Japanese crypto exchange DMM Bitcoin confirmed on Friday that it had been the victim of a hack resulting in the theft of 4,502.9 bitcoin, or about $305 million. From a report: According to crypto security firm Elliptic, this is the eighth largest crypto theft in history. DMM Bitcoin said it detected "an unauthorized leak of Bitcoin (BTC) from our wallet" on Friday and that it was still investigating and had taken measures to stop further thefts. The crypto exchange said it also "implemented restrictions on the use of some services to ensure additional safety," according to a machine translation of the company's official blog post (written in Japanese).

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The retraction rate for European biomedical-science papers increased fourfold between 2000 and 2021, a study of thousands of retractions has found. Nature: Two-thirds of these papers were withdrawn for reasons relating to research misconduct, such as data and image manipulation or authorship fraud. These factors accounted for an increasing proportion of retractions over the roughly 20-year period, the analysis suggests. "Our findings indicate that research misconduct has become more prevalent in Europe over the last two decades," write the authors, led by Alberto RuanoâRavina, a public-health researcher at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Other research-integrity specialists point out that retractions could be on the rise because researchers and publishers are getting better at investigating and identifying potential misconduct. There are more people working to spot errors and new digital tools to screen publications for suspicious text or data. Scholarly publishers have faced increased pressure to clear up the literature in recent years as sleuths have exposed cases of research fraud, identified when peer review has been compromised and uncovered the buying and selling of research articles. Last year saw a record 10,000 papers retracted. Although misconduct is a leading cause of retractions, it is not always responsible: some papers are retracted when authors discover honest errors in their work.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: The sound of the 1990s still resonates in the German capital. Like techno music, the fax machine remains on trend. According to the latest figures from Germany's digital industry association, four out of five companies in Europe's largest economy continue to use fax machines and a third do so frequently or very frequently. Much as Germany's reputation for efficiency is regularly undermined by slow internet connections and a reliance on paper and rubber stamps, fax machines are at odds with a world embracing artificial intelligence. But progress is on the horizon in the Bundestag -- the lower house of parliament -- where lawmakers have been instructed by the parliamentary budget committee to ditch their trusty fax machines by the end of June, and rely on email instead for official communication. Torsten Herbst, parliamentary whip of the pro-business Free Democrats, points out one fax machine after the other as he walks through the Bundestag. He says the public sector is particularly fond of faxing and that joining parliament was like going back in time.

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Vermont has become the first state to enact a law requiring fossil fuel companies to pay a share of the damage caused by climate change after the state suffered catastrophic summer flooding and damage from other extreme weather. From a report: Republican Gov. Phil Scott allowed the bill to become law without his signature late Thursday, saying he is very concerned about the costs and outcome of the small state taking on "Big Oil" alone in what will likely be a grueling legal fight. But he acknowledged that he understands something has to be done to address the toll of climate change. "I understand the desire to seek funding to mitigate the effects of climate change that has hurt our state in so many ways," Scott, a moderate Republican in the largely blue state of Vermont, wrote in a letter to lawmakers. Scott, a popular governor who recently announced that he's running for reelection to a fifth two-year term, has been at odds with the Democrat-controlled Legislature, which he has called out of balance. He was expected by environmental advocates to veto the bill but then allowed it to be enacted. Scott wrote to lawmakers that he was comforted that the Agency of Natural Resources is required to report back to the Legislature on the feasibility of the effort. Last July's flooding from torrential rains inundated Vermont's capital city of Montpelier, the nearby city Barre, some southern Vermont communities and ripped through homes and washed away roads around the rural state. Some saw it as the state's worst natural disaster since a 1927 flood that killed dozens of people and caused widespread destruction. It took months for businesses -- from restaurants to shops -- to rebuild, losing out on their summer and even fall seasons. Several have just recently reopened while scores of homeowners were left with flood-ravaged homes heading into the cold season.

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The Japanese government is pushing ahead with a plan to make Japan's publicly funded research output free to read. From a report: In June, the science ministry will assign funding to universities to build the infrastructure needed to make research papers free to read on a national scale. The move follows the ministry's announcement in February that researchers who receive government funding will be required to make their papers freely available to read on the institutional repositories from January 2025. The Japanese plan "is expected to enhance the long-term traceability of research information, facilitate secondary research and promote collaboration," says Kazuki Ide, a health-sciences and public-policy scholar at Osaka University in Suita, Japan, who has written about open access in Japan. The nation is one of the first Asian countries to make notable advances towards making more research open access (OA) and among the first countries in the world to forge a nationwide plan for OA. The plan follows in the footsteps of the influential Plan S, introduced six years ago by a group of research funders in the United States and Europe known as cOAlition S, to accelerate the move to OA publishing. The United States also implemented an OA mandate in 2022 that requires all research funded by US taxpayers to be freely available from 2026. When the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) announced Japan's pivot to OA in February, it also said that it would invest around $63 million to standardize institutional repositories -- websites dedicated to hosting scientific papers, their underlying data and other materials -- ensuring that there will be a mechanism for making research in Japan open.

