US Cellular To Sell Some Spectrum Licenses To AT&T For $1 Billion

U.S. Cellular has agreed to sell $1.02 billion worth of spectrum licenses to AT&T as part of its strategy to monetize its spectrum assets that were not included in an earlier $4.4 billion deal with T-Mobile. Reuters reports: Last month, U.S. Cellular agreed to sell select spectrum licenses for $1 billion to Verizon. It also signed deals with two other mobile network operators, but did not disclose the details. The latest agreement "adds a fourth mobile network operator, in addition to T-Mobile, to the list of those whose subscribers will benefit from the sale of our spectrum licenses," U.S. Cellular CEO Laurent Therivel said on Thursday. From a press release: Following this transaction, as well as those previously announced, UScellular will have reached definitive agreements to monetize approximately 55%, measured on a MHz-Pops basis, of the spectrum holdings (excluding mmWave) that were excluded from the proposed sale to T-Mobile, for a total consideration of approximately $2.02 billion. Including the proposed T-Mobile transaction, UScellular will have reached agreements to monetize approximately 70% of its total spectrum holdings (excluding mmWave), measured on a MHz-Pops basis.

"After our proposed sales, we will be left with 1.86 billion MHz-Pops of low and mid-band spectrum, as well as 17.2 billion MHz-Pops of mmWave spectrum, with the substantial majority of retained value in the C-band spectrum," [said Laurent C. Therivel, President and CEO]. "The C-band licenses have a number of attributes that we believe are favorable to their long-term value. First, our C-band licenses are positioned in an attractive mid-band frequency that can deliver outstanding speed and capacity. Second, there is a substantial 5G ecosystem of equipment vendors and existing infrastructure that uses C-band. Finally, they have a lengthy build-out timeline, with first and second build-out dates of 2029 and 2033, respectively. This provides ample time and optionality for us to either monetize or deploy the spectrum in the future. We will continue to look for ways to opportunistically monetize the C-band, as well as the other remaining spectrum."

https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/24/11/07/2230235/us-cellular-to-sell-some-spectrum-licenses-to-att-for-1-billion?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/24/11/07/2230235/us-cellular-to-sell-some-spectrum-licenses-to-att-for-1-billion?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


Even Microsoft Notepad Is Getting AI Text Editing Now

Microsoft is introducing a feature to Notepad called Rewrite that will let you use AI to "rephrase sentences, adjust tone, and modify the length of your content." The Verge reports: If you're a Windows Insider with early access to the feature, you can try it by highlighting the text you want to adjust in Notepad, right-clicking it, and choosing Rewrite. Notepad will then display a dialogue box where you can decide how they want to change their text -- for example, if it needs to be longer or shorter. Rewrite will then offer three rewritten versions that you can replace your work with.

It's worth noting that you'll have to sign in to your Microsoft account to use Rewrite, as it's "powered by a cloud-based service that requires authentication and authorization." Microsoft is launching this feature in preview on Windows 11 in the US, France, UK, Canada, Italy, and Germany. In July, Microsoft rolled out spellcheck and autocorrect for Notepad.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/11/07/224248/even-microsoft-notepad-is-getting-ai-text-editing-now?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/11/07/224248/even-microsoft-notepad-is-getting-ai-text-editing-now?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


Interview with Programmer Steve Yegge On the Future of AI Coding

I had the opportunity to interview esteemed programmer Steve Yegge for the SourceForge Podcast to ask him all about AI-powered coding assistants and the future of programming. "We're moving from where you have to write the code to where the LLM will write the code and you're just having a conversation with it about the code," said Yegge. "That is much more accessible to people who are just getting into the industry."

Steve has nearly 30 years of programming experience working at Geoworks, Amazon, Google, Grab and now SourceGraph, working to build out the Cody AI assistant platform. He's not shy about sharing his opinions or predictions for the industry, no matter how difficult it may be for some to hear. "I'm going to make the claim that ... line-oriented programming, which we've done for the last 40, 50 years, ... is going away. It is dying just like assembly language did, and it will be completely dead within five years."

You can watch the episode on YouTube and stream on all major podcast platforms. A transcription of the podcast is available here.

https://developers.slashdot.org/story/24/11/07/1926221/interview-with-programmer-steve-yegge-on-the-future-of-ai-coding?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://developers.slashdot.org/story/24/11/07/1926221/interview-with-programmer-steve-yegge-on-the-future-of-ai-coding?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


US Agency Warns Employees About Phone Use Amid Ongoing China Hack

A federal agency has issued a directive to employees to reduce the use of their phones for work matters due to China's recent hack of U.S. telecommunications infrastructure, WSJ reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: In an email to staff sent Thursday, the chief information officer at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau warned that internal and external work-related meetings and conversations that involve nonpublic data should only be held on platforms like Microsoft Teams and Cisco WebEx and not on work-issued or personal phones.

"Do NOT conduct CFPB work using mobile voice calls or text messages," the email said, while referencing a recent government statement acknowledging the telecommunications infrastructure attack. "While there is no evidence that CFPB has been targeted by this unauthorized access, I ask for your compliance with these directives so we reduce the risk that we will be compromised," said the email, which was sent to all CFPB employees and contractors. It wasn't clear if other federal agencies had taken similar measures or were planning to, but many U.S. officials have already curtailed their phone use due to the hack, according to a former official.

https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/11/07/1910221/us-agency-warns-employees-about-phone-use-amid-ongoing-china-hack?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/11/07/1910221/us-agency-warns-employees-about-phone-use-amid-ongoing-china-hack?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


Hacker Says They Banned 'Thousands' of Call of Duty Gamers By Abusing Anti-Cheat Flaw

An anonymous reader shares a report: In October, video game giant Activision said it had fixed a bug in its anti-cheat system that affected "a small number of legitimate player accounts," who were getting banned because of the bug. In reality, according to the hacker who found the bug and was exploiting it, they were able to ban "thousands upon thousands" of Call of Duty players, who they essentially framed as cheaters. The hacker, who goes by Vizor, spoke to TechCrunch about the exploit, and told their side of the story.

"I could have done this for years and as long as I target random players and no one famous it would have gone without notice," said Vizor, who added that it was "funny to abuse the exploit." TechCrunch was introduced to Vizor by a cheat developer called Zebleer, who is familiar with the Call of Duty hacking scene. Zebleer said he had been in touch with Vizor for months, and as such had knowledge of the exploit, which he said he saw Vizor using.

https://it.slashdot.org/story/24/11/07/1813235/hacker-says-they-banned-thousands-of-call-of-duty-gamers-by-abusing-anti-cheat-flaw?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://it.slashdot.org/story/24/11/07/1813235/hacker-says-they-banned-thousands-of-call-of-duty-gamers-by-abusing-anti-cheat-flaw?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


Nvidia Sets 100-Hour Monthly Cap on Cloud Gaming Service

Nvidia will impose a 100-hour monthly limit on its GeForce Now cloud gaming service for new subscribers starting January 2025, with existing members facing the same restriction from 2026, the company said on Thursday.

The gaming giant aims to maintain current subscription prices by implementing the cap, which affects roughly 6% of users. Members can purchase additional 15-hour blocks for $2.99 on Performance tier or $5.99 for Ultimate tier once they exceed the limit.

The service, which allows users to stream games from remote servers, will also rebrand its Priority membership to Performance tier, adding 1440p streaming and ultrawide resolution support. Subscribers can carry over 15 unused hours monthly or switch to basic servers after reaching the cap, Nvidia said.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/11/07/1442231/nvidia-sets-100-hour-monthly-cap-on-cloud-gaming-service?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/11/07/1442231/nvidia-sets-100-hour-monthly-cap-on-cloud-gaming-service?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


The Other Election Night Winner: Perplexity

AI startup Perplexity demonstrated strong performance in real-time during Tuesday election coverage, while rivals failed by predicting wrong outcomes before polls closed, marking the first major test of AI systems in U.S. election reporting, TechCrunch reports.

Perplexity launched an election hub featuring live maps powered by Associated Press and Democracy Works data, contrasting with major competitors like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, which declined to provide election information. Despite some minor data display issues and occasional inaccuracies in state-level analysis, Perplexity's coverage largely matched traditional media outlets, potentially intensifying its ongoing legal battle with Dow Jones over audience competition.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/11/07/0330223/the-other-election-night-winner-perplexity?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/11/07/0330223/the-other-election-night-winner-perplexity?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


DataBreach.com Emerges As Alternative To HaveIBeenPwned

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCMag: Have I Been Pwned has long been one of the most useful ways to learn if your personal information was exposed in a hack. But a new site offers its own powerful tool to help you check if your data has been leaked to cybercriminals. DataBreach.com is the work of a New Jersey company called Atlas Privacy, which helps consumers remove their personal information from data brokers and people search websites. On Wednesday, the company told us it had launched DataBreach.com as an alternative to Have I Been Pwned, which is mainly searchable via the user's email address. DataBreach.com is designed to do that and more. In addition to your email address, the site features an advanced search function to see whether your full name, physical address, phone number, Social Security number, IP address, or username are in Atlas Privacy's extensive library of recorded breaches. More categories will also be added over time.

