Apple has announced a new $299 HomePod smart speaker with a similar form factor to the original HomePod released in 2018. From a report: It will be sold alongside the HomePod Mini, the smaller version of the speaker introduced in 2020, and features support for the new smart home standard Matter, allowing it to control compatible accessories. The new HomePod is available to order starting today, and will begin shipping February 3rd. The original HomePod had an unusually rocky lifespan for an Apple product. Originally announced in 2017 with a December ship date, the $349 smart speaker was subsequently delayed to February 2018. When it was eventually released, the HomePod's voice assistant Siri fared poorly against Alexa and Google Assistant, and reviewers criticized how locked into Apple's ecosystem the smart speaker was. Despite getting a $50 price cut in 2019, the HomePod was eventually discontinued in 2021.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CoinTelegraph: Venture capital firm Digital Currency Group (DCG) has told shareholders it is halting its quarterly dividend payments until further notice as it attempts to preserve liquidity. According to the letter sent to shareholders on Jan. 17, the firm is focused on "strengthening our balance sheet by reducing operating expenses and preserving liquidity." Its financial issues are derived from the woes of its subsidiary, crypto broker Genesis Global Trading, which reportedly owes creditors more than $3 billion and DCG is also considering selling some of the assets within its portfolio. Customers are currently unable to withdraw funds from Genesis after it halted withdrawals on Nov. 16, which has prompted Cameron Winklevoss -- on behalf of his exchange Gemini and its users with funds on Genesis -- to call for the board of DCG to remove Barry Silbert as CEO of the firm in a Jan. 10 open letter. According to Winklevoss, Genesis owes Gemini $900 million for funds that were lent to Genesis as part of Gemini's Earn program, which offers customers the ability to earn an annual yield of up to 7.4%. He also claimed DCG owed $1.675 billion to Genesis although DCG boss Barry Silbert denied this. Soon after, on Jan. 12, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) poured fuel on the fire charging both firms with offering unregistered securities through the Earn program. DCG "owns Grayscale Investments and its series of digital asset trusts and has invested in over 200 companies within the crypto industry including recognizable names such as blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis, stablecoin issuer Circle and digital asset exchange Kraken," notes the report.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
China has lifted its unofficial ban on Marvel titles, bestowing release dates for two major superhero tentpoles, "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever" and "Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania." Variety reports: "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever," which was released everywhere else in the world last November, will open in China on Feb. 7. Shortly after, "Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania" will be released on Feb. 17, the same day the sequel touches down in the U.S. and the U.K. The dates were released via Marvel's Chinese social media accounts. Those movies will be the first Marvel adventures to play in China since 2019's "Avengers: Endgame" (which made a staggering $632 million in the territory) and "Spider-Man: Far From Home" (which brought in $198 million in the territory). In the past, Marvel movies have been extremely popular in China, with "Black Panther" grossing $105 million and "Ant-Man and the Wasp" earning $121 million in the country. It's not clear why recent titles from Disney and other major studios have been denied release in China. But it is most likely sabre rattling directed towards the U.S. during a period of increased tensions, especially with jingoistic political events like the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party and the 20th National Congress happening in 2021 and 2022 respectively.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Apple has postponed the launch of its lightweight augmented-reality glasses indefinitely due to technical challenges, but is still planning to unveil its first mixed-reality headset this year, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday. Reuters reports: The iPhone maker's mixed-reality headset - which combines both augmented and virtual reality -- is set to launch in this year's spring event, Bloomberg said, adding that the device will cost around $3,000. Apple's mixed-reality device would compete with the likes of Meta Platforms' Quest Pro virtual and mixed-reality headset, which it launched late last year for $1,500, half of the Apple device's reported price. The Cupertino, California-based company now plans to focus on lowering the price of the follow-up version of its mixed-reality device, expected as soon as 2024 or early 2025, instead of working on the AR glasses, according to the report. Apple will aim to do so by using chips on par with those in the iPhone rather than components found in higher-end Mac computers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Dust that billows up from desert storms and arid landscapes has helped cool the planet for the past several decades, and its presence in the atmosphere may have obscured the true extent of global heating caused by fossil fuel emissions. Atmospheric dust has increased by about 55% since the mid-1800s, an analysis suggests. And that increasing dust may have hidden up to 8% of warming from carbon emissions. The analysis by atmospheric scientists and climate researchers in the US and Europe attempts to tally the varied, complex ways in which dust has affected global climate patterns, concluding that overall, it has worked to somewhat counteract the warming effects of greenhouse gasses. The study, published in Nature Reviews Earth and Environment, warns that current climate models fail to take into account the effect of atmospheric dust. About 26m tons of dust are suspended in our atmosphere, scientists estimate. Its effects are complicated. Dust, along with synthetic particulate pollution, can cool the planet in several ways. These mineral particles can reflect sunlight away from the Earth and dissipate cirrus clouds high in the atmosphere that warm the planet. Dust that falls into the ocean encourages the growth of phytoplankton -- microscopic plants in the ocean -- that absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen. Dust can also have a warming effect in some cases -- darkening snow and ice, and prompting them to absorb more heat. But after they tallied everything up, it seemed clear to researchers that the dust had an overall cooling effect.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Su Zhu and Kyle Davies, the founders of collapsed crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC), are hoping to raise $25 million to start a new crypto exchange called GTX, according to two separate pitch decks obtained by The Block. Three Arrows Capital was one of the largest hedge funds in crypto until last year's collapse of the Terra ecosystem left it facing significant losses. The financial advisory firm Teneo has been handling the liquidation of 3AC's assets and the hedge fund has filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy in New York. From the report: News of the fundraise comes two months after exchange giant FTX imploded, leaving more than a million creditors out of pocket. The new exchange takes advantage of the situation offering depositors the ability to transfer their FTX claims to GTX and receive immediate credit in a token called USDG, the pitch deck said. The exchange's name is even a spin on "FTX," with one of the GTX pitch decks opening with the line "because G comes after F." The Three Arrows pair are partnering with Mark Lamb and Sudhu Arumugam, who founded CoinFlex, a crypto exchange which is in the process of restructuring. The exchange's executive team is also made up of several CoinFlex executives including the firm's general counsel and chief technology officer, per one of the decks. GTX will leverage Coinflex's technology to build the exchange and a legal team will be responsible for overseeing the onboarding of claims for all the recent crypto bankruptcies such as Celsius and Voyager, according to the decks. The exchange is looking to launch as soon as possible -- potentially as soon as February -- and is estimating that the claims market is worth around $20 billion, according to the decks.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Netflix is expected to report its slowest quarterly revenue growth on Thursday as its ad-supported plan struggles to attract customers in the saturating U.S. market, which could pressure the company to pull back on content spending this year. Reuters reports: The streaming pioneer has been reeling under strained consumer spending, rising costs of financing production and increased competition from Disney+ and Amazon Prime. It had pinned its hopes on the launch of the ad-supported tier, but analysts say they have not seen a burst of subscriptions. The company is expected to have added 4.5 million subscribers in the fourth quarter - the lowest addition for the holiday period since 2014. It added 8.3 million subscribers a year ago. The $6.99 per month ad-supported plan does not have access to all titles and is not cheap enough to win over significant numbers of customers in the United States and Canada, analysts say. That is likely to draw focus on Netflix's aggressive content spending, which finance chief Spencer Neumann said in July would total about $17 billion annually for the next couple of years.