Bill Gates argues that when it comes to climate change, "there are more reasons to be hopeful than many people realize — and it's not just that renewable energy sources like wind and solar are getting cheaper.

"And it's not just because many of the steps already taken to reduce carbon emissions are working: Carbon emissions from fossil fuels will probably peak in 2025." The main thing that makes me optimistic is all the innovation I'm seeing. As someone who has been funding climate solutions for years, I get to learn from ingenious scientists who are working on ideas that will help the world solve climate change. And their work makes me confident that innovation will help the world get on track to meet its climate goals.

Some people are skeptical when a technology person like me says innovation is the answer. And it's true that new tools aren't the only thing we need. But we won't solve the climate problem without them.

There are two reasons for this. First, we need to eliminate emissions from every sector of the economy. Although some behavior change will help, the world can't achieve its zero-emissions goals without inventing new ways of doing things. For example, the production of concrete and steel alone accounts for around 10 percent of the world's annual greenhouse gases, but right now, we don't have practical ways to make either one without releasing carbon dioxide.

The second reason is that, in a world with limited resources, innovations allow us to magnify the impact of our efforts... We couldn't solve the climate problem with existing technology even if we had unlimited resources — and, of course, we don't have unlimited resources. So we need to be as rigorous as possible about doing the most good with the funding that is available. In my view, that boils down to inventing and deploying new ways to cut emissions and to help people survive and thrive in a warming world.
Gates believes we're at "the beginning of a Clean Industrial Revolution" --pointing readers to Breakthrough Energy's recent State of the Transition Report for more details.

But Gates also provides some specific examples of optimism-fuleing breakthroughs"

• "To reduce emissions, we need to replace the synthetic fertilizers that release nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas, when broken down by microbes in the soil; Pivot Bio has genetically modified microbes to provide plants with the nitrogen they need without the excess greenhouse gases that synthetic alternatives produce."

• "Cement and steel are two of the biggest sources of emissions in this category. Boston Metal is well on the way to making steel with electricity (which can be generated without emissions) instead of coal. CarbonCure and Ecocem have developed low-carbon processes for making cement, and Brimstone has a way to do it while actually removing carbon from the air."

• "Because of inefficient windows and gaps in what's known as the building envelope, as much as 40% of heated or cooled air leaks out of the typical building. If we can drive that number down, buildings will require less heating and cooling — which will substantially lower our emissions. Aeroseal has developed a polymer that can seal ducts and other crevices; more than a quarter of a million buildings in the U.S. and Canada are already using their product. Another company, Luxwall, has developed a window that's many times more efficient than the single-pane windows used in most buildings. And unlike double-paned windows, it's thin enough to replace single-paned glass without having to rebuild the frame."

Rick Lane reports via PC Gamer: KeeperFX has been in the process of rescuing Dungeon Keeper for a decade and a half. The project originally started in 2008, and experienced something of a bumpy road up until 2016. Since then, though, it has gradually added support for Windows 7, 10, and 11, support for hi-res and 4k screens, modernized controls, and even additional campaigns. With this latest version, KeeperFX's developers say "all original Dungeon Keeper code has been rewritten, establishing KeeperFX as a true open-source standalone game." 1.0 also introduces some new features, such as higher framerates, AI that is better at digging and less likely to "instantly" throw its entire army at you, and "higher quality landview speeches" for the additional campaigns. That refers to the introductions and epilogues to missions which, in the game's original campaign, were voiced by Richard Ridings, aka Daddy Pig.

Perhaps most intriguing of all, KeeperFX's 1.0 adds a couple of new units to play with. First up is the Druid, a sort-of color-flipped version of the Warlock who uses ice spells rather than fire. The other unit is the excitingly named Time Mage, a recolor of the Wizard who can cast teleport and speed spells, and also turn enemy units into chickens (presumably through rapid devolution). You won't find these units in the original campaign, but you will encounter them in the custom campaigns bundled with the 1.0 version. You can download KeeperFX here, although it still requires you to own Dungeon Keeper "for copyright reasons."

This week GitHub announced the approaching general availability of the GPT-4-powered GitHub Copilot Chat in December "as part of your existing GitHub Copilot subscription" (and "available at no cost to verified teachers, students, and maintainers of popular open source projects.")

And this "code-aware guidance and code generation" will also be integrated directly into github.com, "so developers can dig into code, pull requests, documentation, and general coding questions with Copilot Chat providing suggestions, summaries, analysis, and answers." With GitHub Copilot Chat we're enabling the rise of natural language as the new universal programming language for every developer on the planet. Whether it's finding an error, writing unit tests, or helping debug code, Copilot Chat is your AI companion through it all, allowing you to write and understand code using whatever language you speak...