Atlas Privacy has been offering its paid services to customers, such as police officers and celebrities, to protect bad actors from learning their addresses or phone numbers. In doing so, the company has also amassed over 17.5 billion records from the numerous stolen databases circulating on the internet, including in cybercriminal forums. As a public service, Atlas is now using its growing repository of stolen records to create a breach notification site, free of charge. DataBreach.com builds off Atlas's effort in August to host a site notifying users whether their Social Security number and other personal information were leaked in the National Public Data hack. Importantly, Atlas designed DataBreach.com to prevent it from storing or collecting any sensitive user information typed into the site. Instead, the site will fetch a hash from Atlas' servers, or a fingerprint of the user's personal information -- whether it be an email address, name, or SSN -- and compare it to whatever the user is searching for. "The comparison will be done locally," meaning it'll occur on the user's PC or phone, rather than Atlas's internet server, de Saint Meloir said.

https://it.slashdot.org/story/24/11/07/0620237/databreachcom-emerges-as-alternative-to-haveibeenpwned?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://it.slashdot.org/story/24/11/07/0620237/databreachcom-emerges-as-alternative-to-haveibeenpwned?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


Australia Proposes Ban On Social Media For Those Under 16

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Australia Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Thursday the government would legislate for a ban on social media for children under 16, a policy the government says is world-leading. "Social media is doing harm to our kids and I'm calling time on it," Albanese told a news conference. Legislation will be introduced into parliament this year, with the laws coming into effect 12 months after it is ratified by lawmakers, he added. There will be no exemptions for users who have parental consent.

"The onus will be on social media platforms to demonstrate they are taking reasonable steps to prevent access," Albanese said. "The onus won't be on parents or young people." Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said platforms impacted would include Meta Platforms' Instagram and Facebook, as well as Bytedance's TikTok and Elon Musk's X. Alphabet's YouTube would likely also fall within the scope of the legislation, she added.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/11/07/0019205/australia-proposes-ban-on-social-media-for-those-under-16?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/11/07/0019205/australia-proposes-ban-on-social-media-for-those-under-16?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


Intel Sued Over Raptor Lake Voltage Instability

Intel faces a class-action lawsuit alleging its 13th and 14th generation desktop processors from 2022 and 2023 are defective, causing system instability and frequent crashes. The suit claims that Intel knew of the issue but continued marketing the processors anyway. The Register reports: The plaintiff, Mark Vanvalkenburgh of Orchard Park, New York, purchased an Intel Core i7-13700K from Best Buy in January 2023, according to the complaint [PDF]. "After purchasing the product, Plaintiff learned that the processor was defective, unstable, and crashing at high rates," the complaint claims. "The processor caused issues in his computer, including random screen blackouts and random computer restarts. These issues were not resolved even after he attempted to install a patch issued by Intel for its 13th Generation processors."

The potential class-action lawsuit cites various media reports and social media posts dating back to December 2022 that describe problems with Intel's 13th and 14th generation processors, known as Raptor Lake. These reports document unexplained failures and system instability, as well as a higher-than-expected rate of product returns. "By late 2022 or early 2023, Intel knew of the defect," the complaint says. "Intel's Products undergo pre-release and post-release testing. Through these tests, Intel became aware of the defect in the processors." And because Intel continued making marketing claims touting the speed and performance of its products, with no mention of any defect, the complaint alleges that Intel committed fraud by omission, breached implied warranty, and violated New York General Business Law.

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/24/11/06/2211220/intel-sued-over-raptor-lake-voltage-instability?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/24/11/06/2211220/intel-sued-over-raptor-lake-voltage-instability?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


OpenAI Acquires Chat.com

OpenAI has acquired the chat.com domain name, likely for well over $10 million. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted a one-word tweet this morning, simply stating, "chat.com." Domain Name Wire reports: The chat.com domain name has changed hands for the third time in two years. HubSpot founder Dharmesh Shah kicked off the buying last year, plunking down over $15.5 million for the domain name. He turned around and sold the domain shortly thereafter for a profit.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/11/06/224243/openai-acquires-chatcom?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/11/06/224243/openai-acquires-chatcom?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


UK Will Legislate Against AI Risks in Next Year, Pledges Kyle

The UK will bring in legislation to safeguard against the risks of AI in the next year, technology secretary Peter Kyle has said, as he pledged to invest in the infrastructure that will underpin the sector's growth. From a report: Kyle told the Financial Times' Future of AI summit on Wednesday that Britain's voluntary agreement on AI testing was "working, it's a good code" but that the long-awaited AI bill would be focused on making such accords with leading developers legally binding. The legislation, which Kyle said would be presented to MPs in the current parliament, will also turn the UK's AI Safety Institute into an arms-length government body, giving it "the independence to act fully in the interests of British citizens."

At present, the body is a directorate of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. At the UK-organised AI safety summit last November, companies including OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic signed a "landmark" but non-binding agreement allowing partner governments to test their forthcoming large language models for risks and vulnerabilities before they were released to consumers. Kyle said that while he was "not fatalistic" about advancements in AI, "citizens need to know that we are mitigating the potential risks."

https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/11/06/182210/uk-will-legislate-against-ai-risks-in-next-year-pledges-kyle?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/11/06/182210/uk-will-legislate-against-ai-risks-in-next-year-pledges-kyle?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


Detroit Is Turning Lampposts Into Internet-Connected EV Chargers

An anonymous reader shares a report: Curbside EV charging in Michigan should become easier in the coming months thanks to a new collaboration between telecom giant AT&T and lamppost EV charging startup Voltpost. The two have joined forces to bring internet connectivity to EV charging posts across Michigan and the Metro-Detroit area-this way, the operator knows immediately if a stall has gone offline and can send a team to fix it faster. Better uptime benefits both the company and the EV drivers who choose to top up their cars' batteries while parked.

Voltpost's lamppost charging solution essentially turns existing street lights into EV chargers. The startup claims the installation of a single stall takes anywhere from one to two hours and that the costs are much lower than a conventional EV charging station. However, the caveat here is that the charging speeds are limited to what one would experience with a home charger. The AC Level 2 lamppost chargers are powered by the street lighting grid, which was never designed to sustain high loads, so expect to keep the car plugged in for hours. That said, the system can still come in handy when the owner of an EV goes to work and parks the car on the street. Or during a lengthy shopping trip topped off with an evening movie. It's no DC fast charger, but it doesn't claim to be one.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/11/06/1741253/detroit-is-turning-lampposts-into-internet-connected-ev-chargers?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/11/06/1741253/detroit-is-turning-lampposts-into-internet-connected-ev-chargers?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


Google Has No Duty To Refund Gift Card Scam Victims, Judge Finds

A federal judge in California has dismissed most claims in a class-action lawsuit against Google over its handling of gift card scams, ruling the tech giant is not liable for millions in consumer losses. U.S. District Judge Beth Freeman found Google bears no responsibility for scam victims' losses since third-party fraudsters, not Google, induced the purchases.

The ruling came in a suit filed by Judy May, who lost $1,000 to scammers demanding Google Play gift cards for a fake government grant. The lawsuit cited Federal Trade Commission data showing Google Play gift card scams comprised 20% of reported gift card fraud between 2018-2021, totaling over $17 million in losses. Google earns 15-30% commission on gift card purchases but denies refunds, citing industry-standard policies. Freeman ruled Google had no duty to investigate reported scams or refund victims.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/11/06/1445223/google-has-no-duty-to-refund-gift-card-scam-victims-judge-finds?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/11/06/1445223/google-has-no-duty-to-refund-gift-card-scam-victims-judge-finds?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


China Reveals a New Heavy Lift Rocket That Is a Clone of SpaceX's Starship

Ars Technica's Eric Berger reports: When Chinese space officials unveiled the design for the country's first super heavy lift rocket nearly a decade ago, it looked like a fairly conventional booster. The rocket was fully expendable, with three stages and solid motors strapped onto its sides. Since then, the Asian country has been revising the design of this rocket, named Long March 9, in response to the development of reusable rockets by SpaceX. As of two years ago, China had recalibrated the design to have a reusable first stage. Now, based on information released at a major airshow in Zhuhai, China, the design has morphed again. And this time, the plan for the Long March 9 rocket looks almost exactly like a clone of SpaceX's Starship rocket.

Based on its latest specifications, the Long March 9 rocket will have a fully reusable first stage powered by 30 YF-215 engines, which are full-flow staged combustion engines fueled by methane and liquid oxygen, each with a thrust of approximately 200 tons. By way of comparison, Starship's first stage is powered by 33 Raptor engines, also fueled with methane and liquid oxygen, each with a thrust of about 280 tons. The new specifications also include a fully reusable configuration of the rocket, with an upper stage that looks eerily similar to Starship's second stage, complete with flaps in a similar location. According to a presentation at the airshow, China intends to fly this vehicle for the first time in 2033, nearly a decade from now. Last week, Chinese space startup Cosmoleap announced plans to develop a fully reusable "Leap" rocket with the next few years. "An animated video that accompanied the funding announcement indicated that the company seeks to emulate the tower catch-with-chopsticks methodology that SpaceX successfully employed during Starship's fifth flight test last month," reports Ars.

https://slashdot.org/story/24/11/06/0129252/china-reveals-a-new-heavy-lift-rocket-that-is-a-clone-of-spacexs-starship?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://slashdot.org/story/24/11/06/0129252/china-reveals-a-new-heavy-lift-rocket-that-is-a-clone-of-spacexs-starship?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


Trump Wins US Presidency For Second Time

Major media outlets are beginning to declare former President Trump the winner of the 2024 presidential election. As with previous election announcements on Slashdot, this is your chance to talk about it and what it means for the future of our nation.

