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An anonymous reader shared this report from the blog OMG Ubuntu: Having recently announced is own range of Raspberry Pi-branded SD cards (with support for command queuing on the Pi 5 and reliable read/write speeds) the company is now offering its own range of branded Raspberry Pi SSDs... And for those who don't have an M.2 expansion board? Well, that's where the new Raspberry Pi SSD Kit comes in. It bundles the official M.2 HAT+ with an SSD for an all-in-one, ready-to-roll solution. Eben Upton expects it to be a popular feature: When we launched Raspberry Pi 5, almost exactly a year ago, I thought the thing people would get most excited about was the three-fold increase in performance over 2019's Raspberry Pi 4. But very quickly it became clear that it was the other new features — the power button (!), and the PCI Express port — that had captured people's imagination. We've seen everything from Ethernet adapters, to AI accelerators, to regular PC graphics cards attached to the PCI Express port... We've also released an AI Kit, which bundles the M.2 HAT+ with an AI inference accelerator from our friends at Hailo. But the most popular use case for the PCI Express port on Raspberry Pi 5 is to attach an NVMe solid-state disk (SSD). SSDs are fast; faster even than our branded A2-class SD cards. If no-compromises performance is your goal, you'll want to run Raspberry Pi OS from an SSD, and Raspberry Pi SSDs are the perfect choice. The entry-level 256GB drive is priced at $30 on its own, or $40 as a kit; its 512GB big brother is priced at $45 on its own, or $55 as a kit... The 256GB SSD and SSD Kit are available to buy today, while the 512GB variants are available to pre-order now for shipping by the end of November. So, there you have it: a cost-effective way to squeeze even more performance out of your Raspberry Pi 5. Enjoy!

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When SpaceX developed reusable boosters for its Falcon rockets, it helped cut costs of launches. Now the Wall Street Journal reports that last week's first-time catch of "its huge Starship booster" could "extend SpaceX's cost advantages, especially in launches to low-Earth orbit, where SpaceX and others operate satellites." A fully and rapidly reusable Starship would push down SpaceX's costs by limiting the need to crank out new hardware and cutting downtime between flights, space industry executives say. Bain, the consulting firm, has estimated that Starship would reduce the cost of getting each kilogram to low-Earth orbit by 50 to 80 times... SpaceX's rocket peers are moving toward reusability, but they are behind the progress Musk's company has made. - The huge booster that will power New Glenn, the orbital rocket Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is developing, is designed to be reusable. That rocket is slated to launch for the first time next month. - ULA, the rocket operator owned by Boeing and Lockheed Martin, is looking to recover the two engines that help power the first part of its new rocket, Vulcan Centaur. The parent company for Arianespace, whose new vehicle is powered by an expendable booster, has also invested in a startup developing a reusable booster. - Last year, Rocket Lab USA used an engine that had flown before on a flight of its Electron rocket, and is working on a new vehicle, called Neutron, with a booster it could use again. - Jason Kim, chief executive of Firefly Aerospace, said the reusable vehicle the Texas-based company is developing with Northrop Grumman would give launch customers more flexibility and better pricing. "It really comes down to the affordability and the schedule," Kim said in a recent interview. "We need reusability for rockets, just like we have reusability for cars, for airplanes, for bicycles, for horses," Musk said in a video SpaceX posted earlier this year...

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An anonymous reader shared this report from the Verge: Ever wondered why some of your Instagram videos tend to look blurry, while others are crisp and sharp? It's because, on Instagram, the quality of your video apparently depends on how many views it's getting. Here's part of Mosseri's explanation, from the video, which was reposted by a Threads user today. "In general, we want to show the highest-quality video we can ... But if something isn't watched for a long time — because the vast majority of views are in the beginning — we will move to a lower quality video. And then if it's watched again a lot then we'll re-render the higher quality video...." The shift in quality "isn't huge," Mosseri said in response to another Threads user, who'd asked if that approach disadvantaged smaller creators. That's "the right concern," he told them, but said people interact with videos based on its content, not its quality. That's consistent with how Meta has described its approach before... Meta wrote in a blog [post] that in order to conserve computing resources for the relatively few, most watched videos, it gives fresh uploads the fastest, most basic encoding. After a video "gets sufficiently high watch time," it receives a more robust encoding pass. "It works at an aggregate level, not an individual viewer level," Mosseri wrote later on Threads. "We bias to higher quality (more CPU intensive encoding and more expensive storage for bigger files) for creators who drive more views. It's not a binary theshhold, but rather a sliding scale."

