The U.S. may have led China in the AI race for the past decade, according to Alexandr Wang, CEO of Scale AI, but on Christmas Day, everything changed. From a report: Wang, whose company provides training data to key AI players including OpenAI, Google and Meta , said Thursday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that DeepSeek, the leading Chinese AI lab, released an "earth-shattering model" on Christmas Day, then followed it up with a powerful reasoning-focused AI model, DeepSeek-R1, which competes with OpenAI's recently released o1 model.

"What we've found is that DeepSeek ... is the top performing, or roughly on par with the best American models," Wang said. In an interview with CNBC, Wang described the artificial intelligence race between the U.S. and China as an "AI war," adding that he believes China has significantly more Nvidia H100 GPUs -- AI chips that are widely used to build leading powerful AI models -- than people may think, especially considering U.S. export controls. [...] "The United States is going to need a huge amount of computational capacity, a huge amount of infrastructure," Wang said, later adding, "We need to unleash U.S. energy to enable this AI boom." DeepSeek's holding company is a quant firm, which happened to have a lot of GPUs for trading and mining. DeepSeek is their "side project."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/01/24/0049233/scale-ai-ceo-says-china-has-quickly-caught-the-us-with-deepseek?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When threat actors use backdoor malware to gain access to a network, they want to make sure all their hard work can't be leveraged by competing groups or detected by defenders. One countermeasure is to equip the backdoor with a passive agent that remains dormant until it receives what's known in the business as a "magic packet." On Thursday, researchers revealed that a never-before-seen backdoor that quietly took hold of dozens of enterprise VPNs running Juniper Network's Junos OS has been doing just that. J-Magic, the tracking name for the backdoor, goes one step further to prevent unauthorized access. After receiving a magic packet hidden in the normal flow of TCP traffic, it relays a challenge to the device that sent it. The challenge comes in the form of a string of text that's encrypted using the public portion of an RSA key. The initiating party must then respond with the corresponding plaintext, proving it has access to the secret key.

The lightweight backdoor is also notable because it resided only in memory, a trait that makes detection harder for defenders. The combination prompted researchers at Lumin Technology's Black Lotus Lab to sit up and take notice. "While this is not the first discovery of magic packet malware, there have only been a handful of campaigns in recent years," the researchers wrote. "The combination of targeting Junos OS routers that serve as a VPN gateway and deploying a passive listening in-memory only agent, makes this an interesting confluence of tradecraft worthy of further observation." The researchers found J-Magic on VirusTotal and determined that it had run inside the networks of 36 organizations. They still don't know how the backdoor got installed.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/01/24/0039249/backdoor-infecting-vpns-used-magic-packets-for-stealth-and-security?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Chinese venture capital and private equity firm HongShan, formerly part of Sequoia, said on Friday it has struck a deal to acquire a majority stake in Marshall in a deal valuing the audio equipment maker at $1.15 billion.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/25/01/24/1331225/private-equity-firm-hongshan-acquires-rock-icon-marshall-for-115-billion?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Google will take firmer action against British businesses that use fake reviews to boost their star ratings on the search giant's reviews platform. From a report: The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced on Friday that Google has agreed to improve its processes for detecting and removing fake reviews, and will take action against the businesses and reviewers that post them.

This includes deactivating the ability to add new reviews for businesses found to be using fake reviews, and deleting all existing reviews for at least six months if they repeatedly engage in suspicious review activity. Google will also place prominent "warning alerts" on the Google profiles of businesses using fake reviews to help consumers be more aware of potentially misleading feedback. Individuals who repeatedly post fake or misleading reviews on UK business pages will be banned and have their review history deleted, even if they're located in another country.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/01/24/1342258/google-agrees-to-crack-down-on-fake-reviews-for-uk-businesses?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Leaders at CERN, Europe's particle-physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, will introduce financial incentives for academic publishers to adopt open science policies as part of the organization's collective agreement with 11 particle-physics journals. From a report: The current scheme sees those journals publish work from the field openly and at no cost to authors, in exchange for bulk payments. Under the newly launched initiative, CERN will pay more to publishers that adopt polices such as use of public or open peer review and linking research to data sets, and less to those that do not. Some open-science specialists say the policy could be a game-changer in encouraging transparent science. Others caution that it could set a precedent for publishers to boost their fees in exchange for becoming more open. "Particle physics is large, international, highly complex, highly dynamic. Openness is the only really effective way of practising science in the discipline," says Kamran Naim, head of open science at CERN.

The move comes as a result of CERN's success in encouraging journals that publish its work to do so more openly, through a programme called the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3). SCOAP3 launched in 2014 and its members include 3,000 libraries, research funders and research organizations worldwide, all of which contribute to a common fund at CERN. This is used to pay annual or quarterly lump sums to journals, in amounts depending on how many papers they publish. The initiative has so far supported the publication of more than 70,000 open-access articles. It has an annual budget of around $10.4 million.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/01/24/1425230/pioneering-cern-scheme-will-pay-publishers-more-if-they-hit-open-science-targets?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Meta plans to spend between $60 billion and $65 billion this year to build out AI infrastructure, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Friday, joining a wave of Big Tech firms unveiling hefty investments to capitalize on the technology. From a report: As part of the investment, Meta will build a more than 2-gigawatt data center that would be large enough to cover a significant part of Manhattan. The company -- one of the largest customers of Nvidia's coveted artificial intelligence chips -- plans to end the year with more than 1.3 million graphics processors.

"This will be a defining year for AI," Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post. "This is a massive effort, and over the coming years it will drive our core products and business." Zuckerberg expects Meta's AI assistant -- available across its services, including Facebook and Instagram -- to serve more than 1 billion people in 2025, while its open-source Llama 4 would become the "leading state-of-the-art model."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/01/24/1546242/meta-to-spend-up-to-65-billion-this-year-to-power-ai-goals?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Sony will cease production of recordable Blu-ray discs at its last factory in February, ending an 18-year manufacturing run amid declining demand for physical media. The Japanese electronics giant will also halt production of MiniDiscs and MiniDV cassettes. The company had already stopped making consumer recordable Blu-ray and optical disks in mid-2024, maintaining production only for business clients.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/01/24/1649223/sony-to-end-blu-ray-media-production-after-18-years?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Battery cars on Britain's roads are lasting as long as petrol and diesel cars, according to a study that has found a rapid improvement in electric vehicle reliability. From a report: An international team of researchers has estimated that an electric car will have a lifespan of 18.4 years, compared with 18.7 years for petrol cars and 16.8 years for diesels, according to a peer-reviewed study published on Friday in the journal Nature Energy. The findings were based on 300m records from compulsory annual MOT tests of roadworthiness.

Automotive engineers have long suspected electric cars will be more reliable than petrol or diesel cars, because they contain many fewer moving parts. Data has been limited, however, because the earliest mass-market electric cars are only just reaching the end of their lives. The researchers, from the University of Birmingham, the London School of Economics, the University of California San Diego, and the University of Bern, Switzerland, used MOT data to estimate the failure rate of all cars -- ignoring scrappage in the first few years, which is most likely to be related to accidents. The analysis found that Tesla cars had the longest lifespan among battery cars.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/01/24/171242/electric-cars-in-uk-last-as-long-as-petrol-and-diesel-vehicles-study-finds?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Walgreens Boots Alliance has ended a $200 million digital display venture with startup Cooler Screens after widespread technical failures and poor revenue, removing thousands of smart screens from its store freezer doors [non-paywalled link]. The screens, which displayed product information and ads, frequently crashed, showed incorrect inventory, and occasionally caught fire, Bloomberg reports.

Cooler Screens CEO Arsen Avakian cut data feeds to over 100 Chicago-area stores in December 2023 during a contract dispute, prompting Walgreens to obtain a restraining order. Walgreens completed removal of 10,300 screens from 700 stores in August 2024, replacing them with traditional glass doors. The screens generated just $215 per door annually, less than half the contractual minimum, according to Walgreens. Nearly $50 million worth of custom-made screens now sit unused in a Texas warehouse.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/01/24/1813201/walgreens-replaced-fridge-doors-with-smart-screens-its-now-a-200-million-fiasco?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The FBI warned this week that North Korean IT workers are abusing their access to steal source code and extort U.S. companies that have been tricked into hiring them. From a report: The security service alerted public and private sector organizations in the United States and worldwide that North Korea's IT army will facilitate cyber-criminal activities and demand ransoms not to leak online exfiltrated sensitive data stolen from their employers' networks. "North Korean IT workers have copied company code repositories, such as GitHub, to their own user profiles and personal cloud accounts. While not uncommon among software developers, this activity represents a large-scale risk of theft of company code," the FBI said.

"North Korean IT workers could attempt to harvest sensitive company credentials and session cookies to initiate work sessions from non-company devices and for further compromise opportunities." To mitigate these risks, the FBI advised companies to apply the principle of least privilege by disabling local administrator accounts and limiting permissions for remote desktop applications. Organizations should also monitor for unusual network traffic, especially remote connections since North Korean IT personnel often log into the same account from various IP addresses over a short period of time.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/01/24/1851209/fbi-north-korean-it-workers-steal-source-code-to-extort-employers?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The game of chess has long been central to computer science and AI-related research, most notably in IBM's Deep Blue in the 1990s and, more recently, AlphaZero. But the game is about more than algorithms, according to Marc Barthelemy, a physicist at the Paris-Saclay University in France, with layers of depth arising from the psychological complexity conferred by player strategies. Now, Barthelmey has taken things one step further by publishing a new paper in the journal Physical Review E that treats chess as a complex system, producing a handy metric that can help predict the proverbial "tipping points" in chess matches. [...]