Developing...

https://politics.slashdot.org/story/24/11/06/0652209/trump-wins-us-presidency-for-second-time?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://politics.slashdot.org/story/24/11/06/0652209/trump-wins-us-presidency-for-second-time?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


Google CEO Forbids Political Talk After Firing 28 Over Israeli Contract Protest

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: Google CEO Sundar Pichai has weighed in on the debate over the relative values of political expression and workplace coexistence by ordering employees to leave their political opinions at home. A day after firing 28 workers for participating in a sit-in protest of the tech giant's cloud contract with Israel, Pichai warned staff that the office is not a place "to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics" in a company blog post.

Although Pichai didn't specifically mention the protests or the Israel-Hamas war, he concluded that the $1.92 trillion company "is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform." "We have a duty to be an objective and trusted provider of information that serves all of our users globally," Pichai continued. "When we come to work, our goal is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. That supersedes everything else and I expect us to act with a focus that reflects that." The sit-in protest was staged against Google's involvement in Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud contract with the Israeli government. During the nearly 10-hour protest, employees wore "Googler against genocide" T-shirts and occupied the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.

The report notes how tech companies, "previously famed for their progressive culture where nap pods and abortion benefits were welcome," are increasingly restricting political discussions to avoid internal conflict. Pichai notes in his memo that Google has previously enjoyed "a culture of vibrant, open discussion that enables us to create amazing products and turn great ideas into action."

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/11/06/0120243/google-ceo-forbids-political-talk-after-firing-28-over-israeli-contract-protest?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/11/06/0120243/google-ceo-forbids-political-talk-after-firing-28-over-israeli-contract-protest?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


Google Asked To Remove 10 Billion 'Pirate' Search Results

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Rightsholders have asked Google to remove more than 10 billion 'copyright infringing' URLs from its search results. The search engine doesn't celebrate the milestone in any way, but the takedown notices document intriguing shifts in volume over time, as well as shifting takedown interests. [...] The path to 10 billion was turbulent. When Google first made DMCA details public it was processing a few million DMCA takedown requests in a year. That number swiftly increased to hundreds of millions and eventually reached a billion DMCA requests in 2016.

The exponential growth curve eventually flattened out and around 2017, the takedown volume started to decline. The decrease was in part due to various anti-piracy algorithms making pirated content less visible in search results. By downranking pirate sites, infringing content became harder to find. As a result, Google processed fewer takedown notices, a welcome change for both rightsholders and the search engine. Today, Google continues to make pirate sites less visible in search, but the reduction in takedown notices didn't last. On the contrary, over the past several months, Google search processed a record number of DMCA notices.

Last summer, the search giant recorded the 7 billionth takedown request and after that the numbers shot up, adding billions more in the year that followed. The company is now handling removal requests at a rate of roughly 2.5 billion per year; a new record. This represents more than 50 million takedown requests per week and roughly 5,000 every minute. [...] While the 10 billionth reported URL is undoubtedly a milestone, this number is largely driven by a few rightsholders, reporting outfits, and domain names. The aforementioned takedown outfit Link-Busters, for example, accounts for roughly 15% of all reported links, nearly 1.5 billion. Similarly, the ten most prolific rightsholders, including the BPI, HarperCollins, and VIZ Media, are responsible for 40% of all reported links. These ten companies are only a tiny fraction of the 600,000 rightsholders that reported pirated links, however. A small group of domains also receives a disproportionate amount of attention. In total, 5,400,061 domains have been reported, with the top domains having dozens of millions of flagged URLs each. However, most domains have only a few flagged links, some of which are erroneous.

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/24/11/05/2059252/google-asked-to-remove-10-billion-pirate-search-results?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/24/11/05/2059252/google-asked-to-remove-10-billion-pirate-search-results?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


Amazon CEO Denies Full In-Office Mandate is 'Backdoor Layoff'

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said at an all-hands meeting on Tuesday that the plan to require employees to be in-office five days per week is not meant to force attrition or satisfy city leaders, as many employees have suggested. Reuters: The controversial plan mandating workers come to Amazon offices every day starting next year, up from three days now, has caused consternation among employees who say it is stricter than other tech companies and will hinder efficiency because of commuting times. Workers who are consistently not in compliance have been told they will be "voluntarily resigning" and locked out of company computers.

"A number of people I've seen theorized that the reason we were doing this is, it's a backdoor layoff, or we made some sort of deal with city or cities," said Jassy, according to a transcript of the meeting reviewed by Reuters. "I can tell you both of those are not true. You know, this was not a cost play for us. This is very much about our culture and strengthening our culture," he said.

https://slashdot.org/story/24/11/05/2224228/amazon-ceo-denies-full-in-office-mandate-is-backdoor-layoff?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://slashdot.org/story/24/11/05/2224228/amazon-ceo-denies-full-in-office-mandate-is-backdoor-layoff?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


The Hyperloop Lives On As a 1/12th Scale Model In Switzerland

Last December, Hyperloop One, the futuristic transportation company pursuing Elon Musk's dream of tube-based, airplane-speed travel, announced its shutdown. However, the concept itself has found a new lease on life in a scaled-down version overseas. According to The Verge's Andrew J. Hawkins, "The hyperloop, in fact, lives on -- as a 1/12th scale model in Switzerland." From the report: Sure, this isn't exactly the full realization of Musk's 2013 white paper, in which he theorized that aerodynamic aluminum capsules filled with passengers or cargo could be propelled through a nearly airless tube at speeds of up to 760mph. These tubes, either raised on pylons or sunk beneath the earth, could be built either within or between cities. Musk called it a "fifth mode of transportation" and argued it could help change the way we live, work, trade, and travel. The idea is being put to the test in Lausanne, Switzerland, where a 120-meter circular test track is being operated by a team that includes the Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), the School of Business and Engineering Vaud (HEIG-VD), and Swisspod Technologies. This week, the group announced that it had conducted "the longest" hyperloop test of its kind: traveling 11.8 km (7.3 miles) at a speed of 40.7km/h (25.3mph).

The circular test track has a circumference of 125.6 meters (412 feet) and a diameter of 40 centimeters (15.7 inches). It sounds modest, but the group claims that in a full-scale system, their test "directly translates" to a journey of 141.6 km (88 miles), which is about the distance between Geneva and Bern, or San Francisco to Sacramento, and speeds of up to 488.2 km/h (303.4mph). The project is called LIMITLESS, which stands for Linear Induction Motor Drive for Traction and Levitation in Sustainable Hyperloop Systems. During the test, the team "monitored the performance of vital subsystems," including propulsion, communication infrastructure, power electronics, and thermal management. They assessed "energy consumption, thrust variations, [linear induction motor] response, and control during acceleration, cruising, coasting, and braking scenarios."

Of course, a 1/12th-scale circular test track is hardly a sign that the hyperloop is alive and well. Most of the startups and companies pursuing a full-scale hyperloop have shut down, victims of financial mismanagement, as well as infrastructure and regulatory hurdles. Critics said that while the hyperloop may be technically feasible, it still only amounts to vaporware. It's been called a "utopian vision" that would be financially impossible to achieve. But the Swiss team is undeterred, promising to conduct a battery of future tests to further validate the system. Swisspod CEO Denis Tudor said the group plans to test its first freight product soon, and is currently building a larger test track in the US. "This is a key step toward making hyperloop for passengers a reality and changing how we connect, work, and live," he said.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/11/05/2217233/the-hyperloop-lives-on-as-a-112th-scale-model-in-switzerland?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/11/05/2217233/the-hyperloop-lives-on-as-a-112th-scale-model-in-switzerland?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


Interpol Disrupts Cybercrime Activity On 22,000 IP Addresses, Arrests 41

During an operation across 95 countries from April to August 2024, Interpol arrested 41 individuals and dismantled over 1,000 servers and infrastructure running on 22,000 IP addresses facilitating cybercrime. BleepingComputer reports: Interpol said its enforcement action was backed by intelligence provided by private cybersecurity firms like Group-IB, Kaspersky, Trend Micro, and Team Cymru, leading to the identification of over 30,000 suspicious IP addresses. Eventually, roughly 76% of those were taken down, 59 servers were seized, and 43 electronic devices were confiscated, which will be examined to retrieve additional evidence. In addition to the 41 individuals who were arrested, the authorities are also investigating another 65 persons suspected of associating with illicit activities.

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/24/11/05/2211252/interpol-disrupts-cybercrime-activity-on-22000-ip-addresses-arrests-41?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/24/11/05/2211252/interpol-disrupts-cybercrime-activity-on-22000-ip-addresses-arrests-41?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


Russian Email Domains Target US Polling Sites with Bomb Threats, FBI Says

The FBI warned on Tuesday that polling stations across multiple U.S. states received fake bomb threats sent from Russian email domains, forcing brief evacuations at two voting sites in Georgia's Fulton County.

The threats, which targeted locations in Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin, have not been deemed credible, the FBI said in a statement. The evacuated Fulton County sites reopened after 30 minutes, prompting local officials to seek extended voting hours beyond the 7 p.m. ET deadline.