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Communications of the ACM checks in on the quest for room-temperature superconductivity. "Time and time again, physicists have announced breakthroughs that were later found to be irreproducible, in error, or even fraudulent." But "The issue is once again simmering..." In January 2024, a group of researchers from Europe and South America announced they had achieved a milestone in room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductivity. Using Scotch-taped cleaved pyrolytic graphite with surface wrinkles, which formed line defects, they observed a room-temperature superconducting state. Their paper, published in the journal Advanced Quantum Technologies, has gained considerable attention in the scientific world... Although many in the scientific community remain incredulous, if valid, this development could help solve a key piece of the puzzle: how defects and wrinkles in a material such as scotch-taped cleaved pyrolytic graphite (HOPG) affect electrical properties and behavior within superconductive systems... "We haven't reached a point where there is a clear path to room temperature superconductivity because researchers are either overly enthusiastic or deceptive," said Elie Track, chief technology officer at HYPRES, Inc., an Elmsford, NY, company that develops and commercializes superconductor integrated circuits (ICs) and systems. "People fail to check measurements and others can't reproduce their results. There is a lot of carelessness and sloppy science surrounding the space because people are so eager to achieve success." The team conducting research into scotch-taped cleaved pyrolytic graphite believe their discovery could tilt the search for practically useful room-temperature superconductivity in a favorable direction. They reported they were able to achieve one-dimensional superconductivity in pyrolytic graphite at temperatures as great as 300 degrees Kelvin (26.85 degrees Celsius), and at ambient pressure. Vinokur and physicist Maria Cristina Diamantini described the development as the first "unambiguous experimental evidence" for a global room temperature zero-resistance state. If true, the team's research could illuminate a path to new superconducting materials.... Others remain skeptical, however. For example Alan Kadin [a technical consultant in the field and a former professor of electrical engineering at the University of Rochester] pointed out that one of the key researchers for the project, Yakov Kopelevich, has been working in the field for two decades and, so far, "The results are not reproducible in other labs...Until someone else independently reproduces these results, I think we can safely ignore them," he argued... Yet as scientists continue to bang away at the superconducting challenge — including the possibility of using generative AI to explore materials and techniques — optimism is growing that a major breakthrough could occur.

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When it comes to introducing liability for software products, "the EU and U.S. are taking very different approaches," according to Lawfare's cybersecurity newsletter. "While the U.S. kicks the can down the road, the EU is rolling a hand grenade down it to see what happens." Under the status quo, the software industry is extensively protected from liability for defects or issues, and this results in systemic underinvestment in product security. Authorities believe that by making software companies liable for damages when they peddle crapware, those companies will be motivated to improve product security... [T]he EU has chosen to set very stringent standards for product liability, apply them to people rather than companies, and let lawyers sort it all out. Earlier this month, the EU Council issued a directive updating the EU's product liability law to treat software in the same way as any other product. Under this law, consumers can claim compensation for damages caused by defective products without having to prove the vendor was negligent or irresponsible. In addition to personal injury or property damages, for software products, damages may be awarded for the loss or destruction of data. Rather than define a minimum software development standard, the directive sets what we regard as the highest possible bar. Software makers can avoid liability if they prove a defect was not discoverable given the "objective state of scientific and technical knowledge" at the time the product was put on the market. Although the directive is severe on software makers, its scope is narrow. It applies only to people (not companies), and damages for professional use are explicitly excluded. There is still scope for collective claims such as class actions, however. The directive isn't law itself but sets the legislative direction for EU member states, and they have two years to implement its provisions. The directive commits the European Commission to publicly collating court judgements based on the directive, so it will be easy to see how cases are proceeding. Major software vendors used by the world's most important enterprises and governments are publishing comically vulnerable code without fear of any blowback whatsoever. So yes, the status quo needs change. Whether it needs a hand grenade lobbed at it is an open question. We'll have our answer soon.