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Discord has acquired the Gas social app, a poll-based app for friends to share compliments with each other. "The app is designed for anonymous compliments and positive affirmations or, as kids say, gassing your friends up," reports The Verge. From the report: Gas has polls that ask users to vote for things like the most beautiful person they've met or the classmate that isn't afraid to get in trouble. It has soared in popularity among high schoolers since launching in August. One of the co-creators of TBH, a very similar teenager app acquired and shut down by Facebook, created Gas, which has caught the attention of more than 1 million daily active users and 30,000 new users per hour in October. "Gas' founders have a proven track record of creating exciting apps and experiences, and we're thrilled to work with their team to take things to the next level," says Discord in a blog post announcing the Gas acquisition. "At this time, Gas will continue as its own standalone app and the Gas team will be joining Discord to help our efforts to continue to grow across new and core audiences." Discord hasn't disclosed the terms of its Gas acquisition, but it's clearly part of a broader and continued effort to target communities and users outside of just gaming.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Britishvolt, a prominent battery start-up that generated enthusiasm from British politicians but never commercially produced a battery, filed for insolvency on Tuesday. The collapse deals a blow to Britain's ambitions to develop low-carbon businesses to replace some of the trade lost under Brexit. It also threatens the future of Britain's auto industry, which requires domestic sources of electric batteries if it is to thrive. Founded in 2019, Britishvolt promoted itself as a British domestic champion. It had plans to build a 3.8 billion pound (or $4.7 billion) battery factory near Blyth in northeast England, creating 3,000 jobs. Despite forming partnerships with companies like the carmaker Aston Martin and Glencore, the commodities trading house, it failed to raise enough money to either construct the factory or perfect its battery technologies. The company said Tuesday that it was forced into administration, analogous to filing for bankruptcy. On Tuesday, all but 26 of the 232 employees at Britishvolt's main unit learned that they had lost their jobs. The insolvency raises important questions about the future of the British auto industry. The government is pushing carmakers to rapidly convert to building electric cars, with a ban on sales of new gasoline and diesel-powered cars beginning 2030. The idea is to both meet far-reaching targets on reducing emissions and to keep pace with an enormous shift to electric cars that is rippling through the global auto industry. Experts, though, say Britain does not have sufficient sources lined up to build the batteries that make up a high proportion of the contents of electric vehicles. Ideally, these devices should be made near car assembly plants in order to meet local content rules and because they are heavy and costly to ship.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
According to new research, Google is working on a new Bluetooth tracker device to compete with Apple's AirTags. 9to5Google reports: Since 2021, Google has included ultra-wideband (UWB) connectivity in its high-end "Pro" phones like the Pixel 6 Pro and Pixel 7 Pro. For now, the hardware has only been used for niche cases like unlocking a luxury car or sending files to a friend, but it's been clear that Google intends for UWB to be used more often. [...] To build up its own "Finder Network," compete with Apple AirTags, and potentially make UWB more useful on Pixel phones, Google is reportedly developing its own tracking accessory. The information comes courtesy of Android researcher and frequent Pixel leaker Kuba Wojciechowski. The tracker is said to be in development under the codename "Grogu" -- a reference to the popular Star Wars series "The Mandalorian" -- alongside the alternate names "GR10" and "Groguaudio." The only other tidbits that have been uncovered so far suggest that the Nest team is seemingly taking lead on the development and that the tracker may be available in multiple colors. The "Groguaudio" codename suggests that Google's tracker would potentially come equipped with a speaker. On Apple's AirTags, a built-in speaker serves as both a privacy measure and a location aid, as if you move someone else's AirTag after it's been separated from them, it will beep. This is just one of many potential privacy issues that Google will need to work through before launching a tracker accessory like this one.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Following controversial changes to Dungeons & Dragons' decades-old Open Gaming License (OGL), "many prominent third-party RPG publishers now say they're abandoning the OGL, regardless of what changes [publisher Wizards of the Coast (WotC)] officially releases in a coming new version," reports Ars Technica. "What's more, many in the community have now lost faith in WotC's stewardship of the licensed rules system that has underpinned so much of the industry's last two decades." From the report: Pathfinder publisher Paizo Inc. is behind perhaps the biggest effort to move the industry away from WotC's OGL. The company announced last Thursday that it is creating a new Open RPG Creative License (ORC) designed to be "open, perpetual, and irrevocable." [...] Regardless of the legal fate of the OGL, Paizo says it wants to "irrevocably and unquestionably keep alive the spirit of the Open Game License" with its new ORC. The system-agnostic license, designed with the help of IP law firm Azora Law, will eventually be controlled and protected by a nonprofit akin to the Linux Foundation, the company says. Until that new license is ready, upcoming Paizo products will be printed without any explicit license, the company says. Paizo's ORC effort has already drawn some significant support from the community. Call of Cthulhu and Runequest publisher Chaosium, which never used the WotC OGL for its products in the first place, nonetheless writes that it's "very happy to be working with the rest of the industry to come up with a system-wide OGL that anyone can use." Popular D&D module publisher Kobold Press has also lent its support to Paizo's ORC product but stopped just short of committing to use it for its just-announced Core Fantasy ruleset, codenamed Project Black Flag. Instead, Kobold says it is "wait[ing] to see exactly what shape the Open Gaming License might take in this new era" and "will review the terms and consider whether they fit the needs of our audience and our business goals" when the updated OGL is eventually released. Mutants & Masterminds publisher Green Ronin is also on board with the ORC, with founder and President Chris Pramas publicly comparing the current OGL fiasco to WotC's disastrous attempt to push a new Game System License for the 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons back in 2008. Apart from the companies backing Paizo's ORC -- including Legendary Games and Rogue Genius -- some tabletop publishers are creating their own licenses or finding other ways to extricate themselves from the WotC OGL. Blade Runner RPG and Mutant: Year Zero publisher Free League, for instance, says it's overhauling its unique Year Zero Engine to remove any WotC OGL content. At the same time, it's creating a new "irrevocable, worldwide, and royalty-free" license for anyone who wants to use that engine in their own games. [...] Old-School Essentials publisher Necrotic Gnome has similarly announced that it's "moving away from the OGL" for its future products. The company is leaving a bit of wiggle room, saying it will be "keeping an eye on developments" and that its next move "will depend on how the OGL topic develops over the coming months." But Necrotic Gnome adds that "the direction is clear," and that direction is toward "an alternative open license," which could end up being Paizo's ORC. Arcadia publisher MCDM and publisher Basic Fantasy also have plans to abandon the D&D 5th edition ruleset. "Troll Lord Games, meanwhile, publicly abandoned the OGL weeks ago and liquidated its existing stock of 5th-edition D&D products, 'never to be revisited again, in any edition,'" adds Ars.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader writes: If you've searched for external SSDs on Amazon.com recently, you may have noticed something weird: mixed in with the 1TB and 2TB drives from brands like Samsung and SanDisk are a bunch of listings for 16TB SSDs, mostly around $100, and with surprisingly high user ratings. Every single one is a scam, even if they're shipped by Amazon. Josh Hendrickson -- Editor-in-Chief of Review Geek -- bought one of the "16TB SSDs" and tore it down to reveal ageneric 64GB microSD card on a USB 2.0 card reader. Adrian Kingsley-Huges, writing for ZDNet in May 2022, found the exact same thing. Different packaging and different case colors, but the same trick. The Verge confirmed that several fake 16TB drives showed up on the first page of results for "external SSD," and over half the results for "16TB SSD" were fakes -- the rest were either 16TB enterprise hard drives, multi-drive enclosures, and one actual 16TB external drive, which costs $2,400 and contains two 8TB SSDs. While the top fake had a 3.6-star rating, the next two were 4.8 and 4.2, respectively. How are such obvious fakes getting such high ratings? It's the scam Hendrickson calls "review merging," and Consumer Reports calls "review hijacking." As Hendrickson explains, some third-party sellers take old listings and replace them with new items, leaving the reviews but changing everything else. A quick scan of one fake 16TB drive listing showed five-star reviews for laptop chargers, basketball backpacks, stickers, screen protectors, Mardi Gras beads, and mousepads. The sellers gather good reviews for cheap generic products, swap in a more expensive fake, and then take it down when bad reviews start piling up.