The incidents follow Friday's joint intelligence warning from the FBI, ODNI, and CISA about Russian-created fake videos aimed at undermining election integrity. The agencies also reported Russian actors are spreading false claims about planned election fraud by U.S. officials.

https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/11/05/2238205/russian-email-domains-target-us-polling-sites-with-bomb-threats-fbi-says?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/11/05/2238205/russian-email-domains-target-us-polling-sites-with-bomb-threats-fbi-says?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


Amazon Starts Drone Deliveries In Arizona

Amazon is launching drone deliveries from its Tolleson, AZ, same-day delivery site, making over 50,000 essentials available to eligible customers in the West Valley Phoenix area. The Verge reports: The news came after Amazon announced it was shutting down its testing zone location in Lockeford, California. The new Tolleson location integrates drone deliveries into Amazon's delivery network for the first time, and the drones will deploy right next to the fulfillment center. Amazon is using its latest MK30 drones that can carry up to 5 pounds while also flying "twice as far" and running "50 percent quieter" than its previous models that sometimes crashed and burned in testing.

Amazon will launch the drones from its hybrid facility. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has approved Amazon's drones for Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS), meaning they can be flown out of visual range from the operator. The company claims it's the first to launch both a new facility and BVLOS drone service that meets FAA requirements.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/11/05/2054203/amazon-starts-drone-deliveries-in-arizona?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/11/05/2054203/amazon-starts-drone-deliveries-in-arizona?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


World's First Wood-Paneled Satellite Launched Into Space

SpaceX has launched the world's first wood-paneled satellite into space "to test the suitability of timber as a renewable building material in future exploration of destinations like the Moon and Mars," reports the BBC. From the report: Made by researchers in Japan, the tiny satellite weighing just 900g is heading for the International Space Station on a SpaceX mission. It will then be released into orbit above the Earth. Named LignoSat, after the Latin word for wood, its panels have been built from a type of magnolia tree, using a traditional technique without screws or glue. Researchers at Kyoto University who developed it hope it may be possible in the future to replace some metals used in space exploration with wood.

"Wood is more durable in space than on Earth because there's no water or oxygen that would rot or inflame it," Kyoto University forest science professor Koji Murata told Reuters news agency. "Early 1900s airplanes were made of wood," Prof Murata said. "A wooden satellite should be feasible, too." If trees could one day be planted on the Moon or Mars, wood might also provide material for colonies in space in the future, the researchers hope. Along with its wood panels, LignoSat also incorporates traditional aluminium structures and electronic components. It has sensors on board to monitor how its wood reacts to the extreme environment of space during the six months it will orbit the Earth. You can watch the launch on YouTube.

https://science.slashdot.org/story/24/11/05/2047247/worlds-first-wood-paneled-satellite-launched-into-space?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://science.slashdot.org/story/24/11/05/2047247/worlds-first-wood-paneled-satellite-launched-into-space?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


Oil Giant BP is Killing 18 Hydrogen Projects, Chilling the Nascent Industry

An anonymous reader shares a report: Tucked inside a 32-page earnings report, oil and gas giant BP revealed it was killing 18 early-stage hydrogen projects, a move that could have a chilling effect on the nascent hydrogen industry. The decision, along with the sale of the company's U.S. on-shore wind power operations, will save BP $200 million annually and help boost its bottom line. The hydrogen industry, which has relied on oil and gas companies both financially and through lobbying efforts, is preparing for a grimmer outcome.

BP has been a supporter of hydrogen. The company's venture capital arm has invested in several green hydrogen startups, including Electric Hydrogen and Advanced Ionics. Earlier this year, BP said it would develop "more than 10" hydrogen projects in the U.S., Europe, and Australia. Now, BP is scaling back those plans, saying it'll develop between five and ten projects. The company is keeping quiet about which ones will receive the green light.

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/24/11/05/1841248/oil-giant-bp-is-killing-18-hydrogen-projects-chilling-the-nascent-industry?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/24/11/05/1841248/oil-giant-bp-is-killing-18-hydrogen-projects-chilling-the-nascent-industry?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


AMD Overtakes Intel in Datacenter Sales For First Time

AMD has surpassed Intel in datacenter processor sales for the first time in history, marking a dramatic shift in the server chip market. AMD's datacenter revenue hit $3.549 billion in Q3, edging out Intel's $3.3 billion, according to SemiAnalysis.

The milestone ends Intel's decades-long dominance in server processors, where it held over 90% market share until recent years. AMD's EPYC processors now power many high-end servers, commanding premium prices despite selling at lower costs than comparable Intel chips.

https://slashdot.org/story/24/11/05/1818222/amd-overtakes-intel-in-datacenter-sales-for-first-time?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://slashdot.org/story/24/11/05/1818222/amd-overtakes-intel-in-datacenter-sales-for-first-time?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


Meta Permits Its AI Models To Be Used For US Military Purposes

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Meta will allow U.S. government agencies and contractors working on national security to use its artificial intelligence models for military purposes, the company said on Monday, in a shift from its policy that prohibited the use of its technology for such efforts. Meta said that it would make its A.I. models, called Llama, available to federal agencies and that it was working with defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin and Booz Allen as well as defense-focused tech companies including Palantir and Anduril. The Llama models are "open source," which means the technology can be freely copied and distributed by other developers, companies and governments.

Meta's move is an exception to its "acceptable use policy," which forbade the use of the company's A.I. software for "military, warfare, nuclear industries," among other purposes. In a blog post on Monday, Nick Clegg, Meta's president of global affairs, said the company now backed "responsible and ethical uses" of the technology that supported the United States and "democratic values" in a global race for A.I. supremacy. "Meta wants to play its part to support the safety, security and economic prosperity of America -- and of its closest allies too," Mr. Clegg wrote. He added that "widespread adoption of American open source A.I. models serves both economic and security interests." The company said it would also share its technology with members of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance: Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand in addition to the United States.

https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/11/05/043209/meta-permits-its-ai-models-to-be-used-for-us-military-purposes?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/11/05/043209/meta-permits-its-ai-models-to-be-used-for-us-military-purposes?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


Researchers Spot Black Hole Eating Stuff At Over 40x the Theoretical Limit

Astronomers have discovered a supermassive black hole in the early Universe devouring matter at over 40 times the Eddington limit. ScienceAlert reports: Led by astronomer Hyewon Suh of Gemini Observatory and NSF's NOIRLab, a team of researchers used JWST to take follow-up observations of a smattering of galaxies identified by the Chandra X-ray Observatory that were bright in X-rays but dim in other wavelengths. When they got to LID-568, they were having trouble identifying its distance across space-time. The galaxy was very faint and very hard to see; but, using the integral field spectrograph on JWST's NIRSpec instrument, the team homed in on the galaxy's exact position. LID-568's far-off location is surprising. Although the object is faint from our position in the Universe, its distance means it must be incredibly intrinsically bright. Detailed observations revealed powerful outflows from the supermassive black hole, a signature of accretion as some of the material is being diverted and blasted into space.

A painstaking analysis of the data revealed that the supermassive black hole is a relatively small one, as supermassive black holes go; just 7.2 million times the mass of the Sun. And the amount of light being produced by the material around the disk was much, much higher than a black hole of this mass should be capable of producing. It suggests an accretion rate some 40 times higher than the Eddington limit. At this rate, the period of super-Eddington accretion should be extremely brief, which means Suh and her team were extremely lucky to catch it in action. And we expect that LID-568 will become a popular observation target for black hole scientists, allowing us a rare glimpse into super-Eddington processes. The research has been published in Nature Astronomy.

https://science.slashdot.org/story/24/11/05/0352224/researchers-spot-black-hole-eating-stuff-at-over-40x-the-theoretical-limit?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://science.slashdot.org/story/24/11/05/0352224/researchers-spot-black-hole-eating-stuff-at-over-40x-the-theoretical-limit?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


Sweden Scraps Plans For 13 Offshore Windfarms Over Russia Security Fears

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Sweden has vetoed plans for 13 offshore windfarms in the Baltic Sea, citing unacceptable security risks. The country's defence minister, Pal Jonson, said on Monday that the government had rejected plans for all but one of 14 windfarms planned along the east coast. The decision comes after the Swedish armed forces concluded last week that the projects would make it more difficult to defend Nato's newest member.

The proposed windfarms would have been located between Aland, the autonomous Finnish region between Sweden and Finland, and the Sound, the strait between southern Sweden and Denmark. The Russian exclave of Kaliningrad is only about 310 miles (500km) from Stockholm. Wind power could affect Sweden's defence capabilities across sensors and radars and make it harder to detect submarines and possible attacks from the air if war broke out, Jonson said. The only project to receive the green light to was Poseidon, which will include as many as 81 wind turbines to produce 5.5 terawatt hours a year off Stenungsund on Sweden's west coast. "Both ballistic robots and also cruise robots are a big problem if you have offshore wind power," Jonson said. "If you have a strong signal detection capability and a radar system that is important, we use the Patriot system for example, there would be negative consequences if there were offshore wind power in the way of the sensors."