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An anonymous reader shares a CR report: Based on the name, you'd think Filmmaker Mode is strictly for watching movies. But in our labs, we find that it can get you pretty close to what we consider to be the ideal settings for all types of programming. Filmmaker Mode is the product of a joint effort by the Hollywood film community, TV manufacturers, and the UHD Alliance to help consumers easily set up their TVs and watch shows and films as they were meant to be displayed. The preset has been widely praised by a host of well-known directors, including J.J. Abrams, Paul Thomas Anderson, James Cameron, Patty Jenkins, Rian Johnson, Christopher Nolan, Jordan Peele, and Martin Scorsese, as well as actors such as Tom Cruise. Right now, you can find Filmmaker Mode on TVs from Hisense, LG, Philips, Samsung, and Vizio. And more sets may get the feature this year. Most newer TVs have fancy features that manufacturers say will improve the picture. But these features can actually have the opposite effect, degrading the fidelity of the image by altering how it was originally intended to look. To preserve the director's original intent, Filmmaker Mode shuts off all the extra processing a TV might apply to movies and shows, including both standard (SDR) and high dynamic range (HDR) content on 4K TVs. This involves preserving the TV's full contrast ratio, setting the correct aspect ratio, and maintaining the TV's color and frame rates, so films look more like what you'd see in a theater. For most of us, though, the biggest benefit of Filmmaker Mode is what the TV won't be doing. For example, it turns off motion smoothing, also referred to as motion interpolation, which can remove movies' filmlike look. (This is one of three TV features that it's best to stop using.) Motion-smoothing features were introduced because most films, and some TV shows, are shot at 24 frames per second, while most TVs display images at 60 or 120 frames per second. To deal with these mismatches, the TV adds made-up (interpolated) frames, filling in the gaps to keep the motion looking smooth. But this creates an artificial look, commonly called the soap opera effect. Think of a daytime TV show shot on video.

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Long before people develop dementia, they often begin falling behind on mortgage payments, credit card bills and other financial obligations, new research shows. The New York Times: A team of economists and medical experts at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Georgetown University combined Medicare records with data from Equifax, the credit bureau, to study how people's borrowing behavior changed [PDF] in the years before and after a diagnosis of Alzheimer's or a similar disorder. What they found was striking: Credit scores among people who later develop dementia begin falling sharply long before their disease is formally identified. A year before diagnosis, these people were 17.2 percent more likely to be delinquent on their mortgage payments than before the onset of the disease, and 34.3 percent more likely to be delinquent on their credit card bills. The issues start even earlier: The study finds evidence of people falling behind on their debts five years before diagnosis. "The results are striking in both their clarity and their consistency," said Carole Roan Gresenz, a Georgetown University economist who was one of the study's authors. Credit scores and delinquencies, she said, "consistently worsen over time as diagnosis approaches, and so it literally mirrors the changes in cognitive decline that we're observing." The research adds to a growing body of work documenting what many Alzheimer's patients and their families already know: Decision-making, including on financial matters, can begin to deteriorate long before a diagnosis is made or even suspected. People who are starting to experience cognitive decline may miss payments, make impulsive purchases or put money into risky investments they would not have considered before the disease.

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Google has published an update on the deprecation timeline of so-called Manifest V2 extensions in the Chrome web browser. Starting this June, Chrome will inform users with classic extensions about the deprecation. From a report: Manifests are rulesets for extensions. They define the capabilities of extensions. When Google published the initial Manifest V3 draft, it was criticized heavily for it. This initial draft had significant impact on content blockers, privacy extensions, and many other extension types. Many called it the end of adblockers in Chrome because of that. In the years that followed, Google postponed the introduction and updated the draft several times to address some of these concerns. Despite all the changes, Manifest V3 is still limiting certain capabilities. The developer of uBlock Origin listed some of these on GitHub. According to the information, current uBlock Origin capabilities such as dynamic filtering, certain per-site switches, or regex-based filters are not supported by Manifest V3. The release of uBlock Origin Minus highlights this. It is a Manifest V3 extension, but limited in comparison to the Manifest V2-based uBlock Origin.

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Private-equity investors have poured billions into healthcare but often game the system, hurting both doctors and patients. From a report: Consolidation is as American as apple pie. When a business gets bigger, it forces mom-and-pop players out of the market, but it can boost profits and bring down costs, too. Think about the pros and cons of Walmart and "Every Day Low Prices." In a complex, multitrillion-dollar system like America's healthcare market, though, that principle has turned into a harmful arms race that has helped drive prices increasingly higher without improving care. Years of dealmaking has led to sprawling hospital systems, vertically integrated health insurance companies, and highly concentrated private equity-owned practices resulting in diminished competition and even the closure of vital health facilities. As this three-part Heard on the Street series will show, the rich rewards and lax oversight ultimately create pain for both patients and the doctors who treat them. Belatedly, state and federal regulators and lawmakers are zeroing in on consolidation, creating uncertainty for the investors who have long profited from the healthcare merger boom. Consider the impact of massive private-equity investment in medical practices. When a patient with employer-based insurance goes under for surgery, the anesthesiologist's fee is supposed to be determined by market forces. But what happens if one firm quietly buys out several anesthesiologists in the same city and then hikes the price of the procedure? Such a scheme was allegedly implemented by the private-equity firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe and the company it created in 2012, U.S. Anesthesia Partners, according to a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit filed last year. It started by buying the largest practice in Houston and then making three further acquisitions, eventually expanding into other cities throughout the state of Texas. In each location, the lawsuit alleges, USAP pursued an aggressive strategy of eliminating competitors by either acquiring them or conspiring with them to weaken competition. As one insurance executive put it in the FTC lawsuit, USAP and Welsh Carson used acquisitions to "take the highest rate of all ... and then peanut butter spread that across the entire state of Texas." In May, U.S. District Judge Kenneth Hoyt dismissed the FTC's unusual step of charging the private-equity investor, Welsh Carson, but allowed the case against USAP to proceed.

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Vista Equity Partners has written off the entire equity value of its investment in tech learning platform Pluralsight, three years after taking it private for $3.5 billion, Axios reported Friday. From the report: One source says that the Utah-based company's financials have improved, with around 26% EBITDA growth in 2023, but not enough to service nearly $1.3 billion of debt that was issued when interest rates were lower. It's also a company whose future could be dimmed by advances in artificial intelligence, since some of the developer skills it teaches are becoming automated. Vista agreed to buy the company in late 2020 for $20.26 per share, representing a 25% premium to its 30-day trading average, despite a lack of profits.