For his analysis, Barthelemy chose to represent chess as a decision tree in which each "branch" leads to a win, loss, or draw. Players face the challenge of finding the best move amid all this complexity, particularly midgame, in order to steer gameplay into favorable branches. That's where those crucial tipping points come into play. Such positions are inherently unstable, which is why even a small mistake can have a dramatic influence on a match's trajectory. Barthelemy has re-imagined a chess match as a network of forces in which pieces act as the network's nodes, and the ways they interact represent the edges, using an interaction graph to capture how different pieces attack and defend one another. The most important chess pieces are those that interact with many other pieces in a given match, which he calculated by measuring how frequently a node lies on the shortest path between all the node pairs in the network (its "betweenness centrality").

He also calculated so-called "fragility scores," which indicate how easy it is to remove those critical chess pieces from the board. And he was able to apply this analysis to more than 20,000 actual chess matches played by the world's top players over the last 200 years. Barthelemy found that his metric could indeed identify tipping points in specific matches. Furthermore, when he averaged his analysis over a large number of games, an unexpected universal pattern emerged. "We observe a surprising universality: the average fragility score is the same for all players and for all openings," Barthelemy writes. And in famous chess matches, "the maximum fragility often coincides with pivotal moments, characterized by brilliant moves that decisively shift the balance of the game." Specifically, fragility scores start to increase about eight moves before the critical tipping point position occurs and stay high for some 15 moves after that. "These results suggest that positional fragility follows a common trajectory, with tension peaking in the middle game and dissipating toward the endgame," writes Barthelemy. "This analysis highlights the complex dynamics of chess, where the interaction between attack and defense shapes the game's overall structure."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://games.slashdot.org/story/25/01/24/2046222/complexity-physics-finds-crucial-tipping-points-in-chess-games?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Netflix plans to expand its cloud gaming offerings to include couch co-op and party games, according to co-CEO Greg Peters. The company will also continue developing narrative games based on its IP, despite recent leadership changes and the closure of its AAA game studio. The Verge reports: In the blog post, Netflix notes that it's a "limited" beta test, so it seems like this won't be available to too many people to start. (Netflix used that same "limited" language with the initial launch in Canada and the UK.) Like with the original test, the only two games available to stream are Oxenfree from Netflix's own Night School Studio and another game titled Molehew's Mining Adventure.

If you have access to the service, you'll need to download Netflix's special controller app for your iPhone or Android device to play the game on your TV. (Netflix says the streamed games work on "select devices," including Amazon Fire TV devices, Chromecast with Google TV, Roku devices and TVs, and more.) On the web, you'll be able to play games with a mouse and keyboard.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/25/01/24/2052235/netflixs-cloud-plans-include-co-op-and-party-games?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader shanen writes: What matters to you when buying a new smartphone? How can we make the recurring topic relevant without more SCREAMS about "dupe"? I do have a bit of recent research I could share -- quite a bit of fresh data since my latest search started a couple of months ago. Or perhaps I could start with a summary of the useful bits from an ancient Ask Slashdot discussion about batteries?

Seems funny to ask about relevant books, even though two come to mind already. One is The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, where he argues that smartphone use by preadolescents is destroying their personalities. The other is Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who doesn't actually say much about them, but I still think they should have been included in the the big table of examples at the end of the prologue. The "system" of smartphones is antifragile, even though the earliest models were quite fragile. The essence of this question is about which current smartphone models are the most robust...

Maybe I should include a list of my own criteria so far? However, would would just be responses to the problems with my current Samsung Galaxy and the Oppo I had before that. I've already determined that the two main problems with those models don't exist with any of the current options offered by my phone company... And the ancient battery problems are still lurking, too.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://ask.slashdot.org/story/25/01/24/2057209/ask-slashdot-what-matters-when-buying-a-new-smartphone?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Apple executive Kim Vorrath, a company veteran known for fixing troubled products and bringing major projects to market, has a new job: whipping artificial intelligence and Siri into shape. Vorrath, a vice president in charge of program management, was moved to Apple's artificial intelligence and machine learning division this week, according to people with knowledge of the matter. She'll be a top deputy to AI chief John Giannandrea, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the change hasn't been announced publicly. The move helps bolster a team that's racing to make Apple a leader in AI -- an area where it's fallen behind technology peers. [...]

Vorrath, who has spent 36 years at Apple, is known for managing the development of tough software projects. She's also put procedures in place that can catch and fix bugs. Vorrath joins the new team from Apple's hardware engineering division, where she helped launch the Vision Pro headset. Over the years, Vorrath has had a hand in several of Apple's biggest endeavors. In the mid-2000s, she was chosen to lead project management for the original iPhone software group and get the iconic device ready for consumers. Until 2019, she oversaw project management for the iPhone, iPad and Mac operating systems, before taking on the Vision Pro software. Haley Allen will replace Vorrath overseeing program management for visionOS, the headset's operating system, according to the people.

Prior to joining Giannandrea's organization, Vorrath had spent several weeks advising Kelsey Peterson, the group's previous head of program management. Peterson will now report to Vorrath -- as will two other AI executives, Cindy Lin and Marc Schonbrun. Giannandrea, who joined Apple from Google in 2018, disclosed the changes in a memo sent to staffers. The move signals that AI is now more important than the Vision Pro, which launched in February 2024, and is seen as the biggest challenge within the company, according to a longtime Apple executive who asked not to be identified. Vorrath has a knack for organizing engineering groups and creating an effective workflow with new processes, the executive said. It has been clear for some time now that Giannandrea needs additional help managing an AI group with growing prominence, according to the executive. Vorrath is poised to bring Apple's product development culture to the AI work, the person said.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://apple.slashdot.org/story/25/01/24/2113240/apple-enlists-veteran-software-executive-to-help-fix-ai-and-siri?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Non-fungible tokens and memecoins are neither securities nor commodities, according to White House crypto czar David Sacks. Instead, he defines them as "collectibles." From a report: "It's like a baseball card or a stamp," Sacks said in an interview with Fox Business on Thursday, referencing Trump's explosively popular memecoin. "People buy it because they want to commemorate something."

The famous venture capitalist's comments touched on a long-running debate about the crypto industry in general: how exactly to treat different digital assets. Some argue that digital assets are securities, which are tradable financial assets like stocks. But others say they're commodities, or raw materials that can be bought and sold, like gold and wheat. The classification differences have vast regulatory implications. "There's a few different categories here, so defining the market structure is important," said Sacks.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/01/24/2322249/crypto-czar-david-sacks-says-nfts-and-memecoins-are-collectibles-not-securities?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Non-fungible tokens and memecoins are neither securities nor commodities, according to White House crypto czar David Sacks. Instead, he defines them as "collectibles." From a report: "It's like a baseball card or a stamp," Sacks said in an interview with Fox Business on Thursday, referencing Trump's explosively popular memecoin. "People buy it because they want to commemorate something."

The famous venture capitalist's comments touched on a long-running debate about the crypto industry in general: how exactly to treat different digital assets. Some argue that digital assets are securities, which are tradable financial assets like stocks. But others say they're commodities, or raw materials that can be bought and sold, like gold and wheat. The classification differences have vast regulatory implications. "There's a few different categories here, so defining the market structure is important," said Sacks.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/01/24/2322249/crypto-czar-david-sacks-says-nfts-and-memecoins-are-collectibles-not-securities?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Nearly 190 million Americans were affected by February's cyberattack on UnitedHealth's Change Healthcare unit, almost double initial estimates, the company disclosed Friday. The breach, the largest in U.S. medical history, exposed sensitive data including Social Security numbers, medical records, and financial information.

