An anonymous reader quotes CNN: French automaker Citroën has unveiled the Ami, a tiny electric car that's designed from the outset to be as cheap as possible. The car isn't very fast and it looks a bit like a washing machine, but it only costs €6,000, or the equivalent of about $6,600.

It would be hard to get a good used car at that price, but the two-seat Ami is barely a car. In fact, Citroën refers to it as a "non-conformist mobility object." It has a top speed of just 45 kilometers an hour, roughly equal to 28 miles per hour. It's powered by a 6 kilowatt, or 8 horsepower, electric motor. For that reason, though, the Ami can be driven by kids as young as 14 in France, or 16 in many other European countries, without a license. Under the laws of these countries, the Ami qualifies as a voiture sans permis (literally "car without license"), or quadricycle, a category of small and slow vehicle that, for purposes of regulation, is treated like a four-wheeled scooter...

The Ami is built using as few unique parts as possible. For instance, the body parts used for the front end are exactly like those used in the back. Also, the right door is exactly like the left door. That means the driver's side door hinge is at the front while the passenger side door hinge is at the back... Since it's a lightweight car with a small battery intended mostly for use in cities, the Ami has a range of only about 70 kilometers, or 43 miles, per charge. On the plus side, though, it can be fully charged in only three hours using a household electrical outlet...

Besides buying the car, shoppers will also have the option to lease it for €20, the equivalent of $22, per month.

"I love that my car recorded a hit-and-run on my behalf," writes a technology columnist at the Washington Post. "Yet I'm scared we're not ready for the ways cameras pointed inside and outside vehicles will change the open road..."

Long-time Slashdot reader Strudelkugel shared the Post's report: It's not just crashes that will be different. Once governments, companies and parents get their hands on car video, it could become evidence, an insurance liability and even a form of control... [I]t's not just the bad guys my car records. I've got clips of countless people's behinds scooching by in tight parking lots, because Sentry Mode activates any time something gets close. It's also recording my family: With another function called Dash Cam that records the road, Tesla has saved hours and hours of my travels -- the good driving and the not-so-good alike.

We've been down this road before with connected cameras. Amazon's Ring doorbells and Nest cams also seemed like a good idea, until hackers, stalkers and police tried to get their hands on the video feed... Applied to a car, the questions multiply: Can you just peer in on your teen driver -- or spouse? Do I have to share my footage with the authorities? Should my car be allowed to kick me off the road if it thinks I'm sleepy? How long until insurance companies offer "discounts" for direct video access? And is any of this actually making cars safer or less expensive to own? Your data can and will be used against you. Can we do anything to make our cars remain private spaces...?

Their design choices may well determine our future privacy. It's important to remember: Automakers can change how their cameras work with as little as a software update. Sentry mode arrived out of thin air last year on cars made as early as 2017... Tesla is already recording gobs. Living in a dense city, my Sentry Mode starts recording between five and seven times per day -- capturing lots of people, the vast majority of whom are not committing any crime. (This actually drains the car's precious battery. Some owners estimate it sips about a mile's worth of the car's 322-mile potential range for every hour it runs.) Same with the Dash Cam that runs while I'm on the road: It's recording not just my driving, but all the other cars and people on the road, too. The recordings stick around on a memory card until you delete them or the card fills up, and it writes over the old footage... Now imagine what Google or Facebook might want to do with that data on everywhere you drive...

Without Sentry Mode, I wouldn't have known what hit me. The city's response to my hit-and-run report was that it didn't even need my video file. Officials had evidence of their own: That bus had cameras running, too.
"Thank You St. Tesla," jokes Slashdot reader DenverTech, linking to a story in which a Tesla owner shared the video it recorded of another car struck in a hit-and-run accident in the parking lot of a Colorado Olive Garden. "It just makes me really thankful that there are cars out there, that can prove what happened so justice can happen," that car's owner told a local news station -- though the Tesla owner had also already written down the license number of the truck which struck her vehicle.

The news station also links to another story in which a man accused of dragging a knife across a parked Tesla "was also captured on the vehicle's built-in camera."

World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen has been sneaking onto online chess sites using stupid pseudonyms and taunting his opponents by using pointless maneuvers with names like "the Bongcloud." One YouTube commenter calls it "a revolution in the history of chess."

Slate documents the antics in an article titled "DrDrunkenstein's Reign of Terror." "DrDrunkenstein" is one of many aliases Magnus Carlsen has played under during the past two years, when he went on a killing spree across the speed chess tournaments of the internet. Since winter 2017, Carlsen has taken to livestreaming his games on a variety of platforms, which has provided a surprisingly entertaining window into the mind of an all-time great.

