store exclusively. Holy shakedown, batman! That might be the most blatant extortion attempt ever committed to public policy by any technology company ever. And Meta has many successful apps! WhatsApp is even more popular in Europe than Instagram, so that's another $135M+/year. Then they gotta pay for the Facebook app too. There's the Messenger app. You add a hundred million here and a hundred million there, and suddenly you're talking about real money! Even for a big corporation like Meta, it would be an insane expense to offer all their apps in these new alternative app stores. Which, of course, is the entire point. Apple doesn't want Meta, or anyone, to actually use these alternative app stores. They want everything to stay exactly as it is, so they can continue with the rake undisturbed. This poison pill is therefore explicitly designed to ensure that no second-party app store ever takes off. Without any of the big apps, there will be no draw, and there'll be no stores. All of the EU's efforts to create competition in the digital markets will be for nothing. And Apple gets to send a clear signal: If you interrupt our tool-booth operation, we'll make you regret it, and we'll make you pay. Don't resist, just let it be. Let's hope the EU doesn't just let it be. Coalition of App Fairness, an industry body that represents over 70 firms including Tinder, Spotify, Proton, Tile, and News Media Europe: "Apple clearly has no intention to comply with the DMA. Apple is introducing new fees on direct downloads and payments they do nothing to process, which violates the law. This plan does not achieve the DMA's goal to increase competition and fairness in the digital market -- it is not fair, reasonable, nor non-discriminatory," said Rick VanMeter, Executive Director of the Coalition for App Fairness. "Apple's proposal forces developers to choose between two anticompetitive and illegal options. Either stick with the terrible status quo or opt into a new convoluted set of terms that are bad for developers and consumers alike. This is yet another attempt to circumvent regulation, the likes of which we've seen in the United States, the Netherlands and South Korea. Apple's 'plan' is a shameless insult to the European Commission and the millions of European consumers they represent -- it must not stand and should be rejected by the Commission."Read more of this story at Slashdot.