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: Eating one freshwater fish caught in a river or lake in the United States is the equivalent of drinking a month's worth of water contaminated with toxic "forever chemicals," new research said on Tuesday. The invisible chemicals, called PFAS, were first developed in the 1940s to resist water and heat and are now used in items such as non-stick pans, textiles, fire suppression foams and food packaging. But the indestructibility of PFAS, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, means the pollutants have built up over time in the air, soil, lakes, rivers, food, drinking water and even our bodies. There have been growing calls for stricter regulation for PFAS, which have been linked to a range of serious health issues including liver damage, high cholesterol, reduced immune responses and several kinds of cancer. To find out PFAS contamination in locally caught fish, a team of researchers analyzed more than 500 samples from rivers and lakes across the United States between 2013 and 2015. The median level of PFAS in the fish was 9,500 nanograms per kilogram, according to a study published in the journal Environmental Research. Nearly three quarters of the detected "forever chemicals" were PFOS, one of the most common and hazardous of the thousands of forms of PFAS. Eating just one freshwater fish equalled drinking water with PFOS at 48 parts per trillion for a month, the researchers calculated. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency lowered the level of PFOS in drinking water it considers safe to 0.02 parts per trillion. The total PFAS level in the freshwater fish was 278 times higher than what has been found in commercially sold fish, the study said. "This study is important because it provides the first evidence for widespread transfer of PFAS directly from fish to humans," said David Andrews, a senior scientist at the non-profit Environmental Working Group, which led research. He's calling for much more stringent regulation to bring an end to all non-essential uses of PFAS. The new findings appear in the journal Environmental Research.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Microsoft plans to cut thousands of jobs with some roles expected to be eliminated in human resources and engineering divisions, according to media reports on Tuesday. From a report: The expected layoffs would be the latest in the U.S. technology sector, where companies including Amazon.com and Meta have announced retrenchment exercises in response to slowing demand and a worsening global economic outlook. Microsoft's move could indicate that the tech sector may continue to shed jobs. "From a big picture perspective, another pending round of layoffs at Microsoft suggests the environment is not improving, and likely continues to worsen," Morningstar analyst Dan Romanoff said. U.K broadcaster Sky News reported, citing sources, that Microsoft plans to cut about 5% of its workforce, or about 11,000 roles.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader shares a report: A viral tweet today highlights a somewhat frustrating limitation with the Apple TV software. As of a recent software update, tvOS expects users have access to an iPhone or iPad in order to do things like accept new iCloud terms and conditions, or update their Apple ID settings. Although most people who use the Apple TV 4K box are deeply ensconced in the Apple ecosystem, this doesn't apply to everyone. Up until recently, the Apple TV could be used essentially independently. It was assumed to be a standalone device, not an accessory. Not so much, anymore. Moreover, these changes mean Apple TV users who have Macs -- but no personal iOS devices -- are also left in the lurch. Most of the Apple TV can be used without needing access to other Apple hardware. You can set up the Apple TV from scratch completely independently, install apps, and make purchases. Typical Apple ID management duties can be performed from a web browser on a PC, if occasionally necessary. However, there are some tasks -- seemingly more prevalent than ever as of tvOS 16 -- that the Apple TV expects you to do on an iOS device signed in with the same account. This viral tweet from @hugelgupf showcases perhaps the most egregious example: accepting new iCloud terms and conditions requires an iOS device.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Environmental groups are pushing New York state to scrutinize a crypto mining company's purchase of a gas-fired power plant, contending in a new lawsuit that turning the power plant into a crypto mine would go against the state's climate goals and dump more pollution on nearby neighborhoods. From a report: Sierra Club and the Clean Air Coalition of Western New York filed a suit on Friday that challenges the New York Public Service Commission's (PSC) approval of the sale. Under state law, the commission has to give the green light before the transfer of ownership of a power plant can take place. Until now, the commission has mostly focused on whether such a sale would affect residents' electricity rates or create a monopoly. The commission needs to start taking climate change and environmental injustice into consideration because of a sweeping climate law passed in 2019, the new lawsuit argues.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Indian government has proposed making the Press Bureau of India and its other agencies the arbiter of truth on what information is misleading for social media firms and other internet companies as they oversee their users' data in the South Asian market. From a report: The proposal by the Ministry of Electronics and IT came as part of an amendment to the nation's IT rules. In the current draft, the ministry asks social media firms and online gaming companies to undertake due diligence on the content users "host, display, upload, modify, publish, transmit, store, update or share" and ensure that they are not "patently false and untrue or misleading in nature." The change proposes that the social media firms and gaming companies use the judgment of the Press Information Bureau, a nodal agency, of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting or other agency authorized by the Central Government for fact checking or "in respect of any business of the Central Government, by its department in which such business is transacted." The Press Bureau of India's fact checks have been scrtunized and found to be misleading in some instances by the local media.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
DIY-minded Samsung owners now have officially supported options to repair more smartphones and, for the first time, laptops from that firm. From a report: The company announced Tuesday that its Self-Repair program now covers Galaxy S22, Galaxy S22+, Galaxy S22 Ultra phones as well as Galaxy Book Pro 15-inch and Galaxy Book Pro 360 (15-inch) laptops. Samsung says S22-series owners will be able to buy kits to swap out "display assemblies, back glass, and charging ports." For the two Galaxy Book laptops, both introduced in 2021, the parts menu covers "the case front, case rear, display, battery, touchpad, power key with fingerprint reader, and rubber foot."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Wikipedia should be treated differently to the big social media firms in the Online Safety Bill, a leading member of its foundation says. From a report: The encyclopaedia is written and edited entirely by thousands of volunteers around the world. The Wikimedia Foundation's Rebecca MacKinnon also says a proposed change to the bill,would "limit freedom of expression". The bill aims to protect people from harmful content online. The Wikimedia Foundation is the not-for-profit organisation which hosts the encyclopaedia. Ms MacKinnon says the foundation is concerned about the effect of the bill on volunteer-run sites. She told the BBC that the threat of "harsh" new criminal penalties for tech bosses "will affect not only big corporations, but also public interest websites such as Wikipedia".Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Over 290 MSI motherboards are reportedly affected by an insecure default UEFI Secure Boot setting that allows any operating system image to run regardless of whether it has a wrong or missing signature. From a report: This discovery comes from a Polish security researcher named Dawid Potocki, who claims that he did not receive a response despite his efforts to contact MSI and inform them about the issue. The issue, according to Potocki, impacts many Intel and AMD-based MSI motherboards that use a recent firmware version, affecting even brand-new MSI motherboard models.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The United Kingdom wants to become the safest place for children to grow up online. Many UK lawmakers have argued that the only way to guarantee that future is to criminalize tech leaders whose platforms knowingly fail to protect children. From a report: Today, the UK House of Commons reached a deal to appease those lawmakers, Reuters reports, with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's government agreeing to modify the Online Safety Bill to ensure its passage. It now appears that tech company executives found to be "deliberately" exposing children to harmful content could soon risk steep fines and jail time of up to two years. The agreement was reached during the safety bill's remaining stages before a vote in the House of Commons. Next, it will move on to review by the House of Lords, where the BBC reports it will "face a lengthy journey." Sunak says he will revise the bill to include new terms before it reaches the House of Lords, where lawmakers will have additional opportunities to revise the wording. Reports say that tech executives responsible for platforms hosting user-generated content would only be liable if they fail to take "proportionate measures" to prevent exposing children to harmful content, such as materials featuring child sexual abuse, child abuse, eating disorders, and self-harm. Some measures that tech companies can take to avoid jail time and fines of up to 10 percent of a company's global revenue include adding age verification, providing parental controls, and policing content. If passed, the Online Safety Bill would make managers liable for holding tech companies to their own community guidelines, including content and age restrictions. If a breach of online safety duties is discovered, UK media regulator Ofcom would be responsible for prosecuting tech leaders who fail to respond to enforcement notices. Anyone found to be acting in good faith to police content and protect kids reportedly won't be prosecuted.