California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a law giving the California Energy Commission the authority to require bidirectional charging in electric vehicles (EVs) in the future -- although no timeline is set. Bidirectional charging allows EVs to not only charge from the grid but also supply electricity back to the grid, potentially enhancing grid resiliency, supporting renewable energy, and reducing peak electricity demand. Electrek reports: The idea started in 2023 when state Senator Nancy Skinner introduced a bill which would require EVs to have bidirectional charging by 2027. As this bill made its way through the legislative process, it got watered down from that ambitious timeline. So the current form of the bill, which is now called SB 59, took away that timeline and instead gave the California Energy Commission (CEC) the go-ahead to issue a requirement whenever they see it fit. The bill directs the CEC, the California Air Resources Board, and the California Public Utilities Commission to examine the use cases of bidirectional charging and give them the power to require specific weight classes of EVs to be bidirectional-capable if a compelling use case exists.

The state already estimates that integrating EVs into the grid could save $1 billion in costs annually, so there's definitely a use case there, but the question is the cost and immediacy of building those vehicles into the grid. The reason this can't be done immediately is that cars take time to design, and while adding bidirectional charging to an EV isn't the most difficult process, it also only really becomes useful with a whole ecosystem of services around the vehicle.

And that ecosystem has been a bit of a hard sell so far. It's all well and good to tell someone they can make $500/year by selling energy to the grid, but then you have to convince them to buy a more expensive charging unit and keep their car plugged in all the time, with someone else managing its energy storage. Some consumers might push back against that, so part of CEC's job is to wait to pull the trigger until it becomes apparent that people are actually interested in the end-user use case for V2G -- otherwise, no sense in requiring a feature that nobody is going to use.

U.S. real estate developers "are having a hard time keeping up with demand," reports the Los Angeles Times, "as businesses in search of secure spots for their servers rent nearly every square foot that becomes available..." Construction of new data centers is at "extraordinary levels" driven by "insatiable demand," a recent report on the industry by real estate brokerage JLL found. "Never in my career of 25 years in real estate have I seen demand like this on a global scale," said JLL real estate broker Darren Eades, who specializes in data centers...

The biggest drivers are AI and cloud service providers that include some of the biggest names in tech, such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Oracle. With occupancy in conventional office buildings still down sharply following the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and property values falling, data centers represent a rare ripe opportunity for real estate developers, who are pursuing opportunities in major markets like Los Angeles and less urban locales that are served by plentiful and preferably cheap power needed to run data centers. "If you can find a cluster of power to build a site, they'll come," Eades said of developers. Construction is taking place at an "extraordinary" pace nationwide and still not keeping up, the JLL data center report said. [Data center] "Vacancy declined to a record low of 3% at midyear due to insatiable demand and despite rampant construction."

Development increased more than sevenfold in two years, with the pipeline of new projects leveling off in the first half of 2024, a potential signal that the U.S. power grid cannot support development at a faster pace. But when projects currently under construction or planned are complete, the U.S. colocation market, in which businesses rent space in a data center owned by another company for their servers and other computing hardware, will triple in size from current levels... Real estate investors and landlords are being drawn into the market because demand from tenants is high and they are likely to renew their leases after shouldering the costs of setting up data centers. "They invest in their space and in your space and they tend to stick around longer," said Mark Messana, president of Downtown Properties, which owns offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco. "As we all know, the office market is struggling a little bit, so it's nice to be able to have some data customers in the mix..."

Power demand for computing is growing so intense that it threatens to strain the nation's electrical grid, sending users to remote locations where power is plentiful and preferably cheap. Data center developers are working in Alabama, the Dakotas and Indiana, "traditionally states that wouldn't have data centers," Eades said.
The article includes "the mother of all data centers" in the western U.S. — a 30-story building where "thousands of miles of undersea fiber-optic cables disappear into an ordinary-looking office tower." Once a prestigious location for businesses, "The recent departure of a law firm that had been in the building more than 50 years cleared out five floors that will quickly be re-leased to data tenants, said Eades, who represents the landlord..."

To retrofit the building for data centers, "two elevators were removed so the empty shafts could hold water pipes used to help keep the temperature cool enough for the heat-producing servers" — and developers are happy rents "can be double what they are at newer downtown office high-rises, according to real estate data provider CoStar...

"By 2030, data centers could account for as much as 11% of U.S. power demand — up from 3% now, according to analysts at Goldman Sachs."

SpzToid shares a report: Today, a group of independent security researchers revealed that they'd found a flaw in a web portal operated by the carmaker Kia that let the researchers reassign control of the Internet-connected features of most modern Kia vehicles -- dozens of models representing millions of cars on the road -- from the smartphone of a car's owner to the hackers' own phone or computer. By exploiting that vulnerability and building their own custom app to send commands to target cars, they were able to scan virtually any Internet-connected Kia vehicle's license plate and within seconds gain the ability to track that car's location, unlock the car, honk its horn, or start its ignition at will.

After the researchers alerted Kia to the problem in June, Kia appears to have fixed the vulnerability in its web portal, though it told WIRED at the time that it was still investigating the group's findings and hasn't responded to WIRED's emails since then. But Kia's patch is far from the end of the car industry's web-based security problems, the researchers say. The web bug they used to hack Kias is, in fact, the second of its kind that they've reported to the Hyundai-owned company; they found a similar technique for hijacking Kias' digital systems last year. And those bugs are just two among a slew of similar web-based vulnerabilities they've discovered within the last two years that have affected cars sold by Acura, Genesis, Honda, Hyundai, Infiniti, Toyota, and more.