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/24/11/05/0011207/sweden-scraps-plans-for-13-offshore-windfarms-over-russia-security-fears?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/24/11/05/0011207/sweden-scraps-plans-for-13-offshore-windfarms-over-russia-security-fears?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


Netflix Is Removing Nearly All of Its Interactive Titles

According to The Verge, Netflix plans to delist almost all of its interactive shows and films as of December 1st. Only four of the 24 interactive titles will remain: Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy vs. the Reverend, Ranveer vs. Wild with Bear Grylls, and You vs. Wild. From the report: The removal of the titles marks a disappointing conclusion to Netflix's earliest efforts into interactive content. The company first launched the interactive titles in 2017 with Puss in Book: Trapped in an Epic Tale, and I remember being wowed (and horrified) by paths in Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. In addition to specials based on franchises like Carmen Sandiego and Boss Baby, Netflix also tried ideas like a daily trivia series and a trivia game you could play with a friend. But the relatively few titles available suggests the format wasn't much of a hit -- Puss in Book has apparently been gone for a while. "The technology served its purpose, but is now limiting as we focus on technological efforts in other areas," spokesperson Chrissy Kelleher says.

https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/24/11/05/000250/netflix-is-removing-nearly-all-of-its-interactive-titles?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/24/11/05/000250/netflix-is-removing-nearly-all-of-its-interactive-titles?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


Robinhood and Kraken Launch New Global Stablecoin Network With Paxos' USDG

Leading fintech and digital asset firms, including Robinhood, Kraken and Galaxy Digital, have introduced a joint stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar. Called the Global Dollar Network, it seeks to enhance the stablecoin market by lowering transaction costs, boosting consumer protections, and facilitating cross-border transactions with rewards for institutional participants. Crypto Briefing reports: The network will utilize Paxos's new stablecoin, the Global Dollar (USDG), which complies with the Monetary Authority of Singapore's upcoming stablecoin framework. USDG is designed to return yield on reserve assets to participants who contribute to its adoption, encouraging the development of crypto and financial solutions using the token. The Global Dollar Network aims to address shortcomings in the stablecoin market, such as high transaction costs and limited consumer protections.

The network has opened an invite-only phase for select custodians, exchanges, payment processors, merchants, and banks to develop new solutions using USDG. Initial distribution is available on Anchorage Digital, Galaxy Digital, Kraken, and Paxos platforms, with plans to expand access through additional partners in the coming months.

https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/11/04/2356230/robinhood-and-kraken-launch-new-global-stablecoin-network-with-paxos-usdg?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/11/04/2356230/robinhood-and-kraken-launch-new-global-stablecoin-network-with-paxos-usdg?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


Prime Video Will Let You Summon AI To Recap What You're Watching

Amazon's Prime Video has introduced "X-Ray Recaps," a generative AI feature that will recap what you're watching. The new tool can create text summaries of "full seasons of TV shows, single episodes, and even pieces of episodes," the company says in a blog post. The Verge reports: X-Ray Recaps will be accessible from the detail page of a show or in X-Ray while you're watching something. The tool "analyzes various video segments, combined with subtitles or dialogue, to generate detailed descriptions of key events, places, times, and conversations," Amazon says. Amazon has also applied "guardrails" to help the feature avoid sharing spoilers and to keep summaries concise.

X-Ray Recaps, which is are beta, are coming to Fire TV devices starting today, with support for "additional devices" available by the end of this year, Amazon says. The feature, at launch, will work with all Amazon MGM Studios Original series.

https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/24/11/04/2148215/prime-video-will-let-you-summon-ai-to-recap-what-youre-watching?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/24/11/04/2148215/prime-video-will-let-you-summon-ai-to-recap-what-youre-watching?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


FFmpeg Devs Boast of Up To 94x Performance Boost After Implementing Handwritten AVX-512 Assembly Code

Anton Shilov reports via Tom's Hardware: FFmpeg is an open-source video decoding project developed by volunteers who contribute to its codebase, fix bugs, and add new features. The project is led by a small group of core developers and maintainers who oversee its direction and ensure that contributions meet certain standards. They coordinate the project's development and release cycles, merging contributions from other developers. This group of developers tried to implement a handwritten AVX512 assembly code path, something that has rarely been done before, at least not in the video industry.

The developers have created an optimized code path using the AVX-512 instruction set to accelerate specific functions within the FFmpeg multimedia processing library. By leveraging AVX-512, they were able to achieve significant performance improvements -- from three to 94 times faster -- compared to standard implementations. AVX-512 enables processing large chunks of data in parallel using 512-bit registers, which can handle up to 16 single-precision FLOPS or 8 double-precision FLOPS in one operation. This optimization is ideal for compute-heavy tasks in general, but in the case of video and image processing in particular.

The benchmarking results show that the new handwritten AVX-512 code path performs considerably faster than other implementations, including baseline C code and lower SIMD instruction sets like AVX2 and SSSE3. In some cases, the revamped AVX-512 codepath achieves a speedup of nearly 94 times over the baseline, highlighting the efficiency of hand-optimized assembly code for AVX-512.

https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/11/04/2140206/ffmpeg-devs-boast-of-up-to-94x-performance-boost-after-implementing-handwritten-avx-512-assembly-code?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/11/04/2140206/ffmpeg-devs-boast-of-up-to-94x-performance-boost-after-implementing-handwritten-avx-512-assembly-code?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


Inside the Massive Crime Industry That's Hacking Billion-Dollar Companies

Cybercriminals have breached dozens of major companies including AT&T, Ticketmaster and Hot Topic by exploiting "infostealer" malware that harvests login credentials from infected computers, an investigation has found. The malware, spread through pirated software and social media, has infected 250,000 new devices daily, according to cybersecurity firm Recorded Future. Russian developers create the malware while contractors distribute it globally, deliberately avoiding former Soviet states. Hot Topic suffered potentially the largest retail hack ever in October when attackers accessed 350 million customer records using stolen developer credentials. Google and Microsoft are racing to patch vulnerabilities, but malware makers quickly adapt to new security measures.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/11/04/1815206/inside-the-massive-crime-industry-thats-hacking-billion-dollar-companies?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/11/04/1815206/inside-the-massive-crime-industry-thats-hacking-billion-dollar-companies?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


Google, Apple Drive 'Black Box' IP Policing with App Store Rules

App developers Musi and Sarafan Mobile have sued Apple and Google in California federal court over app removals they claim were unjustified, highlighting tensions over the tech giants' intellectual property enforcement policies. Musi's music-streaming app was removed after YouTube complained about interface infringement, while Sarafan's "Reely" app was taken down following Instagram's claims about logo similarity.

Both developers say the platforms breached their agreements by removing apps without sufficient evidence. The lawsuits underscore broader concerns about Apple and Google's dominance in app distribution. Their private IP dispute systems operate outside traditional legal frameworks, with platforms making unilateral decisions that can effectively shut down businesses, according to University of New Hampshire law professor Peter Karol.

https://apple.slashdot.org/story/24/11/04/1734211/google-apple-drive-black-box-ip-policing-with-app-store-rules?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://apple.slashdot.org/story/24/11/04/1734211/google-apple-drive-black-box-ip-policing-with-app-store-rules?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


Governments Stress Links Between Climate and Nature Collapse

An anonymous reader shares a report: As world leaders gathered in Colombia this week, they also watched for news from home, where many of the headlines carried the catastrophic consequences of ecological breakdown. Across the Amazon rainforest and Brazil's enormous wetlands, relentless fires had burned more than 22m hectares (55m acres). In Spain, the death toll in communities devastated by flooding passed 200. In the boreal forests that span Siberia, Scandinavia, Alaska and Canada, countries were recording alarming signs that their carbon sinks were collapsing under a combined weight of drought, tree death and logging. As Canada's wildfire season crept to a close, scientists calculated it was the second worst in two decades -- behind only last year's burn, which released more carbon than some of the world's largest emitting countries.

In global negotiations, climate and nature move along two independent tracks, and for years were broadly treated as distinct challenges. But as negotiations closed at the Cop16 biodiversity summit in Cali on Saturday, ministers from around the world underscored the crucial importance of nature to limiting damage from global heating, and vice versa -- emphasising that climate and biodiversity could no longer be treated as independent issues if either crisis was to be resolved. Countries agreed a text on links between the climate and nature, but failed to include language on a phase out of fossil fuels.

The UK environment secretary, Steve Reed, said that attending the summit in Colombia had brought home the links between climate and biodiversity. "One of the other things that's really struck me coming here and speaking to the Colombians in particular is how for them the nature crisis and the climate crisis are exactly the same thing. In the UK, perhaps more widely in the global north, we tend to talk a lot about climate and particularly net zero, and much less about nature -- perhaps because we're already more nature-depleted. But those two things connect entirely," he said. The Cop16 president, Susana Muhamad, Colombia's environment minister, has sought to put nature on a level with global efforts to decarbonise the world economy during the summit, warning that slashes to greenhouse gas emissions must be accompanied by the protection and restoration of the natural world if they are to be effective. Her presidency has repeatedly described nature and climate as "two sides of the same coin."

https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/11/04/1525243/governments-stress-links-between-climate-and-nature-collapse?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/11/04/1525243/governments-stress-links-between-climate-and-nature-collapse?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


Apple Delays Cut-price Vision Headset Until 2027, Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo Says

Apple has scrapped plans for a budget mixed-reality headset initially slated for 2025, pushing the launch to 2027, according to supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. The company will instead focus on releasing an upgraded Vision Pro next year featuring its M5 chip and enhanced AI capabilities, he said. The canceled lower-cost model would have stripped features like EyeSight and used cheaper components to target mainstream consumers.

https://apple.slashdot.org/story/24/11/04/1444210/apple-delays-cut-price-vision-headset-until-2027-analyst-ming-chi-kuo-says?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://apple.slashdot.org/story/24/11/04/1444210/apple-delays-cut-price-vision-headset-until-2027-analyst-ming-chi-kuo-says?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


Meta's Plan For Nuclear-Powered AI Data Centre Thwarted By Rare Bees

An anonymous reader shares a report: Plans by Mark Zuckerberg's Meta to build an AI data centre in the US that runs on nuclear power were thwarted in part because a rare species of bee was discovered on land earmarked for the project, according to people familiar with the matter.