Copilot Chat uses your code as context, and is able to explain complex concepts, suggest code based on your open files and windows, help detect security vulnerabilities, and help with finding and fixing errors in code, terminal, and debugger...

With the new inline Copilot Chat, developers can chat about specific lines of code, directly within the flow of their code and editor.
InfoWorld notes it will chat in "whatever language a developer speaks." (And that Copilot Chat will also be available in GitHub's mobile app.) But why wait until December? GitHub's blog post says that Copilot Chat "will come to the JetBrains suite of IDEs, available in preview today."

GitHub also plans to introduce "slash commands and context variables" for GitHub Copilot, "so fixing or improving code is as simple as entering /fix and generating tests now starts with /tests."

"With Copilot in the code editor, in the CLI, and now Copilot Chat on github.com and in our mobile app, we are making Copilot ubiquitous throughout the software development lifecycle and always available in all of GitHub's surface areas..."

CNBC adds that "Microsoft-owned GitHub" also plans to introduce "a more expensive Copilot assistant" in February "for developers inside companies that can explain and provide recommendations about internal source code."

Wednesday's blog post announcing these updates was written by GitHub's CEO, who seemed to be predicting an evolutionary leap into a new future. "Just as GitHub was founded on Git, today we are re-founded on Copilot." He promised they'd built on their vision of a future "where AI infuses every step of the developer lifecycle." Open source and Git have fundamentally transformed how we build software. It is now evident that AI is ushering in the same sweeping change, and at an exponential pace... We are certain this foundational transformation of the GitHub platform, and categorically new way of software development, is necessary in a world dependent on software. Every day, the world's developers balance an unsustainable demand to both modernize the legacy code of yesterday and build our digital tomorrow. It is our guiding conviction to make it easier for developers to do it all, from the creative spark to the commit, pull request, code review, and deploy — and to do it all with GitHub Copilot deeply integrated into the developer experience.
And if you're worried about the security of AI-generated code... Today, GitHub Copilot applies an LLM-based vulnerability prevention system that blocks insecure coding patterns in real-time to make GitHub Copilot's suggestions more secure. Our model targets the most common vulnerable coding patterns, including hardcoded credentials, SQL injections, and path injections. GitHub Copilot Chat can also help identify security vulnerabilities in the IDE, explain the mechanics of a vulnerability with its natural language capabilities, and suggest a specific fix for the highlighted code.
But for Enterprise accounts paying for GitHub Advanced Security, there's also an upgrade coming: "new AI-powered application security testing features designed to detect and remediate vulnerabilities and secrets in your code." (It's already available in preview mode.)

GitHub even announced plans for a new AI assistant in 2024 that generates a step-by-step plan for responding to GitHub issues. (GitHub describes it as "like a pair programming session with a partner that knows about every inch of the project, and can follow your lead to make repository-wide changes from the issue to the pull request with the power of AI.")

CNBC notes that AI-powered coding assistants "are still nascent, though, with less than 10% enterprise adoption, according to Gartner, a technology industry research firm."

But last month Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told analysts GitHub Copilot already had one million paying users...

And GitHub's blog post concludes, "And we're just getting started."

Long-time Slashdot reader cusco writes: Forty years ago today Microsoft introduced its new Graphical User Interface for MS-DOS. Inspired by the Xerox PARC project Alto, as was the Apple Mac, it was their first attempt to address the user unfriendliness of the standard computer interface. Named Windows 1.0 after the "windows" it created to view individual running programs, it generated quite a bit of interest at the initial reveal. Unfortunately, difficulty in ironing out bugs (especially in memory management) delayed release for two years, to November 1985.

Windows Central: Microsoft began rolling out its new AI assistant for Windows earlier this year with the Windows 11 version 23H2 release, which adds a new Microsoft Copilot button directly to the Taskbar. Microsoft has been putting its Copilot in front of every user it can, but there's still a large chunk of PC users on the older Windows 10 OS which hasn't seen any of Microsoft's recent AI additions. That may soon be changing. According to my sources, Microsoft is planning to bring the same Microsoft Copilot to Windows 10 in an update coming soon. Just like Windows 11, this update to Windows 10 will place a Copilot button directly on the Windows 10 taskbar, which will open the exact same Copilot sidebar experience found on Windows 11.