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Increasingly redundant copper wires may be worth over $7 billion to telecommunications firms, should they take the trouble to recycle them. From a report: The estimate comes from British engineering company TXO, which claims there's up to 800,000 metric tons of copper wiring that could be harvested in the next ten years. TXO claims over a dozen telcos are investigating extracting copper wires from old networks to sell on the open market. The need for copper wiring is declining as carriers adopt fiber optics, which have superior carrying capacity -- one upcoming fiber technology is expected to increase the data capacity of undersea cables by 12 times. While repurposing old stuff isn't unusual, recycling copper can be particularly valuable as the conductive metal is a crucial material for things like solar panels and batteries, which rely on old-school electrical wiring. A 2022 report from S&P Global estimated demand for copper would double by 2035 -- from 25 million metric tons in 2022 to 50 million -- and since the copper mining industry reportedly won't be able to keep up with demand, that means higher prices. Copper is already 50 percent more expensive since the COVID-19 pandemic, and prices will likely continue to increase.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Liz Reid, the Head of Google Search, has admitted that the company's search engine has returned some "odd, inaccurate or unhelpful AI Overviews" after they rolled out to everyone in the US. The executive published an explanation for Google's more peculiar AI-generated responses in a blog post, where it also announced that the company has implemented safeguards that will help the new feature return more accurate and less meme-worthy results. Reid defended Google and pointed out that some of the more egregious AI Overview responses going around, such as claims that it's safe to leave dogs in cars, are fake. The viral screenshot showing the answer to "How many rocks should I eat?" is real, but she said that Google came up with an answer because a website published a satirical content tackling the topic. "Prior to these screenshots going viral, practically no one asked Google that question," she explained, so the company's AI linked to that website. The Google VP also confirmed that AI Overview told people to use glue to get cheese to stick to pizza based on content taken from a forum.

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Framework, a company known for its modular laptops, has announced a fourth round of iterative updates and upgrade options for its Framework Laptop 13. The upgrades include motherboards and pre-built laptops featuring new Intel Meteor Lake Core Ultra processors with Intel Arc dedicated GPUs, lower prices for AMD Ryzen 7000 and 13th-gen Intel editions, and a new display with a higher resolution and refresh rate. The Core Ultra boards come with three CPU options, with prices starting at $899 for a pre-built or DIY model. Upgrading from an older Intel Framework board requires an upgrade to DDR5 RAM, and Framework charges $40 for every 8GB of DDR5-5600, which is above market rates. The new 13.5-inch display has a resolution of 2880x1920, a 120 Hz refresh rate, and costs $130 more than the standard display.

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Microsoft seems to be concerned about some of OpenAI's business dealings. From a report: Satya Nadella recently met with Sam Altman to discuss an apparent deal between OpenAI and Apple, The Information reported [hard-paywalled]. According to the outlet, the OpenAI CEO recently reached an agreement with the iPhone maker to incorporate some OpenAI services into Apple products. Nadella was reportedly concerned about the potential impact of a deal on Microsoft's product ambitions, per the report. Apple was said to be considering both Google and OpenAI for the deal, which could be worth billions. If OpenAI has indeed reached an agreement with Apple, it would be a much-needed win for Altman. The tech boss has faced heightened scrutiny after former employees and board members publicly criticized him. Helen Toner, a former OpenAI director, recently accused Altman of lying to the board "multiple" times and "withholding information."

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The New York governor, Kathy Hochul, plans to introduce a bill banning smartphones in schools, the latest in a series of legislative moves aimed at online child safety by New York's top official. From a report: "I have seen these addictive algorithms pull in young people, literally capture them and make them prisoners in a space where they are cut off from human connection, social interaction and normal classroom activity," she said. Hochul said she would launch the bill later this year and take it up in New York's next legislative session, which begins in January 2025. If passed, schoolchildren will be allowed to carry simple phones that cannot access the internet but do have the capability to send texts, which has been a sticking point for parents. She did not offer specifics on enforcing the prohibition. "Parents are very anxious about mass shootings in school," she said. "Parents want the ability to have some form of connection in an emergency situation." The smartphone-ban bill will follow two others Hochul is pushing that outline measures to safeguard children's privacy online and limit their access to certain features of social networks.

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Google Cloud faced a major setback earlier this month when it accidentally deleted the account of UniSuper, an Australian pension fund managing $135 billion in assets, causing a two-week outage for its 647,000 members. Google Cloud has since completed an internal review of the incident and published a blog post detailing the findings. ArsTechnica: Google has a "TL;DR" at the top of the post, and it sounds like a Google employee got an input wrong. "During the initial deployment of a Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) Private Cloud for the customer using an internal tool, there was an inadvertent misconfiguration of the GCVE service by Google operators due to leaving a parameter blank. This had the unintended and then unknown consequence of defaulting the customer's GCVE Private Cloud to a fixed term, with automatic deletion at the end of that period. The incident trigger and the downstream system behavior have both been corrected to ensure that this cannot happen again."

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Some of the world's most profitable -- and most polluting corporations -- have invested in carbon offset projects that have fundamental failings and are "probably junk," suggesting industry claims about greenhouse gas reductions were likely overblown, according to new analysis. From a report: Delta, Gucci, Volkswagen, ExxonMobil, Disney, easyJet and Nestle are among the major corporations to have purchased millions of carbon credits from climate friendly projects that are "likely junk" or worthless when it comes to offsetting their greenhouse gas emissions, according to a classification system developed by Corporate Accountability, a non-profit, transnational corporate watchdog. Some of these companies no longer use CO2 offsets amid mounting evidence that carbon trading do not lead to the claimed emissions cuts -- and in some cases may even cause environmental and social harms. However, the multibillion-dollar voluntary carbon trading industry is still championed by many corporations including oil and gas majors, airlines, automakers, tourism, fast-food and beverage brands, fashion houses, banks and tech firms as the bedrock of climate action -- a way of claiming to reduce their greenhouse gas footprint while continuing to rely on fossil fuels and unsustainable supply chains. Yet, for 33 of the top 50 corporate buyers, more than a third of their entire offsets portfolio is "likely junk" -- suggesting at least some claims about carbon neutrality and emission reductions have been exaggerated according to the analysis. The fundamental failings leading to a "likely junk" ranking include whether emissions cuts would have happened anyway, as is often the case with large hydroelectric dams, or if the emissions were just shifted elsewhere, a common issue in forestry offset projects.

