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The US and Europe Are Growing Alarmed By China's Rush Into Legacy Chips Published on August 01, 2023 at 05:32AM An anonymous reader quotes a report from TIME: U.S. and European officials are growing increasingly concerned about China's accelerated push into the production of older-generation semiconductors and are debating new strategies to contain the country's expansion. President Joe Biden implemented broad controls over China's ability to secure the kind of advanced chips that power artificial-intelligence models and military applications. But Beijing responded by pouring billions into factories for the so-called legacy chips that haven't been banned. Such chips are still essential throughout the global economy, critical components for everything from smartphones and electric vehicles to military hardware. That's sparked fresh fears about China's potential influence and triggered talks of further reining in the Asian nation, according to people familia...

Massachusetts Lawmakers Eye a 'Netflix Tax' To Fund Community TV Channels Published on August 01, 2023 at 04:10AM A proposed state tax in Massachusetts on streaming video services could increase prices for popular platforms like Netflix and Hulu, as the 5 percent fee would support approximately 200 community access cable channels struggling due to declining cable subscriptions. The Boston Globe reports: In July, the Joint Committee on Advanced Information Technology held hearings on legislation filed by Democratic State Representative Joan Meschino and Republican Representative Mathew J. Muratore, both of Plymouth. Their bill would require streaming video companies to pay a 5 percent fee on the gross revenues generated in the state. The estimated $65 million a year raised by the fee would support roughly 200 community access channels, the most in any state. The community channels are run by nonprofit organizations or town governments, and funded by cable TV companies, which a...

Amazon Achieved Its 'Fastest Prime Speeds Ever' Last Quarter Published on August 01, 2023 at 03:30AM An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Amazon achieved its "fastest Prime speeds ever" last quarter, the online retail giant announced on Monday. The company says it has delivered more than 1.8 billion units to U.S. Prime members so far this year, nearly four times what it delivered at those speeds by this point in 2019. Across the top 60 largest U.S. metro areas, more than half of Prime member orders arrived the same or next day. Same-day delivery is currently available on millions of items for customers across more than 90 U.S. metro areas, and Amazon plans to double the number of delivery sites in the coming years. Amazon notes that the average time from picking a customer's items to positioning the customer's package on the outbound dock is 11 minutes in same-day facilities, more than an hour faster than its traditional fulfillment centers. ...

Japan's Population Drops by Nearly 800,000 With Falls in Every Prefecture For the First Time Published on August 01, 2023 at 02:50AM Every one of Japan's 47 prefectures posted a population drop in 2022, while the total number of Japanese people fell by nearly 800,000. The figures released by the Japan's internal affairs ministry mark two new unwelcome records for a nation sailing into uncharted demographic territory, but on a course many other countries are set to follow. From a report: Japan's prime minister has called the trend a crisis and vowed to tackle the situation. But national policies have so far failed to dent population decline, though concerted efforts by a sprinkling of small towns have had some effect. Wednesday's new data showed deaths hit a record high of more than 1.56 million while there were just 771,000 births in Japan in 2022, the first time the number of newborns has fallen below 800,000 since records began. Even an all-time high increase in...

Who Paid for a Mysterious Spy Tool? The FBI, an FBI Inquiry Found. Published on August 01, 2023 at 02:10AM A New York Times investigation uncovered earlier this year that the US government used spyware made by Israeli hacking firm NSO. Now, after an FBI investigation into who was using the tech, the department uncovered a confusing answer: itself. From a report: The deal for the surveillance tool between the contractor, Riva Networks, and NSO was completed in November 2021. Only days before, the Biden administration had put NSO on a Commerce Department blacklist, which effectively banned U.S. firms from doing business with the company. For years, NSO's spyware had been abused by governments around the world. This particular tool, known as Landmark, allowed government officials to track people in Mexico without their knowledge or consent. The F.B.I. now says that it used the tool unwittingly and that Riva Networks misled the bureau. Once the agency discovered in late April that Ri...