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Federal Election Commission has dismissed a complaint from Republicans that Google's Gmail app aided Democratic candidates by sending GOP fundraising emails to spam at a far higher rate than Democratic solicitations. From a report: The Republican National Committee and others contended that the alleged benefit amounted to unreported campaign contributions to Democrats. But in a letter to Google last week, the FEC said it "found no reason to believe" that Google made prohibited in-kind corporate contributions, and that any skewed results from its spam filter algorithms were inadvertent. "Google has credibly supported its claim that its spam filter is in place for commercial reasons and thus did not constitute a contribution" within the meaning of federal campaign laws, according to an FEC analysis reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The Republican National Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee complained to the FEC last year, citing an academic study that showed that nearly 70% of emails from Republican candidates were sent to spam compared with fewer than 1 in 10 from Democrat candidates from 2019 to 2020. The RNC and other campaign committees argued that Google's "overwhelmingly disproportionate suppression of Republican emails" constituted an illegal corporate contribution to Democratic candidates. But the FEC disagreed, finding that Google established that it maintains its spam filter settings to aid its business in keeping out malware, phishing attacks and scams, and not for the purpose of benefiting any political candidates.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Mac Mini is Apple's next computer to get the bump up to the M2 chip -- and this time around, it's being offered with the Pro version of Apple's processor, too. From a report: The new model was announced this morning in a press release, with a starting price of $599, and is available to order today, with availability beginning Tuesday, January 24th. The Mac Mini's baseline configuration includes the M2 chip, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage. It features an HDMI port, Gigabit Ethernet, and a standard headphone jack, alongside two USB-A ports and two Thunderbolt 4 (USB-C) ports -- an upgrade from the Thunderbolt 3 ports on the previous generation. The M2 Pro configuration of the new Mac Mini features 16GB of RAM, 512GB of SSD storage, and an additional two Thunderbolt 4 ports alongside the ports already available on the standard M2 model. This configuration will set you back $1,299, more than double the price of the baseline model. This is the first time Apple has brought Pro-tier chips to the Mini. The Mini was previously only offered with the entry-level M1 chip -- the same one used in MacBook Air. This time, it's being offered with one of Apple's more powerful chip series. The M2 Max, however, is so far only being offered in the MacBook Pro.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Apple has announced new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros, featuring its latest M2 Pro and Max chips. From a report: The M2 Pro model will launch with a 12-core CPU, up to 19-core GPU, and up to 32GB of unified memory, while the M2 Max includes up to 38 cores of GPU power and support for up to 96GB of unified memory. The new 14-inch MacBook Pro with M2 Pro starts at $1,999, with the 16-inch model starting at $2,499. Both are available to order online today and will start shipping and appearing in Apple stores on January 24th. Apple says the M2 Pro has double the amount of transistors the M2 shipped with and nearly 20 percent more than the M1 Pro. It also features 200GB/s of unified memory bandwidth, twice what's available on the regular M2. All of this power should result in better performance in apps like Adobe Photoshop and Xcode. Apple claims the MacBook Pro with M2 Pro "is able to process images in Adobe Photoshop up to 40 percent faster than with M1 Pro, and as much as 80 percent faster than MacBook Pro with an Intel Core i9 processor." The M2 Max chip has the same 12-core CPU as the M2 Pro, but much like the M1 Max, it really pushes the GPU power more. Apple claims the M2 Max is up to 30 percent faster than the M1 Max in graphics and can apparently "tackle graphics-intensive projects that competing systems can't even run." Chips aside, the latest MacBook Pro models now include Wi-Fi 6E3 and a "more advanced HDMI" (probably HDMI 2.1) that supports 8K displays up to 60Hz and 4K displays up to 240Hz.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Getty Images is suing Stability AI, creators of popular AI art tool Stable Diffusion, over alleged copyright violation. From a report: In a press statement shared with The Verge, the stock photo company said it believes that Stability AI "unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright" to train its software and that Getty Images has "commenced legal proceedings in the High Court of Justice in London" against the firm. Getty Images CEO Craig Peters told The Verge in an interview that the company has issued Stability AI with a "letter before action" -- a formal notification of impending litigation in the UK.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: It was landing at Singapore's international airport a decade ago that sparked Shara Ticku's idea to create a lab-grown alternative to palm oil. "In 2013 I flew to Singapore, and when I landed I had to wear a mask," says the boss of US tech firm C16 Biosciences. "The air was toxic because they were burning the rainforest in Indonesia." Indonesian farmers, who were clearing land for palm oil and other crops, were blamed for the fires and the smoke that drifted across the sea to Singapore. Fast forward to today, and her business has just commercially released an alternative to palm oil that is created from yeast cells. Palm oil remains the world's most-produced vegetable oil, accounting for 40% of the total, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). [...] The widely-documented problem with this usage is that this demand for palm oil has led to significant deforestation in areas where oil palm trees can grow -- low-lying, hot, wet areas near the equator. The use of this land for palm oil cultivation, 85% of which is in Indonesia and Malaysia, has increased almost nine-fold from 3.3 million hectares (eight million acres) in 1970 to 28.7 million hectares in 2020. In financial terms, one report valued the worldwide palm oil industry at $62.3 billion in 2021. And such is the continuing growth in demand, this figure is expected to increase to $75.7 billion by 2028. To try to reduce the world's reliance on palm oil, Ms Ticku, who was formerly an investment banker, and her co-founders set up C16 Biosciences in New York City in 2018. Backed by multi-million dollar funding from Microsoft founder Bill Gates, the company has spent the past four years developing and finessing their product, which is called Palmless. They grow a strain of yeast that naturally produces an oil with very similar properties to palm, which they harvest. The yeast is fed on sugars from sugar cane plants grown on land already used for arable farming. "Our process takes less than seven days from start to finish," says a spokeswoman for C16 Biosciences. "For a traditional oil palm tree, the oil wouldn't be ready to harvest until years after the seed is planted, and most trees don't reach peak production until seven years later." She adds that the company is now "actively collaborating on partnerships in the beauty and home categories -- for example, moisturizers, nourishing oils, soaps and cancels". "[And] we plan to enter into food in 2024." Chris Chuck, professor of bioprocess engineering at the University of Bath, leads another team that has created its own yeast-sourced alternative. "After hundreds of generations of yeast, and years of trial and error, they arrived at a unique strain called metschnikowia pulcherrima, or MP for short," reports the BBC. "MP is said to be hardy and not fussy what it eats. It can be fed on grass and food waste. And at the point of harvesting, its cells are full of oil. Even the leftover yeast cell biomass need not go to waste. It can be used for other products, for example creating a substitute for soya protein." Prof Chuck says the aim is for the oil to be as sustainable as possible. "In the best case scenarios we've modeled," he says, "it could be even just a couple of percent of the greenhouse gas emissions from palm oil grown in Indonesia or Malaysia."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Sweeping the area of 12.3 standard NFL fields each rotation, with gargantuan 140-meter (459-ft) blades, the MySE 18.X-28X will be the largest wind turbine ever built. New Atlas reports: [T]he new MySE 18.X-28X promises to push "beyond the 18 MW threshold," with a mind-boggling swept area of 66,052 sq m (711,000 sq ft). MingYang says it'll handle "the most extreme ocean conditions," including level-17 typhoons with wind speeds over 56.1 m/s (202 km/h / 125.5 mph). Given an average wind speed of 8.5 m/s (30.6 km/h / 19 mph), MingYang projects it will produce 80 GWh of energy per year, "sufficient to supply 96,000 residents." Why go to the trouble of making these things so enormous? Well, increasing the swept area of your fan increases the slice of sky you're harvesting energy from, and it bumps up your overall yield. But perhaps more importantly, wind farms need to be thought of as total systems. One of the biggest costs in an offshore installation is the work needed at the sea bed to root these huge turbines down and give the wind something to push against. So both MingYang and CSSC sell these mammoth mega-turbines primarily as cost-cutting measures that'll help bring down the capital cost of wind farm setup, and eventually the cost of the energy they produce. "Compared to the installation of 13MW models," reads a statement by MingYang on LinkedIn, "the higher output of the MySE18.X-28X would save 18 units required for a 1GW wind farm, shaving off construction costs by 120,000 - 150,000 USD/MW." New Atlas calculated this to "represent a CAPEX saving of $120-150 million on a gigawatt-scale project." "For reference, the 1.2-GW Hornsea One Project, built using 7-MW turbines, is estimated to have cost "at least $5.153 billion, so while $150 million can't be considered chump change, it might represent a couple of percent on a project this big."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