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Mishaal Rahman, reporting for AndroidAuthority: Google just unveiled its latest Android Feature Drop earlier today, and it's one of the most exciting feature drops I can remember. The two features I'm most excited about are part of Play Services's new Cross-Device Services module, which brings some Apple Continuity-style magic to your Android devices. For example, the new Instant Hotspot feature lets you connect your Android tablet or Chromebook to your phone's hotspot with a single tap. Instant Hotspot works with phones running Android 11 or newer, with one notable exception: Samsung devices. According to Google, Instant Hotspot will not be available on any Samsung devices. [...] It's not clear exactly why Instant Hotspot isn't available on Samsung devices. The feature is part of Google Play Services, which is available on all Google-certified Android devices, including those from Samsung. It's likely that Samsung opted out of this particular feature, perhaps to encourage users to buy devices within their ecosystem.

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Apple prioritizes device durability over easier repairs, according to John Ternus, the company's head of hardware engineering, in a recent interview with YouTuber MKBHD. "It's objectively better for the customer to have that reliability," Ternus stated, adding that it is "ultimately better for the planet" due to significantly lower failure rates. Apple tests over 10,000 units of each product before release and incorporates real-world concerns into its testing suite.

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A widespread outage affecting over 600,000 routers connected to Windstream's Kinetic broadband service left customers without internet access for several days last October, according to a report by security firm Lumen Technologies' Black Lotus Labs. The incident, dubbed "Pumpkin Eclipse," is believed to be the result of a deliberate attack using commodity malware known as Chalubo to overwrite router firmware. Windstream, which has about 1.6 million subscribers in 18 states, has not provided an explanation for the outage. The company sent replacement routers to affected customers, many of whom reported significant financial losses due to the disruption. ArsTechnica adds: After learning of the mass router outage, Black Lotus began querying the Censys search engine for the affected router models. A one-week snapshot soon revealed that one specific ASN experienced a 49 percent drop in those models just as the reports began. This amounted to the disconnection of at least 179,000 ActionTec routers and more than 480,000 routers sold by Sagemcom. The constant connecting and disconnecting of routers to any ISP complicates the tracking process, because it's impossible to know if a disappearance is the result of the normal churn or something more complicated. Black Lotus said that a conservative estimate is that at least 600,000 of the disconnections it tracked were the result of Chaluba infecting the devices and, from there, permanently wiping the firmware they ran on. After identifying the ASN, Black Lotus discovered a complex multi-path infection mechanism for installing Chaluba on the routers.

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The staggering electricity demand needed to power next-generation technology is forcing the US to rely on yesterday's fuel source: coal. From a report: Retirement dates for the country's ageing fleet of coal-fired power plants are being pushed back as concerns over grid reliability and expectations of soaring electricity demand force operators to keep capacity online. The shift in phasing out these facilities underscores a growing dilemma facing the Biden administration as the US race to lead in artificial intelligence and manufacturing drives an unprecedented growth in power demand that clashes with its decarbonisation targets. The International Energy Agency estimates the AI application ChatGPT uses nearly 10 times as much electricity as Google Search. An estimated 54 gigawatts of US coal powered generation assets, about 4 per cent of the country's total electricity capacity, is expected to be retired by the end of the decade, a 40 per cent downward revision from last year, according to S&P Global Commodity Insights, citing reliability concerns. "You can't replace the fossil plants fast enough to meet the demand," said Joe Craft, chief executive of Alliance Resource Partners, one of the largest US coal producers. "In order to be a first mover on AI, we're going to need to embrace maintaining what we have." Operators slowing down retirements include Alliant Energy, which last week delayed plans to convert its Wisconsin coal-fired plant to gas from 2025 to 2028. Earlier this year, FirstEnergy announced it was scrapping its 2030 target to phase out coal, citing "resource adequacy concerns." Further reading: Data Centers Could Use 9% of US Electricity By 2030, Research Institute Says.

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Google has confirmed the authenticity of 2,500 leaked internal documents detailing the company's data collection practices. The documents offer insights into Google's closely guarded search ranking algorithm. However, Google cautioned against making inaccurate assumptions based on incomplete information. The Verge adds: The leaked material suggests that Google collects and potentially uses data that company representatives have said does not contribute to ranking webpages in Google Search, like clicks, Chrome user data, and more. The thousands of pages of documents act as a repository of information for Google employees, but it's not clear what pieces of data detailed are actually used to rank search content -- the information could be out of date, used strictly for training purposes, or collected but not used for Search specifically. The documents also do not reveal how different elements are weighted in search, if at all.

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Alphabet's Google and augmented reality startup Magic Leap are forming a strategic technology partnership and working on building immersive experiences that blend the physical and digital worlds. From a report: Magic Leap said in a blog post on Thursday that the two companies have agreed to a partnership. While short on details, the announcement adds to signals that Google may be plotting a return to the market for augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) technologies that it so far has largely yielded to rivals Meta and Apple. The partnership would combine Florida-based Magic Leap's expertise in optics and device manufacturing with Google's technology platforms, Magic Leap said.