First US Nuclear Reactor Built In Decades Enters Commercial Operation Published on August 01, 2023 at 01:30AM ZipNada writes: A new reactor at a nuclear power plant in Georgia has entered commercial operation, becoming the first new American reactor built from scratch in decades. Georgia Power announced Monday that Unit 3 at Plant Vogtle, southeast of Augusta, has completed testing and is now sending power to the grid reliably. At its full output of 1,100 megawatts of electricity, Unit 3 can power 500,000 homes and businesses. Utilities in Georgia, Florida and Alabama are receiving the electricity. Nuclear power now makes up about 25% of the generation of Georgia Power, the largest unit of Atlanta-based Southern Co. A fourth reactor is also nearing completion at the site, where two earlier reactors have been generating electricity for decades. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Friday said radioactive fuel could be loaded into Unit 4, a step expected to take place before the end of...

Dell Is All In On Generative AI Published on August 01, 2023 at 12:45AM It isn't just software companies looking to enter the generative AI fray. Dell, the PC maker, is going all in on generative AI and offering hardware to run powerful models and a new platform to help organizations get started. From a report:The company released what it calls Dell Generative AI Solutions for clients to set up access to large language models and create generative AI projects. The company will offer new hardware setups, a managed service platform, and computers to run generative AI projects faster. Dell is known for releasing laptops and monitors, but the company also produces server racks and other enterprise hardware. While the more public face of the AI arms race is between developers of large language models like Meta, OpenAI, and Google, another group of tech companies is looking into how to cash in on the technology. From hardware providers to cloud providers, everyone believes they need an...

Elon Musk Predicts Electricity Shortage in Two Years Published on July 31, 2023 at 07:29AM "The man behind the race to replace gasoline-fueled cars with electric ones is worried about having enough juice," writes the Wall Street Journal: In recent days he has reiterated those concerns, predicting U.S. consumption of electricity, driven in part by battery-powered vehicles, will triple by around 2045. That followed his saying earlier this month that he anticipates an electricity shortage in two years that could stunt the energy-hungry development of artificial intelligence. âoeYou really need to bring the time scale of projects in sooner and have a high sense of urgency,â Musk told energy executives Tuesday at a conference held by PG&E, one of the nationâ(TM)s largest utilities. âoeMy biggest concern is that thereâ(TM)s insufficient urgency....â The U.S. energy industry in recent years already has struggled at times to keep up with demand, resorting to threats of rolling ...

GNOME Devs Are Working on a New Window Management System Published on July 31, 2023 at 05:29AM Managing windows — "even after 50 years, nobody's fully cracked it yet," writes GNOME developer Tobias Bernard: Most of the time you don't care about exact window sizes and positions and just want to see the windows that you need for your current task. Often that's just a single, maximized window. Sometimes it's two or three windows next to each other. It's incredibly rare that you need a dozen different overlapping windows. Yet this is what you end up with by default today, when you simply use the computer, opening apps as you need them. Messy is the default, and it's up to you to clean it up... We've wanted more powerful tiling for years, but there has not been much progress due to the huge amount of work involved on the technical side and the lack of a clear design direction we were happy with. We now finally feel like the design is at a stage where ...

Antarctica is Missing an Argentina-Sized Amount of Sea Ice This Year Published on July 31, 2023 at 03:54AM The world just broke "another terrifying climate record," reports CNN: Antarctic sea ice has fallen to unprecedented lows for this time of year. Every year, Antarctic sea ice shrinks to its lowest levels towards the end of February, during the continent's summer. The sea ice then builds back up over the winter. But this year scientists have observed something different. The sea ice has not returned to anywhere near expected levels. In fact it is at the lowest levels for this time of year since records began 45 years ago. The ice is around 1.6 million square kilometers (0.6 million square miles) below the previous winter record low set in 2022, according to data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). In mid-July, Antarctica's sea ice was 2.6 million square kilometers (1 million square miles) below the 1981 to 2010 average. That is an area nearly as ...