In a blog post this evening, Microsoft announced the general availability of Azure OpenAI Service, which allows businesses to power their apps with large-scale AI models, including GPT-3.5, DALL-E 2, and Codex. VentureBeat reports: According to a press statement, availability is "restricted to customers who meet and adhere to the standards for responsible and ethical AI principles that Microsoft has set and published (linked here). Customers are required to apply for access describing their intended use-case or application before they are given access to the service." Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella tweeted the announcement, adding that "ChatGPT is coming soon to the Azure Open AI Service, which is now generally available, as we help customers apply the world's most advanced AI models to their own business imperatives." OpenAI tweeted the news, adding that "We've learned a lot from the ChatGPT research preview and have been making important updates based on user feedback. ChatGPT will be coming to our API and Microsoft's Azure OpenAI Service soon."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: China's population declined in 2022, the National Bureau of Statistics said Tuesday. The drop was the first since the early 1960s, according to Yi Fuxian, a critic of China's one-child policy and author of the book "Big Country With an Empty Nest." Mainland China's population, excluding foreigners, fell by 850,000 people in 2022 to 1.41 billion, the statistics bureau said. The country reported 9.56 million births and 10.41 million deaths for 2022. In 2021, China's population grew by the slowest increase on record. The mainland China population, excluding foreigners, rose by 480,000 to 1.41 billion people at the end of 2021, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. New births on the mainland fell by 13% in 2021 to 10.62 million babies, the data showed. In 2020, new births fell by 22%, according to the data. "The population will likely trend down from here in coming years," said Zhiwei Zhang, president and chief economist at Pinpoint Asset Management. "This is very important, with implications for potential growth and domestic demand." The National Bureau of Statistics also reported that China's economy expanded by 3% in 2022, far below the government's target. "It also marks one of the worst performances in nearly half a century," reports CNN. This is a developing story...Read more of this story at Slashdot.
fahrbot-bot shares a report from Engadget: Lightning rods have been used to safely guide strikes into the ground since Benjamin Franklin's day, but their short range (roughly the same radius as the height) and fixed-in-place design makes them ineffective for protecting large areas. The technology may finally be here to replace them in some situations. European researchers have successfully tested a system that uses terawatt-level laser pulses to steer lighting toward a 26-foot rod. It's not limited by its physical height, and can cover much wider areas -- in this case, 590 feet -- while penetrating clouds and fog. ["The experiment was performed on Santis Mountain, in northeast Switzerland," adds The Washington Post. "A 407-foot (124-meter) communications tower there, equipped with a lightning rod, is struck roughly a hundred times a year."] The design ionizes nitrogen and oxygen molecules, releasing electrons and creating a plasma that conducts electricity. As the laser fires at a very quick 1,000 pulses per second, it's considerably more likely to intercept lightning as it forms. In the test, conducted between June and September 2021, lightning followed the beam for nearly 197 feet before hitting the rod. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Photonics. A video of the work has also been published on YouTube.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Last month, CircleCI urged users to rotate their secrets following a breach of the company's systems. The company confirmed in a blog post on Friday that some customers' data was stolen in the breach. While the customer data was encrypted, cybercriminals obtained the encryption keys able to decrypt the data. TechCrunch reports: The company said in a detailed blog post on Friday that it identified the intruder's initial point of access as an employee's laptop that was compromised with malware, allowing the theft of session tokens used to keep the employee logged in to certain applications, even though their access was protected with two-factor authentication. The company took the blame for the compromise, calling it a "systems failure," adding that its antivirus software failed to detect the token-stealing malware on the employee's laptop. Session tokens allow a user to stay logged in without having to keep re-entering their password or re-authorizing using two-factor authentication each time. But a stolen session token allows an intruder to gain the same access as the account holder without needing their password or two-factor code. As such, it can be difficult to differentiate between a session token of the account owner, or a hacker who stole the token. CircleCi said the theft of the session token allowed the cybercriminals to impersonate the employee and gain access to some of the company's production systems, which store customer data. "Because the targeted employee had privileges to generate production access tokens as part of the employee's regular duties, the unauthorized third party was able to access and exfiltrate data from a subset of databases and stores, including customer environment variables, tokens, and keys," said Rob Zuber, the company's chief technology officer. Zuber said the intruders had access from December 16 through January 4. Zuber said that while customer data was encrypted, the cybercriminals also obtained the encryption keys able to decrypt customer data. "We encourage customers who have yet to take action to do so in order to prevent unauthorized access to third-party systems and stores," Zuber added. Several customers have already informed CircleCi of unauthorized access to their systems, Zuber said. Zuber said that CircleCi employees who retain access to production systems "have added additional step-up authentication steps and controls," which should prevent a repeat-incident, likely by way of using hardware security keys.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
According to The Register, IBM has shifted the roles of US IBM Systems employees developing AIX over to the Indian office. From the report: Prior to this transition, said to taken place in the third quarter of 2022, AIX development was split more or less evenly between the US and India, an IBM source told The Register. With the arrival of 2023, the entire group had been moved to India. Roughly 80 US-based AIX developers were affected, our source estimates. We're told they were "redeployed," and given an indeterminate amount of time to find a new position internally, in keeping with practices we reported last week based on claims by other IBM employees. Evidently, the majority of those redeployed found jobs elsewhere at IBM. A lesser number of staff are evidently stuck in "redeployment limbo," with no IBM job identified and no evident prospects at the company. "It also appears that these people in 'redeployment' limbo within IBM are all older, retirement eligible employees," our source said. "The general sense among my peers is that redeployment is being used to nudge older employees out of the company and to do so in a manner that avoids the type of scrutiny that comes with layoffs." Layoffs generally come with a severance payment and may have reporting requirements. Redeployments -- directing workers to find another internal position, which may require relocating -- can avoid cost and bureaucracy. They also have the potential to encourage workers to depart on their own. We're told that IBM does not disclose redeployment numbers to its employees and does not report how internal jobs were obtained -- through internal search, with the assistance of management -- or were not obtained -- employees left in limbo or who choose to leave rather than wait.