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American Lidar, a company registered in Michigan in December, is a subsidiary of China-based lidar maker Hesai Group, which the U.S. has labeled a security concern, WSJ reported Wednesday, citing policymakers and national-security experts. Chinese firms facing regulatory or reputational problems are rebranding and creating U.S.-domiciled businesses to sell their wares as the Biden administration expands the government entity lists that restrict Chinese companies' business dealings in the U.S., the report said. These moves, while legal, irritate regulators who can't enforce laws when it isn't clear who is behind a company. Hesai became a target in the U.S.-China tech-trade war after allegations that its laser sensors could be used to collect sensitive American data, and was added to the Defense Department list that designates companies as Chinese military entities operating in the U.S. BGI Genomics and DJI are also facing similar challenges and are attempting to rebrand or license their technology to American startups to avoid sanctions.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Google is killing off a messaging service! This one is the odd "Google Business Messaging" service -- basically an instant messaging client that is built into Google Maps. If you looked up a participating business in Google Maps or Google Search on a phone, the main row of buttons in the place card would read something like "Call," "Chat," "Directions," and "Website." That "Chat" button is the service we're talking about. It would launch a full messaging interface inside the Google Maps app, and businesses were expected to use it for customer service purposes. Google's deeply dysfunctional messaging strategy might lead people to joke about a theoretical "Google Maps Messaging" service, but it already exists and has existed for years, and now it's being shut down.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: At a two-hour drive from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia's capital, rows of solar panels extend to the horizon like waves on an ocean. Despite having almost limitless reserves of oil, the kingdom is embracing solar and wind power, partly in an effort to retain a leading position in the energy industry, which is vitally important to the country but fast changing. Looking out over 3.3 million panels, covering 14 square miles of desert, Faisal Al Omari, chief executive of a recently completed solar project called Sudair, said he would tell his children and grandchildren about contributing to Saudi Arabia's energy transition. Although petroleum production retains a crucial role in the Saudi economy, the kingdom is putting its chips on other forms of energy. Sudair, which can light up 185,000 homes, is the first of what could be many giant projects intended to raise output from renewable energy sources like solar and wind to around 50 percent by 2030. Currently, renewable energy accounts for a negligible amount of Saudi electricity generation. Analysts say achieving that hugely ambitious goal is unlikely. "If they get 30 percent, I would be happy because that would be a good signal," said Karim Elgendy, a climate analyst at the Middle East Institute, a research organization in Washington. Still, the kingdom is planning to build solar farms at a rapid pace. "The volumes you see here, you don't see anywhere else, only in China," said Marco Arcelli, chief executive of Acwa Power, Sudair's Saudi developer and a growing force in the international electricity and water industries. The Saudis not only have the money to expand rapidly, but are free of the long permit processes that inhibit such projects in the West. "They have a lot of investment capital, and they can move quickly and pull the trigger on project development," said Ben Cahill, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research institution in Washington. Even Saudi Aramco, the crown jewel of the Saudi economy and the producer of nearly all its oil, sees a shifting energy landscape. To gain a foothold in solar, Aramco has taken a 30 percent stake in Sudair, which cost $920 million, the first step in a planned 40-gigawatt solar portfolio -- more than Britain's average power demand -- intended to meet the bulk of the government's ambitions for renewable energy. The company plans to set up a large business of storing greenhouse gases underground.

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Apple is seeking a senior engineer to help build a television and sports app for Android, a sign the company is finally bringing its TV+ service to the rival smartphone platform. From a report: In a job listing published in recent days, Apple said it's looking for someone to lead the development of "fun new features" and "help build an application used by millions to watch and discover TV and sports." The move suggests that the company is looking to gain market share in video streaming -- and is setting aside its rivalry with Android in order to chase additional users. It's rare for Apple to develop software for Google's Android, which competes with its iOS platform. The TV+ service, launched in 2019, is Apple's answer to Netflix or Disney+, and the company has spent heavily on feeding it with original content.

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House Republicans this week accused officials at the National Institutes of Health of orchestrating "a conspiracy at the highest levels" of the agency to hide public records related to the origins of the Covid pandemic. And the lawmakers promised to expand an investigation that has turned up emails in which senior health officials talked openly about trying to evade federal records laws. From a report: The latest accusations -- coming days before a House panel publicly questions Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, a former top N.I.H. official -- represent one front of an intensifying push by lawmakers to link American research groups and the country's premier medical research agency with the beginnings of the Covid pandemic. That push has so far yielded no evidence that American scientists or health officials had anything to do with the coronavirus outbreak. But the House panel, the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, has released a series of private emails that suggest at least some N.I.H. officials deleted messages and tried to skirt public records laws in the face of scrutiny over the pandemic. Even those N.I.H. officials whose job it was to produce records under the Freedom of Information Act may have helped their colleagues avoid their obligations under that law, several emails suggest. The law, known as FOIA, gives people the right to obtain copies of federal records.

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Mistral, the French AI startup backed by Microsoft and valued at $6 billion, has released its first generative AI model for coding, dubbed Codestral. From a report: Codestral, like other code-generating models, is designed to help developers write and interact with code. It was trained on over 80 programming languages, including Python, Java, C++ and JavaScript, explains Mistral in a blog post. Codestral can complete coding functions, write tests and "fill in" partial code, as well as answer questions about a codebase in English. Mistral describes the model as "open," but that's up for debate. The startup's license prohibits the use of Codestral and its outputs for any commercial activities. There's a carve-out for "development," but even that has caveats: the license goes on to explicitly ban "any internal usage by employees in the context of the company's business activities." The reason could be that Codestral was trained partly on copyrighted content. Codestral might not be worth the trouble, in any case. At 22 billion parameters, the model requires a beefy PC in order to run.

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Data centers could use up to 9% of total electricity generated in the United States by the end of the decade, more than doubling their current consumption, as technology companies pour funds into expanding their computing hubs, the Electric Power Research Institute said on Wednesday. From a report: Depending on the adoption pace of technology such as generative artificial intelligence, which is fueling the expansion of data centers, and the energy efficiency of new centers, the estimated annual growth rate of electricity use by the industry ranges from 3.7% to 15% through 2030, the institute's analysis said. The institute is a U.S.-based research organization funded by energy and government organizations. Data centers, along with expanding domestic manufacturing and electrification of transportation, are lifting the U.S. electricity industry out of two decades of flat growth. The centers require massive amounts of power for high-intensity computing and cooling systems, with a new large data center requiring the same amount of electricity needed to power 750,000 homes, according to numerous energy company earnings calls this year.