UnitedHealth said it has not detected misuse of the stolen data or found medical databases among compromised files. Change Healthcare, a major U.S. healthcare claims processor, paid multiple ransoms after Russian-speaking hackers known as ALPHV breached its systems using stolen credentials lacking multi-factor authentication, according to CEO Andrew Witty's testimony to Congress.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/01/24/2337254/unitedhealth-data-breach-hits-190-million-americans-in-worst-healthcare-hack?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Scientists have observed for the first time how microplastics move through and block blood vessels in mouse brains, according to research published in Science Advances this week. Using fluorescence imaging, researchers at Peking University tracked plastic particles as they were consumed by immune cells and accumulated in brain blood vessels, causing obstructions that persisted for up to four weeks and reduced blood flow. The study found that these blockages, which behaved similarly to blood clots, decreased the mice's mobility for several days.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/01/24/2348221/microplastics-block-blood-flow-in-the-brain-mouse-study-reveals?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The British Museum was partly closed after a dismissed IT contractor trespassed, shutting down systems including its ticketing platform. The move disrupted operations and forced the closure of temporary exhibitions. The Guardian reports: While the museum will remain open this weekend, only a handful of ticket holders will be able to access its paid-for exhibitions, such as its Silk Roads show, because the IT system that manages bookings has been rendered unusable. The incident caused chaos in the middle of a busy Friday afternoon and is the latest security issue to blight the institution. A statement on the museum's website on Friday said that "due to an IT infrastructure issue some galleries have had to be closed. Please note that this means capacity will be limited, and priority will be given to members and pre-booked ticket holders. Currently our exhibitions remain closed."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/01/24/2351234/british-museum-forced-to-partly-close-after-alleged-it-attack-by-former-employee?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

As spotted by Tom's Hardware, Nvidia's CUDA 12.8 release notes signal the transition of Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPUs to the legacy driver branch. As a result, there will be no more new feature updates for these architectures; however, CUDA and gaming driver support will remain for now. From the report: It's crucial to highlight that this has nothing to do with GeForce gaming driver support. In fact, Maxwell and Pascal continue to be on the support list for the GeForce RTX series driver, unlike Kepler. Nvidia didn't detail whether or when it'll drop support for Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPUs for the gaming driver.

Nvidia has not issued an exact date for the end of full support for these three GPU architectures, but it will soon. The current CUDA toolkit still supports the three affected architectures, but they won't receive future updates. Once the move goes through, the only remaining GTX-series GPUs with full support will be the GTX 16-series, based on the RTX 20-series' Turing architecture.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/01/24/2356254/nvidia-starts-phasing-out-maxwell-pascal-and-volta-gpus?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A U.S. auto safety agency said on Friday it is reconsidering a landmark rule from the administration of former President Joe Biden requiring nearly all new cars and trucks by 2029 to have advanced automatic emergency braking systems. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it would delay the effective date to March 20 to give the new Trump administration time to further review the regulation.

The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, representing General Motors, Toyota Motor, Volkswagen and other automakers, last week filed suit to block the rule, saying the regulation is "practically impossible with available technology." The group asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to overturn the rule, saying the requirement that cars and trucks must be able to stop and avoid striking vehicles in front of them at up to 62 miles per hour (100 kph) is unrealistic. It unsuccessfully asked NHTSA last year to reconsider the rule. Come 2029, all cars sold in the U.S. "must be able to stop and avoid contact with a vehicle in front of them at speeds up to 62 mph," reports Car and Driver."

"Additionally, the system must be able to detect pedestrians in both daylight and darkness. As a final parameter, the federal standard will require the system to apply the brakes automatically up to 90 mph when a collision is imminent, and up to 45 mph when a pedestrian is detected."

According to the NHTSA, the rule will save at least 360 lives annually and prevent more than 24,000 injuries.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/01/25/0011211/us-reviewing-automatic-emergency-braking-rule?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

CERN's particle accelerator is being used in a pioneering cancer treatment called Flash radiotherapy. This method delivers ultra-high radiation doses in less than a second, minimizes side effects while targeting tumors more effectively than conventional radiotherapy. The BBC reports: In a series of vast underground caverns on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland, experiments are taking place which may one day lead to new generation of radiotherapy machines. The hope is that these devices could make it possible to cure complex brain tumors (PDF), eliminate cancers that have metastasized to distant organs, and generally limit the toll which cancer treatment exerts on the human body. The home of these experiments is the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (Cern), best known to the world as the particle physics hub that developed the Large Hadron Collider, a 27 kilometer (16.7 mile)-long ring of superconducting magnets capable of accelerating particles to near the speed of light.

Arguably Cern's crowning achievement was the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, the so-called "God Particle" which gives other particles their mass and in doing so lays the foundation for everything that exists in the universe. But in recent years, the centre's unique expertise in accelerating high-energy particles has found a new niche -- the world of cancer radiotherapy. Eleven years ago, Marie-Catherine Vozenin, a radiobiologist now working at Geneva University Hospitals (Hug), and others published a paper outlining a paradigm-shifting approach to traditional radiotherapy treatment which they called Flash. By delivering radiation at ultra-high dose rates, with exposures of less than a second, they showed that it was possible to destroy tumors in rodents while sparing healthy tissue. Its impact was immediate. International experts described it as a seminal breakthrough, and it galvanized fellow radiobiologists around the world to conduct their own experiments using the Flash approach to treat a wide variety of tumors in rodents, household pets, and now humans.

In recent years, animal studies have repeatedly shown that Flash makes it possible to markedly increase the amount of radiation delivered to the body while minimizing the impact that it has on surrounding healthy tissue. In one experiment, healthy lab mice which were given two rounds of radiation via Flash did not develop the typical side effects which would be expected during the second round. In another study, animals treated with Flash for head and neck cancers experienced fewer side effects, such as reduced saliva production or difficulty swallowing. Loo is cautiously optimistic that going forwards, such benefits may also translate to human patients. "Flash produces less normal tissue injury than conventional irradiation, without compromising anti-tumor efficacy -- which could be game-changing," he says. An additional hope is that this could then reduce the risk of secondary cancers (PDF), resulting from radiation-induced damage later in life, although it is still too early to know if that will be the case. [...] But the next phase of research is not only about testing whether Flash works in people. It's also about identifying which kind of radiation is the best one to use.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/01/25/0020230/ultra-fast-cancer-treatments-could-replace-conventional-radiotherapy?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has released the largest ever photomosaic featuring over 200 million stars -- all of which are bright than our own Sun. It consists of over 600 overlapping Hubble images and 2.5 billion pixels. "That is a huge number, yet only a fraction of the estimated one trillion stars in the Andromeda galaxy," reports TechSpot. "Many of Andromeda's less massive stars are beyond Hubble's sensitivity limit and thus, are not represented in the imaged."

"NASA has multiple sizes of the panoramic available for download, including the full-size 203 MB image (42,208 x 9,870) and a more user friendly 9 MB variant (10,552 x 2,468)."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/01/25/0043227/hubbles-largest-panorama-ever-showcases-200-million-stars?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Late last month, researchers revealed a finding that's likely to shock some people and confirm the low expectations of others: Renewable energy facilities throughout Central Europe use unencrypted radio signals to receive commands to feed or ditch power into or from the grid that serves some 450 million people throughout the continent. Fabian Braunlein and Luca Melette stumbled on their discovery largely by accident while working on what they thought would be a much different sort of hacking project. After observing a radio receiver on the streetlight poles throughout Berlin, they got to wondering: Would it be possible for someone with a central transmitter to control them en masse, and if so, could they create a city-wide light installation along the lines of Project Blinkenlights?

The first Project Blinkenlights iteration occurred in 2001 in Berlin, when the lights inside a large building were synchronized to turn on and off to give the appearance of a giant, low-resolution monochrome computer screen. The researchers, who presented their work last month at the 38th Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, Germany, wondered if they could control streetlights in Berlin to create a city-wide version, though they acknowledged it would likely be viewable only from high altitudes. They didn't know then, but their project was about to undergo a major transformation.

After an extensive and painstaking reverse-engineering process that took about a year, Braunlein and Melette learned that they could indeed control the streetlights simply by replaying legitimate messages they observed being sent over the air previously. They then learned something more surprising — the very same system for controlling Berlin's lights was used throughout Central Europe to control other regional infrastructure, including switches that regulate the amount of power renewable electric generation facilities feed into the grid. Collectively, the facilities could generate as much as 40 gigawatts in Germany alone, the researchers estimate. In addition, they estimate that in Germany, 20 GW of loads such as heat pumps and wall boxes are controlled via those receivers. That adds up to 60 GW that might be controllable through radio signals anyone can send.

When Braunlein and Melette realized how much power was controlled, they wondered how much damage might result from rogue messages sent simultaneously to multiple power facilities in strategically designed sequences and times of day. By their calculation, an optimally crafted series of messages sent under certain conditions would be enough to bring down the entire European grid. [...] The grid security experts Ars talked to for this story said they're doubtful of the assessment. "A sudden deficit of 60 GW will definitely lead to a brownout because 60 GW is far more than [the] reserves available," said Albert Moser, a RWTH Aachen professor with expertise in power grids. "A sudden deficit of 60 GW could even lead to a blackout due to the very steep fall of frequency that likely cannot be handled fast enough by underfrequency relays (load shedding)." He wasn't able to confirm that 60 GW of generation/load is controlled by radio signals or that security measures for Radio Ripple Control are insufficient.

Jan Hoff, a grid security expert, was also doubtful there'd be enough electricity dropped quickly enough to cause a brownout. "He likened the grid to the roly-poly toys from the 1970s, which were built to be knocked around but not fall over," said Ars.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/01/25/0037206/researchers-say-new-attack-could-take-down-the-european-power-grid?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

"For years, renewable energy proponents have hoped to build a U.S. electric grid powered by wind, solar, geothermal and — to a lesser extent — nuclear power..." writes the Washington Post. In America's power markets "the economics of clean energy are strong," with renewable energy cheaper than fossil fuel plants in many jurisdictions.

But the Post spoke to the "electricity modeling" director at nonpartisan clean energy think tank Energy Innovation, who offered this assessment. "The technology is ready, and the financial services are ready — but the question nobody really put enough thought into was, could the government keep up? And at the moment, the answer is no."