Microsoft has decided to axe the Windows Insider MVP program, which is now scheduled to be discontinued at the end of the year. From a report: A Microsoft spokesperson told The Register: "In an effort to consolidate MVP-style programs across Microsoft, we have decided to retire the Windows Insider MVP Program effective December 31, 2023. All our existing Windows Insider MVPs will be nominated to participate in the Microsoft MVP Program which has similar benefits and opportunities to continue networking with us and interacting with many other Microsoft MVPs globally."

The Windows Insider MVPs are usually enthusiasts of Microsoft's wares who are rewarded for their loyalty with access to the engineering teams, complimentary subscriptions to products such as Visual Studio Enterprise and Office 365, as well as the odd paperweight or two. A nomination must come from another MVP or a Microsoft employee to achieve this coveted status. An application is then scrutinized, and if one has demonstrated sufficient passion for all things Microsoft, the nod is given. Microsoft has plenty of Insider programs where users can play with pre-release versions of the company's software.

Microsoft's dedicated OS for embedded and pocket devices, Windows CE, has reached the end of its support lifetime. From a report: Windows CE -- and there's never been an official explanation of what the WinCE-inducing name stood for -- debuted in November 1996, just a few months after Windows NT 4, the first version of NT with the Explorer desktop from Windows 95. Earlier this month, as reported by HPC Factor, the last ever version, CE 8, branded Compact Embedded 2013, reached its end of support.

In 2011, Microsoft said it would be replaced by a unified platform based on Windows 8, but we know how well that went down. By 2020, the official migration path was set -- to a container on top of Win10 IoT. Its fortunes have always fluctuated. In 1999, we asked does MS care about WinCE? By 2003, we reported that eTForecasts said it would outship PCs. Indirectly, the researchers were right -- smartphones did end up massively outselling PCs. They just weren't Microsoft ones.

ZDNet reports an interesting static from Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella. "We have over 1 million paid Copilot users in more than 37,000 organizations that subscribe to Copilot for business, with significant traction outside the United States."

And Microsoft's quarterly results also "showed early signs that the company's investments in generative AI were beginning to bolster sales, most notably reversing what had been slowing growth of the company's important cloud computing product," reports the New York Times. (Alternate URL here.) The company had $56.5 billion in sales in the three months that ended in September, up 13% from a year earlier. Profit hit $22.3 billion, up 27%. The results beat analyst expectations and Microsoft's own estimates.

Microsoft had told investors that A.I. wouldn't start producing meaningful results until after the start of 2024, when more products became widely available. The company and its competitors are racing to put generative A.I. into nearly every product they offer. Microsoft is seen by many companies as a leading A.I. provider, thanks to its partnership with — and $13 billion investment in — the start-up OpenAI, which introduced the chatbot ChatGPT almost a year ago. Microsoft's flagship cloud computing product, Azure, grew 29%, up from 26% in the previous quarter. About three percentage points of Azure's growth came from generative A.I. products, including the access Microsoft provides to OpenAI's GPT-4 language model, more than the company had told investors to expect.

More than 18,000 organizations are using Microsoft's Azure OpenAI services, Satya Nadella, the company's chief executive, said in a call with investors. He said that included customers who had not used Azure before. "Azure again took share as organizations took their workloads to our cloud," Mr. Nadella said... The company said that sales could increase as much as 8.7% in the current quarter, exceeding investor expectations, and that it was investing in building data centers to support the demand for A.I. and cloud computing...

Microsoft's personal computing business grew just 3%, to $13.7 billion, reflecting how consumer behaviors have shifted since the laptop-buying binges of the pandemic. The revenue of the Windows operating system installed on new computers was up 4%. Gaming provided a consumer bright spot, with Xbox content and services up 13%.
Next month Microsoft integrates its Copilot AI product into its Excel/Word/Teams "productivity suite" — but Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that 40% of Fortune 100 companies have already been testing the feature during its "limited preview", and "so far, so good."

Yet the article notes it isn't all good news for Microsoft. Investment bank UBS has told investors that while Microsoft integrated an AI-powered chatbot into its Bing search engine, there is "no evidence" that Bing has actually gained any search market share.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has downplayed the threat of rival chipmakers creating processors based on the Arm architecture for PCs. From a report: "Arm and Windows client alternatives, generally they've been relegated to pretty insignificant roles in the PC business," he told analysts during the x86 giant's Q3 earnings call Thursday. "We take all our competition seriously, but I think history is our guide here. We don't see these as potentially being all that significant overall," he added, a sentiment somewhat at odds with Microsoft which last week cited analyst research predicting Arm's PC market share will grow from its curernt 14 percent to 25 percent by 2027.