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"Friction between bosses and their employees over the terms of their return shows no signs of abating," reports the Los Angeles Times. But there's one big loophole... About 80% of organizations have put in place return-to-office policies, but in a sign that many managers are reluctant to clamp down on the flexibility employees have become accustomed to, only 17% of those organizations actively enforce their policies, according to recent research by real estate brokerage CBRE. "Some organizations out there have 'mandated' something, but if most of your organization is not following that mandate, then there is not too much you can do to enforce it," said Julie Whelan, head of research into workplace trends for CBRE... The tension "is due to the fact that we have changed since we all went to our separate corners and then came back" from pandemic-imposed office exile, said Elizabeth Brink, a workplace expert at architecture firm Gensler. "It's fair to say that we have different needs now." A disconnect persists between employer expectations for office attendance and employee behavior, CBRE found. Sixty percent of leaders surveyed said they want their employees in the office three or more days a week, while only 51% reported that employees work in the office at that frequency. Conversely, 37% of employees show up one or two days a week, yet only 17% of employers are satisfied with that attendance. In the article, one worker complains about their employer's two-days-a-week of mandated in-office time. "I feel like I'm back in grade school and being forced to sit down and do my homework." The article also notes some employers are also considering changes in the other direction: "calculating whether to shed office space to cut down on rent, typically the largest cost of operating a business after payroll."

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Boeing received an email from the chief pilot at Ethiopian Airlines on December 1, 2018 with several questions, reports the New York Times (alternate URL here). "in essence the pilot was asking for direction. If we see a series of warnings on the new 737 Max, he posed, what do we do?" What ensued was an email conversation among a number of Boeing senior officials about whether they could answer the pilot's questions without violating international restrictions on disseminating information about a crash while it was still under investigation. That restriction was in play because a 737 Max flown by Lion Air had crashed a few weeks earlier leaving Indonesia. The inquiry from Ethiopian Airlines would prove chillingly prescient because just months later one of its 737s would go down because of a flight control malfunction similar to the one that led to the Lion Air crash. The Ethiopian Airlines crash would kill everyone on board and leave questions about whether Boeing had done everything it could to inform pilots of what it had learned about the malfunction and how to handle it. In response to the inquiry from Ethiopian Airlines, Boeing's chief pilot, Jim Webb, proposed to his colleagues that he thank the airline for attending a previous briefing on the flight control system, called MCAS, but otherwise decline to answer the pilot's first two questions and just refer the airline to training materials and previously issued guidance. Most of those on the email agreed. Boeing's eventual response? "I can only address the current system and the Operations Manual Bulletin. The first two questions directly relate to the accident scenario; therefore, I will be unable to address them here." The Times adds that Boeing's chief pilot Jim Webb then "ended the email by stating that if airline officials had any additional questions about the bulletin and system, they should feel free to reach out.... "It is impossible to know whether any pilots with Ethiopian Arlines would have acted differently if Webb's reply had been more forthcoming. But Boeing's limited response to an airline seeking help highlights a missed opportunity to collaborate on safety and to pass along lessons Boeing had collected following the Lion Air jet's crash into the Java Sea on Oct. 29, 2018."

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A writer for the New York Times editorial board argues we don't yet fully understand the impact of warehouses. "Thanks to the rise of online shopping and the proximity to so many American doorsteps, warehouses have become a major source of blue-collar employment," both in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and beyond. "In Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley, more than 19,000 people work in the warehouses that prepare our packages. Thousands more drive the trucks that deliver them." But while the total number of warehouse-related jobs almost replaces the jobs lost from the closure of a major steel plant, "the political power that blue-collar workers once wielded has not been replaced." Despite their large numbers, their importance to the economy, and their presence in Northampton — a swing county in a crucial battleground state — warehouse workers don't form an influential voting bloc in the way that steelworkers did... It turns out that making stuff isn't the same as distributing it. Working in a steel mill is a communal act that lends itself to the pursuit of political power in a way that warehouse jobs do not. Steelworkers toiled alongside one another, forming lifelong bonds, bowling leagues and unions that delivered a reliable voting bloc. Back when thousands of workers streamed out of the gates of Bethlehem Steel at quitting time, "politicians would come out to shake our hands," Jerry Green, retired president of United Steelworkers Local 2599, told me. Factories were so good at political mobilization, in fact, that some credit them for democracy itself. Women and working-class men won the right to vote in the United States, Western Europe and much of East Asia after about a quarter of those populations were employed in factories, according to recent research by Sam van Noort, a lecturer at Princeton. Warehouses, by contrast, have no such mystique. Nobody campaigns outside the Walmart distribution centers here. Workers tend to be hired by staffing agencies and many stay for only a few months. They work on their own and rarely socialize. They are notoriously difficult to organize. Alec MacGillis, author of "Fulfillment: America in the Shadow of Amazon," told me that the biggest challenge for labor organizers at Amazon warehouses was getting workers to stay on the job long enough to feel a sense of solidarity. Malenie Tapia, who moved to Bethlehem from Queens, N.Y., five years ago and took a job as a "picker" in a Zara warehouse, explained why. For eight hours a day, she grabbed items off numbered shelves and delivered them to packers who packed them into boxes. Talking to co-workers was forbidden, she said, except during a brief lunch break. "Sometimes I would go to the section in the back, where there would be less eyes on you, and sneak in a little moment of conversation," she said. Here's what happened when the reporter asked a pair of Latino workers about their political opinions: Most of all, they fretted about being replaced by machines. They spoke with dread about a fully automated McDonald's and a robot that unloads container ships. They didn't seem to see themselves as part of a working class that could band together to demand protections for their jobs. The hot political issue around warehouses isn't the workers at all; it's the traffic and loss of green space associated with them. Both the Democratic and Republican candidates in the race for a state representative seat in Northampton have vowed to stop the proliferation of warehouses, which some citizens' groups say destroys their rural way of life. If warehouse workers had a political voice, they might push back. But they don't, so they won't. Warehouses have been an economic boon. But politically, for workers, they are a loss.

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"In the early hours of Thursday, March 23, 2023, residents in the German town of Kronberg were woken from their sleep by several explosions," reports CNN . "Criminals had blown up an ATM located below a block of flats in the town center..." According to local media reports, witnesses saw people dressed in dark clothing fleeing in a black car towards a nearby highway. During the heist, thieves stole 130,000 euros in cash. They also caused an estimated half a million euros worth of collateral damage, according to a report by Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office, BKA. Rather than staging dramatic and risky bank robberies, criminal groups in Europe have been targeting ATMs as an easier and more low-key target. In Germany — Europe's largest economy — thieves have been blowing up ATMs at a rate of more than one per day in recent years. In a country where cash is still a prevalent payment method, the thefts can prove incredibly lucrative, with criminals pocketing hundreds of thousands of euros in one attack. Europol has been cracking down on the robberies, carrying out large cross-border operations aimed at taking down the highly-organized criminal gangs behind them. Earlier this month, authorities from Germany, France and the Netherlands arrested three members of a criminal network who have been carrying out attacks on cash machines using explosives, Europol said in a statement. Since 2022, the detainees are believed to have looted millions of euros and run up a similar amount in property damage, from 2022 to 2024, Europol said... Unlike its European neighbors, who largely transitioned away from cash payments due to the Covid-19 pandemic, cash still plays a significant role in Germany. One half of all transactions in 2023 were made using banknotes and coins, according to Bundesbank. Germans have a cultural attachment to cash, traditionally viewing it as a safe method of payment. Some say it allows a greater level of privacy, and gives them more control over their expenses.

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In Iceland, "a volcanic system has awoken after an 800-year slumber," according to a multimedia CNN Special Report. "But in another part of Iceland, scientists and engineers are hoping to harness magma's immense power to solve the planet's biggest problem..." It all started in 2009 when Bjarni Pálsson, an engineer with Iceland's national power company, accidentally drilled into a magma chamber. "Armed with new technology and know-how, he is going back in..." The ambition of the geothermal experts and volcanologists that comprise the Krafla Magma Testbed is to convert the immense heat and pressure into a new "limitless" form of supercharged geothermal energy — a tantalizing prospect as the world struggles to end its relationship with planet-heating fossil fuels. "This has never been done before," said Hjalti Páll Ingólfsson, director of the Geothermal Research Cluster, which developed the project.... If all goes to plan, the first borehole will be completed in 2027 and will mark the first time anyone has ever implanted sensors directly into a magma chamber... If the first drilling experiment succeeds, the team will move onto the second borehole, due to be completed in 2029 — and this could be the global gamechanger. It's here the team will attempt to harness the intense heat of magma to produce a new kind of extreme geothermal energy, many times more powerful than conventional... If they succeed, the implications could reverberate around the world, Ingólfsson said. There are an estimated 800 million people living within roughly 60 miles of an active volcano. The report includes a map showing volcano sites around the earth where similar drilling could theoretically unleash the same intense magma-powered extreme geothermal energy. Iceland's plan is to drill down 1.2 miles — about 2 kilometers — into a magma chamber that's around 1,800 Fahrenheit (nearly 1,000 degrees Celsius). The engineering feat "won't be easy," the article acknowledges. "But as humans heat the planet at record speed with fossil fuel pollution, there is increasing pressure to perform moonshot feats of engineering to save us from ourselves."