Zuckerberg had planned to strike a deal with an existing nuclear power plant operator to provide emissions-free electricity for a new data centre supporting his artificial intelligence ambitions. However, the potential deal faced multiple complications including environmental and regulatory challenges, these people said.

The discovery of the rare bee species on a location next to the plant where the data centre was to be built would have complicated the project, Zuckerberg told a Meta all-hands meeting last week, according to two people familiar with the meeting.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/11/04/1356218/metas-plan-for-nuclear-powered-ai-data-centre-thwarted-by-rare-bees?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/11/04/1356218/metas-plan-for-nuclear-powered-ai-data-centre-thwarted-by-rare-bees?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


New 'Open Source AI Definition' Criticized for Not Opening Training Data

Long-time Slashdot reader samj — also a long-time Debian developer — tells us there's some opposition to the newly-released Open Source AI definition. He calls it a "fork" that undermines the original Open Source definition (which was originally derived from Debian's Free Software Guidelines, written primarily by Bruce Perens), and points us to a new domain with a petition declaring that instead Open Source shall be defined "solely by the Open Source Definition version 1.9. Any amendments or new definitions shall only be recognized with clear community consensus via an open and transparent process."

This move follows some discussion on the Debian mailing list:

Allowing "Open Source AI" to hide their training data is nothing but setting up a "data barrier" protecting the monopoly, disabling anybody other than the first party to reproduce or replicate an AI. Once passed, OSI is making a historical mistake towards the FOSS ecosystem.

They're not the only ones worried about data. This week TechCrunch noted an August study which "found that many 'open source' models are basically open source in name only. The data required to train the models is kept secret, the compute power needed to run them is beyond the reach of many developers, and the techniques to fine-tune them are intimidatingly complex. Instead of democratizing AI, these 'open source' projects tend to entrench and expand centralized power, the study's authors concluded."

samj shares the concern about training data, arguing that training data is the source code and that this new definition has real-world consequences. (On a personal note, he says it "poses an existential threat to our pAI-OS project at the non-profit Kwaai Open Source Lab I volunteer at, so we've been very active in pushing back past few weeks.")

And he also came up with a detailed response by asking ChatGPT. What would be the implications of a Debian disavowing the OSI's Open Source AI definition? ChatGPT composed a 7-point, 14-paragraph response, concluding that this level of opposition would "create challenges for AI developers regarding licensing. It might also lead to a fragmentation of the open-source community into factions with differing views on how AI should be governed under open-source rules." But "Ultimately, it could spur the creation of alternative definitions or movements aimed at maintaining stricter adherence to the traditional tenets of software freedom in the AI age."

However the official FAQ for the new Open Source AI definition argues that training data "does not equate to a software source code."

Training data is important to study modern machine learning systems. But it is not what AI researchers and practitioners necessarily use as part of the preferred form for making modifications to a trained model.... [F]orks could include removing non-public or non-open data from the training dataset, in order to train a new Open Source AI system on fully public or open data...

[W]e want Open Source AI to exist also in fields where data cannot be legally shared, for example medical AI. Laws that permit training on data often limit the resharing of that same data to protect copyright or other interests. Privacy rules also give a person the rightful ability to control their most sensitive information — like decisions about their health. Similarly, much of the world's Indigenous knowledge is protected through mechanisms that are not compatible with later-developed frameworks for rights exclusivity and sharing.

 Read on for the rest of their response...

https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/11/03/0257241/new-open-source-ai-definition-criticized-for-not-opening-training-data?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/11/03/0257241/new-open-source-ai-definition-criticized-for-not-opening-training-data?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


Invisible, Super Stretchy Nanofibers Discovered In Natural Spider Silk

Long-time Slashdot reader yet-another-lobbyist writes: Phys.org has an article on the recent discovery of super stretchy nanofibers in natural spider silk! The thinnest natural spider silk nanofibrils ever seen are only a few molecular layers thin, about 5 nm. They are too thin to be seen even with a very powerful optical microscope. Researchers used atomic force microscopy (AFM) not only to visualize them, but also to probe their stretchiness and strength.
Even the original article is available without a paywall. Mechanical tests of molecularly thin materials — pretty cool!

The doctoral candidate's advisor thought it would be impossible to perform the measurements, according to the article, which quotes him as saying "It's actually kind of crazy to think that it's even possible.... We humans think we're so great and we can invent things, but if you just take a step outside, you find so many things that are more exciting."
That advisor — long term spider-silk researcher of Hannes Schniepp (also a co-author on the paper) — adds that the tip of the needle was so sharp, its end was only a few atoms thick. "You would not see the end of it in the best optical microscope. It will just disappear because it's so small that you can't even see it. It's probably one of the highest developed technologies on the planet."

If humans find a way to replicate the structure of spider silk, it could be manufactured for use in practical applications. "You could make a super bungee cord from it," said Schniepp. "Or a shield around a structure where you have something incoming at high velocity and you need to absorb a lot of energy. Things like that."

https://science.slashdot.org/story/24/11/02/2333223/invisible-super-stretchy-nanofibers-discovered-in-natural-spider-silk?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://science.slashdot.org/story/24/11/02/2333223/invisible-super-stretchy-nanofibers-discovered-in-natural-spider-silk?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


Can Heat Pumps Still Save the Planet from Climate Change?

"One technology critical to fighting climate change is lagging," reports the Washington Post, "thanks to a combination of high interest rates, rising costs, misinformation and the cycle of home construction. Adoption of heat pumps, one of the primary ways to cut emissions from buildings, has slowed in the United States and stalled in Europe, endangering the switch to clean energy.

"Heat pump investment in the United States has dropped by 4 percent in the past two years, even as sales of EVs have almost doubled, according to data from MIT and the Rhodium Group. In 13 European countries, heat pump sales dropped nearly in half in the first half of 2024, putting the European Union off-track for its climate goals."

"Many many markets are falling," said Paul Kenny, the director general of the European Heat Pump Association. "It takes time to change people's minds about a heating system." Heat pumps — essentially air conditioners that can also work in reverse, heating a space as well as cooling it — are crucial to making buildings more climate-friendly. Around 60 percent of American homes are still heated with furnaces running on oil, natural gas, or even propane; to cut emissions from homes, all American houses and apartments will need to be powered by electricity...

In the United States, experts point to lags in construction, high interest rates, and general belt-tightening from inflation... [Cora Wyent, director of research for the electrification advocacy group Rewiring America] added, heat pumps are still growing as a share of overall heating systems, gaining ground on gas furnaces. In 2023, heat pumps made up 55 percent of all heating systems sold, while gas furnaces made up just 45 percent. "Heat pumps are continuing to increase their total market share," she said.
Homeowners may also run into trouble when trying to find contractors to install heat pumps. Barton James, the president and CEO of the Air Conditioning Contractors of America, says many contractors don't have training on how to properly install heat pumps; if they install them incorrectly, the ensuing problems can sour consumers on the technology... In the United States, low gas prices also make the economics of heat pumps more challenging. Gas is around three times cheaper than electricity — while heat pumps make up most of that ground with efficiency, they aren't the most cost-effective option for every household.

The Post also spoke to the manager for the carbon-free buildings team at the clean energy think tank RMI. They pointed out that heating systems need to be replaced roughly every 15 years — and the next cycle doesn't start until 2035.

The article concludes that "even with government policies and subsidies, many parts of the move to clean energy will require individual people to make changes to their lives. According to the International Energy Agency, the number of heat pumps will have to triple by 2030 to stay on track with climate goals. The only way to do that, experts say, is if incentives, personal beliefs, and technology all align."

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/24/11/02/198243/can-heat-pumps-still-save-the-planet-from-climate-change?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/24/11/02/198243/can-heat-pumps-still-save-the-planet-from-climate-change?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


The 'Passive Housing' Trend is Booming

The Washington Post reports that a former Etsy CEO remodeled their home into what's known as a passive house. It's "designed to be as energy efficient as possible, typically with top-notch insulation and a perfect seal that prevents outside air from penetrating the home; air flows in and out through filtration and exhaust systems only."

Their benefits include protection from pollution and pollen, noise insulation and a stable indoor temperature that minimizes energy needs. That translates to long-term savings on heating and cooling.

While the concept has been around for about 50 years, experts say that the United States is on the cusp of a passive house boom, driven by lowered costs, state-level energy code changes and a general greater awareness of — and desire for — more sustainable housing... Massachusetts — which alongside New York and Pennsylvania is one of the leading states in passive house adoption — has 272 passive house projects underway thanks to an incentive program, says Zack Semke [the director of the Passive House Accelerator, a group of industry professionals who aim to spread lessons in passive house building]. Consumer demand for passive houses is also increasing, says Michael Ingui, an architect in New York City and the founder of the Passive House Accelerator... The need to lower our energy footprint is so much more top-of-mind today than it was 10 years ago, Ingui says, and covid taught us about the importance of good ventilation and filtered fresh air. "People are searching for the healthiest house," he says, "and that's a passive house...."