Lichess.org is a free, ad-less web platform for chess players, a favorite in the online chess community... Carlsen appeared incognito as "DannyTheDonkey" and won, donating his small prize money back to the website. Carlsen's first showing as DrDrunkenstein was in Lichess' second Titled Arena the following month... Carlsen streamed the games on Twitch, where he lived up to his username, pounding Coronas while bantering in Norwegian with his friends. Chess fans were astonished. There's something hypnotizing about watching a guy known as "the Mozart of chess" — a player who is quantifiably better than Bobby Fischer — taking a big gulp of beer, announcing his position as "completely winning," then singing along to Dr. Dre saying "motherfuck the police" while coasting into another quick checkmate...

In an interview with a Norwegian newspaper in October, Carlsen admits he quit drinking for his health. "I wouldn't say I was an alcoholic exactly," he said, "but I found out this year, if I'm going to travel and play a lot... I need to prioritize differently...." On the eve of his world championship defense, Carlsen appeared in the next tournament as "manwithavan," playing a large chunk of his games on a phone from a minivan, where the touch screen presented a massive handicap. He again earned the adoration of spectators, this time for riskily walking his king into the center of the board against one of the most dangerous players in the tournament. He came in third... As DrNykterstein, he alternated between two ways of wasting his early, important opening moves. Sometimes, he'd take his queen on a four-move tour of the board before swapping her home square with the king's, letting his opponent develop their pieces while he showboated... Other times, he'd fidget his knights back and forth from their starting squares, offering his challenger a six-move time advantage. In this tournament he filled with gags, he came in first again...

One of the sweetest benefits of watching these matches is enjoying Carlsen's dry, self-deprecating sense of humor — something no chess prodigy has any right to have.
In December, Magnus also reached the #1 spot, beating seven million other players, on a fantasy football table.

SpaceX envisions Starship as a 387-foot-tall (118 meters) spacecraft/booster that can carry up to 100 people to Mars. Pig Hogger (Slashdot reader #10,379) tipped us off to this progress report from Space.com: SpaceX's new Starship prototype appeared to burst during a pressure test late Friday (Feb. 28), rupturing under the glare of flood lights and mist at the company's south Texas facility. The Starship SN1 prototype, which SpaceX moved to a launchpad near its Boca Chica, Texas, assembly site earlier this week, blew apart during a liquid nitrogen pressure test according to a video captured by SPadre.com. A separate video posted by NASASpaceflight.com member BocaChicaGal clearly shows the Starship SN1's midsection buckle during the test, then shoot upward before crashing back to the ground...

SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has hinted that many of these prototypes will be needed to perfect the Starship vehicle... Musk unveiled the first full-size Starship prototype, called the Starship Mk1, in September 2019. That vehicle blew its top during cryogenic testing.

VCs have given nearly half a billion dollars to a stealth startup called SambaNova Systems to build "a new kind of computer to replace the typical Von Neumann machines expressed in processors from Intel and AMD, and graphics chips from Nvidia."

ZDNet reports: The last thirty years in computing, said CEO Rodrigo Liang, have been "focused on instructions and operations, in terms of what you optimize for. The next five, to ten, to twenty years, large amounts of data and how it flows through a system is really what's going to drive performance." It's not just a novel computer chip, said Liang, rather, "we are focused on the complete system," he told ZDNet. "To really provide a fundamental shift in computing, you have to obviously provide a new piece of silicon at the core, but you have to build the entire system, to integrate across several layers of hardware and software...."

[One approach to training neural networks with very little labeled data] is part of the shift of computer programming from hard-coded to differentiable, in which code is learned on the fly, commonly referred to as "software 2.0." Liang's co-founders include Stanford professor Kunle Olukotun, who says a programmable logic device similar to a field-programmable gate array could change its shape over and over to align its circuitry [to] that differentiated program, with the help of a smart compiler such as Spatial. [Spatial is "a computing language that can take programs and de-compose them into operations that can be run in parallel, for the purpose of making chips that can be 'reconfigurable,' able to change their circuitry on the fly."]