[R]enewable developers say that the new technologies are stymied by complicated local and federal regulations, a long wait to connect to the electricity grid, and community opposition... "The U.S. offshore wind business is at a very nascent stage versus Europe or China," Rob Barnett, a senior analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, said in an email. "With the new permitting pause, it's doubtful much progress for this emerging industry will be made...." After the Inflation Reduction Act passed, Rhodium Group — an independent clean energy research firm — estimated that between 2023 and 2025, on average, the country would add between 36 and 46 gigawatts of clean electricity to the grid every year. Late last year, however, the group found that the country only installed around 27 gigawatts in 2023. The U.S.'s renewable growth is now expected to fall on the low end of that range — or miss it entirely.

"It actually is really hard to build a lot of this stuff fast," said Trevor Houser, partner in climate and energy at Rhodium Group. As a result, Rhodium found, the country only cut carbon emissions by 0.2 percent in 2024... A significant amount of this lag has come from wind power, where problems with supply chains and getting permits and approval to build has put a damper on development. But solar construction is also on the low end of what experts were expecting...

Developers point to lags in the interconnection queue — a system that gives new solar, wind or fossil fuel projects permission to connect to the larger electricity grid. According to a report from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, it can now take nearly 3 years for a project to get through the queue. The grid operator that covers the Mid-Atlantic and parts of the Midwest, PJM, had over 3,300 projects in its queue at the end of 2023. The vast majority of these applications are for renewables — more than the entire number of active wind farms in the nation... There are possible solutions. Some developers hope to reuse old fossil fuel sites, like coal plants, that are already connected to the grid — bypassing the long queue entirely. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has instated new rules to make it easier to build transmission lines.

Part of the problem is that wind and solar facilities "sometimes need to be built hundreds or even thousands of miles away" — requiring long transmission lines. Sandhya Ganapathy, CEO of EDP Renewables North America, tells the Post that in America, "The grid that we have was never designed to handle this kind of load." And yet last year just 255 miles of new transmission line were built in the U.S., according to the American Clean Power Association. And Ganapathy also complains that approval for a new renewable energy project takes "anywhere between six to eight years" — which makes developers hesitant to build. "Why are we taking a big risk of a massive investment if I will not be able to sell the electrons?"

The end result? The Washington Post writes that "Experts once hoped that by the end of the decade the United States could generate up to 80 percent of its power with clean power... Now, some wonder if the country will be able to reach even 60 percent."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/01/25/002249/america-lags-on-renewable-energy-blame-regulations-and-grid-connection-issues?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader jenningsthecat writes:
3D printer manufacturer Bambu Labs has faced a storm of controversy and protest after releasing a security update which many users claim is the first step in moving towards an HP-style subscription model.

Bambu Labs responded that there's misinformation circulating online, adding "we acknowledge that our communication might have contributed to the confusion." Bambu Labs spokesperson Nadia Yaakoubi did "damage control", answering questions from the Verge:

Q: Will Bambu publicly commit to never requiring a subscription in order to control its printers and print from them over a home network?
A: For our current product line, yes. We will never require a subscription to control or print from our printers over a home network...
Q: Will Bambu publicly commit to never putting any existing printer functionality behind a subscription?
Yes...
Bambu's site adds that the security update "is beta testing, not a forced update. The choice is yours. You can participate in the beta program to help us refine these features, or continue using your current firmware."

Hackaday notes another wrinkle:
This follows the original announcement which had the 3D printer community up in arms, and quickly saw the new tool that's supposed to provide safe and secure communications with Bambu Lab printers ripped apart to extract the security certificate and private key... As the flaming wreck that's Bambu Lab's PR efforts keeps hurtling down the highway of public opinion, we'd be remiss to not point out that with the security certificate and private key being easily obtainable from the Bambu Connect Electron app, there is absolutely no point to any of what Bambu Lab is doing.

The Verge asked Bambu Labs about that too:

Q: Does the private key leaking change any of your plans?

No, this doesn't change our plans, and we've taken immediate action.

Bambu Labs had said their security update would "ensure only authorized access and operations are permitted," remembers Ars Technica. "This would, Bambu suggested, mitigate risks of 'remote hacks or printer exposure issues' and lower the risk of 'abnormal traffic or attacks.'"

This was necessary, Bambu wrote, because of increases in requests made to its cloud services "through unofficial channels," targeted DDOS attacks, and "peaks of up to 30 million unauthorized requests per day" (link added by Bambu).
But Ars Technica also found some skepticism online:
Repair advocate Louis Rossmann, noting Bambu's altered original blog post, uploaded a video soon after, "Bambu's Gaslighting Masterclass: Denying their own documented restrictions"... suggesting that the company was asking buyers to trust that Bambu wouldn't enact restrictive policies it otherwise wrote into its user agreements.
And Ars Technica also cites another skeptical response from a video posted by open source hardware hacker and YouTube creator Jeff Geerling:
"Every IoT device has these problems, and there are better ways to secure things than by locking out access, or making it harder to access, or requiring their cloud to be integrated."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/01/25/031258/bambu-labs-3d-printer-authorization-update-beta-sparks-concerns?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

TikTok is still not available for download from U.S.-based app stores, reports CBS News. So "Some fast-acting entrepreneurs are selling phones with TikTok preloaded on devices for thousands of dollars online." The Associated Press notes that New York-based Nicholas Matthews "listed an iPhone 14 Plus with TikTok for $10,000. As of Friday, Matthews said his highest bid was for $4,550."

Another example from The New York Times:
An information technology engineer, Mr. Gustab listed his iPhone 15 Pro with TikTok downloaded onto it for $3,000 on Facebook Marketplace. That's about three times the cost of a brand-new iPhone 16 Pro. On Thursday night, he had an offer for $1,200, still more than almost every brand-new iPhone and nearly twice as much as a refurbished iPhone 15 Pro without TikTok.

Business Insider reports the search term iPhone TikTok "yielded more than 45,000 results" on eBay...

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/01/25/0450205/people-are-hawking-tiktok-loading-phones-for-thousands-on-ebay-facrebook?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

2021: "Automotive Startup Canoo Debuts a Snub-Nosed Electric Pickup"

2025: Canoo "Goes Belly-Up After Moving to Texas"

"Its production volumes paled in comparison to Canoo's rate of cash burn, which was substantial, with net losses in 2023 totaling just over $300 million..." reports AutoWeek. "It was able to deliver small batches of vans to a few customers, but apparently remained distant from anything approaching volume production."

"Back in 2020, electric vehicle maker Canoo snagged a $2.4 billion valuation before it had shipped a single car," remembers SFGate. "Now, just months after yanking its headquarters from Los Angeles County to Texas, the company has gone belly-up."

In its four-year span as a public company, Canoo battled investor lawsuits, Securities and Exchange Commission charges, executive departures and a mixed reception of its cars. Auto tech blogger Steven Symes recently likened Canoo's cargo-style van to an "eraser on wheels."

"Canoo is the latest EV startup to go bankrupt after merging with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) as a shortcut to going public," notes TechCrunch. "Electric Last Mile Solutions was the first in June 2022. But since then, Fisker, Lordstown Motors, Proterra, Lion Electric, and Arrival all filed for different levels of bankruptcy protection in their various home countries."

In the years since it went public, [Canoo] made a small number of its bubbly electric vans and handed them over to partners — some paying — willing to trial the vehicles. The U.S. Postal Service, Department of Defense, and NASA all have or had Canoo vehicles.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/01/25/0345200/ev-maker-canoo-goes-belly-up-after-moving-to-texas?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

TikTok is still not available for download from U.S.-based app stores, reports CBS News. So "Some fast-acting entrepreneurs are selling phones with TikTok preloaded on devices for thousands of dollars online." The Associated Press notes that New York-based Nicholas Matthews "listed an iPhone 14 Plus with TikTok for $10,000. As of Friday, Matthews said his highest bid was for $4,550."

Another example from The New York Times:
An information technology engineer, Mr. Gustab listed his iPhone 15 Pro with TikTok downloaded onto it for $3,000 on Facebook Marketplace. That's about three times the cost of a brand-new iPhone 16 Pro. On Thursday night, he had an offer for $1,200, still more than almost every brand-new iPhone and nearly twice as much as a refurbished iPhone 15 Pro without TikTok.

Business Insider reports the search term iPhone TikTok "yielded more than 45,000 results" on eBay...

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/01/25/0450205/people-are-hawking-tiktok-loading-phones-for-thousands-on-ebay-facebook?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

ZDNET's senior editor sees an "overwhelmingly negative" response to Microsoft's surprise price hike for the 84 million paying subscribers to its Microsoft 365 software suite. Attempting the first price hike in more than 12 years, "they made it a 30% price increase" — going from $10 a month to $13 a month — "and blamed it all on artificial intelligence."

Bad idea. Why? Because...
No one wants to pay for AI...

If you ask Copilot in Word to write something for you, the results will be about what you'd expect from an enthusiastic summer intern. You might fare better if you ask Copilot to turn a folder full of photos into a PowerPoint presentation. But is that task really such a challenge...?