These days, new passive houses are usually large, multifamily apartment buildings or high-end single-family homes. But that leaves out a large swath of homeowners in the middle. To widen passive house accessibility to include all types of people and their housing needs, we need better energy codes and even more policies and incentives, says In Cho, a sustainability architect, educator and a co-founder of the nonprofit Passive House for Everyone! Passive houses "can and should serve folks from all socioeconomic backgrounds," she says. Using a one-two punch of mandates for energy efficient buildings and greater awareness to the public, that increased demand for passive houses will lead to more supply, Cho says. And we're already seeing those changes in the market.

Take triple-pane windows, for example, which are higher performing and more insulating than their double-pane counterparts. Even just 10 to 20 years ago, the difference in price between the two was high enough to make triple-pane windows cost-prohibitive for a lot of people, Cho says. Over the years, as the benefits of higher performing windows became more well-known, and as cities and states changed their energy codes, more companies began producing better windows. Now they're basically at price parity, she says. If we keep pushing for greater awareness and further policy changes, it's possible that all of the components of passive house buildings could follow that trend.

"For large multifamily projects, we're already seeing price parity in some cases, Semke says...

"But as it stands, single-family passive houses are still likely to cost a margin more than non-passive houses, he says. This is because price parity is easier to achieve when working at larger scales, but also because many of the housing policies and incentives encouraging passive house buildings are geared toward these larger projects."

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/24/11/02/202229/the-passive-housing-trend-is-booming?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/24/11/02/202229/the-passive-housing-trend-is-booming?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


Don't Look Now, but GM's EV Sales Are on Fire

GM's president of global markets says their EV portfolio "is growing faster than the market," according to Investopedia, "because we have an all-electric vehicle for just about everybody, no matter what they like to drive."

The headline at Barrons? "Don't Look Now, but GM's EV Sales Are on Fire."

GM delivered almost 32,000 all-electric vehicles in the third quarter — a record — and up about 58% from a year earlier. The more affordable Chevy Equinox, which starts at about $35,000 before any federal tax credit, helped boost sales. GM delivered almost 10,000 of the new EVs, up from 1,013 in the second quarter, when they first went on sale.

EV penetration of total GM car sales was about almost 5%, up almost two percentage points year over year. EVs accounted for 19.4% of Cadillac sales, up about 11 percentage points year over year. Year to date, GM has delivered just over 70,000 all-electric cars.

GM originally planned to manufacture 200,000 EVs in 2024. That still looks aggressive, but the strong third-quarter showing makes 120,000 possible, which would be up almost 60% year over year — a respectable outcome. More important to investors than EV sales right now might be dealer inventories. GM said there were about 627,000 vehicles on dealer lots at the end of September. That's a little better than what Wolfe Research analyst Emmanuel Rosner expected. It indicates GM dealers have roughly 60 days worth of sales on their lots. That's a safe level. Lower dealer inventories reduce presure to reduce prices. They also reduce the need to cut production because dealer lots are full... GM expects to generate a full-year operating profit of about $14 billion.

Meanwhile, Stellantis "slashed its financial guidance recently, partly because it needs to dramatically reduce its U.S. inventories," according to the article. For example, its Jeep dealers ended August with roughly 122 days worth of sales on their lots, while its Dodge dealers "had almost 150 days of inventory."

And Investopedia argues that while GM's EV sales growth is "soaring," Ford's is showing "only modest gains."

[W]hile Ford's overall U.S. sales were 0.7% higher at 504,039, it had just a 12% gain in EVs to 23,509.3 In the second quarter, Ford's EV sales had soared 61% to 23,957. Sales growth was more than three times higher for Ford's hybrid models, with President of Ford Blue and Ford Customer Service Division Andrew Frick arguing that the company has "listened to customers to offer them vehicles with powertrains to meet their specific needs."
Ford is hoping to boost EV sales by offering buyers a free home charger and installation.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/11/02/2251208/dont-look-now-but-gms-ev-sales-are-on-fire?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/11/02/2251208/dont-look-now-but-gms-ev-sales-are-on-fire?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


Is AI-Driven 0-Day Detection Here?

"AI-driven 0-day detection is here," argues a new blog post from ZeroPath, makers of a GitHub app that "detects, verifies, and issues pull requests for security vulnerabilities in your code."

They write that AI-assisted security research "has been quietly advancing" since early 2023, when researchers at the DARPA and ARPA-H's Artificial Intelligence Cyber Challenge demonstrated the first practical applications of LLM-powered vulnerability detection — with new advances continuing. "Since July 2024, ZeroPath's tool has uncovered critical zero-day vulnerabilities — including remote code execution, authentication bypasses, and insecure direct object references — in popular AI platforms and open-source projects." And they ultimately identified security flaws in projects owned by Netflix, Salesforce, and Hulu by "taking a novel approach combining deep program analysis with adversarial AI agents for validation. Our methodology has uncovered numerous critical vulnerabilities in production systems, including several that traditional Static Application Security Testing tools were ill-equipped to find..."

TL;DR — most of these bugs are simple and could have been found with a code review from a security researcher or, in some cases, scanners. The historical issue, however, with automating the discovery of these bugs is that traditional SAST tools rely on pattern matching and predefined rules, and miss complex vulnerabilities that do not fit known patterns (i.e. business logic problems, broken authentication flaws, or non-traditional sinks such as from dependencies). They also generate a high rate of false positives.

The beauty of LLMs is that they can reduce ambiguity in most of the situations that caused scanners to be either unusable or produce few findings when mass-scanning open source repositories... To do this well, you need to combine deep program analysis with an adversarial agents that test the plausibility of vulnerabilties at each step. The solution ends up mirroring the traditional phases of a pentest — recon, analysis, exploitation (and remediation which is not mentioned in this post)...

AI-driven vulnerability detection is moving fast... What's intriguing is that many of these vulnerabilities are pretty straightforward — they could've been spotted with a solid code review or standard scanning tools. But conventional methods often miss them because they don't fit neatly into known patterns. That's where AI comes in, helping us catch issues that might slip through the cracks.
"Many vulnerabilities remain undisclosed due to ongoing remediation efforts or pending responsible disclosure processes," according to the blog post, which includes a pie chart showing the biggest categories of vulnerabilities found:

53%: Authorization flaws, including roken access control in API endpoints and unauthorized Redis access and configuration exposure. ("Impact: Unauthorized access, data leakage, and resource manipulation across tenant boundaries.")
26%: File operation issues, including directory traversal in configuration loading and unsafe file handling in upload features. ("Impact: Unauthorized file access, sensitive data exposure, and potential system compromise.")
16%: Code execution vulnerabilities, including command injection in file processing and unsanitized input in system commands. ("Impact: Remote code execution, system command execution, and potential full system compromise.")

The company's CIO/cofounder was "former Red Team at Tesla," according to the startup's profile at YCombinator, and earned over $100,000 as a bug-bounty hunter. (And another co-founded is a former Google security engineer.)

Thanks to Slashdot reader Mirnotoriety for sharing the article.

https://it.slashdot.org/story/24/11/02/2150233/is-ai-driven-0-day-detection-here?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://it.slashdot.org/story/24/11/02/2150233/is-ai-driven-0-day-detection-here?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


As Data Centers for AI Strain the Power Grid, Bills Rise for Everyday Customers

While Amazon, Google, and other companies build new data centers — sometimes for their AI projects — parts of America "are facing higher electric bills," reports the Washington Post:

The facilities' extraordinary demand for electricity to power and cool computers inside can drive up the price local utilities pay for energy and require significant improvements to electric grid transmission systems. As a result, costs have already begun going up for customers — or are about to in the near future, according to utility planning documents and energy industry analysts. Some regulators are concerned that the tech companies aren't paying their fair share, while leaving customers from homeowners to small businesses on the hook.

In Oregon, electric utilities are warning regulators that consumers need protections from rising rates caused by data centers. From Virginia to Ohio and South Carolina, companies are battling over the extent of their responsibility for increases, attempting to fend off anger from customers. In the Mid-Atlantic, the regional power grid's energy costs shot up dramatically, and data centers are cited as among root causes of rate increases of up to 20 percent expected in 2025...

The tech firms and several of the power companies serving them strongly deny they are burdening others. They say higher utility bills are paying for overdue improvements to the power grid that benefit all customers. In some cases, they said in response to criticism from consumer and business advocates that they are committed to covering additional costs. But regulators — and even some utilities — are growing skeptical.

A jarring example of fallout on consumers is playing out on the Mid-Atlantic regional power grid, called PJM Interconnection, which serves 13 states and D.C. The recent auction to secure power for the grid during periods of extreme weather and high demand resulted in an 800 percent jump in the price that the grid's member utilities had to pay. The impact will be felt by millions by the spring, according to public records. Power bills will increase as much as 20 percent for customers of a dozen utilities in Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and West Virginia, regulatory filings show. That includes households in the Baltimore area, where annual bills will increase an average of $192, said Maryland People's Counsel David Lapp, a state appointee who monitors utilities. The next auction, in 2025, could be more painful, Lapp said, leaving customers potentially "looking at increases of as much as $40 to $50 a month...."