Is AI Dangerous? James Cameron Says 'I Warned You Guys in 1984 and You DIdn't Listen' Published on July 31, 2023 at 02:54AM "Oscar-winning Canadian filmmaker James Cameron says he agrees with experts in the AI field that advancements in the technology pose a serious risk to humanity," reports CTV: Many of the so-called godfathers of AI have recently issued warnings about the need to regulate the rapidly advancing technology before it poses a larger threat to humanity. "I absolutely share their concern," Cameron told CTV News Chief Political Correspondent Vassy Kapelos in a Canadian exclusive interview... "I warned you guys in 1984, and you didn't listen," he said... "I think the weaponization of AI is the biggest danger," he said. "I think that we will get into the equivalent of a nuclear arms race with AI, and if we don't build it, the other guys are for sure going to build it, and so then it'll escalate... You cou...

68-Year-Old Uses AirTag (and Twitter) to Find the Bike His Airline Lost Published on July 31, 2023 at 01:54AM An anonymous reader shared this story from CNN: Barry Sherry was traveling from his home in Virginia to Europe for the cycling trip of a lifetime: a week riding through the Swiss Alps, followed by another in Luxembourg, where his cycling group was riding with two former Tour de France competitors, and then a third week cycling in Finland with friends. It was, he says, to be his last cycling trip to Europe. "I'm 68 — I'm getting old," he says... While his suitcase arrived on the carousel, his [$8,000] bike — zipped up in its carrier — had become one of the 7.6 out of every 1,000 items of luggage to be, as the industry coyly terms it, "mishandled." In other words: lost... The "Find My" app, which traces Apple devices including AirTags, showed the bike at Heathrow... British Airways has up to six flights per day from Heathrow to Zurich, but ...

Documentary on Hungary's Videogames Behind the Iron Curtain Crowdfunds Expanded Disks Published on July 31, 2023 at 12:54AM A documentary series by Moleman Films reached its 5th episode, a 144-minute film about "the golden age of Hungarian video gaming and the formation of the Hungarian demoscene in the 80s and 90s." You can watch this episode on YouTube (and English subtitles can be selected). From Commodore 64s smuggled across the Iron Curtain to cracked games on cassette tapes sold at flea markets, floppy disk swapping via postal mail, hacked phone booths connected to U.S. BBSes, and copy parties packed to capacity, Stamps Back tells the story of how teenagers in Hungary ignited a computing revolution in the 1980s with illegally copied video games from the West, and began the Hungarian demoscene. But the filmmakers say "We received a lot of feedback that you would like to see the full-length interviews...in a physical special edition." So they've launch...

Libreboot Creator Says After Coding a Fork for 'GNU Boot Project', FSF Sent a Cease-and-Desist Letter Over Its Name Published on July 30, 2023 at 01:04PM Libreboot is a distribution of coreboot "aimed at replacing the proprietary BIOS firmware contained by most computers," according to Wikipedia. It was briefly part of the GNU project, until maintainer Leah Rowe and the GNU project agreed to part ways in 2017. But here in 2023, the GNU project has created a fork of Libreboot named GNU Boot... The GNU Boot fork "currently does not have a website and does not have any releases of its own," points out Libreboot's Leah Rowe, adding "My intent is to help them, and they are free — encouraged — to re-use my work... " But things have gotten messy, writes Rowe: They forked Libreboot, due to disagreement with Libreboot's Binary Blob Reduction Policy. This is a pragmatic policy, enacted in November 2022, to increase the number of coreboot users by i...

AMD 'Zenbleed' Bug Leaks Data From Zen 2 Ryzen, EPYC CPUs Published on July 30, 2023 at 10:04AM Monday a researcher with Google Information Security posted about a new vulnerability he independently found in AMD's Zen 2 processors. Tom's Hardware reports: The 'Zenbleed' vulnerability spans the entire Zen 2 product stack, including AMD's EPYC data center processors and the Ryzen 3000/4000/5000 CPUs, allowing the theft of protected information from the CPU, such as encryption keys and user logins. The attack does not require physical access to the computer or server and can even be executed via JavaScript on a webpage... AMD added the AMD-SB-7008 Bulletin several hours later. AMD has patches ready for its EPYC 7002 'Rome' processors now, but it will not patch its consumer Zen 2 Ryzen 3000, 4000, and some 5000-series chips until November and December of this year... AMD hasn't given specific details of any performance impacts but did issue the fol...