The announcement was bungled, too... I learned about the new price thanks to a pop-up message on my Android phone... It could be worse, I suppose. Just ask the French and Spanish subscribers who got a similar pop-up message telling them their price had gone from €10 a month to €13,000. (Those pesky decimals.) Oh, and I've lost count of the number of people who were baffled and angry that Microsoft had forcibly installed the Copilot app on their devices. It was just a rebranding of the old Microsoft 365 app with the new name and logo, but in my case it was days later before I received yet another pop-up message telling me about the change...

[T]hey turned the feature on for everyone and gave Word users a well-hidden checkbox that reads Enable Copilot. The feature is on by default, so you have to clear the checkbox to make it go away. As for the other Office apps? "Uh, we'll get around to giving you a button to turn it off next month. Maybe." Seriously, the support page that explains where you can find that box in Word says, "We're working on adding the Enable Copilot checkbox to Excel, OneNote, and PowerPoint on Windows devices and to Excel and PowerPoint on Mac devices. That is tentatively scheduled to happen in February 2025." Until the Enable Copilot button is available, you can't disable Copilot.

ZDNET's senior editor concludes it's a naked grab for cash, adding "I could plug the numbers into Excel and tell you about it, but let's have Copilot explain instead."

Prompt: If I have 84 million subscribers who pay me $10 a month, and I increase their monthly fee by $3 a month each, how much extra revenue will I make each year?
Copilot describes the calculation, concluding with "You would make an additional $3.024 billion per year from this fee increase." Copilot then posts two emojis — a bag of money, and a stock chart with the line going up.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/01/25/1735212/copilot-price-hike-for-microsoft-365-called-total-disaster-with-overwhelmingly-negative-response?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

CleanTechnicareports that last year Americans "bought 37% more air source heat pumps than the next most popular heating appliance — gas furnaces."

And Americans bought 21% more heat pumps than they did in 2023.

Canary Media is quick to point out that in many homes, more than one heat pump is required, so that data should be interpreted with that in mind. Typically, a home uses only one furnace. Nevertheless, the trend for heat pumps is up. Russell Unger, the head of decarbonizing buildings at RMI, said, "There's just been this long term, consistent trend."

It's easy to understand why heat pumps are gaining in popularity. In addition to providing heated air in the winter and cool air in the summer, they are far more efficient than conventional heat sources — delivering three to four times more heat per dollar spent than oil- or gas-fired heating equipment or old fashioned electric baseboard heat. They also create far less carbon pollution. How much less depends on the source of electricity in the local area,

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/01/25/1944213/heat-pumps-are-now-outselling-gas-furnaces-in-america?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from TechCrunch:

The developer behind Pixelfed, Loops, and Sup, open source alternatives to Instagram, TikTok, and WhatsApp, respectively, is now raising funds on Kickstarter to fuel the apps' further development. The trio is part of the growing open social web, also known as the fediverse, powered by the same ActivityPub protocol used by X alternative Mastodon... [and] challenge Meta's social media empire... "Help us put control back into the hands of the people!" [Daniel Supernault, the Canadian-based developer behind the federated apps] said in a post on Mastodon where he announced the Kickstarter's Thursday launch.

As of the time of writing, the campaign has raised $58,383 so far. While the goal on the Kickstarter site has been surpassed, Supernault said that he hopes to raise $1 million or more so he can hire a small team... A fourth project, PubKit, is also a part of these efforts, offering a toolset to support developers building in the fediverse... The stretch goal of the Kickstarter campaign is to register the Pixelfed Foundation as a not-for-profit and grow its team beyond volunteers. This could help address the issue with Supernault being a single point of failure for the project... Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko made a similar decision earlier this month to transition to a nonprofit structure. If successful, the campaign would also fund a blogging app as an alternative to Tumblr or LiveJournal at some point in the future.

The funds will also help the apps manage the influx of new users. On Pixelfed.social, the main Pixelfed instance, (like Mastodon, anyone can run a Pixelfed server), there are now more than 200,000 users, thanks in part to the mobile app's launch, according to the campaign details shared with TechCrunch. The server is also now the second-largest in the fediverse, behind only Mastodon.social, according to network statistics from FediDB. New funds will help expand the storage, CDNs, and compute power needed for the growing user base and accelerate development. In addition, they'll help Supernault dedicate more of his time to the apps and the fediverse as a whole while also expanding the moderation, security, privacy, and safety programs that social apps need.

As a part of its efforts, Supernault also wants to introduce E2E encryption to the fediverse.

The Kickstarter campaign promises "authentic sharing reimagined," calling the apps "Beautiful sharing platforms that puts you first. No ads, no algorithms, no tracking — just pure photography and authentic connections... More Privacy, More Safety. More Variety. "
Pixelfed/Loops/Sup/Pubkit isn't a ambitious dream or vaporware — they're here today — and we need your support to continue our mission and shoot for the moon to be the best social communication platform in the world.... We're following the both the Digital Platform Charter of Rights & Ethical Web Principles of the W3C for all of our projects as guidelines to building platforms that help people and provide a positive social benefit.

The campaign's page says they're building "a future where social networking respects your privacy, values your freedom, and prioritizes your safety."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/01/25/0534250/pixelfed-creator-crowdfunds-more-capacity-plus-open-source-alternatives-to-tiktok-and-whatsapp?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Founded in 1947, the Minor Planet Center is the official worldwide authority "for observing and reporting new asteroids, comets and other small bodies in the solar system," reports USA Today.

Unfortunately, "What an amateur astronomer recently took to be a newly discovered asteroid turned out to be a Tesla Roadster,"

The Minor Planet Center didn't initially consider the possibility when the organization announced the discovery on Jan. 2 of the unusual asteroid, complete with an official name: 2018 CN41. But less than 17 hours later, the Minor Planet Center issued an editorial notice that it would be deleting 2018 CN41 from its records... According to the Minor Planet Center's notice regarding the deletion, turns out the object was the Roadster, along with the Falcon Heavy rocket's upper stage.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/01/25/2026244/report-of-newly-discovered-asteroid-turns-out-to-be-a-tesla-roadster?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Two computer scientists at the University of Waterloo in Canada believe changing 30 lines of code in Linux "could cut energy use at some data centers by up to 30 percent," according to the site Data Centre Dynamics.

It's the code that processes packets of network traffic, and Linux "is the most widely used OS for data center servers," according to the article:

The team tested their solution's effectiveness and submitted it to Linux for consideration, and the code was published this month as part of Linux's newest kernel, release version 6.13. "All these big companies — Amazon, Google, Meta — use Linux in some capacity, but they're very picky about how they decide to use it," said Martin Karsten [professor of Computer Science in the Waterloo's Math Faculty]. "If they choose to 'switch on' our method in their data centers, it could save gigawatt hours of energy worldwide. Almost every single service request that happens on the Internet could be positively affected by this."

The University of Waterloo is building a green computer server room as part of its new mathematics building, and Karsten believes sustainability research must be a priority for computer scientists. "We all have a part to play in building a greener future," he said. The Linux Foundation, which oversees the development of the Linux OS, is a founder member of the Green Software Foundation, an organization set up to look at ways of developing "green software" — code that reduces energy consumption.

Karsten "teamed up with Joe Damato, distinguished engineer at Fastly" to develop the 30 lines of code, according to an announcement from the university. "The Linux kernel code addition developed by Karsten and Damato was based on research published in ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review" (by Karsten and grad student Peter Cai).

Their paper "reviews the performance characteristics of network stack processing for communication-heavy server applications," devising an "indirect methodology" to "identify and quantify the direct and indirect costs of asynchronous hardware interrupt requests (IRQ) as a major source of overhead...

"Based on these findings, a small modification of a vanilla Linux system is devised that improves the efficiency and performance of traditional kernel-based networking significantly, resulting in up to 45% increased throughput..."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/01/25/2111225/could-new-linux-code-cut-data-center-energy-use-by-30?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

A plan to keep TikTok available in the U.S. "involves tapping software company Oracle and a group of outside investors," reports NPR, "to effectively take control of the app's global operations, according to two people with direct knowledge of the talks..."

"[P]otential investors who are engaged in the talks include Microsoft."

Under the deal now being negotiated by the White House, TikTok's China-based owner ByteDance would retain a minority stake in the company, but the app's algorithm, data collection and software updates will be overseen by Oracle, which already provides the foundation of TikTok's web infrastructure... "The goal is for Oracle to effectively monitor and provide oversight with what is going on with TikTok," said the person directly involved in the talks, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the deliberations. "ByteDance wouldn't completely go away, but it would minimize Chinese ownership...." Officials from Oracle and the White House held a meeting on Friday about a potential deal, and another meeting has been scheduled for next week, according to the source involved in the discussions, who said Oracle is interested in a TikTok stake "in the tens of billions," but the rest of the deal is in flux...

Under a law passed by Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court, TikTok must execute what is known as "qualified divestiture" from ByteDance in order to stay in business in the U.S... A congressional staffer involved in talks about TikTok's future, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said binding legal agreements from the White House ensuring ByteDance cannot covertly manipulate the app will prove critical in winning lawmakers' approval. "A key part is showing there is no operational relationship with ByteDance, that they do not have control," the Congressional staffer said. "There needs to be no backdoors where China can potentially gain access...."