Advocates cite another source of cost-shifting onto consumers: discounted rates that power companies and local government officials use to entice tech companies to build data centers... Google worked out a deal with Dominion Energy, blessed by regulators, to pay 6 cents per kilowatt hour for its power. That is less than half of what residential customers pay, as well as substantially less than is paid by businesses...

The article points out that in Pennsylvania, "Amazon's novel plan to fuel a data center from a reactor at the nearby Susquehanna nuclear plant is now in jeopardy, after regulators blocked it Friday. They cited potential impact on consumers as among their concerns. The plan threatens to leave other ratepayers stuck with a bill of $50 million to $140 million, according to testimony from [power utility] AEP and utility conglomerate Exelon."

And meanwhile, one Virginia retiree complained about a proposed $54 million transmission line and substation for an Amazon data center. "They are already making money hand over fist, and now they want us to pay for this?

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/24/11/02/0427238/as-data-centers-for-ai-strain-the-power-grid-bills-rise-for-everyday-customers?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/24/11/02/0427238/as-data-centers-for-ai-strain-the-power-grid-bills-rise-for-everyday-customers?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


NVIDIA Replaces Rival Chipmaker Intel on the Dow Jones Industrial Average

In 1896 the Dow Jones Industrial Average (or DJIA) was created as a kind of proxy indicator for the wider stock market. "A stock is typically added only if the company has an excellent reputation, demonstrates sustained growth and is of interest to a large number of investors," according to a source cited by Yahoo Finance. Its mix of stocks might be informally considered a sign of the times, since it's made up of 30 stocks that according to Wikipedia have been changed only 57 times over the last 128 years.

Wait — make that 58.... CNBC reports that NVIDIA is replacing Intel in the DJIA, "a shakeup to the blue-chip index that reflects the boom in AI and a major shift in the semiconductor industry."

Companies including Microsoft, Meta, Google and Amazon are purchasing Nvidia's GPUs, such as the H100, in massive quantities to build clusters of computers for their AI work. Nvidia's revenue has more than doubled in each of the past five quarters, and has at least tripled in three of them. The company has sginaled that demand for its next-generation AI GPU called Blackwell is "insane...."

While Nvidia has been soaring, Intel has been slumping. Long the dominant maker of PC chips, Intel has lost market share to Advanced Micro Devices and has made very little headway in AI. Intel shares have fallen by more than half this year as the company struggles with manufacturing challenges and new competition for its central processors. Intel said in a filing this week that the board's audit and finance committee approved cost and capital reduction activities, including lowering head count by 16,500 employees and reducing its real estate footprint. The job cuts were originally announced in August."

The DJIA will now include four of six tech companies worth $1 trillion — Apple, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Amazon (which joined in February, replacing the owners of the Walgreens pharmacy chain). The other two trillion-dollar tech companies (not included in the DJIA) are Meta and Alphabet.

Adding NVIDIA to the DJIA will ensure "more representative exposure to the semiconductors industry" within the average, the index's curators told the Washington Post.

And also leaving the DJIA is power-generation company AES (which according to CNBC had a power mix of 54% renewables, 27% natural gas, 17% coal). It will be replaced by Vistra, defined by Wikipedia as America's largest competitive power generator, "with a capacity of approximately 39GW powered by a diverse portfolio including natural gas, nuclear, solar, and battery energy storage facilities."
In the 2020 Forbes Global 2000, Vistra Energy was ranked as the 756th-largest public company in the world. The company owns the Moss Landing Power Plant in California which currently (2021) contains the largest battery energy storage system in the world (400-MW/1,600-MWh). As of 2020, the company was ranked as the highest CO2 emitter in the U.S.

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/24/11/02/0328233/nvidia-replaces-rival-chipmaker-intel-on-the-dow-jones-industrial-average?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/24/11/02/0328233/nvidia-replaces-rival-chipmaker-intel-on-the-dow-jones-industrial-average?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


PimEyes 'Made a Public Rolodex of Our Faces'. Should You Opt Out?

The free face-image search engine PimEyes "scans through billions of images from the internet and finds matches of your photo that could have appeared in a church bulletin or a wedding photographer's website," -us/news/technology/they-made-a-public-rolodex-of-our-faces-here-s-how-i-tried-to-get-out/ar-AA1tlpPuwrites a Washington Post columnist.

So to find and delete themselves from "the PimEyes searchable Rolodex of faces," they "recently handed over a selfie and a digital copy of my driver's license to a company I don't trust."
PimEyes says it empowers people to find their online images and try to get unwanted ones taken down. But PimEyes face searches are largely open to anyone with either good or malicious intent. People have used PimEyes to identify participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, and creeps have used it to publicize strangers' personal information from just their image.

The company offers an opt-out form to remove your face from PimEyes searches. I did it and resented spending time and providing even more personal information to remove myself from the PimEyes repository, which we didn't consent to be part of in the first place. The increasing ease of potentially identifying your name, work history, children's school, home address and other sensitive information from one photo shows the absurdity of America's largely unrestrained data-harvesting economy.
While PimEyes' CEO said they don't keep the information you provide to opt-out, "you give PimEyes at least one photo of yourself plus a digital copy of a passport or ID with personal details obscured..." according to the article. (PimEyes' confirmation email "said I might need to repeat the opt-out with more photos...")

Some digital privacy experts said it's worth opting out of PimEyes, even if it's imperfect, and that PimEyes probably legitimately needs a personal photo and proof of identity for the process. Others found it "absurd" to provide more information to PimEyes... or they weren't sure opting out was the best choice... Experts said the fundamental problem is how much information is harvested and accessible without your knowledge or consent from your phone, home speakers, your car and information-organizing middlemen like PimEyes and data brokers.
Nathan Freed Wessler, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney focused on privacy litigation, said laws need to change the assumption that companies can collect almost anything about you or your face unless you go through endless opt-outs. "These systems are scary and abusive," he said. "If they're going to exist, they should be based on an opt-in system."

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/24/11/02/055255/pimeyes-made-a-public-rolodex-of-our-faces-should-you-opt-out?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/24/11/02/055255/pimeyes-made-a-public-rolodex-of-our-faces-should-you-opt-out?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


How America's Export Controls Failed to Keep Cutting-Edge AI Chips from China's Huawei

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post:

A few weeks ago, analysts at a specialized technological lab put a microchip from China under a powerful microscope. Something didn't look right... The microscopic proof was there that a chunk of the electronic components from Chinese high-tech champion Huawei Technologies had been produced by the world's most advanced chipmaker, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.

That was a problem because two U.S. administrations in succession had taken actions to assure that didn't happen. The news of the breach of U.S. export controls, first reported in October by the tech news site the Information, has sent a wave of concern through Washington... The chips were routed to Huawei through Sophgo Technologies, the AI venture of a Chinese cryptocurrency billionaire, according to two people familiar with the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic... "It raises some fundamental questions about how well we can actually enforce these rules," said Emily Kilcrease, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington... Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs confirmed that TSMC recently halted shipments to a "certain customer" and notified the United States after suspecting that customer might have directed its products to Huawei...

There's been much intrigue in recent days in the industry over how the crypto billionaire's TSMC-made chips reportedly ended up at Huawei. Critics accuse Sophgo of working to help Huawei evade the export controls, but it is also possible that they were sold through an intermediary, which would align with Sophgo's denial of having any business relationship with Huawei... While export controls are often hard to enforce, semiconductors are especially hard to manage due to the large and open nature of the global chip trade. Since the Biden administration implemented sweeping controls in 2022, there have been reports of widespread chip smuggling and semiconductor black markets allowing Chinese companies to access necessary chips...

Paul Triolo, technology policy lead at Albright Stonebridge Group, said companies were trying to figure out what lengths they had to go to for due diligence: "The guidelines are murky."

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/24/11/02/0540218/how-americas-export-controls-failed-to-keep-cutting-edge-ai-chips-from-chinas-huawei?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/24/11/02/0540218/how-americas-export-controls-failed-to-keep-cutting-edge-ai-chips-from-chinas-huawei?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


Threads Soars to 275 Million Monthly Users, Says Zuckerberg

An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this report from CNBC:

Threads now has nearly 275 million monthly users, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday. "We continue to be on track towards this becoming our next major social app," Zuckerberg said on a call with analysts, adding that he was "quite pleased" with the trajectory of the app.

The latest numbers indicate Threads is up 175% from a year ago when it reached 100 million users... The app is now signing up more than 1 million users per day, Zuckerberg also said on Wednesday. X remains ahead of Threads in terms of users, but not by much. Musk's social media app now has roughly 318 million monthly users, according to an estimate by market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. That's down 24% since Musk completed his acquisition of the company in October 2022, according to Sensor Tower.

The news also drew a reaction from ActivityPub/Activity Streams 2.0 co-author Evan Prodromou, who pointed out that the 275 million monthly active users is up from the 200 million reported just 13 weeks ago at the end of July.

"And most of them have access to the Fediverse. With more, hopefully, getting access soon."

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/11/02/0247249/threads-soars-to-275-million-monthly-users-says-zuckerberg?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
 at Slashdot.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/11/02/0247249/threads-soars-to-275-million-monthly-users-says-zuckerberg?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed