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Last December, Hyperloop One, the futuristic transportation company pursuing Elon Musk's dream of tube-based, airplane-speed travel, announced its shutdown. However, the concept itself has found a new lease on life in a scaled-down version overseas. According to The Verge's Andrew J. Hawkins, "The hyperloop, in fact, lives on -- as a 1/12th scale model in Switzerland." From the report: Sure, this isn't exactly the full realization of Musk's 2013 white paper, in which he theorized that aerodynamic aluminum capsules filled with passengers or cargo could be propelled through a nearly airless tube at speeds of up to 760mph. These tubes, either raised on pylons or sunk beneath the earth, could be built either within or between cities. Musk called it a "fifth mode of transportation" and argued it could help change the way we live, work, trade, and travel. The idea is being put to the test in Lausanne, Switzerland, where a 120-meter circular test track is being operated by a team that includes the Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), the School of Business and Engineering Vaud (HEIG-VD), and Swisspod Technologies. This week, the group announced that it had conducted "the longest" hyperloop test of its kind: traveling 11.8 km (7.3 miles) at a speed of 40.7km/h (25.3mph). The circular test track has a circumference of 125.6 meters (412 feet) and a diameter of 40 centimeters (15.7 inches). It sounds modest, but the group claims that in a full-scale system, their test "directly translates" to a journey of 141.6 km (88 miles), which is about the distance between Geneva and Bern, or San Francisco to Sacramento, and speeds of up to 488.2 km/h (303.4mph). The project is called LIMITLESS, which stands for Linear Induction Motor Drive for Traction and Levitation in Sustainable Hyperloop Systems. During the test, the team "monitored the performance of vital subsystems," including propulsion, communication infrastructure, power electronics, and thermal management. They assessed "energy consumption, thrust variations, [linear induction motor] response, and control during acceleration, cruising, coasting, and braking scenarios." Of course, a 1/12th-scale circular test track is hardly a sign that the hyperloop is alive and well. Most of the startups and companies pursuing a full-scale hyperloop have shut down, victims of financial mismanagement, as well as infrastructure and regulatory hurdles. Critics said that while the hyperloop may be technically feasible, it still only amounts to vaporware. It's been called a "utopian vision" that would be financially impossible to achieve. But the Swiss team is undeterred, promising to conduct a battery of future tests to further validate the system. Swisspod CEO Denis Tudor said the group plans to test its first freight product soon, and is currently building a larger test track in the US. "This is a key step toward making hyperloop for passengers a reality and changing how we connect, work, and live," he said.

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

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The FBI warned on Tuesday that polling stations across multiple U.S. states received fake bomb threats sent from Russian email domains, forcing brief evacuations at two voting sites in Georgia's Fulton County. The threats, which targeted locations in Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin, have not been deemed credible, the FBI said in a statement. The evacuated Fulton County sites reopened after 30 minutes, prompting local officials to seek extended voting hours beyond the 7 p.m. ET deadline. The incidents follow Friday's joint intelligence warning from the FBI, ODNI, and CISA about Russian-created fake videos aimed at undermining election integrity. The agencies also reported Russian actors are spreading false claims about planned election fraud by U.S. officials.

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Amazon is launching drone deliveries from its Tolleson, AZ, same-day delivery site, making over 50,000 essentials available to eligible customers in the West Valley Phoenix area. The Verge reports: The news came after Amazon announced it was shutting down its testing zone location in Lockeford, California. The new Tolleson location integrates drone deliveries into Amazon's delivery network for the first time, and the drones will deploy right next to the fulfillment center. Amazon is using its latest MK30 drones that can carry up to 5 pounds while also flying "twice as far" and running "50 percent quieter" than its previous models that sometimes crashed and burned in testing. Amazon will launch the drones from its hybrid facility. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has approved Amazon's drones for Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS), meaning they can be flown out of visual range from the operator. The company claims it's the first to launch both a new facility and BVLOS drone service that meets FAA requirements.

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SpaceX has launched the world's first wood-paneled satellite into space "to test the suitability of timber as a renewable building material in future exploration of destinations like the Moon and Mars," reports the BBC. From the report: Made by researchers in Japan, the tiny satellite weighing just 900g is heading for the International Space Station on a SpaceX mission. It will then be released into orbit above the Earth. Named LignoSat, after the Latin word for wood, its panels have been built from a type of magnolia tree, using a traditional technique without screws or glue. Researchers at Kyoto University who developed it hope it may be possible in the future to replace some metals used in space exploration with wood. "Wood is more durable in space than on Earth because there's no water or oxygen that would rot or inflame it," Kyoto University forest science professor Koji Murata told Reuters news agency. "Early 1900s airplanes were made of wood," Prof Murata said. "A wooden satellite should be feasible, too." If trees could one day be planted on the Moon or Mars, wood might also provide material for colonies in space in the future, the researchers hope. Along with its wood panels, LignoSat also incorporates traditional aluminium structures and electronic components. It has sensors on board to monitor how its wood reacts to the extreme environment of space during the six months it will orbit the Earth. You can watch the launch on YouTube.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit arm of the Firefox browser maker Mozilla, has laid off 30% of its employees as the organization says it faces a "relentless onslaught of change." When reached by TechCrunch, Mozilla Foundation's communications chief Brandon Borrman confirmed the layoffs in an email. "The Mozilla Foundation is reorganizing teams to increase agility and impact as we accelerate our work to ensure a more open and equitable technical future for us all. That unfortunately means ending some of the work we have historically pursued and eliminating associated roles to bring more focus going forward," read the statement shared with TechCrunch. According to its annual tax filings, the Mozilla Foundation reported having 60 employees during the 2022 tax year. The number of employees at the time of the layoffs was closer to 120 people, according to a person with knowledge. When asked by TechCrunch, Mozilla's spokesperson did not dispute the figure. This is the second layoff at Mozilla this year, the first affecting dozens of employees who work on the side of the organization that builds the popular Firefox browser. [...] Announcing the layoffs in an email to all employees on October 30, the Mozilla Foundation's executive director Nabiha Syed confirmed that two of the foundation's major divisions -- advocacy and global programs -- are "no longer a part of our structure." The move, according to Syed, is in part to produce a "unified, powerful narrative from the Foundation," including revamping the foundation's strategic communications. "Our mission at Mozilla is more high-stakes than ever," said Syed. "We find ourselves in a relentless onslaught of change in the technology (and broader) world, and the idea of putting people before profit feels increasingly radical." "Navigating this topsy-turvy, distracting time requires laser focus -- and sometimes saying goodbye to the excellent work that has gotten us this far because it won't get us to the next peak. Lofty goals demand hard choices."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Tucked inside a 32-page earnings report, oil and gas giant BP revealed it was killing 18 early-stage hydrogen projects, a move that could have a chilling effect on the nascent hydrogen industry. The decision, along with the sale of the company's U.S. on-shore wind power operations, will save BP $200 million annually and help boost its bottom line. The hydrogen industry, which has relied on oil and gas companies both financially and through lobbying efforts, is preparing for a grimmer outcome. BP has been a supporter of hydrogen. The company's venture capital arm has invested in several green hydrogen startups, including Electric Hydrogen and Advanced Ionics. Earlier this year, BP said it would develop "more than 10" hydrogen projects in the U.S., Europe, and Australia. Now, BP is scaling back those plans, saying it'll develop between five and ten projects. The company is keeping quiet about which ones will receive the green light.

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AMD has surpassed Intel in datacenter processor sales for the first time in history, marking a dramatic shift in the server chip market. AMD's datacenter revenue hit $3.549 billion in Q3, edging out Intel's $3.3 billion, according to SemiAnalysis. The milestone ends Intel's decades-long dominance in server processors, where it held over 90% market share until recent years. AMD's EPYC processors now power many high-end servers, commanding premium prices despite selling at lower costs than comparable Intel chips.

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The degradation of the world's soils and landscapes is threatening human life, and must be addressed as a matter of urgency, the government of Saudi Arabia has said. The Guardian: Neglect of the land is wiping trillions of dollars from global economies, hampering agricultural production, disrupting water supplies, threatening children with poor nutrition, and destroying vital ecosystems, according to the country's deputy environment minister. Land degradation, and ways to combat the problem, will come into sharp focus at a global summit to be held in the nation's capital, Riyadh, in December. The conference of the parties (Cop) to the UN convention on combating desertification (CCD), which takes place every two years, is often an overlooked international meeting, sparsely attended compared with the Cops on climate and on biodiversity. But as this year's host, Saudi Arabia is planning to put the issue of land management in the spotlight, inviting senior ministers and heads of government from around the world, in an attempt to bring in some financial muscle. In so doing, the country, often accused of obstructive behaviour at climate Cops, will offer an unusual glimpse of its own environmental priorities, in a world increasingly imperilled by global heating and related water shortages. Osama Faqeeha, deputy environment minister in the kingdom's government, said people should not be misled by the term desertification, which could appear a narrow concern limited to arid countries. In fact, the CCD should be understood to cover all of the globe's vulnerable lands, and efforts to rescue and protect them.

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Apple has warned investors that future products may never be as profitable as its iPhone business, as it pushes into unproven new markets such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality headsets. From a report: The iPhone maker added the new warning on growth and profit margins to its latest annual report, in the list of "risk factors" facing the tech group's business. "New products, services and technologies may replace or supersede existing offerings and may produce lower revenues and lower profit margins," Apple said, "which can materially adversely impact the company's business, results of operations and financial condition." Apple routinely warns investors in its annual reports that competition, foreign exchange, supply chain issues and other factors can put "volatility and downward pressure" on its margins. The same 10-K regulatory filing in previous years suggested that new product introductions could have "higher cost structures." But until now, Apple has not been so direct in addressing the financial profile of its future products.

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spatwei writes: Google has used a large language model (LLM) agent called "Big Sleep" to discover a previously unknown, exploitable memory flaw in a widely used software for the first time, the company announced Friday. The stack buffer underflow vulnerability in a development version of the popular open-source database engine SQLite was found through variant analysis by Big Sleep, which is a collaboration between Google Project Zero and Google DeepMind. Big Sleep is an evolution of Project Zero's Naptime project, which is a framework announced in June that enables LLMs to autonomously perform basic vulnerability research. The framework provides LLMs with tools to test software for potential flaws in a human-like workflow, including a code browser, debugger, reporter tool and sandbox environment for running Python scripts and recording outputs. The researchers provided the Gemini 1.5 Pro-driven AI agent with the starting point of a previous SQLIte vulnerability, providing context for Big Sleep to search for potential similar vulnerabilities in newer versions of the software. The agent was presented with recent commit messages and diff changes and asked to review the SQLite repository for unresolved issues. Google's Big Sleep ultimately identified a flaw involving the function "seriesBestIndex" mishandling the use of the special sentinel value -1 in the iColumn field. Since this field would typically be non-negative, all code that interacts with this field must be designed to handle this unique case properly, which seriesBestIndex fails to do, leading to a stack buffer underflow.

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India's capital territory of Delhi is keen to use artificial rain to fight air pollution this year, its Environment Minister Gopal Rai said on Tuesday, as deteriorating air quality in the region led to an increase in respiratory illnesses. From a report: Large swathes of north India battle pollution each winter as cold air traps dust, vehicle emissions and smoke from farm fires in the breadbasket states of Punjab and Haryana, shrouding the national capital and its suburbs in a toxic haze. Cloud-seeding - the method of triggering rain by seeding clouds with salts - was considered to curb pollution in 2023 too but the plan did not materialise due to unfavourable weather conditions. "I appeal to the federal environment minister...now in Delhi and north India, the pollution has reached the border of 400," Rai told reporters, referring to the air quality index (AQI) score on Tuesday. "The next 10 days are quite crucial...help us get permission for artificial rain, call a meeting," he said. About a third of Delhi's 39 monitoring stations showed a severe AQI score of more than 400 on Tuesday, a level which affects healthy people but is more serious for those fighting disease. An air quality score of zero to 50 is considered good.

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Version 2.1.0 of the LXQt lightweight Qt desktop environment has been released. The highlight of this release is support for multiple Wayland compositors:

Through its new component lxqt-wayland-session, LXQt 2.1.0 supports 7 Wayland sessions (with Labwc, KWin, Wayfire, Hyprland, Sway, River and Niri), has two Wayland back-ends in lxqt-panel (one for kwin_wayland and the other general), and will add more later. All LXQt components that are not limited to X11 — i.e., most components — work fine on Wayland. [...]

Of course, the X11 session will be supported indefinitely. Wayland is optional and rather experimental.

Joshua Liebow-Feeser took to the stage at RustConf to describe the methodology that his team uses to encode arbitrary constraints in the Rust type system when working on the Fuchsia operating system (slides). The technique is not unknown to the Rust community, but Liebow-Feeser did a good job of both explaining the method and making a case for why it should be used more widely.