Chinese regulators, who have for years opposed the selling of TikTok, recently signaled that they would not stand in the way of a TikTok ownership change, saying acquisitions "should be independently decided by the enterprises and based on market principles." The statement, at first, does not seem to say much, but negotiators in the White House believe it indicates that Beijing is not planning to block a deal that gives American investors a majority-stake position in the company.

"Meanwhile, Apple and Google still have not returned TikTok to app stores..."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/01/26/0037255/oracle-and-us-investors-including-microsoft-discuss-taking-control-of-tiktok-in-the-us?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Friday Bill Gates shared an excerpt from his upcoming memoir Source Code: My Beginnings. Published in the Wall Street Journal, the excerpt includes pictures of young Bill Gates when he was 12 (dressed for a hike) and 14 (studying a teletype machine).

Gates remembers forming "a sort of splinter group" from the Boy Scouts when he was 13 with a group of boys who "wanted more freedom and more risk" and took long hikes around Seattle, travelling hundreds of miles together on hikes as long as "seven days or more." (His favorite breakfast dish was Oscar Mayer Smokie Links.) But he also remembers another group of friends — Kent, Rick, and... Paul — who connected to a mainframe computer from a phone line at their private school. Both hiking and programming "felt like an adventure... exploring new worlds, traveling to places even most adults couldn't reach."

Like hiking, programming fit me because it allowed me to define my own measure of success, and it seemed limitless, not determined by how fast I could run or how far I could throw. The logic, focus and stamina needed to write long, complicated programs came naturally to me. Unlike in hiking, among that group of friends, I was the leader.
When Gates' school got a (DEC) PDP-8 — which cost $8,500 — "For a challenge, I decided I would try to write a version of the Basic programming language for the new computer..." And Gates remembers a long hike where "I silently honed my code" for its formula evaluator:

I slimmed it down more, like whittling little pieces off a stick to sharpen the point. What I made seemed efficient and pleasingly simple. It was by far the best code I had ever written...
By the time school started again in the fall, whoever had lent us the PDP-8 had reclaimed it. I never finished my Basic project. But the code I wrote on that hike, my formula evaluator — and its beauty — stayed with me. Three and a half years later, I was a sophomore in college not sure of my path in life when Paul Allen, one of my Lakeside friends, burst into my dorm room with news of a groundbreaking computer. I knew we could write a Basic language for it; we had a head start.
Gates typed his code from that hike, "and with that planted the seed of what would become one of the world's largest companies and the beginning of a new industry."

Gates cites Richard Feynman's description of the excitement and pleasure of "finding the thing out" — the reward for "all of the disciplined thinking and hard work." And he remembers his teenaged years as "intensely driven by the love of what I was learning, accruing expertise just when it was needed: at the dawn of the personal computer."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/01/26/0249204/bill-gates-began-the-altair-basic-code-in-his-head-while-hiking-as-a-teenager?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

July saw the news that Meta had launched a powerful open-source AI model, Llama 3.1.

But the Free Software Foundation evaluated Llama 3.1's license agreement, and announced this week that "this is not a free software license and you should not use it, nor any software released under it."

Not only does it deny users their freedom, but it also purports to hand over powers to the licensors that should only be exercised through lawmaking by democratically-elected governments.

Moreover, it has been applied by Meta to a machine-learning (ML) application, even though the license completely fails to address software freedom challenges inherent in such applications....

We decided to review the Llama license because it is being applied to an ML application and model, while at the same time being presented by Meta as if it grants users a degree of software freedom. This is certainly not the case, and we want the free software community to have clarity on this.

In other news, the FSF also announced the winner of the logo contest for their big upcoming 40th anniversary celebration.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/01/25/2311217/fsf-metas-license-for-its-llama-31-ai-model-is-not-a-free-software-license?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shared this report from the Guardian:
More electricity was made from sunshine than coal in the EU last year, a report has found, in what analysts called a "milestone" for the clean energy transition. Solar panels generated 11% of the EU's electricity in 2024, while coal-burning power plants generated 10%, according to data from climate thinktank Ember...

Coal-burning in the EU power sector peaked in 2003 and has fallen by 68% since then. At the same time, clean sources of electricity have boomed. Wind and solar energy rose to 29% of EU electricity generation in 2024, while hydropower and nuclear energy continued to rebound from the 2022 lows...

The report found the share of coal fell in 16 of the 17 countries that still used it in 2024. It said the fuel has become "marginal or absent" in most systems. Germany and Poland, the two countries that burn most of the EU's coal, were among those where there was a shift to cleaner sources of energy. The share of coal in Germany's electricity grid fell 17% year-on-year, while in Poland it dropped8%, the report found.

Fossil gas also fell for the fifth year in a row, declining in 14 of the 26 countries, according to the article, and now accounting for just 16% of the electricity mix.

"The findings come despite a small increase in electricity demand after two years of steep decline brought on by Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/01/25/0119258/europe-made-more-electricity-from-solar-than-coal-in-2024?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Amid the ongoing Linux 6.14 kernel development cycle, Phoronix spotted a pull request for ACPI updates which "will allow for faster suspend and resume cycles on some systems."

Wikipedia defines ACPI as "an open standard that operating systems can use to discover and configure computer hardware components" for things like power management and putting unused hardware components to sleep. Phoronix reports:

The ACPI change worth highlighting for Linux 6.14 is switching from msleep() to usleep_range() within the acpi_os_sleep() call in the kernel. This reduces spurious sleep time due to timer inaccuracy. Linux ACPI/PM maintainer Rafael Wysocki of Intel who authored this change noted that it could "spectacularly" reduce the duration of system suspend and resume transitions on some systems...

Rafael explained in the patch making the sleep change:

"The extra delay added by msleep() to the sleep time value passed to it can be significant, roughly between 1.5 ns on systems with HZ = 1000 and as much as 15 ms on systems with HZ = 100, which is hardly acceptable, at least for small sleep time values."
One 2022 bug report complained a Dell XPS 13 using Thunderbolt took "a full 8 seconds to suspend and a full 8 seconds to resume even though no physical devices are connected." In November an Intel engineer posted on the kernel mailing list that the fix gave a Dell XPS 13 a 42% improvement in kernel resume time (from 1943ms to 1127ms).

[ Read more of this story ]( https://linux.slashdot.org/story/25/01/25/2343225/linux-614-brings-some-systems-faster-suspend-and-resume?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The state of Michigan will now require each public high school in the state to offer at least one computer science course to its students. "This bill aligns Michigan with a majority of the country," according to the state's announcement, which says the bill "advances technological literacy" and ensures their students "are well-equipped with the critical thinking skills necessary for success in the workforce."
Slashdot reader theodp writes:

From the Michigan House Fiscal Agency Analysis: "Supporters of the bill say that increasing access to computer science courses for students in schools should be a priority of the state in order to ensure that students can compete for the types of jobs that have good pay and will be needed in the coming decades."
That analysis goes on to report that testifying in favor of the bill were tech-giant backed nonprofit Code.org (Microsoft is a $30 million Code.org donor), Amazon and AWS (Amazon is a $30+ million Code.org donor), the tech-supported Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA), and the lobbying organization TechNet, whose members include Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and OpenAI).
It's not clear how many high schools in Michigan are already teaching CS courses, but this still raises a popular question for discussion. Should high schools be required to teach at least one CS course?

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/01/26/1547204/new-michigan-law-requires-high-schools-to-offer-cs-classes?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Earlier this month a major fire erupted at a California battery plant. But several factors contributed to its rapid spread, the fire district's chief told the Los Angeles Times:
A fire suppression system that is part of every battery rack at the plant failed and led to a chain reaction of batteries catching on fire, he said at a news conference last week. Then, a broken camera system in the plant and superheated gases made it challenging for firefighters to intervene. Once the fire began spreading, firefighters were not able to use water, because doing so can trigger a violent chemical reaction in lithium-ion batteries, potentially causing more to ignite or explode.
The county's Board of Supervisors has now requested that the plant remain offline until an investigation is completed. A county supervisor told the newspaper "What we're doing with this technology is way ahead of government regulations and ahead of the industry's ability to control it."

And plans for a new battery storage site nearby are now being questioned, with an online petition to halt all new battery-storage facilities in the county drawing over 3,200 signatures.

The fire earlier this month was the fourth at Moss Landing since 2019, and the third at buildings owned by Texas-based Vistra Energy... Already, the fire has prompted calls for additional safety regulations around battery storage, and more local control over where storage sites are located...
California Assemblymember Dawn Addis (D-Morro Bay) has introduced Assembly Bill 303 — the Battery Energy Safety & Accountability Act — which would require local engagement in the permitting process for battery or energy storage facilities, and establish a buffer to keep such sites a set distance away from sensitive areas like schools, hospitals and natural habitats... Gov. Gavin Newsom, a fierce advocate of clean energy, agrees an investigation is needed to determine the fire's cause and supports taking steps to make Moss Landing and similar facilities safer, his spokesperson Daniel Villaseñor said in a statement. Addis and two other state legislators sent a letter to the California Public Utilities Commission Thursday requesting an investigation.