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SpaceNews reports: SpaceX's Super Heavy booster came within a second of aborting a "catch" landing attempt on the latest Starship test flight, according to audio posted online, apparently inadvertently, by Elon Musk... In the audio, one person, not identified, described an issue with the Super Heavy landing burn where a "misconfigured" parameter meant that spin pressure, presuming in the Raptor engines in the booster, did not increase as expected. "We were one second away from that tripping and telling the rocket to abort and try to crash into the ground next to the tower," that person said. That scenario would "erroneously tell a healthy rocket to not try that catch...." The people on the audio note that there had been discussions of delaying the Flight 5 launch to provide additional time to check those parameters. "We were scared about the fact that we had 100 aborts that were not super-trivial," one person said... Another issue discussed in the audio... was a cover on a chine, a vertical structure on the booster, that came off as the vehicle went transonic during its descent. A SpaceX official said in the audio that having chine cover come off was something that they were worried about before launch... The person also started to discuss an issue with the engine plume during the landing burn, but the video stops at that point. The discussions appeared to involve planning for the next Starship test flight, Flight 6. SpaceX is moving ahead with preparations for the flight, moving the next Super Heavy booster to the launch site for testing. "Flight 6 is coming up soon!" Musk posted early Oct. 25. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

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This week Google-backed Anthropic announced its upgraded AI model Claude 3.5 Sonnet could "perform tasks like navigating web browsers, filling forms, and manipulating data." Now Google plans something similar for Chrome, reports 9to5Linux.com: According to The Information, Google is "developing artificial intelligence that takes over a person's web browser to complete tasks such as gathering research, purchasing a product or booking a flight." "Project Jarvis" — in a nod to J.A.R.V.I.S. in Iron Man — would operate in Google Chrome and is a consumer-facing (rather than enterprise) feature to "automate everyday, web-based tasks." The article doesn't specify whether this would be for mobile or desktop... Given a command/action, Jarvis works by taking "frequent screenshots of what's on their computer screen, and interpreting the shots before taking actions like clicking on a button or typing into a text field." The Information reports that Google "plans to preview the product, also known as a computer-using agent, as early as December alongside the release of its next flagship Gemini large language model, which would help power the product, two of the people said."

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The cost of cleaning up the U.K.'s largest nuclear site, "is expected to spiral to £136 billion" (about $176 billion), according to the Guardian, creating tension with the country's public-spending watchdog. Projects to fix the state-owned buildings with hazardous and radioactive material "are running years late and over budget," the Guardian notes, with the National Audit Office suggesting spending at the Sellafield site has risen to more than £2.7 billion a year ($3.49 billion). Europe's most hazardous industrial site has previously been described by a former UK secretary of state as a "bottomless pit of hell, money and despair". The Guardian's Nuclear Leaks investigation in late 2023 revealed a string of cybersecurity problems at the site, as well as issues with its safety and workplace culture. The National Audit Office found that Sellafield was making slower-than-hoped progress on making the site safe and that three of its most hazardous storage sites pose an "intolerable risk". The site is a sprawling collection of buildings, many never designed to hold nuclear waste long-term, now in various states of disrepair. It stores and treats decades of nuclear waste from atomic power generation and weapons programmes, has taken waste from countries including Italy and Sweden, and is the world's largest store of plutonium. Sellafield is forecast to cost £136bn to decommission, which is £21.4bn or 18.8% higher than was forecast in 2019. Its buildings are expected to be finally torn down by 2125 and its nuclear waste buried deep underground at an undecided English location. The underground project's completion date has been delayed from 2040 to the 2050s at the earliest, meaning Sellafield will need to build more stores and manage waste for longer. Each decade of delay costs Sellafield between £500m and £760m, the National Audit Office said. Meanwhile, the government hopes to ramp up nuclear power generation, which will create more waste. "Plans to clean up three of its worst ponds — which contain hazardous nuclear sludge that must be painstakingly removed — are running six to 13 years later than forecast when the National Audit Office last drew up a report, in 2018... " "One pond, the Magnox swarf storage silo, is leaking 2,100 litres of contaminated water each day, the NAO found. The pond was due to be emptied by 2046 but this has slipped to 2059." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.