In an interview in his office last spring, Olukotun laid out a sketch of how all that might come together. In what he refers to as a "data flow," the computing paradigm is turned inside-out. Rather than stuffing a program's instructions into a fixed set of logic gates permanently etched into the processor, the processor re-arranges its circuits, perhaps every clock cycle, to variably manipulate large amounts of data that "flows" through the chip.... Today's chips execute instructions in an instruction "pipeline" that is fixed, he observed, "whereas in this reconfigurable data-flow architecture, it's not instructions that are flowing down the pipeline, it's data that's flowing down the pipeline, and the instructions are the configuration of the hardware that exists in place.

"From the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs comes three case studies on people who benefited from LSD overdoses including one woman who took a dose of 55 milligrams of pure powdered LSD," writes clovis (Slashdot reader #4,684).

CNN reports: The 49-year-old woman, known as CB, had contracted Lyme disease in her early 20s, which damaged her feet and ankles and left her in "significant pain." In September 2015, she took 55 milligrams of what she believed was cocaine but was actually "pure LSD in powder form." The authors defined a normal recreational dose as 100 micrograms -- equal to 0.1 milligrams. The woman blacked out and vomited frequently for the next 12 hours but reported feeling "pleasantly high" for the 12 hours after that -- still vomiting, but less often. According to her roommate, she sat mostly still in a chair, either with her eyes open or rolled back, occasionally speaking random words. Ten hours later, she was able to hold a conversation and "seemed coherent."

Her foot pain was gone the next day and she stopped using morphine for five days. While the pain returned, she was able to control it with a lower dose of morphine and a microdose of LSD every three days. After more than two years, in January 2018, she stopped using both morphine and LSD and reported no withdrawal symptoms, although the case report said she did experience an increase in anxiety, depression and social withdrawal.

"It's only been a few months since we learned that The Matrix 4 was actually a real movie that was going to actually happen, and was actually going to star Keanu Reeves, and now the movie is actually filming in San Francisco..." writes Cinema Blend. "However, making things real is apparently causing real damage in the city by the bay."

NBC Bay Area reports: Filming of "The Matrix 4" brought helicopters, explosions and cars flipping in the air to San Francisco over the weekend, but it also resulted in some damage. The heat from the explosions was so intense it melted the covers of a couple building lamps and melted the plastic cover of an advertising street sign. Workers who replaced the plastic said it cost about $2,000...

Filming of "The Matrix 4" in San Francisco wraps up on Sunday.
BGR reports that a few locals shared their own videos of the filming online, including one Twitch social media analyst who found prop cars at the old Transbay terminal that "smelled freshly burnt."

One YouTube user also shared footage of what they describe as "Keanu Reeves or Stunt Double Jumping off building in San Francisco."

The new 1.14 release of the Go programming language "is dotted with performance and security improvements," reports the developer news site DevClass, "but also gives devs more flexibility when it comes to module use."

And they also give a nice overview of Go's development process: Go is the language most containerization projects are built with. The wide adoption of this approach is one of the reasons that made the Go team implement a new feedback-based system for language enhancements. In it, only a limited number of new features are proposed for an upcoming release, giving the community room to weigh in on them. If they decide a change will do more good than harm the feature will make it into the new version. However, since alterations affect a quite wide range of people, they are often heavily disputed. This already led to the abandoning of a proposal thought to improve the language's often discussed error handling. Currently, a couple of new vet checks and minor adjustments are discussed for the 1.15 release.

Updates in Go 1.14 mainly concern the toolchain, runtime, and libraries. The only change to the language allows for methods of embedded interfaces to have the same name and signature as those on the embedding interface. Supposedly to facilitate the creation of somewhat safer applications, version 1.14 includes a hash/maphash package. The hash functions on byte sequences contained in it are meant to help with the implementation of hash tables or similar data structures. The Go team warns though that "the hash functions are collision-resistant but not cryptographically secure...."

Go 1.14 is the last release to run on macOS 10.11 and support 32-bit binaries on Apple's operating system. Meanwhile binaries for Windows come with data execution prevention enabled, experimental support for 64-bit RISC-V on Linux is included, and v1.14 should work with 64-bit ARM architecture on FreeBSD 12.0 or later.

Several pundits criticized Google for warning Edge users to switch to Chrome if they wanted to use Chrome extensions "securely". "In Chrome, a plugin can be remotely disabled by the Chrome team if it's considered unsafe for whatever reason," notes PC World. "Google lacks the ability to remotely disable the same plugin within Edge, prompting Google to recommend switching to Chrome, a source close to Google said."

Though PC World notes that Google isn't giving the same warning to Opera users...