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IP core designer Arm announced its next-generation CPU and GPU designs for flagship smartphones: the Cortex-X925 CPU and Immortalis G925 GPU. Both are direct successors to the Cortex-X4 and Immortalis G720 that currently power MediaTek's Dimensity 9300 chip inside flagship smartphones like the Vivo X100 and X100 Pro and Oppo Find X7. From a report: Arm changed the naming convention for its Cortex-X CPU design to highlight what it says is a much faster CPU design. It claims the X925's single-core performance is 36 percent faster than the X4 (when measured in Geekbench). Arm says it increased the AI workload performance by 41 percent, time to token, with up to 3MB of private L2 cache. The Cortex-X925 brings a new generation of Cortex-A microarchitectures ("little" cores) with it, too: the Cortex-A725, which Arm says has 35 percent better performance efficiency than last-gen's A720 and a 15 percent more power-efficient Cortex-A520. Arm's new Immortalis G925 GPU is its "most performant and efficient GPU" to date, it says. It's 37 percent faster on graphics applications compared to the last-gen G720, with improved ray-tracing performance with intricate objects by 52 percent and improved AI and ML workloads by 34 percent -- all while using 30 percent less power. For the first time, Arm will offer "optimized layouts" of its new CPU and GPU designs that it says will be easier for device makers to "drop" or implement into their own system on chip (SoC) layouts. Arm says this new physical implementation solution will help other companies get their devices to market faster, which, if true, means we could see more devices with Arm Cortex-X925 and / or Immortalis G925 than the few that shipped with its last-gen ones.

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Colorado Governor Jared Polis has signed the "Consumer Right to Repair Digital Electronic Equipment" bill into law. The legislation grants consumers the right to repair their own electronic devices, including cell phones, gaming systems, computers, and televisions. According to Polis, the bill will provide Coloradans with the necessary information to repair their own equipment or choose their preferred repair provider, potentially leading to lower prices and faster repairs through increased competition. State Senator Jeff Bridges, the bill's prime sponsor, called for the federal government and other states to follow Colorado's lead, claiming that this bill is the strongest repair legislation in the country. Bridges emphasized that the law addresses issues such as "parts pairing" and repair restrictions that have prevented owners from fixing their devices in the past. The bill expands on Colorado's previous right-to-repair law for agricultural equipment, which Polis cited as a successful precedent for this new legislation.

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Helen Toner, a former OpenAI board member, said that the board didn't know about the company's 2022 launch of its chatbot ChatGPT until afterward -- and only found out about it on Twitter. From a report: In a podcast, Toner gave her fullest account to date of the events that prompted her and other board members to fire Sam Altman in November of last year. In the days that followed Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman's sudden ouster, employees threatened to quit, Altman was reinstated, and Toner and other directors left the board. "When ChatGPT came out in November 2022, the board was not informed in advance about that," Toner said on the podcast. "We learned about ChatGPT on Twitter." In a statement provided to the TED podcast, OpenAI's current board chief, Bret Taylor said, "We are disappointed that Ms. Toner continues to revisit these issues." He also said that an independent review of Altman's firing "concluded that the prior board's decision was not based on concerns regarding product safety or security, the pace of development, OpenAI's finances, or its statements to investors, customers, or business partners." [...] In the podcast, Toner also said that Altman didn't disclose his involvement with OpenAI's startup fund. And she criticized his leadership on safety. "On multiple occasions, he gave us inaccurate information about the formal safety processes that the company did have in place," she said,"meaning that it was basically impossible for the board to know how well those safety processes were working or what might need to change."

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BrianFagioli writes: Canonical has officially released the optimized Ubuntu 24.04 image for the Milk-V Mars, a credit-card-sized RISC-V single board computer (SBC) developed by Shenzhen MilkV Technology Co., Ltd. The Milk-V Mars is the world's first high-performance RISC-V SBC of its size. Powered by the StarFive JH7110 quad-core processor, the board is equipped with up to 8GB of LPDDR4 memory and supports various modern interfaces, including USB 3.0, HDMI 2.0 for 4K output, and Ethernet with PoE capabilities. It also offers comprehensive expansion options with M.2 E-Key and extensive MIPI CSI channels, making it an ideal choice for developers and tech enthusiasts.

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Russia may charge domestic companies to use foreign software, the TASS news agency quoted Digital Development Minister Maksut Shadaev as saying on Tuesday, as Moscow seeks to cut dependency on foreign technology and bolster its own. From a report: President Vladimir Putin has made achieving technological independence a key goal, as Western sanctions over the war in Ukraine seek to hamstring Moscow's ability to acquire technology and equipment from abroad that could help it on the battlefield. As part of that push, Putin signed a decree in early May which stated that at least 80% of Russian companies in key economic sectors should transition to using Russian-made software by 2030. Many Russian companies still use foreign software in their daily operations, although an EU sanctions package passed last December prohibits companies from supplying enterprise and design-related software to Russia. Shadaev said that introducing a levy on Russian firms would "equalise" foreign and Russian software.

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Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (TEPCO) showcased a remote-controlled robot on Tuesday that will retrieve small pieces of melted fuel debris from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant later this year. The robot, developed by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, features an extendable pipe and tongs capable of picking up granule-sized debris. TEPCO plans to remove less than 3 grams of debris during the test at the No. 2 reactor, marking the first such operation since the 2011 meltdown caused by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami. The removal of the estimated 880 tons of highly radioactive melted fuel from the three damaged reactors is crucial for the plant's decommissioning, which critics say may take longer than the government's 30-40 year target.