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The Netherlands, once famed for being cycle-friendly, is facing a surprising threat: souped-up electric bikes speeding at up to 42kph (26mph). [...] Fietsersbond [is] a cyclists' union that is campaigning to crack down on speedy e-bikes and "fat bikes" -- those with extremely wide tyres. These should only use cycle paths with a maximum speed of 25kph -- but some of the bikes are designed to go faster or are being altered by the user to allow them to do so. Last June, Dutch MPs voted to ban people from boosting factory-programmed e-bike speeds, and cycling experts warn that nations rapidly adopting them, such as the UK, will soon face the same issues. Recent Dutch government research found e-bikes typically travel at almost 24kph, 3kph faster than normal bicycles, but a quarter of e-bikers exceed the limit – especially young adults. Mopeds and racers might be worse, but the Netherlands has an estimated 5m e-bikes, for a population of 17.8 million, and users include primary school children. Esther van Garderen, director of the Fietsersbond, is campaigning for quick enforcement of the speed-boost ban and prohibiting fast e-bikes in bike lanes. "The problem is not normal e-bikes, but ever more souped-up bikes that are basically illegal mopeds," she said. "In the Netherlands, since January, moped users must wear a helmet and young people don't like this. They also need to be 16 and have a driving licence, but illegal 'fat' bikes are just sold, youngsters under 16 use them on the roads going at 40kph, without a helmet. This isn't allowed, but there is no enforcement." She added that a plan by Amsterdam-Zuid district council to research whether child cyclists should be obliged to attach a flag to their bikes to improve road safety made her blood boil: "To think that the solution is that children need to have a flag is blaming the victim to the max." This autumn, Amsterdam will reduce speed limits from 50 to 30kph on 500 roads and the city is also researching "intelligent speed adaptation" systems to warn speeding cyclists or even force e-bikes to slow down. "Traffic safety and safe biking are areas where I really want to break ground in the coming years," said Melanie van der Horst, deputy mayor for traffic. "Two-thirds of Amsterdammers tell us they don't feel safe in the traffic. So more than 80% of roads will become a 30kph zone and we are researching a speed limit on the bike lanes. The growth of electric vehicles means there are huge speed differences on bike lanes and studies show that this creates risks." [...] The international cycling advocacy foundation BYCS believes that slightly slower cities might be better ones. "Technology is praised as progress, but it's not about progress," said Maud de Vries, the chief executive. "It's about urban health and a system where people are more active, healthy and cross each other's paths, in a good way."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
There's a real possibility that SODIMM memory sticks could be replaced by a new type of removable memory called CAMM. According to PC World, "Memory overseer JEDEC will formally adopt the 'CAMM Common Spec' as the next RAM module standard for laptops." From the report: JEDEC, the memory group that homologates RAM standards, is in the process of hammering out the new spec to replace the basic SO-DIMMs that have been in use for 25 years, according to JEDEC committee member, and Dell Senior Distinguished Engineer Tom Schnell. Schnell actually created the original CAMM -- or Compression Attached Memory Module -- design for Dell last year. JEDEC's CAMM standard will be based on that CAMM design but is likely to be somewhat different as companies hammer it out. "We have unanimous approval of the 0.5 spec," Schnell told PCWorld. Schnell said JEDEC is targeting the second half of the 2023 to finalize the 1.0 spec, with CAMM-based systems out by next year. Who are the companies that voted for it? Schnell can't say, as that's up to each member to reveal, but group covers the range of suppliers, from SoC, to connectors, to OEMs, and all unanimously voted to adopt the CAMM Common Spec, with no dissenters. There are currently 332 companies listed in JEDEC, from Apple to ZTE, each involved in different aspects of memory in different industries. For those who haven't followed it, Dell introduced its CAMM design in April 2022 with the aim of replacing the decades old SO-DIMM design that has been used in most gaming and workstation laptops up to now. CAMM's main appeal is that it enables higher memory density while also scaling to ever higher clock speeds. Some of the motivation for expediency likely comes from the fast-approaching "brick wall" facing laptops when SO-DIMMs hit at DDR5/6400. Schnell said the CAMM spec is far from finalized, but the first JEDEC CAMM modules should take over right where SO-DIMM ends at 6400. [...] With CAMM being hammered out now, Schnell did lay out some possible paths for CAMM as it replaces SO-DIMM. DDR6 is an obvious road, he said, but CAMM even enables the possibility of LPDDR6 on a replaceable module. LPDDR, or low-power DDR RAM, has long been preferred for smaller and thinner laptops as well as phones for power savings. It's also long been implemented only as soldered-on. Schnell foresees a version of CAMM enabling the performance and power benefits of LPDDR, but in a replaceable and upgradeable module. With JEDEC adopting CAMM now, that future gets closer.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
According to the Wall Street Journal, citing preliminary research from LMC Automotive and EV-Volumes.com, there were 7.8 million electric vehicles sold worldwide in 2022, a 68% increase from 2021. "The uptick helped electric vehicles achieve a roughly 10% global market share in the automotive industry for the first time," reports Insider. From the report: While 10% is only a modest share of the total market, the industry is growing faster than some had predicted. In 2021, for instance, the International Energy Agency projected that it would take until 2030 for the EV industry to reach between 7% and 12% of global auto sales. Europe and China have led the way, where electric vehicles already account for 11% and 19% of total car sales respectively, WSJ reported, citing data from LMC Automotive. CBInsights Auto and Mobility Trends estimated that its global market share could reach 22% by 2030. BloombergNEF projected the industry's market share could reach nearly 40% by the end of the decade. The Biden Administration, which included a $7,500 tax credit for purchasing an electric vehicle in last year's Inflation Reduction Act, is aiming for half of US vehicle sales to be electric by 2030.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: GitHub has taken down a popular Pirate Bay proxy information portal from Github.io. The developer platform took action in response to a takedown request sent by City of London Police's Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU). The takedown notice concludes that the site, which did not link to any infringing content directly, is illegal. [...] "This site is in breach of UK law, namely Copyright, Design & Patents Act 1988, Offences under the Fraud Act 2006 and Conspiracy to Defraud," PIPCU writes. "Suspension of the domain(s) is intended to prevent further crime. Where possible we request that domain suspension(s) are made within 48 hours of receipt of this Alert," the notice adds. This takedown request was honored by GitHub, meaning that people who try to access the domain now get a 404 error instead. While GitHub's swift response is understandable, it's worth pointing out how these blocking efforts are evolving and expanding, far beyond blocking the original Pirate Bay site. The Proxy Bay doesn't link to infringing content directly. The site links to other proxy sites which serve up the Pirate Bay homepage. From there, users may search for or browse torrent links that, once loaded, can download infringing content. Does this mean that simply linking to The Pirate Bay can be considered a crime in itself? If that's the case, other sites such as Wikipedia and Bing are in trouble too. A more reasonable middle ground would be to consider the intent of a site. The Proxy Bay was launched to facilitate access to The Pirate Bay, which makes court orders less effective. In 2015 UK ISPs began blocking proxy and proxy indexing sites, so that explains why thepirateproxybay.com and others are regularly blocked. Whether this constitutes criminal activity is ultimately for the court to decide, not the police. In this regard, it's worth noting that City of London Police previously arrested the alleged operator of a range of torrent site proxies. The then 20-year-old defendant, who also developed censorship circumvention tool Immunicity, was threatened with a hefty prison sentence but the court disagreed and dismissed the case.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
As farmers in Europe and across the world grapple with increases in the cost of fertilizers, researchers suggest a solution may be closer to home in what people flush down the toilet. From a report: A peer-reviewed paper by scientists in Europe published Monday in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science found that fertilizer made from human feces and urine is safe to use, and that only extremely tiny quantities of chemicals from medicines or drugs, for example, would get into the food. Governments worldwide are struggling to keep fertilizer costs manageable and increase self-sufficiency after Russia's invasion of Ukraine drove up prices of natural gas, a key feedstock for crop nutrients. European Union authorities are considering ways to speed up development of manure-based fertilizers after the surge in costs spurred anger among the bloc's farmers. In terms of safety, the researchers screened human waste for 310 chemicals, from pharmaceuticals to insect repellents, and found that only 6.5% of these were above the limit for detection and at low concentrations. "In general, the risk for human health of pharmaceutical compounds entering the food system by means of fecal compost use, seems low," the authors concluded. While they detected two pharmaceutical products in edible parts of cabbages, the painkiller ibuprofen and the anticonvulsant drug carbamazepine, the concentrations were markedly low. This means that more than half a million cabbage heads would need to be eaten to accumulate a dose equivalent to one carbamazepine pill, they said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The return of the El Nino climate phenomenon later this year will cause global temperatures to rise "off the chart" and deliver unprecedented heatwaves, scientists have warned. From a report: Early forecasts suggest El Nino will return later in 2023, exacerbating extreme weather around the globe and making it "very likely" the world will exceed 1.5C of warming. The hottest year in recorded history, 2016, was driven by a major El Nino. It is part of a natural oscillation driven by ocean temperatures and winds in the Pacific, which switches between El Nino, its cooler counterpart La Nina, and neutral conditions. The last three years have seen an unusual run of consecutive La Nina events. This year is already forecast to be hotter than 2022, which global datasets rank as the fifth or sixth hottest year on record. But El Nino occurs during the northern hemisphere winter and its heating effect takes months to be felt, meaning 2024 is much more likely to set a new global temperature record.