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SFGate spills the secrets of Disneyland's "Enchanted Tiki Room" and its lifelike animatronic singing birds — Jose, Fritz, Michael and Pierre — "whose movements were perfectly synced with the audio track." "Beneath the room, the heartbeat of the attraction is a $1 million installation of electronics equipment, operated by a roll of 14-channel magnetic tape," the Orange County Register wrote upon its opening. "It is the same system which programs the U.S. military's polaris missile." That system also ran very hot. To keep guests from overheating, air conditioning was installed throughout the building, making the Tiki Room Disneyland's first attraction to be fully air conditioned... Or, as another article puts it, "While Disney did not delve into the speculative science of cryogenics to preserve his life, he did borrow the mechanical brain of a nuclear missile to simulate life, creating a new type of entertainment in the process." The article remembers how Wernher Von Braun became a technical advisor (and on-camera presenter) for three Disney-produced TV episodes about space travel — at the same time Von Braun was working as technical director for the U.S. Army rocket program that produced the world's first long-range guided ballistic missile, plus the first submarine-launched ballistic missile with its ground-breaking launch control mechanism: An important aspect of the Polaris launch system hinged on the fact that the conditions under which the missiles might be launched were constantly changing. Different underwater currents, temperatures, and flexing of the metal hull all contributed to the difficulty of a successful launch. In order to minimize human errors and to automate the sequence as much as possible, scientists developed an audio control system. A magnetic audio tape with a series of prerecorded cues precisely timed to account for the submarine's movement, controlled the launch machinery. This new technology, invented to deliver nuclear destruction, proved exactly what Disney needed for his wonderland developed for children. The article concludes that Disneyland engineering "transformed Von Braun's military technology" to the point today where "what was once controlled by the artificial brain of a nuclear missile is now run by the equivalent of a MacBook." SFGate delves deeper into the attraction's strange origins — and how it all came full circle 63 years later... At the intersection of Main Street and Adventureland, a restaurant called the Pavillion — now the Jolly Holiday — bridged the gap. Under one roof, it served food to Main Street guests on one side and Adventureland diners on the other. The inelegant transition created an eyesore that Walt despised... The need for the Tiki Cafe "appeared to be less about food and more about aesthetics," Ken Bruce writes in Before the Birds Sang Words , a comprehensive history of the attraction. In 1961, Walt gathered with park designers about the concept. The sketch made by legendary theme park designer John Hench was remarkably thorough, with much of its design incorporated into the final product... When Walt saw a plethora of birds in the sketch, he famously exclaimed, "We can't have birds in there ... because they'll poop in the food." Hench hurriedly ad-libbed that the birds would be mechanical, a concept that Walt adored... Although its powerful air conditioning may be its biggest draw today, many attractions you love owe their existence to the flock of singing birds. Disney engineers' work on the talking flora and fauna laid the foundation for much more complex Audio-Animatronics (a word that Walt Disney coined). Without Jose, Fritz, Michael and Pierre, there would be no Haunted Mansion, no Pirates of the Caribbean, no Rise of the Resistance. Next year, in celebration of Disneyland's 70th anniversary, the park will unveil one of its most sophisticated animatronics yet: Walt Disney himself. It will be the first time Walt appears in a Disney attraction anywhere in the world, completing a journey that started with a mechanical bird and ends with an immortal homage. Their article also reveals that a year after the Tiki Room opened, one of the birds was programmed to say "Come, there's an island there for you in Hawaii. Soaring birds of United Airlines fly there too!" Because Disneyland had signed a sponsorship deal with United Airlines...