Reddit Users Heckle Search for New Mods, as Some Mods Move to Lemmy and Discord Published on July 30, 2023 at 07:04AM "Over the past week, a Reddit employee has posted to subreddits with ousted mods, asking for new volunteers," reports Ars Technica. But it's not always going smoothly... A Reddit employee going by ModCodeofConduct (Reddit has refused to disclose the real names of admins representing the company on the platform) has posted to numerous subreddits over recent days, including r/IRLEasterEggs, r/donthelpjustfilm, r/ActLikeYouBelong, r/malefashionadvice, and r/AccidentalRenaissance... Like most official Reddit posts since the API war began, the comments under the job ads display users' discontent. "May I nominate a mod? I think u/ConspirOC would be a great mod, as he created this subreddit and has successfully run it for years, before you forcibly removed him," a user going by LittleManOnACan wrote on ModCodeofConduct's post seeking replaceme...

America Will Convert Land from Its Nuclear Weapons Program into Clean Energy Projects Published on July 30, 2023 at 04:04AM Friday Ameria's Department of Energy announced plans to re-purpose some of the land it owns — "portions of which were previously used in the nation's nuclear weapons program" — for generating clean energy. They'll be leasing them out for "utility-scale clean energy projects" in an initiative called "Cleanup to Clean Energy." The agency has identified 70,000 acres for potential development, in New Mexico, Nevada, South Carolina, Idaho, and Washington: "We are going to transform the lands we have used over decades for nuclear security and environmental remediation by working closely with tribes and local communities together with partners in the private sector to build some of the largest clean energy projects in the world," said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. "Through the Cleanup to Clean En...

Many Physicists 'Skeptical' of Spectacular Superconductor Claims Published on July 30, 2023 at 03:05AM "This week, social media has been aflutter over a claim for a new superconductor that works not only well above room temperatures, but also at ambient pressure," writes Science magazine. If true, the discovery would be one of the biggest ever in condensed matter physics and could usher in all sorts of technological marvels, such as levitating vehicles and perfectly efficient electrical grids. However, the two related papers, posted to the arXiv preprint server by Sukbae Lee and Ji-Hoon Kim of South Korea's Quantum Energy Research Centre and colleagues on 22 July, are short on detail and have left many physicists skeptical... "They come off as real amateurs," says Michael Norman, a theorist at Argonne National Laboratory. "They don't know much about superconductivity and the way they've presented some of the data is fishy." On the oth...

Building a Better Server? Oxide Computer Ships Its First Rack Published on July 30, 2023 at 02:04AM Oxide Computer Company spent four years working toward "The power of the cloud in your data center... bringing hyperscaler agility to the mainstream enterprise." And on June 30, Oxide finally shipped its very first server rack. Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland shares this report: It's the culmination of years of work — to fulfill a long-standing dream. In December of 2019, Oxide co-founder Jess Frazelle had written a blog post remembering conversations over the year with people who'd been running their own workloads on-premises... "Hyperscalers like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have what I like to call 'infrastructure privilege' since they long ago decided they could build their own hardware and software to fulfill their needs better than commodity vendors. We are working to bring that same infrastructure privilege to everyone else!" Frazelle...

Seven Major Automakers Plan 30,000 More High-Speed Chargers in North America by 2030 Published on July 30, 2023 at 01:04AM "A new group of automotive super friends is banding together," reports the Verge, "promising to build the next big North American electric vehicle charging network." These worldwide automakers — BMW, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, and Stellantis — announced a planned joint venture Wednesday to erect easy-to-activate DC fast chargers along US and Canadian highways and in urban environments. The grand plan for the currently unnamed partnership is to install "at least" 30,000 high-speed EV chargers by 2030, with the first ones to open summer 2024 in the US. The collective plans to leverage National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) funding in the US and will also use other private and public funding from state and federal sources to build out the network... The new stations will connect and charge EV models mad...