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Fintech firm Klarna, one of the early adopters of generative AI said on Tuesday it is using AI for purposes such as running marketing campaigns and generating images, saving about $10 million in costs annually. From a report: The company has cut its sales and marketing budget by 11% in the first quarter, with AI responsible for 37% of the cost savings, while increasing the number of campaigns, the company said. Using GenAI tools like Midjourney, DALL-E, and Firefly for image generation, Klarna said it has reduced image production costs by $6 million.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Commercial dot-matrix printing was yet another arena in which the needs of Chinese character I/O were not accounted for. This is witnessed most clearly in the then-dominant configuration of printer heads -- specifically the 9-pin printer heads found in mass-manufactured dot-matrix printers during the 1970s. Using nine pins, these early dot-matrix printers were able to produce low-resolution Latin alphabet bitmaps with just one pass of the printer head. The choice of nine pins, in other words, was "tuned" to the needs of Latin alphabetic script. These same printer heads were incapable of printing low-resolution Chinese character bitmaps using anything less than two full passes of the printer head, one below the other. Two-pass printing dramatically increased the time needed to print Chinese as compared to English, however, and introduced graphical inaccuracies, whether due to inconsistencies in the advancement of the platen or uneven ink registration (that is, characters with differing ink densities on their upper and lower halves). Compounding these problems, Chinese characters printed in this way were twice the height of English words. This created comically distorted printouts in which English words appeared austere and economical, while Chinese characters appeared grotesquely oversized. Not only did this waste paper, but it left Chinese-language documents looking something like large-print children's books. When consumers in the Chinese-Japanese-Korean (CJK) world began to import Western-manufactured dot-matrix printers, then, they faced yet another facet of Latin alphabetic bias.

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The WeWork founder Adam Neumann has shelved his bid to acquire the bankrupt shared office space provider. From a report: It emerged earlier this year that Neumann, who was ousted from the business in 2019 following a botched attempt to take it public on the stock market, was seeking to buy the business. His new real estate venture, Flow Global, submitted a bid of more than $500m to take over WeWork and its assets. On Tuesday morning, however, Neumann confirmed that Flow was walking away from his dream to take back control of the firm. "For several months, we tried to work constructively with WeWork to create a strategy that would allow it to thrive," he told DealBook. "Instead, the company looks to be emerging from bankruptcy with a plan that appears unrealistic and unlikely to succeed." WeWork, with over $13bn in long-term leases, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last November in order to renegotiate these agreements. At its peak, the company had been valued at $47bn as investors including the Japanese multinational SoftBank lined up to back it. As it prepared to go public in 2019, however, analysts gave it a far lower valuation. After it eventually went public, in 2021, its market valuation tumbled to less than $50m.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Just before Microsoft closed its acquisition of Activision Blizzard, it said that it would take some time to bring the publisher's titles to Game Pass. We've only seen one such addition so far in the form of Diablo IV, but the company has announced another, somewhat notable one. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 will be available on Game Pass on its release day later this year. Microsoft is banking on the debut of a new Call of Duty title on its subscription service leading to a significant bump in the number of Game Pass members. It's a bit of a gamble, as for nearly every year in recent memory, the latest Call of Duty release has been the best-selling game. Microsoft is likely to see lower direct sales of Black Ops 6 on Xbox and PC, though it will still generate revenue from Game Pass and the PlayStation version (and perhaps even a Nintendo Switch release), as well as through microtransactions.

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The Biden administration on Tuesday laid out for the first time [PDF] a set of broad government guidelines around the use of carbon offsets in an attempt to shore up confidence in a method for tackling global warming that has faced growing criticism. From a report: Companies and individuals spent $1.7 billion last year voluntarily buying carbon offsets, which are intended to cancel out the climate effects of activities like air travel by funding projects elsewhere, such as the planting of trees, that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but that wouldn't have happened without the extra money. Yet a growing number of studies and reports have found that many carbon offsets simply don't work. Some offsets help fund wind or solar projects that likely would have been built anyway. And it's often extremely difficult to measure the effectiveness of offsets intended to protect forests. As a result, some scientists and researchers have argued that carbon offsets are irredeemably flawed and should be abandoned altogether. Instead, they say, companies should just focus on directly cutting their own emissions. The Biden administration is now weighing in on this debate, saying that offsets can sometimes be an important tool for helping businesses and others reduce their emissions, as long as there are guardrails in place. The new federal guidelines are an attempt to define "high-integrity" offsets as those that deliver real and quantifiable emissions reductions that wouldn't have otherwise taken place. [...] The new federal guidelines also urge businesses to focus first on reducing emissions within their own supply chains as much as possible before buying carbon offsets. Some companies have complained that it is too difficult to control their sprawling network of outside suppliers and that they should be allowed to use carbon offsets to tackle pollution associated with, for instance, the cement or steel they use.

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Sales of SUVs hit a new record in 2023, making up half of all new cars sold globally, data has revealed. Experts warned that the rising sales of the large, heavy vehicles is pushing up the carbon emissions that drive global heating. From a report: The analysis, by the International Energy Agency, found that the rising emissions from SUVs in 2023 made up 20% of the global increase in CO2, making the vehicles a major cause of the intensifying climate crisis. If SUVs were a country, the IEA said, they would be the world's fifth-largest emitter of CO2, ahead of the national emissions of both Japan and Germany. Climate-fuelled extreme weather is increasing, with urgent cuts in emissions needed. But emissions from the global transport sector have risen fast in recent years, outside of the Covid pandemic. SUV sales rose 15% in 2023, compared with a 3% rise for conventional cars. There were more than 360m SUVs on the roads worldwide in 2023, producing 1bn tonnes of CO2 emissions, up about 10% on 2022. As a result, global oil consumption rose by 600,000 barrels a day, more than a quarter of total growth in oil demand, the IEA said. SUVs weigh 200-300kg more than an average medium-sized car and emit about 20% more CO2. In rich countries, almost 20m new SUVs were sold in 2023, surpassing a market share of 50% for the first time. Globally, 48% of new cars were SUVs and, including older cars, one in four cars on the road today are SUVs, according to the IEA.