Yet now when you try to add Chrome Extensions to Edge, Microsoft also gives you a warning of its own -- that extensions installed from sources other than the Microsoft Store "are unverified [by Microsoft], and may affect browser performance." And while Google.com is still displaying an ad for Chrome to web surfers using Edge, now if you search for "Chrome web store" on Bing, the first result is an ad ("promoted by Microsoft") for Microsoft's own Edge browser.

ZDNet's Chris Matyszczyk asked both Google and Microsoft for a comment: [N]othing from Google. But suddenly, a confirmation from Microsoft that it wouldn't offer official comment. My sniffings around Google suggest the company may have been taken aback by the positive public reaction to Edge... My nasal probings around Redmond offer the reasoning that, well, Microsoft hasn't tested or verified extensions that arrive from places other than they Microsoft Edge add-ons website. Why, they're far too busy to do that. And, well, it's the Chrome web store. Who knows what you'll find over there? Oh, and Edge gives you more control over your data, so there.

Could it be, then, that Google is being vacuously childish and trying to scare people into resisting the lures of Microsoft's browser handiwork? Could it also be that Microsoft is doing something rather similar in either retaliation or merely homage to the brutally competitive instincts of social activist Bill Gates?

Could it be that both of these companies should pause to examine their consciences, go sit in a corner and embrace their customers' needs and choices a touch more fully?

The New York Times reports: Some of Earth's plants have fallen in love with metal. With roots that act practically like magnets, these organisms -- about 700 are known -- flourish in metal-rich soils that make hundreds of thousands of other plant species flee or die....

The plants not only collect the soil's minerals into their bodies but seem to hoard them to "ridiculous" levels, said Alan Baker, a visiting botany professor at the University of Melbourne who has researched the relationship between plants and their soils since the 1970s. This vegetation could be the world's most efficient, solar-powered mineral smelters. What if, as a partial substitute to traditional, energy-intensive and environmentally costly mining and smelting, the world harvested nickel plants...?

On a plot of land rented from a rural village on the Malaysian side of the island of Borneo, Dr. Baker and an international team of colleagues have proved it at small scale. Every six to 12 months, a farmer shaves off one foot of growth from these nickel-hyper-accumulating plants and either burns or squeezes the metal out. After a short purification, farmers could hold in their hands roughly 500 pounds of nickel citrate, potentially worth thousands of dollars on international markets. Now, as the team scales up to the world's largest trial at nearly 50 acres, their target audience is industry. In a decade, the researchers hope that a sizable portion of insatiable consumer demand for base metals and rare minerals could be filled by the same kind of farming that produces the world's coconuts and coffee... [T]he technology has the additional value of enabling areas with toxic soils to be made productive...

Now, after decades behind the lock and key of patents, Dr. Baker said, "the brakes are off the system."
Long-time Slashdot reader necro81 adds "This process, called phytomining, cannot supplant the scale of traditional mining, but could make a dent in the world's demand for nickel, cobalt, and zinc.

"Small-holding farmers could earn more from phytomining than from coaxing food crops from metal-laden soils. Using these plants could also help clean brownfields left over from prior industrial use."

"Intel's security plans sound a lot like 'we're going to catch up to AMD,'" argues FOSS advocate and "mercenary sysadmin" Jim Salter at Ars Technica, citing a "present-and-future" presentation by Anil Rao and Scott Woodgate at Intel's Security Day that promised a future with Full Memory Encryption but began with Intel SGX (launched with the Skylake microarchitecture in 2015).

Salter describes SGX as "one of the first hardware encryption technologies designed to protect areas of memory from unauthorized users, up to and including the system administrators themselves." SGX is a set of x86_64 CPU instructions which allows a process to create an "enclave" within memory which is hardware encrypted. Data stored in the encrypted enclave is only decrypted within the CPU -- and even then, it is only decrypted at the request of instructions executed from within the enclave itself. As a result, even someone with root (system administrator) access to the running system can't usefully read or alter SGX-protected enclaves. This is intended to allow confidential, high-stakes data processing to be safely possible on shared systems -- such as cloud VM hosts. Enabling this kind of workload to move out of locally owned-and-operated data centers and into massive-scale public clouds allows for less expensive operation as well as potentially better uptime, scalability, and even lower power consumption.

Intel's SGX has several problems. The first and most obvious is that it is proprietary and vendor-specific -- if you design an application to utilize SGX to protect its memory, that application will only run on Intel processors... Finally, there are potentially severe performance impacts to utilization of SGX. IBM's Danny Harnik tested SGX performance fairly extensively in 2017, and he found that many common workloads could easily see a throughput decrease of 20 to 50 percent when executed inside SGX enclaves. Harnik's testing wasn't 100 percent perfect, as he himself made clear -- in particular, in some cases his compiler seemed to produce less-optimized code with SGX than it had without. Even if one decides to handwave those cases as "probably fixable," they serve to highlight an earlier complaint -- the need to carefully develop applications specifically for SGX use cases, not merely flip a hypothetical "yes, encrypt this please" switch....