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Russia's attacks on Ukraine's electrical grid are straining the war-torn country's mobile-telephone network, leading to a global hunt for batteries and other equipment critical for keeping the communications system working. From a report: Ukraine's power outages aren't just putting out the lights. The electricity shortages also affect water supplies, heating systems, manufacturing and the cellular-telephone and internet network, a vital communications link in a nation where fixed-line telephones are uncommon. Consumers can charge their cellphones at cafes or gas stations with generators, but the phones have to communicate with base stations whose antennas and switching equipment need large amounts of power. With rolling blackouts now a regular feature of life in Ukraine, the internet providers are relying on batteries to keep the network going. The stakes are high, since Ukrainian officials are using positive news of the war, speeches by President Volodymyr Zelensky and videos distributed by cellphone to maintain popular support for fighting Russia. First responders and evacuees rely on the mobile network, and a long-term loss of communications in major cities would compound the existing problems of electrical, heating and water outages, the companies say. Labor shortages have exacerbated the mobile-network issues as many Ukrainians have been displaced by the war or gone to the front to fight. In December, the chief executive of Ukraine's Lifecell mobile operator, Ismet Yazici, went into the field himself to wheel in a generator and restore backup power at a cell tower, according to the company. But the biggest problem is power equipment.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader shares a report: David Heinemeier Hansson, CTO of 37Signals -- which operates project management platform Basecamp and other products -- has detailed the colossal cloud bills that saw the outfit quit the cloud in October 2022. The CTO and creator of Ruby On Rails did all the sums and came up with an eye-watering cloud bill for $3,201,564 in 2022 -- or $266,797 each month. Plenty of that spend -- $759,983 -- went on compute, in the form of Amazon Web Services' EC2 and EKS services. On Twitter, Hansson contrasted that cost with the spend needed to acquire servers packing 288 vCPUs and plenty more besides over three years. Hansson was at pains to point out that even that bill was the result of a concerted effort to keep it low. "Getting this massive spend down to just $3.2 million has taken a ton of work. The ops team runs a vigilant cost-inspection program, with monthly reporting and tracking, and we've entered into long-term agreements on Reserved Instances and committed usage, as part of a Private Pricing Agreement," he wrote. "This is a highly optimized budget."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Extreme engineering is becoming the norm as offshore wind continues to scale up. Sweeping the area of 12.3 standard NFL fields each rotation, with gargantuan 140-meter (459-ft) blades, the MySE 18.X-28X will be the largest wind turbine ever built. From a report: Only a week ago, we wrote about CSSC's new H260-18MW, the world's largest wind turbine. Partially constructed at a special and very spacious seaside facility, this offshore wind giant took over from MingYang's MySE 16.0-242 as the biggest wind turbine on the planet. Now, MingYang has struck back in this game of one-upsmanship with the announcement of something significantly bigger. And it's not like CSSC's 18-megawatt rated effort was small; each of its three blades stretches a near-unthinkable 128 m (420 ft). But the new MySE 18.X-28X promises to push "beyond the 18 MW threshold," with a mind-boggling swept area of 66,052 sq m (711,000 sq ft). MingYang says it'll handle "the most extreme ocean conditions," including level-17 typhoons with wind speeds over 56.1 m/s (202 km/h / 125.5 mph). Given an average wind speed of 8.5 m/s (30.6 km/h / 19 mph), MingYang projects it will produce 80 GWh of energy per year, "sufficient to supply 96,000 residents." Why go to the trouble of making these things so enormous? Well, increasing the swept area of your fan increases the slice of sky you're harvesting energy from, and it bumps up your overall yield. But perhaps more importantly, wind farms need to be thought of as total systems. One of the biggest costs in an offshore installation is the work needed at the sea bed to root these huge turbines down and give the wind something to push against.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader shares a report: What many of us had expected has finally happened, artist have sued for copyright infringement a couple of AI companies, as well as an art repository site {complaint here (PDF)}. Is this the end of AI tools? I don't think so, I'll try to explain why, this will not be a detailed look at the lawsuit, there will be more time for that, this is my own take on some of the technical issues that I think the complaint gets wrong, so this is not intended as an in-depth look at the law anyway, as I suspect this may not get to a trial, more on that later. I'm also aware that this is at a very early stage, things may change, and most importantly, nobody can be sure of what the result will be, this is my own early speculation on the first filing as it stands, I'll update and write further blog posts as needed. Three artists are starting a class-action lawsuit against Stability.ai, Midjourney, and DeviantArt alleging direct copyright infringement, vicarious copyright infringement, DMCA violations, publicity rights violation, and unfair competition. DeviantArt appears to be included as punishment for "betrayal of its artist community," so I will mostly ignore their part in this analysis for now. Specifically with regards to the copyright claims, the lawsuit alleges that Stability.ai and Midjourney have scraped the Internet to copy billions of works without permission, including works belonging to the claimants. They allege that these works are then stored by the defendants, and these copies are then used to produce derivative works. This is at the very core of the lawsuit. The complaint is very clear that the resulting images produced by Stable Diffusion and Midjourney are not directly reproducing the works by the claimants, no evidence is presented of even a close reproduction of one of their works.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
England will ban businesses from selling and offering a variety of single-use plastics, including plates and cutlery, by the end of the year, the UK's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs announced on Saturday. From a report: The government will begin enforcing the legislation in October 2023. In addition to some plastics, the ban will cover single-use trays and certain types of polystyrene cups and food containers but will exempt plates, trays and bowls included with supermarket-ready meals; the government intends to target those through a separate plan that incentives manufacturers to meet higher recycling standards. According to one estimate cited by the environment ministry, English consumers use about 2.7 billion items of single-use cutlery every year, and only about 10 percent of those are recycled. The department said 95 percent of people it consulted before today's announcement were in favor of a ban. "We have listened to the public and these new single-use plastics bans will continue our vital work to protect the environment for future generations," said Environment Secretary Therese Coffey.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader writes: The pharmaceutical company Moderna didn't present a set of infection data on the company's new Covid-19 booster during meetings last year when [FDA] advisers discussed whether the shot should be authorized and made available to the publicThat data suggested the possibility that the updated booster might not be any more effective at preventing Covid-19 infections than the original shots. Specifically, Moderna hid data on actual infection rates among patients who were administered the original booster and those who got the bivalent "vaccine." The reason is obvious: The data showed that the original booster resulted in fewer infections than the bivalent version, which clearly wouldn't be good news for sales. 1.9% of the study participants who received the original booster became infected. Among those who got the updated bivalent vaccine -- the one that scientists hoped would work better -- a higher percentage, 3.2%, became infected. Research released by the New England Journal of Medicine found that "boosting with new bivalent mRNA vaccines targeting both the BA.4-BA.5 variant and the D614G strain did not elicit a discernibly superior virus-neutralizing peak antibody response as compared with boosting with the original monovalent vaccines." In English, that means they don't work as promised.