Which seems far from "pretty insignificant." Gelsinger's words also contrast markedly with past Intel CEO Andy Grove, who penned a book titled "Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company." While Gelsinger doesn't see Arm as a threat, he said Intel Foundry Services is more than happy to work with chipmakers to build chips based on the architecture. "When you're thinking about other alternative architectures like Arm, we also say, 'Wow, what a great opportunity for our foundry'," he said. To that end, the in April 2023 the chipmaker announced a strategic partnership with Arm to make it easier to produce chips on the architecture in Intel foundries.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft is starting to roll out new changes to Windows Ink that let you write anywhere you can type in Windows 11. After months of previewing the changes, the handwriting-to-text conversion now works inside search boxes and other elements of Windows 11 where you'd normally type your input. [...] If you have a Surface device with a stylus or any other Windows tablet that supports Windows Ink then you'll immediately see this new feature if you head into Settings and start to write into a search box, or in other text edit fields in Windows 11.

The Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) has delivered a petition to Microsoft calling on the company to rethink the impending abandonment of Windows 10 in the face of millions of PCs potentially being rendered eligible for landfill overnight. From a report: There are now less than two years until Microsoft is due to cut support for Windows 10, and at current estimates, 400 million PCs can't make the jump to Windows 11. The petition, addressed to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, criticizes its plans and states that customers expect their devices to last rather than be rendered obsolete by an arbitrary decision. PIRG warns that tipping that much hardware into landfills is somewhat at odds with the company's stance on the environment.

The petition reads: "All software reaches a point at which it's no longer supported, but when the consequences to our environment are this large we shouldn't accept it." As a reminder, while Windows 10 was largely backwards-compatible with computers running older operating systems, Microsoft slapped hardware requirements on Windows 11 that rendered machines even just a few years old unable to upgrade -- the main issues center on the CPU and TPM requirements.

iFixit has started selling genuine replacement parts for Microsoft Surface devices. From a report: The company now offers SSDs, batteries, screens, kickstands, and a whole bunch of other parts for 15 Surface products. Some of the devices on that list include the Surface Pro 9, Surface Laptop 5, Surface Go 4, Surface Studio 2 Plus, and others. You can check out the entire list of supported products and parts in this post on Microsoft's website. In addition to supplying replacement parts, iFixit also offers disassembly videos and guides for each product, as well as toolkits that include things like an opening tool, tweezers, drivers, and more.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is the third chief executive of the software giant to admit the company has made some serious mobile mistakes. From a report: Satya Nadella took over from former CEO Steve Ballmer in 2014 and, just over a year later, wrote off $7.6 billion related to Microsoft's acquisition of the Nokia phone business. In an interview with Business Insider, Nadella admitted that Microsoft's "exit" from the mobile phone business could have been handled better. Asked about a strategic mistake or wrong decision that he might regret, Nadella responds: "The decision I think a lot of people talk about -- and one of the most difficult decisions I made when I became CEO -- was our exit of what I'll call the mobile phone as defined then. In retrospect, I think there could have been ways we could have made it work by perhaps reinventing the category of computing between PCs, tablets, and phones."

According to Reuters, Nvidia is designing ARM-based processors that would run Microsoft's Windows operating system. While they're not expected to be ready until 2025, it poses a major new challenge to Intel which has long dominated the PC industry. From the report: The AI chip giant's new pursuit is part of Microsoft's effort to help chip companies build Arm-based processors for Windows PCs. Microsoft's plans take aim at Apple, which has nearly doubled its market share in the three years since releasing its own Arm-based chips in-house for its Mac computers, according to preliminary third-quarter data from research firm IDC. Advanced Micro Devices also plans to make chips for PCs with Arm technology, according to two people familiar with the matter. Nvidia and AMD could sell PC chips as soon as 2025, one of the people familiar with the matter said. Nvidia and AMD would join Qualcomm, which has been making Arm-based chips for laptops since 2016. At an event on Tuesday that will be attended by Microsoft executives, including vice president of Windows and Devices Pavan Davuluri, Qualcomm plans to reveal more details about a flagship chip that a team of ex-Apple engineers designed, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Nvidia, AMD and Qualcomm's efforts could shake up a PC industry that Intel long dominated but which is under increasing pressure from Apple. Apple's custom chips have given Mac computers better battery life and speedy performance that rivals chips that use more energy. Executives at Microsoft have observed how efficient Apple's Arm-based chips are, including with AI processing, and desire to attain similar performance, one of the sources said. Microsoft has been encouraging the involved chipmakers to build advanced AI features into the CPUs they are designing. The company envisions AI-enhanced software such as its Copilot to become an increasingly important part of using Windows. To make that a reality, forthcoming chips from Nvidia, AMD and others will need to devote the on-chip resources to do so. "Microsoft learned from the 90s that they don't want to be dependent on Intel again, they don't want to be dependent on a single vendor," said Jay Goldberg, chief executive of D2D Advisory, a finance and strategy consulting firm. "If Arm really took off in PC (chips), they were never going to let Qualcomm be the sole supplier."