"The Moss Landing facility has represented a pivotal piece of our state's energy future, however this disastrous fire has undermined the public's trust in utility scale lithium-ion battery energy storage systems," states the letter. "If we are to ensure California moves its climate and energy goals forward, we must demonstrate a steadfast commitment to safety..."

initial testing from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ruled that the levels of toxic gases released by the batteries, including hydrogen fluoride, did not pose a threat to public health during the fire. [The EPA says their monitoring "showed concentrations of particulate matter to be consistent with the air quality index throughout the Monterey Bay and San Francisco Bay regions, with no measurements exceeding the moderate air quality level... In addition to EPA's monitoring, Vistra Energy brought in a third-party environmental consultant with air monitoring expertise, right after the fire started"]

Still, many residents remain on edge about potential long-term impacts on the nearby communities of Watsonville, Castroville, Salinas and the ecologically sensitive Elkhorn Slough estuary.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/01/26/1841249/californias-battery-plant-fire-sparks-call-for-investigation-new-regulations?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

This weekend Cory Doctorow delved into "the two factors that make services terrible: captive users, and no constraints."

If your users can't leave, and if you face no consequences for making them miserable (not solely their departure to a competitor, but also fines, criminal charges, worker revolts, and guerrilla warfare with interoperators), then you have the means, motive and opportunity to turn your service into a giant pile of shit... Every economy is forever a-crawl with parasites and monsters like these, but they don't get to burrow into the system and colonize it until policymakers create rips they can pass through.

Doctorow argues that "more and more critics are coming to understand that lock-in is the root of the problem, and that anti-lock-in measures like interoperability can address it."

Even more important than market discipline is government discipline, in the form of regulation. If Zuckerberg feared fines for privacy violations, or moderation failures, or illegal anticompetitive mergers, or fraudulent advertising systems that rip off publishers and advertisers, or other forms of fraud (like the "pivot to video"), he would treat his users better. But Facebook's rise to power took place during the second half of the neoliberal era, when the last shreds of regulatory muscle that survived the Reagan revolution were being devoured... But it's worse than that, because Zuckerberg and other tech monopolists figured out how to harness "IP" law to get the government to shut down third-party technology that might help users resist enshittification... [Doctorow says this is "why companies are so desperate to get you to use their apps rather than the open web"] IP law is why you can't make an alternative client that blocks algorithmic recommendations. IP law is why you can't leave Facebook for a new service and run a scraper that imports your waiting Facebook messages into a different inbox. IP law is why you can't scrape Facebook to catalog the paid political disinformation the company allows on the platform...

But then Doctorow argues that "Legacy social media is at a turning point," citing as "a credible threat" new systems built on open standards like Mastodon (built on Activitypub) and Bluesky (built on Atproto):

I believe strongly in improving the Fediverse, and I believe in adding the long-overdue federation to Bluesky. That's because my goal isn't the success of the Fediverse — it's the defeat of enshtitification. My answer to "why spend money fixing Bluesky?" is "why leave 20 million people at risk of enshittification when we could not only make them safe, but also create the toolchain to allow many, many organizations to operate a whole federation of Bluesky servers?" If you care about a better internet — and not just the Fediverse — then you should share this goal, too... Mastodon has one feature that Bluesky sorely lacks — the federation that imposes antienshittificatory discipline on companies and offers an enshittification fire-exit for users if the discipline fails. It's long past time that someone copied that feature over to Bluesky.
Doctorow argues that federated and "federatable" social media "disciplines enshittifiers" by freeing social media's captive audiences.
"Any user can go to any server at any time and stay in touch with everyone else."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/01/26/2043253/cory-doctorow-asks-can-interoperability-end-enshittification-and-fix-social-media?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

For the first time in America, an empty self-driving car has been involved in a fatal collision. But it was "hit from behind by a speeding car that was going about 98 miles per hour," a local news site reports, citing comments from Waymo. ("Two other victims were taken to the hospital with life-threatening injuries. A dog also died in the crash, according to the San Francisco Fire Department.")

Waymo's self-driving car "is not being blamed," notes NBC Bay Area. Instead the Waymo car was one of six vehicles "struck when a fast-moving vehicle slammed into a line of cars stopped at a traffic light..."

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration requires self-driving car companies, like Waymo, to report each time their vehicles are involved in an accident, regardless of whether the autonomous vehicle was at fault. According to NHTSA, which began collecting such data in July 2021, Waymo's driverless vehicles have been involved in about 30 different collisions resulting in some type of injury. Waymo, however, has noted that nearly all those crashes, like Sunday's collision, were the fault of other cars driven by humans. While NHTSA's crash data doesn't note whether self-driving vehicles may have been to blame, Waymo has previously noted that it only expects to pay out insurance liability claims for two previous collisions involving its driverless vehicles that resulted in injuries.

In December, Waymo touted the findings of its latest safety analysis, which determined its fleet of driverless cars continue to outperform human drivers across major safety metrics. The report, authored by Waymo and its partners at the Swiss Reinsurance Company, reviewed insurance claim data to explore how often human drivers and autonomous vehicles are found to be liable in car collisions. According to the study, Waymo's self-driving vehicles faced about 90% fewer insurance claims relating to property damage and bodily injuries compared to human drivers... The company's fleet of autonomous vehicles have traveled more than 33 million miles and have provided more than five million rides across San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Austin...

In California, there are more than 30 companies currently permitted by the DMV to test driverless cars on the open road. While most are still required to have safety drivers sitting in the front seat who can take over when needed, Waymo remains the only fleet of robotaxis in California to move past the state's testing phase to, now, regularly offer paid rides to passengers.

Their article adds that while Sunday's collision marks the first fatal crash involving a driverless car, "it was nearly seven years ago when another autonomous vehicle was involved in a deadly collision with a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona, though that self-driving car had a human safety driver behind the wheel. The accident, which occurred in March 2018, involved an autonomous car from Uber, which sold off its self-driving division two years later to a competitor."

In other news, an unoccupied Waymo vehicle was attacked by a mob in Los Angeles last night, according to local news reports. "Video footage of the incident appears to show the vehicle being stripped of its door, windows shattered, and its Jaguar emblems removed. The license plate was also damaged, and the extent of the vandalism required the vehicle to be towed from the scene."
The Los Angeles Times reminds its readers that "Last year, a crowd in San Francisco's Chinatown surrounded a Waymo car, vandalized it and then set it ablaze..."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/01/26/2150209/bad-week-for-unoccupied-waymo-cars-one-hit-in-fatal-collision-one-vandalized-by-mob?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Since launching in 2020, the nonprofit site RestofWorld.org has been covering tech news from 100 countries. And they've just announced the winners in their 2024 international photography contest.

"From Cape Verde to Bhutan, we received 227 entries from over 45 countries around the world, featuring everything from sprawling mines to biometric facial scans."

Like last year, the majority of the entries in our 2024 photography contest captured on-the-ground realities of how technology is transforming lives in every corner of the world. We received submissions from over 45 countries, showcasing a stunning variety of perspectives on the intersection of technology and daily life.

Beyond striking visuals, the photographs tell us stories of how tech plays a role in local communities, from iris-scanning payment systems inside refugee camps to EV battery-powered music gatherings. The 227 entries we received from contestants — including from Mongolia, the Philippines, Argentina, and Jordan — not only celebrate these stories but reaffirm our commitment at Rest of World to challenge stereotypes about how people use technology in their daily lives.

An "honorable mention" photo shows immigrants from Africa arriving on the Italian island of Lampedusa after a perilous boat journey. ("Upon their arrival, these refugees borrowed a smartphone from a bystander and started a video call to let their relatives know they survived the journey.") And the top photo shows a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent using a cellphone to collect facial scans from migrants entering the country from Mexico. ("After they make the crossing into the U.S., migrants are subjected to further data collection, including DNA samples.")

Biometric data collection was a recurring theme. A photo from Jordan shows a Syrian boy paying for groceries with an iris scanner at a supermarket "run jointly by the World Food Programme and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees." Eye-scanning technology is being used there "to ensure people use only their own credit and not borrowed or stolen cards. After having their iris scanned, Syrian refugees living in the camp can make use of services such as health care and shopping, using just their eyes."

Another recurring theme was energy. There's a lovely "honorable mention" photo from the Philippines showing two young people on a beach playing basketball "under the towering blades of the windmills in Bangu... Renewable energy has transformed this community, cutting household expenses and powering opportunities once thought to be out of reach." The third-place photo shows six children in a distant tent in "a mountainous, subarctic forest" in Mongolia" — all gathered around a laptop "to watch a documentary about a Norwegian reindeer herder" who had visited their region. ("Modern technology such as solar panels, car batteries, and the occasional Wi-Fi connection allows these families to stay connected with the world.") One photo shows a young boy carrying a solar panel down from the roof in a remote village in Jharkhand, India.

Another photo documents the largest salt flat in Argentina, part of the so-called "lithium triangle" with parts of Chile and Bolivia. A salt miner says "They started looking for lithium there in 2010. We made them stop; it was hurting the environment and affecting the water. But now they are back and I am afraid. Everything we have could be lost."