India's government challenged Wikipedia's legal immunity as a tech platform on Tuesday, issuing a notice questioning whether the online encyclopedia should be reclassified as a publisher. The move follows Delhi High Court warnings to suspend Wikipedia's India operations over a defamation case filed by Asian News International. The news agency seeks to unmask contributors who labeled it a "government propaganda tool." Justice Navin Chawla threatened contempt proceedings after Wikipedia cited its lack of physical presence in India to request more time for disclosing user information. The court deemed the site's open editing feature "dangerous."

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After a couple of years of effort, the BPF instruction set architecture has been accepted as RFC 9669, giving it a standard outside of the in-kernel implementation. This message from David Vernet (who also contributed an article on the standardization process last year) describes the process and why it is important:

Though some vendors have already implemented BPF offloading capabilities without having a standardized ISA, others are not quite as risk tolerant. As Christoph [Hellwig] discussed at LSFMM 2022, certain NVMe vendors have expressed an interest in building BPF offloading capabilities for various use cases such as eXpress Resubmission Path (XRP), but they simply can't fund such a project without certain components of BPF being standardized. Hence, the effort to standardize BPF was born.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox, openexr, and thunderbird), Fedora (llama-cpp and python-quart), Oracle (firefox, openexr, thunderbird, and xorg-x11-server and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), SUSE (chromium, govulncheck-vulndb, openssl-1_1, python311, and python312), and Ubuntu (linux-azure, linux-bluefield, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-ibm, openjpeg2, and ruby3.0, ruby3.2, ruby3.3).

Apple is exploring a push into smart glasses with an internal study of products currently on the market, setting the stage for the company to follow Meta into an increasingly popular category. From a report: The initiative, code-named Atlas, got underway last week and involves gathering feedback from Apple employees on smart glasses, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Additional focus groups are planned for the near future, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the work is secret. The studies are being led by Apple's Product Systems Quality team, part of the hardware engineering division. "Testing and developing products that all can come to love is very important to what we do at Apple," the group wrote in an email to select employees at the company's headquarters in Cupertino, California. "This is why we are looking for participants to join us in an upcoming user study with current market smart glasses."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Meta will allow U.S. government agencies and contractors working on national security to use its artificial intelligence models for military purposes, the company said on Monday, in a shift from its policy that prohibited the use of its technology for such efforts. Meta said that it would make its A.I. models, called Llama, available to federal agencies and that it was working with defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin and Booz Allen as well as defense-focused tech companies including Palantir and Anduril. The Llama models are "open source," which means the technology can be freely copied and distributed by other developers, companies and governments. Meta's move is an exception to its "acceptable use policy," which forbade the use of the company's A.I. software for "military, warfare, nuclear industries," among other purposes. In a blog post on Monday, Nick Clegg, Meta's president of global affairs, said the company now backed "responsible and ethical uses" of the technology that supported the United States and "democratic values" in a global race for A.I. supremacy. "Meta wants to play its part to support the safety, security and economic prosperity of America -- and of its closest allies too," Mr. Clegg wrote. He added that "widespread adoption of American open source A.I. models serves both economic and security interests." The company said it would also share its technology with members of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance: Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand in addition to the United States.

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The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) blocked Amazon's bid to access more power from the Susquehanna nuclear plant for its Pennsylvania data center, citing grid reliability and consumer cost concerns. The Hill reports: In a 2-1 decision, the FERC found the regional grid operator, PJM Interconnection, failed to prove that the changes to the transmission agreement with Susquehanna power plant were necessary. The regulator's two Republican commissioners, Mark Christie and Lindsay See, outvoted Democratic chair Willie Phillips. The chair's two fellow Democratic commissioners, David Rosner and Judy Chang, sat out the vote. "Co-location arrangements of the type presented here present an array of complicated, nuanced and multifaceted issues, which collectively could have huge ramifications for both grid reliability and consumer costs," Christie wrote in a concurring statement. In a dissenting statement, Phillips argued the deal with Amazon "represents a 'first of its kind' co-located load configuration" and that Friday's decision is a "step backward for both electric reliability and national security." "We are on the cusp of a new phase in the energy transition, one that is characterized as much by soaring energy demand, due in large part to AI, as it is by rapid changes in the resource mix," Phillips wrote. Amazon purchased a 960-megawatt data center next to the Susquehanna power plant for $650 million earlier this year. Following the announcement, PJM sought to increase the amount of power running directly to the co-located data center. However, the move faced pushback from regional utilities, including Exelon and American Electric Power (AEP).

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