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2020, scientists decided just to rework the alphanumeric symbols they used to represent genes rather than try to deal with an Excel feature that was interpreting their names as dates and (un)helpfully reformatting them automatically. Last week, a member of the Excel team posted that the company is rolling out an update on Windows and macOS to fix that. Excel's automatic conversions are intended to make it easier and faster to input certain types of commonly entered data -- numbers and dates, for instance. But for scientists using quick shorthand to make things legible, it could ruin published, peer-reviewed data, as a 2016 study found.

Microsoft detailed the update in a blog post last week, adding a checkbox labeled "Convert continuous letters and numbers to a date." You can probably guess what that toggles. The update builds on the Automatic Data Conversions settings the company added last year, which included the option for Excel to warn you when it's about to get extra helpful and let you load your file without automatic conversion so you can ensure nothing will be screwed up by it.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple was caught flat-footed when ChatGPT and other AI tools took the technology industry by storm. But the company is now preparing its response and plans to develop features for its full range of devices. One of the most intense and widespread endeavors at Apple right now is its effort to respond to the AI frenzy sweeping the technology industry. The company has some catching up to do. Apple largely sat on the sidelines when OpenAI's ChatGPT took off like a rocket last year. It watched as Google and Microsoft rolled out generative AI versions of their search engines, which spit out convincingly human-like responses to users' queries. Microsoft also updated its Windows apps with smarter assistants, and Amazon unveiled an AI-enhanced overhaul of Alexa. All the while, the only noteworthy AI release from Apple was an improved auto-correct system in iOS 17.

Apple's senior vice presidents in charge of AI and software engineering, John Giannandrea and Craig Federighi, are spearheading the effort. On Cook's team, they're referred to as the "executive sponsors" of the generative AI push. Eddy Cue, the head of services, is also involved, I'm told. The trio are now on course to spend about $1 billion per year on the undertaking. Giannandrea is overseeing development of the underlying technology for a new AI system, and his team is revamping Siri in a way that will deeply implement it. This smarter version of Siri could be ready as soon as next year, but there are still concerns about the technology and it may take longer for Apple's AI features to spread across its product line. Federighi's software engineering group, meanwhile, is adding AI to the next version of iOS. There's an edict to fill it with features running on the company's large language model, or LLM, which uses a flood of data to hone AI capabilities. The new features should improve how both Siri and the Messages app can field questions and auto-complete sentences, mirroring recent changes to competing services.

"Twenty phone companies may soon have all their voice calls blocked by US carriers," reports Ars Technica, "because they didn't submit real plans for preventing robocalls on their networks." The 20 carriers include a mix of US-based and foreign voice service providers that submitted required "robocall mitigation" plans to the Federal Communications Commission about two years ago. The problem is that some of the carriers' submissions were blank pages and others were bizarre images or documents that had no relation to robocalls. The strange submissions, according to FCC enforcement orders issued Monday, included "a .PNG file depicting an indiscernible object," a document titled "Windows Printer Test Page," an image "that depicted the filer's 'Taxpayer Profile' on a Pakistani government website," and "a letter that stated: 'Unfortunately, we do not have such a documents.'"

Monday's FCC announcement said the agency's Enforcement Bureau issued orders demanding that "20 non-compliant companies show cause within 14 days as to why the FCC should not remove them from the database for deficient filings." The orders focus on the certification requirements and do not indicate whether these companies carry large amounts of robocall traffic. Each company will be given "an opportunity to cure any deficiencies in its robocall mitigation program description or explain why its certification is not deficient." After the October 30 deadline, the companies could be removed from the FCC's Robocall Mitigation Database.

Removal from the database would oblige other phone companies to block all of their calls.