And a photo from Nigeria shows two people wearing traditional African attire but adorned with "goggles crafted from repurposed VHS tapes". RestofWorld says the goggles "represent how individuals and communities reclaim and reinterpret technology for art, commentary, and resilience. This practice reflects a community's ability to find new life in what others might discard, highlighting a deep relationship with both old and new technologies."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/01/26/231212/biometrics-windmills-and-vhs-tapes-the-winners-of-rest-of-world-international-tech-photo-contest?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press:

Perplexity AI has presented a new proposal to TikTok's parent company that would allow the U.S. government to own up to 50% of a new entity that merges Perplexity with TikTok's U.S. business, according to a person familiar with the matter... The new proposal would allow the U.S. government to own up to half of that new structure once it makes an initial public offering of at least $300 billion, said the person, who was not authorized to speak about the proposal. The person said Perplexity's proposal was revised based off of feedback from the Trump administration. If the plan is successful, the shares owned by the government would not have voting power, the person said. The government also would not get a seat on the new company's board.

Under the plan, ByteDance would not have to completely cut ties with TikTok, a favorable outcome for its investors. But it would have to allow a "full U.S. board control," the person said.

Under the proposal, the China-based tech company would contribute TikTok's U.S. business without the proprietary algorithm that fuels what users see on the app, according to a document seen by the Associated Press.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/01/26/2316243/a-new-bid-for-tiktok-from-perplexity-ai-would-give-the-us-government-a-50-stake?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

"An underwater data cable between Sweden and Latvia was damaged early on Sunday," reports the Financial Times, "in at least the fourth episode of potential sabotage in the Baltic Sea that has caused concern in Nato about the vulnerability of critical infrastructure..."

Criminal investigations have started in Latvia and Sweden, and a ship has been seized as part of the probes, according to Swedish prosecutors, who did not identify the vessel. Previous incidents have been linked to Russian and Chinese ships...

The latest incident comes as the three Baltic states are preparing to disconnect their electricity systems from the former Soviet network in early February and integrate themselves into the continental European grid, with some fearing further potential disruption ahead of that. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have joined the EU and Nato since regaining their independence after their forced annexation by the Soviet Union, and see their switch to the European electricity system as their final integration into the west. KÄ(TM)stutis Budrys, Lithuania's foreign minister, said navigation rules in the Baltic Sea needed to be reviewed "especially when it comes to the use of anchors" and added there were now so many incidents that there was little chance they could all be accidents.

Repair of data cables has tended to take much less time than that for gas or electricity connections, and the Latvian state radio and television centre said it had found alternative routes for its communications.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/01/27/0140243/another-undersea-cable-damaged-in-baltic-sea-criminal-sabotage-investigation-launched?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

At December's "Microsoft Excel World Championship" in Las Vegas, "finance professionals fluent in spreadsheets were treated like minor celebrities," writes the New York Times, "as they gathered to solve devilishly complex Excel puzzles in front of an audience of about 400 people, and more watching an ESPN3 livestream."

The Times notes that "many fans find out about the Excel championship through ESPN's annual obscure sports showcase, where it is sandwiched between competitions like speed chess and the World Dog Surfing Championships." But the contest's organizer envisions tournaments with "more spectators, bigger sponsors and a million-dollar prize" — even though this year's prize was $5,000 and a pro wrestling-style championship belt.

The format for the finals was a mock-up of World of Warcraft, an online role-playing game. It required the 12 men (this particular nerdfest was mostly a guy thing) to design Excel formulas for tracking 20 avatars and their vital signs... To prepare, [competitor Diarmuid] Early adjusted the width of his Excel columns with the precision of a point guard lining up a 3-point shot. [Andrew] Ngai queued up a YouTube compilation of "focus music". After an announcer kicked off the 40-minute event — "Five, four, three, two, one, and Excel!" — the 12 players leaned over their keyboards and began plugging in formulas. One example: "=CountChar (Lower (D5),"W")" allowed one competitor, Michael Jarman, to figure out how many times the letter "W" appeared in a spreadsheet.

ZDNet points out that there's a seven-hour livestream of the event that's "worth checking out for the opening theme song alone."

The New York Times closes their article with a quote from super-fan Erik Oehm, a software developer from San Francisco who called the event "the Super Bowl for Excel nerds". Oehm watched excitedly from the front row as this year's winner — Michael Jarman — finally raised the championship belt overhead while someone dumped glitter on him. And then he said...

"You'd never see this with Google Sheets. You'd never get this level of passion."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/01/27/0355223/the-super-bowl-for-nerds-scenes-from-the-microsoft-excel-world-championship?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

"Looking for a quick fix for their fast-growing electricity diets, tech giants are increasingly looking to strike deals with power plant owners to plug in directly," reports the Associated Press, "avoiding a potentially longer and more expensive process of hooking into a fraying electric grid that serves everyone else." (It can take up to four years to connect a data center to the grid, one data center trade group says in the article — years longer than it takes to build a new data center.)

But the idea of bypassing the grid is "raising questions over whether diverting power to higher-paying customers will leave enough for others and whether it's fair to excuse big power users from paying for the grid."

Front and center is the data center that Amazon's cloud computing subsidiary, Amazon Web Services, is building next to the Susquehanna nuclear plant in eastern Pennsylvania. The arrangement between the plant's owners and AWS — called a "behind the meter" connection — is the first such to come before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. For now, FERC has rejected a deal that could eventually send 960 megawatts — about 40% of the plant's capacity — to the data center. That's enough to power more than a half-million homes... [But the FERC's 2-1 rejection "was procedural. Recent comments by commissioners suggest they weren't ready to decide how to regulate such a novel matter without more study."]

In theory, the AWS deal would let Susquehanna sell power for more than they get by selling into the grid... The profit potential is one that other nuclear plant operators, in particular, are embracing after years of financial distress and frustration with how they are paid in the broader electricity markets. Many say they have been forced to compete in some markets against a flood of cheap natural gas as well as state-subsidized solar and wind energy. Power plant owners also say the arrangement benefits the wider public, by bypassing the costly buildout of long power lines and leaving more transmission capacity on the grid for everyone else...

Monitoring Analytics, the market watchdog in the mid-Atlantic grid, wrote in a filing to FERC that the impact would be "extreme" if the Susquehanna-AWS model were extended to all nuclear power plants in the territory. Energy prices would increase significantly and there's no explanation for how rising demand for power will be met even before big power plants drop out of the supply mix, it said.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/01/27/0539219/should-big-tech-plug-its-data-centers-directly-into-power-plants?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The EFF has complained that in general "smart" products for babies "collect a ton of information about you and your baby on an ongoing basis". (For this year's "worst in privacy" product at CES they chose a $1,200 baby bassinet equipped with a camera, a microphone, and a radar sensor...)

But today the Washington Post reported on a $1,700 bassinet that surprised the mother of a one-month-old when it "abruptly demanded money for a feature she relied on to soothe her baby to sleep."

The internet-connected bassinet... reliably comforted her 1-month-old — just as it had her first child — until it started charging $20 a month for some abilities, including one that keeps the bassinet's motion and sounds at one level all night. The level-lock feature previously was available without a fee. "It all felt really intrusive — like they went into our bedroom and clawed back this feature that we've been depending on...." When the Snoo's maker, Happiest Baby, introduced a premium subscription for some of the bassinet's most popular features in July, owners filed dozens of complaints to the Federal Trade Commission and the Better Business Bureau, coordinated review bombs and vented on social media — saying the company took advantage of their desperation for sleep to bait-and-switch them...

Happiest Baby isn't the only baby gear company that has rolled out a subscription. In 2023, makers of the Miku baby monitor, which retails for up to $400, elicited similar fury from parents when it introduced a $10 monthly subscription for most features. A growing number of internet-connected products have lost software support or functionality after purchase in recent years, such as Spotify's Car Thing — a $90 Bluetooth streaming device that the company announced in May it plans to discontinue — and Levi's $350 smart jacket, which let users control their phones by swiping sensors on its sleeve...

Seventeen consumer protection and tech advocacy groups cited Happiest Baby and Car Thing in a letter urging the FTC to create guidelines that ensure products retain core functionality without the imposition of fees that did not exist when the items were originally bought.

The Times notes that the bassinets are often resold, so the subscription fees are partly to cover the costs of supporting new owners, according to Happiest Baby's vice president for marketing and communications. But the article three additional perspectives:

"This new technology is actually allowing manufacturers to change the way the status quo has been for decades, which is that once you buy something, you own it and you can do whatever you want. Right now, consumers have no trust that what they're buying is actually going to keep working." — Lucas Gutterman, who leads the Public Interest Research Group's "Design to Last" campaign.
"It's a shame to be beholden to companies' goodwill, to require that they make good decisions about which settings to put behind a paywall. That doesn't feel good, and you can't always trust that, and there's no guarantee that next week Happiest Baby isn't going to announce that all of the features are behind a paywall." — Elizabeth Chamberlain, sustainability director at iFixit.
"It's no longer just an out-and-out purchase of something. It's a continuous rental, and people don't know that." — Natasha Tusikov, an associate professor at York University

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/01/27/0455205/internet-connected-smart-products-for-babies-suddenly-start-charging-subscription-fees?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.