After discussing real-world use of SGX, Rao moved on to future Intel technologies -- specifically, full-memory encryption. Intel refers to its version of full-memory encryption as TME (Total Memory Encryption) or MKTME (Multi-Key Total Memory Encryption). Unfortunately, those features are vaporware for the moment. Although Intel submitted an enormous Linux kernel patchset last May for enabling those features, there are still no real-world processors that offer them... This is probably a difficult time to give exciting presentations on Intel's security roadmap. Speculative prediction vulnerabilities have hurt Intel's processors considerably more than their competitors', and the company has been beaten significantly to market by faster, easier-to-use hardware memory encryption technologies as well. Rao and Woodgate put a brave face on things by talking up how SGX has been and is being used in Azure. But it seems apparent that the systemwide approach to memory encryption already implemented in AMD's Epyc CPUs -- and even in some of their desktop line -- will have a far greater lasting impact.

Intel's slides about their own upcoming full memory encryption are labeled "innovations," but they look a lot more like catching up to their already-established competition.

"Mats Järlström's emotions were clearly visible Friday morning. After years of arguing red light traffic cameras are flawed, the official Journal of the Institute of Transportation Engineers said he was right," reports a local news station in Portland, Oregon: The ITE sets traffic policy recommendations for the United States — and they said cities should be using his formula. "It is a big deal," Järlström told KOIN 6 News. "It's the top."

Six years ago he tried to tell the Beaverton City Council there's a problem with its red light cameras. Then there was the State of Oregon, which fined him for practicing engineering without a license. He had to file a federal lawsuit to continue his research to prove drivers making turns at intersections often get caught in a dilemma when they're slowing down to make a turn and the yellow light isn't long enough.

Järlström said he used 8th-grade math skills to prove drivers have been getting tickets they can't avoid.
"It didn't take an engineering license to realize that the formula for traffic light timing was flawed," Järlström says on the Institute for Justice site. "I'm just glad that the ITE and the professional engineering community were willing to listen to an outsider, consider my work, and finally update their formula."

"The First Amendment protects Americans' right to speak regardless of whether they are right or wrong," said the Institute for Justice attorney who represented Järlström. "But in Mats's case, the ITE committee's decision suggests that he not only has a right to speak, but also, that he was right all along." The ITE's vote updates a 55-year-old equation, the site reports.

Järlström added, "We will never know how many Americans have received red light tickets for making perfectly safe right-hand turns."

"Tesla will work with PG&E to build the world's largest battery facility able to store energy generated by both solar and wind power in Monterey, California," writes long-time Slashdot reader Okian Warrior.

Clean Technica reports: "Certainly, combined, this is going to be the largest battery facility in the world, so it's a big boost to our community and our country," said Monterey County Supervisor John Phillips. Both projects will utilize hundreds of lithium-ion batteries to store clean and renewable energy. They will also use the existing power lines to transmit the energy around Monterey County and parts of Silicon Valley.

Next month, Tesla and PG&E hope to break ground on their project with hopes that it will be completed by the end of this year.

UPDATE: (2/29/2020) Saturday U.S. health officials confirmed the first American death from coronavirus.

And the Boston Globe's Stat News site reports that the new coronavirus "may be spreading in parts of the Pacific Northwest, with California, Oregon, and Washington State reporting Friday that they have diagnosed cases with no travel history or known contact with another case...." Problems with a coronavirus test developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have meant that little testing for the new virus has been done in the U.S. Worried infectious diseases experts have warned that the lack of apparent cases in the country cannot be taken as a sign the virus isn't spreading, undetected in some places...

The discovery that the virus may be spreading in the country should not come as a surprise, said Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy. "It just tells us where there is testing, there are cases. And that's what we have to understand," Osterholm said. "There is no such thing as a barrier containment to keep these out. It's going to happen. And what we have to do now is get on with how we're going to deal with them...."

Dr. Sara Cody, health officer for Santa Clara County, said individuals need to start practicing good hand hygiene and learn to stop touching their faces -- people can infect themselves if they pick up viruses off a contaminated surface, then put a finger in their mouth or rub their eyes or nose.