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"Google essentially disappeared us from the internet," says the couple who created price-comparison site Foundem in 2006. Google's search results for "price comparison" and "comparison shopping" buried their site — for more than three years. Today the BBC looks at their 15-year legal battle, which culminated with a then record €2.4 billion fine (£2 billion or $2.6 billion) for Google, which was deemed to have abused its market dominance. The case has been hailed as a landmark moment in the global regulation of Big Tech. Google spent seven years fighting that verdict, issued in June 2017, but in September this year Europe's top court — the European Court of Justice — rejected its appeals. Speaking to Radio 4's The Bottom Line in their first interview since that final verdict, Shivaun and Adam explained that at first, they thought their website's faltering start had simply been a mistake. "We initially thought this was collateral damage, that we had been false positive detected as spam," says Shivaun, 55. "We just assumed we had to escalate to the right place and it would be overturned...." The couple sent Google numerous requests to have the restriction lifted but, more than two years later, nothing had changed and they said they received no response. Meanwhile, their website was "ranking completely normally" on other search engines, but that didn't really matter, according to Shivaun, as "everyone's using Google". The couple would later discover that their site was not the only one to have been put at a disadvantage by Google — by the time the tech giant was found guilty and fined in 2017 there were around 20 claimants, including Kelkoo, Trivago and Yelp... In its 2017 judgement, the European Commission found that Google had illegally promoted its own comparison shopping service in search results, whilst demoting those of competitors... "I guess it was unfortunate for Google that they did it to us," Shivaun says. "We've both been brought up maybe under the delusion that we can make a difference, and we really don't like bullies." Even Google's final defeat in the case last month did not spell the end for the couple. They believe Google's conduct remains anti-competitive and the EC is looking into it. In March this year, under its new Digital Markets Act, the commission opened an investigation into Google's parent company, Alphabet, over whether it continues to preference its own goods and services in search results... The Raffs are also pursuing a civil damages claim against Google, which is due to begin in the first half of 2026. But when, or if, a final victory comes for the couple it will likely be a Pyrrhic one — they were forced to close Foundem in 2016. A spokesperson for Google told the BBC the 2024 judgment from the European Court of Justice only relates to "how we showed product results from 2008-2017. The changes we made in 2017 to comply with the European Commission's Shopping decision have worked successfully for more than seven years, generating billions of clicks for more than 800 comparison shopping services. "For this reason, we continue to strongly contest the claims made by Foundem and will do so when the case is considered by the courts."

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"Nvidia dethroned Apple as the world's most valuable company on Friday..." reports Reuters, "powered by insatiable demand for its specialized artificial intelligence chips." Nvidia's stock market value briefly touched $3.53 trillion, slightly above Apple's $3.52 trillion, LSEG data showed... In June, Nvidia briefly became the world's most valuable company before it was overtaken by Microsoft and Apple. The tech trio's market capitalizations have been neck-and-neck for several months. [Friday] Microsoft's market value stood at $3.18 trillion, with its stock up 0.8%... Nvidia's shares hit a record high on Tuesday, building on a rally from last week when TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker, posted a forecast-beating 54% jump in quarterly profit driven by soaring demand for chips used in AI. The article points out that by the end of the day Friday, Nvidia's valuation had dropped to $3.47 trillion, while Apple had risen to $3.52 trillion...

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"We passed Berkeley air — just outdoor air — into the material to see how it would perform," says U.C. Berkeley chemistry professor Omar Yaghi, "and it was beautiful. "It cleaned the air entirely of CO2," Yaghi says in an announcement from the university. "Everything." SFGate calls it "a discovery that could help potentially mitigate the effects of climate change..." Yaghi's lab has worked on carbon capture since the 1990s and began work on these crystalline structures in 2005. The innovative substance has lots of tiny holes, making it "great for storing gases or liquids, much like a sponge holds water," Yaghi said... While it could take one to two years for the powder to be usable in large-scale applications, Yaghi co-founded Atoco, an Irvine company, to commercialize his research and expand it beyond just carbon capture and storage. "Capturing carbon from the air just got easier," says the headline on the anouncement from the university, which explains why this technology is crucial: [T]oday's carbon capture technologies work well only for concentrated sources of carbon, such as power plant exhaust. The same methods cannot efficiently capture carbon dioxide from ambient air, where concentrations are hundreds of times lower than in flue gases. Yet direct air capture, or DAC, is being counted on to reverse the rise of CO2 levels, which have reached 426 parts per million, 50% higher than levels before the Industrial Revolution. Without it, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we won't reach humanity's goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degreesC (2.7 degreesF) above preexisting global averages. A new type of absorbing material developed by chemists at the University of California, Berkeley, could help get the world to negative emissions... According to Yaghi, the new material could be substituted easily into carbon capture systems already deployed or being piloted to remove CO2 from refinery emissions and capture atmospheric CO2 for storage underground. UC Berkeley graduate student Zihui Zhou, the paper's first author, said that a mere 200 grams of the material, a bit less than half a pound, can take up as much CO2 in a year — 20 kilograms (44 pounds) — as a tree. Their research was published this week in the journal Nature. And it's also interesting that they're using AI, according to the university's announcement: Yaghi is optimistic that artificial intelligence can help speed up the design of even better COFs and MOFs for carbon capture or other purposes, specifically by identifying the chemical conditions required to synthesize their crystalline structures. He is scientific director of a research center at UC Berkeley, the Bakar Institute of Digital Materials for the Planet (BIDMaP), which employs AI to develop cost-efficient, easily deployable versions of MOFs and COFs to help limit and address the impacts of climate change. "We're very, very excited about blending AI with the chemistry that we've been doing," he said. Another potential use could be for harvesting water from desert air for drinking water, Yaghi told SFGate. But he seems very focused specifically on carbon capture. "Another thing is that we need a strong determination among officials and industries to make carbon capture a high priority. Things have to change, but I believe that direct carbon capture from air is very doable."