Sci-Hub's Alexandra Elbakyan Receives EFF Award For Providing Access To Scientific Knowledge Published on July 29, 2023 at 03:30AM An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: The Electronic Frontier Foundation will award Alexandra Elbakyan, founder of the 'pirate' library Sci-Hub, for her efforts to provide access to scientific knowledge. According to EFF, Elbakyan's site is a vital resource for millions of students and researchers. Some medical professionals have even argued that the site helped to save lives. [...] "When I was working on my research project, I found out that all research papers I needed for work were paywalled. I was a student in Kazakhstan at the time and our university was not subscribed to anything," Alexandra told TorrentFreak years ago. Today, Sci-Hub continues to tear down academic paywalls but that comes at a cost. Sci-Hub has been sued several times and owes millions in damages to major publishers. In addition, Elbakyan ...

Blood of Young Mice Extends Life in the Old Published on July 29, 2023 at 02:50AM A team of scientists has extended the lives of old mice by connecting their blood vessels to young mice. The infusions of youthful blood led the older animals to live 6 to 9 percent longer, the study found, roughly equivalent to six extra years for an average human. From a report: While the study does not point to an anti-aging treatment for people, it does hint that the blood of young mice contains compounds that promote longevity, the researchers said. "I would guess it's a useful cocktail," said James White, a cell biologist at the Duke University School of Medicine and an author of the new study. Joining animals together, known as parabiosis, has a long history in science. In the 19th century, French scientists connected the blood vessels of two rats. To prove that the rats shared a circulatory system, they injected belladonna, a compound from the deadly nightshade plant, into one of t...

Apple Cracking Down on 'Fingerprinting' With New App Store API Rules Published on July 29, 2023 at 02:10AM Apple will soon start cracking down on apps that collect data on users' devices in order to track them (aka "fingerprinting"), according to an article on its developer site. Engadget writes: Starting with the release of iOS 17, tvOS 17, watchOS 10 and macOS Sonoma, developers will be required to explain why they're using so-called required reason APIs. Apps failing to provide a valid reason will be rejected started in spring of 2024. "Some APIs... have the potential of being misused to access device signals to try to identify the device or user, also known as fingerprinting. Regardless of whether a user gives your app permission to track, fingerprinting is not allowed," Apple wrote. "To prevent the misuse of certain APIs that can be used to collect data about users' devices through fingerprinting, you'll need to declare the reason...

US Spies Are Lobbying Congress To Save a Phone Surveillance 'Loophole' Published on July 29, 2023 at 01:30AM An effort by United States lawmakers to prevent government agencies from domestically tracking citizens without a search warrant is facing opposition internally from one of its largest intelligence services. From a report: Republican and Democratic aides familiar with ongoing defense-spending negotiations in Congress say officials at the National Security Agency (NSA) have approached lawmakers charged with its oversight about opposing an amendment that would prevent it from paying companies for location data instead of obtaining a warrant in court. Introduced by US representatives Warren Davidson and Sara Jacobs, the amendment would prohibit US military agencies from "purchasing data that would otherwise require a warrant, court order, or subpoena" to obtain. The ban would cover more than half of the US intelligence community, including the NSA, the Defense I...

Maine Lawmakers Approve Bill to Boost Offshore Wind Development Published on July 29, 2023 at 12:50AM Maine moved a step closer to becoming the East Coast's first floating offshore wind location after lawmakers approved a bill paving the way for deep-water development. From a report: The bill, approved Wednesday, includes pathways for utility companies to purchase wind power and for developers to build port infrastructure using local workers, a detail that prompted Governor Janet Mills' veto last month. She is expected to sign the bill in the coming days. The state has a goal to install 3 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2040, bringing Maine closer to its goal of powering its grid with 100% renewable energy by that year. The bill would help Maine contribute to the Biden administration's target of deploying 15 gigawatts of floating offshore wind by 2035. Read more of this story at Slashdot.