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The US stock market is finally as fast as it was about a hundred years ago. Bloomberg News: That was the last time share trades in New York settled in a single day, as they will from Tuesday under new Securities and Exchange Commission rules. The change, halving the time it takes to complete every transaction, also occurred in jurisdictions including Canada and Mexico on Monday. The switch to the system known as T+1 -- abandoned in the earlier era as volumes became unwieldy -- is ultimately intended to reduce risk in the financial system. Yet there are worries about potential teething issues, including that international investors may struggle to source dollars on time, global funds will move at different speeds to their assets, and everyone will have less time to fix errors. The hope is that everything will run smoothly, but even the SEC said last week the transition may lead to a "short-term uptick in settlement fails and challenges to a small segment of market participants." The finance world's main industry group, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, has instigated what it calls the T+1 Command Center to identify problems and coordinate a response. Firms across the spectrum have been preparing for months, relocating staff, adjusting shifts and overhauling workflows, and many say they're confident in their own readiness. The worry is whether every other counterparty and intermediary is similarly organized.

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PayPal hopes to boost its growth by starting an ad network [non-paywalled link] juiced with something it already owns: data on its millions of users. From a report: The digital payments company plans to build an ad sales business around the reams of data it generates from tracking the purchases as well as the broader spending behaviors of millions of consumers who use its services, which include the more socially-enabled Venmo app. PayPal has hired Mark Grether, who formerly led Uber's advertising business, to lead the effort as senior vice president and general manager of its newly-created PayPal Ads division. In his new role, he will be responsible for developing new ad formats, overseeing sales and hiring staff to fill out the division, he said. PayPal in January introduced Advanced Offers, its first ad product, which uses AI and the company's data to help merchants target PayPal users with discounts and other personalized promotions. Advanced Offers only charges advertisers when consumers make a purchase. Online marketplaces eBay and Zazzle have begun testing it, according to a PayPal spokesman. But PayPal now aims to sell ads not only to its own customers, but to so-called non-endemic advertisers, or those that don't sell products or services through PayPal. Those companies might use PayPal data to target consumers with ads that could be displayed elsewhere, for instance, on other websites or connected TV sets.

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T-Mobile said Tuesday that it plans to acquire most of U.S. Cellular, including stores, some of the wireless operator's spectrum and its customers, in a deal worth $4.4 billion. The deal includes cash and up to $2 billion of debt. From a report: T-Mobile said it will use U.S. Cellular wireless spectrum to improve coverage in rural areas while offering better connectivity to U.S. Cellular customers around the United States. The company said it will allow U.S. Cellular customers to keep their current plans or switch to a T-Mobile plan. U.S. Cellular will retain some of its wireless spectrum and towers and will lease space on at least 2,100 additional towers to T-Mobile. The companies expect the deal to close in mid-2025.

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OpenAI said on Tuesday that it has begun training a new flagship AI model that would succeed the GPT-4 technology that drives its popular online chatbot, ChatGPT. From a report: The San Francisco start-up, which is one of the world's leading A.I. companies, said in a blog post that it expects the new model to bring "the next level of capabilities" as it strives to build "artificial general intelligence," or A.G.I., a machine that can do anything the human brain can do. The new model would be an engine for A.I. products including chatbots, digital assistants akin to Apple's Siri, search engines and image generators. OpenAI also said it was creating a new Safety and Security Committee to explore how it should handle the risks posed by the new model and future technologies. "While we are proud to build and release models that are industry-leading on both capabilities and safety, we welcome a robust debate at this important moment," the company said. OpenAI is aiming to move A.I. technology forward faster than its rivals, while also appeasing critics who say the technology is becoming increasingly dangerous, helping to spread disinformation, replace jobs and even threaten humanity. Experts disagree on when tech companies will reach artificial general intelligence, but companies including OpenAI, Google, Meta and Microsoft have steadily increased the power of A.I. technologies for more than a decade, demonstrating a noticeable leap roughly every two to three years.

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YouTube's latest move against ad blockers involves skipping videos straight to the end or muting audio for users with ad blockers enabled, according to user reports. This follows previous tests by the Google-owned platform, including blocking playback after three videos and slowing down load times for ad-blocker users.

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A hacker group called RansomHub said it was behind the cyberattack that hit the Christie's website just days before its marquee spring sales began, forcing the auction house to resort to alternatives to online bidding. From a report: In a post on the dark web on Monday, the group claimed that it had gained access to sensitive information about the world's wealthiest art collectors, posting only a few examples of names and birthdays. It was not immediately possible to verify RansomHub's claims, but several cybersecurity experts said they were a known ransomware operation and that the claim was plausible. Nor was it clear if the hackers had gained access to more sensitive information, including financial data and client addresses. The group said it would release the data, posting a countdown timer that would reach zero by the end of May. At Christie's, a spokesman said in a statement, "Our investigations determined there was unauthorized access by a third party to parts of Christie's network." The spokesman, Edward Lewine, said that the investigations "also determined that the group behind the incident took some limited amount of personal data relating to some of our clients." He added, "There is no evidence that any financial or transactional records were compromised." Hackers said that Christie's failed to pay a ransom when one was demanded.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Similar to the GCC compiler dropping support for the Xeon Phi Knights Mill and Knights Landing accelerators a few days ago, Intel has also gone ahead and seen to the removal of Xeon Phi support for the LLVM/Clang 19 compiler. Since earlier this year in LLVM/Clang 18 the Xeon Phi Knights Mill and Knights Landing support was treated as deprecated. Now for the LLVM 19 release due out around September, the support is removed entirely. This aligns with GCC 14 having deprecated Xeon Phi support too and now in GCC 15 Git having the code removed.

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