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Germany wants to force its power-hungry data centers to harness excess heat for warming residential homes -- an effort which the industry warns is likely to fall flat. From a report: The country has become one of the largest global hubs for data centers thanks to its clear data protection and security laws. Politicians are now trying to re-purpose some of their controversial excess heat to improve efficiency in light of the energy crisis. While in theory an innovative way to reduce the industry's immense carbon footprint, experts have pointed to a flaw in the government's proposal expected to be passed this month: potential recipients of waste heat are not being compelled to take it. The warm air expelled by server farms isn't nearly as hot as that required by most district heating networks. That means any utility they partner with must invest in heat pumps to bring the air to usable levels, further ramping up costs and power usage. What's at stake for Europe's largest economy is that it either risks scaring off IT investments and slowing its efforts to digitize, or falling behind on climate goals. The energy efficiency law being prepared by the government aims to save some 500 terawatt-hours of energy by 2030 -- pegged in part on a requirement to reuse at least 30% of a new data center's heat by 2025.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Employment scams using fake job opportunities to swindle applicants are on the rise and have found a new, prime target in laid-off tech workers. From a report: These schemes -- which often involve fictitious job listings, interviews with fake recruiters and sham onboarding processes to steal job seekers' money or identities -- proliferated during the pandemic alongside virtual hiring and remote work, according to Federal Trade Commission data. Scammers now appear to be zeroing in on workers who have recently lost jobs, particularly in the tech industry, workforce experts and recent job-scam victims say. The number of reported job scams nearly tripled to 104,000 between 2019 and 2021 and remained elevated in 2022, according to the FTC. U.S. workers lost more than $200 million from employment-related scams in 2021, up from $133 million in 2019, agency data show.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Microsoft is likely to receive an EU antitrust warning about its $69 billion bid for "Call of Duty" maker Activision Blizzard, Reuters reported Monday, citing people familiar with the matter, that could pose another challenge to completing the deal. From the report: The European Commission is readying a charge sheet known as a statement of objections setting out its concerns about the deal which will be sent to Microsoft in the coming weeks, the people said. The EU antitrust watchdog, which has set an April 11 deadline for its decision on the deal, declined to comment.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
theodp writes: In case there are any doubts that the hiring party is over at Amazon, the number of open jobs in the Software Development category has declined to 299 in January 2023 from 32,692 in May 2022, according to Amazon's Jobs site. Internet Archive captures of Amazon's Software Development jobs category show the number of open jobs declined from 32,692 in May to 31,840 in June, 30,124 in July, 24,747 in August, 17,141 in September, 2,829 in November, and 373 in December. The number of Software Development job openings currently stands at 299 (164 of those in the U.S.), or less than 1% of the 32,692 May job openings. Declaring that "the U.S. isn't producing nearly enough students trained in computer science to meet the future demands of the American workforce," Amazon in May publicly called on Congress and legislatures across the U.S. to support and fund CS education in public schools to "create a much-needed pipeline of talent that will carry us into the future." And in July, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy joined other Tech Giant CEOs as signatories to a public letter calling for state governments and education leaders to bring more CS to K-12 students. "The USA has over 700,000 open computing jobs but only 80,000 computer science graduates a year," the 'CEOs for CS' explained. "We must educate American students as a matter of national competitiveness." Days later, 50 of the nation's Governors accepted the challenge, signing a Compact To Expand K-12 Computer Science Education in their states and territories. Last fall, a new Amazon-bankrolled $15 million CS curriculum aimed at dramatically boosting the number of high school students who take the Java-based AP CS A course was rolled out nationwide (Java founder and AWS employee James Gosling recently noted that "A lot of the guts of AWS is Java, and AWS has a pretty big Java team"). And in December, Amazon News reported that "600,000 students across 5,000 schools received computer science education through the Amazon Future Engineer 'childhood-to-career' program." The next business day, the Financial Times reported that Amazon had delayed start dates for some university graduates who had been set to the join the company in May 2023, blaming the "macroeconomic environment" and telling students they would now not be able to begin until the end of 2023. The FT article followed an NY Times report on the shrinking Big Tech job market faced by CS students.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"I saw the future at CES 2023," writes Geoffrey Morrison, describing "a new, top-secret prototype display technology" that could one day replace LCD and OLED for phones and TVs. "It was impossibly flat, like a vibrantly glowing piece of paper." Meet electroluminescent quantum dots:Until now, quantum dots were always a supporting player in another technology's game. A futuristic booster for older tech, elevating that tech's performance. QDs weren't a character on their own. That is no longer the case. The prototype I saw was completely different. No traditional LEDs and no OLED. Instead of using light to excite quantum dots into emitting light, it uses electricity. Nothing but quantum dots. Electroluminescent, aka direct-view, quantum dots. This is huge. Or at least, has the potential to be huge. Theoretically, this will mean thinner, more energy-efficient displays. It means displays that can be easier, as in cheaper, to manufacture. That could mean even less expensive, more efficient, bigger-screen TVs. The potential in picture quality is at least as good as QD-OLED, if not better. The tech is scalable from tiny, lightweight, high-brightness displays for next-generation VR headsets, to highly efficient phone screens, to high-performance flat-screen TVs. The article predicts the simpler structure means "Essentially, you can print an entire QD display onto a surface without the heat required by other 'printable' tech.... Just about any flat or curved surface could be a screen." This leads to QD screens not just on TVs and phones, but on car windshields, eyeglass lenses, and even bus or subway windows. ("These will initially be pitched by cities as a way to show people important info, but inevitably they'll be used for advertising. That's certainly not a knock against the tech, just how things work in the world....") Nanosys is calling this direct-view, electroluminescent quantum dot tech "nanoLED," and told CNET that "their as-yet-unnamed manufacturing partner is going to be talking more about the technology in a few months... "Even Nanosys admits direct-view quantum dot displays are still several years away from mass production.... But 5-10 years from now we'll almost certainly have options for QD [quantum dot] displays in our phones, probably in our living rooms, and possibly on our windshields and windows."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Verge reports "undeniable momentum" for Matter, the royalty-free interoperability standard that "allows smart home devices from any manufacturer to talk to other devices directly and locally with no need to use the cloud." "Matter was the buzzword throughout CES 2023 this year, with most companies even remotely connected to the smart home loudly discussing their Matter plans."The new smart home standard was featured in several keynotes and displayed prominently in smart home device makers' booths as well as in Google, Amazon, and Samsung's big, showy displays. More importantly, dozens of companies and manufacturers announced specific plans. Several companies said they would update entire product lines, while others announced new ones, sometimes with actual dates and prices. And Matter controllers have become a major thing, with at least four brand-new ones debuting at CES. Interestingly, nearly all of them have a dual or triple function, helping banish the specter of seemingly pointless white hubs stuck in your router closet.... Matter works over the protocols Thread, Wi-Fi, and ethernet and has been jointly developed by Apple, Google, Samsung, Amazon, and pretty much every other smart home brand you can name, big or small. If a device supports Matter, it will work locally with Amazon Alexa, Samsung SmartThings, Apple Home, Google Home, and any other smart home platform that supports Matter. It will also be controllable by any of the four voice assistants.... The big four have turned on Matter support on their platforms, but Amazon's approach has been piecemeal, and aside from Apple, nobody supports onboarding devices to Matter on iOS yet. However, that is shifting: at CES, Amazon announced a full rollout by spring, and Samsung's Jaeyeon Jung told The Verge that Matter support is coming to its iOS app this month. There's still no news on Matter support in Google Home's iOS app. Then there's the whole competing Thread network issue, although that sounds like it will be resolved sooner rather than later.... The Matter device drought should be over soon — although, judging by most of these ship dates, not until at least the second half of 2023. "It's also likely we'll see dedicated bridges coming out that can bring Z-Wave and other products with proprietary protocols into Matter...."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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