Linus Torvalds has said he bought a Dell XPS-13 with Ubuntu Linux for his daughter. Now ZDNet shares some trivia from the history of "the most well-known Linux laptop," citing a presentation by Barton George, Dell Technologies' Developer Community manager, at the Linux/open-source conference All Things Open: First, however, you should know that Dell has supported Linux desktops and laptops since the middle 2000s. In 2006, Michael Dell told me that Dell would be the first major PC vendor to release and support desktop Linux — and this proved to be a success. Barton George explained that Dell had always done great volume with these computers. Not volume, like the Windows machines, of course, but enough that Dell has always offered Linux-based — primarily Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) powered — workstations.

Still, none of these machines really appealed to developers... George announced on his personal blog what Dell was planning, and his traffic went from 60 views a day to 15,000. Then, as now, there's a lot of interest in laptops that come with Linux ready to go... Dell got together with Canonical, Ubuntu Linux's parent company, to make sure all the drivers were in place for a top-notch Ubuntu Linux developer desktop experience. Indeed, the name 'Project Sputnik' is a nod to Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu founder and Canonical CEO. A decade before the project itself, Shuttleworth had spent eight days orbiting the Earth in a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft. George and the crew decided "Soyuz" didn't have an inspiring ring to it, so the company went with "Sputnik" instead.

George continued: "We announced a beta program for the machine with a 10% off offer. We thought, well, we'll probably get 300 people. Instead, we got 6,000. This is where senior management said OK, you've got something real."

Google security researchers say they have found evidence that government-backed hackers linked to Russia and China are exploiting a since-patched vulnerability in WinRAR, the popular shareware archiving tool for Windows. From a report: The WinRAR vulnerability, first discovered by cybersecurity company Group-IB earlier this year and tracked as CVE-2023-38831, allows attackers to hide malicious scripts in archive files that masquerade as seemingly innocuous images or text documents. Group-IB said the flaw was exploited as a zero-day -- since the developer had zero time to fix the bug before it was exploited -- as far back as April to compromise the devices of at least 130 traders.

Rarlab, which makes the archiving tool, released an updated version of WinRAR (version 6.23) on August 2 to patch the vulnerability. Despite this, Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) said this week that its researchers have observed multiple government-backed hacking groups exploiting the security flaw, noting that "many users" who have not updated the app remain vulnerable. In research shared with TechCrunch ahead of its publication, TAG says it has observed multiple campaigns exploiting the WinRAR zero-day bug, which it has tied to state-backed hacking groups with links to Russia and China.

Long-time Slashdot reader couchslug shares a report from Ars Technica, writing: "A new attack on the right to do with one's property as the owner sees fit. First step, threaten without providing evidence." From the report: Before last week, owners of certain Mazda vehicles who also had a Home Assistant setup could create some handy connections for their car. One CX60 driver had a charger that would only power on when it confirmed his car was plugged in and would alert him if he left the trunk open. Another used Home Assistant to control their charger based on the dynamic prices of an Agile Octopus energy plan. Yet another had really thought it through, using Home Assistant to check the gas before their morning commute, alert them if their windows were down before rain was forecast, and remotely unlock and start the car in cold conditions. The possibilities were vast, and purportedly beyond what Mazda's official app offered.

Mazda, however, had issues with the project, which was largely the free-time work of one software developer, Brandon Rothweiler. In a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice sent to GitHub, Mazda (or an authorized agent) alleges that Rothweiler's integration: contains code that "is violating [Mazda's] copyright ownership"; used "certain Mazda information, including proprietary API information," to "create code and information"; and contained code that "provides functionality same as what is currently" in Mazda's apps posted to the Apple App Store and Google Play Store for Android.

One day later, Rothweiler made a pull request to the Home Assistant core project: "I'm removing the Mazda integration due to a legal notice sent to me by Mazda." The Home Assistant project pushed an update to remove the integration, posted about the removal, and noted that they were "disappointed that Mazda has decided to take this position" and that "Mazda's first recourse was not to reach out to us and the maintainer but to send a cease and desist letter instead." One of the many commenters confused by Mazda's code claims said they couldn't find any of the copyrighted code the company referenced. Additionally, Ars Technica suggests the project "could be considered a fair use exception to the DMCA, as explained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation."

"When Mazda contacted me, my options were to either comply or open myself up to potential legal risk," said Rothweiler. "Even if I believe that what I'm doing is morally correct and legally protected, legal processes still have a financial cost. I can't afford to take on that financial risk for something that I do in my spare time to help others."