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NoWayNoShapeNoForm writes: OpenVault believes that data caps on broadband are not a problem because most people do not exceed their existing data caps. OpenVault contends that people that do exceed their broadband data caps are simply being forgetful — leaving a streaming device on 24x7, or deploying unsecure WiFi access points, or reselling their service within an apartment building. Yes, there may be some ISPs that have older networks that they have not upgraded. Or maybe they are unable to increase network capacity in "the middle mile" of their networks, but the Covid pandemic certainly encouraged many ISPs to upgrade their networks and capacity while many ISPs that had broadband data caps ended that feature. Perhaps the biggest problem, according to OpenVault, is that most broadband users do not really have any idea how much bandwidth they "consume" every month. If Internet access is a service that people want to treat as a "utility", then you have to ask, Would they keep the water running after finishing their shower? In the article Ookla's VP of Smart Communities adds that "Scrolling through social media feeds for hours can 'push' hundreds of videos to the user, many of which may be of no interest — they just start running." So the main driver for usage-based billing wasn't to increase revenue, OpenVault CEO Mark Trudeau tells the site, but to "balance the network a little more..." (Though he then also adds that sometimes a subscriber could also be reselling broadband service in their apartment building, "And that's not even legal.") "If one or two customers on a given node is causing issues for 300 others, where those 300 are not getting the service that they paid for, then that's a problem right?" he said. Having said that, the article also points out that "Many major fiber providers, like AT&T, Frontier, Google Fiber and Verizon Fios, don't have data caps at all."

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"The world's largest renewable energy and transmission project has received key approval from government officials," reports New Atlas. Solar power from Australia will be carried 2,672 miles (4,300 kilometers) to Singapore over undersea cables in what's being called "the Australia-Asia Power Link project." Reuters reports that SunCable "aims to produce 6 gigawatts of electricity at a vast solar farm in Northern Australia and ship about a third of that to Singapore via undersea cable." More from New Atlas: [The project] will start by constructing a mammoth solar farm in Australia's Northern Territory to transmit around-the-clock clean power to [the Australian city] Darwin, and also export "reliable, cost-competitive renewable energy" to Singapore... with a clean energy generation capacity of up to 10 gigawatts, plus utility scale onsite storage. [The recently-obtained environmental approval] also green lights an 800-km (~500-mile) overhead transmission line between the solar precinct and Murrumujuk near Darwin... If all of the dominoes line up perfectly, supply of the first clean electricity is estimated to start in the early 2030s. An overview graphic on the project page shows that the eventual end game for the Powell Creek development appears to be the generation of up to 20 GW of peak solar power and have some 36-42 GWh of battery storage on site. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.

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SC World reports: Several major end-to-end encrypted cloud storage services contain cryptographic flaws that could lead to loss of confidentiality, file tampering, file injection and more, researchers from ETH Zurich said in a paper published this month. The five cloud services studied offer end-to-end encryption (E2EE), intended to ensure files can not be read or edited by anyone other than the uploader, meaning not even the cloud storage provider can access the files. However, ETH Zurich researchers Jonas Hofmann and Kien Tuong Truong, who presented their findings at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) last week, found serious flaws in four out of the five services that could effectively bypass the security benefits provided by E2EE by enabling an attacker who managed to compromise a cloud server to access, tamper with or inject files. The E2EE cloud storage services studied were Sync, pCloud, Seafile, Icedrive and Tresorit, which have a collective total of about 22 million users. Tresorit had the fewest vulnerabilities, which could enable some metadata tampering and use of non-authentic keys when sharing files. The other four services were found to have more severe flaws posing a greater risk to file confidentiality and integrity. BleepingComputer reports that Sync is "fast-tracking fixes," while Seafile "promised to patch the protocol downgrade problem on a future upgrade." And SC World does note that all 10 of the tested exploits "would require the attacker to have already gained control of a server with the ability to read, modify and inject data. "The authors wrote that they consider this to be a realistic threat model for E2EE services, as these services are meant to protect files even if such a compromise was to occur." Thanks to Slashdot reader spatwei for sharing the article.

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