OpenAI is working on a plan to restructure its core business into a for-profit benefit corporation that will no longer be controlled by its non-profit board. "Chief executive Sam Altman will also receive equity for the first time in the for-profit company, which could be worth $150 billion after the restructuring as it also tries to remove the cap on returns for investors," reports Reuters. From the report: The OpenAI non-profit will continue to exist and own a minority stake in the for-profit company, the sources said. The move could also have implications for how the company manages AI risks in a new governance structure. [...] The details of the proposed corporate structure, first reported by Reuters, highlight significant governance changes happening behind the scenes at one of the most important AI companies. The plan is still being hashed out with lawyers and shareholders and the timeline for completing the restructuring remains uncertain, the sources said. "We remain focused on building AI that benefits everyone, and we're working with our board to ensure that we're best positioned to succeed in our mission. The non-profit is core to our mission and will continue to exist," an OpenAI spokesperson said.

Earlier today, OpenAI's chief technology officer Mira Murati announced her departure from the company. Her resignation follows the departures of founders Ilya Sutskever and John Schulman.

Further reading: OpenAI Pitched White House On Unprecedented Data Center Buildout

Evan Prodromou, co-author of the ActivityPub protocol, has launched The Social Web Foundation to address the challenges of the ActivityPub ecosystem and foster the growth of the Fediverse. The foundation aims to support developers, organizations, and governments through advocacy, educational materials, and infrastructure, while maintaining a decentralized approach to improving the social web. We Distribute reports: "I wish I would've started it five years ago," Evan explains in a call, "We're seeing growth of ActivityPub in the commercial sector, we want to help guide that work, especially for devs that don't know how to engage with the Fediverse, or the work that happens in private spaces. As we're seeing a lot of growth, it's important to help push that growth forward, we're really filling in the crack no other organization is doing." The foundation launches with a dedicated team of three: Evan Prodromou is the Research Director, Mallory Knodel serves as the Executive Director, and Tom Coates acts as Product Director. The trio brings a wealth of knowledge regarding protocol development, open source development, technology policy, and product development for the Web.

In terms of fulfilling its goals, the organization has a few specific areas of focus: People, Policy, Protocol, and Plumbing. The SWF has deemed these areas as critical to their mission statement, and will start with these core focuses. [...] At launch, The Social Web Foundation has announced 12 partner organizations, who serve as a pool of knowledge, resources, and stakeholders. The majority of these entities are either building for the Fediverse directly, or providing infrastructure and services indirectly. Aside from Meta being an early supporter, one surprise is the inclusion of The Ford Foundation, a social justice organization dedicated to supporting next-generation solutions for the social good. At time of launch, the SWF will have access to more than 20 dedicated advisors, who will guide the organization on current problem areas their own efforts are facing, and provide insights on how to move forward and make progress. "The Fediverse is too big and too diverse for anyone to claim to speak for the Fediverse. That's not what we want to do or who we want to be," Evan says, "We may do things that people on the network disagree with, like encouraging media organizations to join the network, but what we want to do is help the mission of growing and improving the Fediverse over time."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: OpenAI has pitched the Biden administration on the need for massive data centers that could each use as much power as entire cities, framing the unprecedented expansion as necessary to develop more advanced artificial intelligence models and compete with China. Following a recent meeting at the White House, which was attended by OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman and other tech leaders, the startup shared a document with government officials outlining the economic and national security benefits of building 5-gigawatt data centers in various US states, based on an analysis the company engaged with outside experts on. To put that in context, 5 gigawatts is roughly the equivalent of five nuclear reactors, or enough to power almost 3 million homes. OpenAI said investing in these facilities would result in tens of thousands of new jobs, boost the gross domestic product and ensure the US can maintain its lead in AI development, according to the document, which was viewed by Bloomberg News. To achieve that, however, the US needs policies that support greater data center capacity, the document said. "Whatever we're talking about is not only something that's never been done, but I don't believe it's feasible as an engineer, as somebody who grew up in this," said Joe Dominguez, CEO of Constellation Energy Corp. "It's certainly not possible under a timeframe that's going to address national security and timing."

Tony Isaac shares a report from WOSU Public Media: Silicon Valley has the reputation of being the birthplace of our hyper-connected Internet age, the hub of companies such as Apple, Google and Facebook. However, a pioneering company here in central Ohio is responsible for developing and popularizing many of the technologies we take for granted today. A listener submitted a question to WOSU's Curious Cbus series wanting to know more about the legacy of CompuServe and what it meant to go online before the Internet. That legacy was recently commemorated by the Ohio History Connection when they installed a historical marker in Upper Arlington -- near the corner of Arlington Center and Henderson roads -- where the company located its computer center and corporate building in 1973. The plaque explains that CompuServe was "the first major online information service provider," and that its subscribers were among the first to have access to email, online newspapers and magazines and the ability to share and download files. CompuServe, founded in 1969 in Ohio as a subsidiary of Golden United Life Insurance, began as a computer time-sharing service for businesses. In 1979, it launched an online service for consumers, partnering with RadioShack since they "were key in reaching early computer users."

Acquired by H&R Block in 1980, CompuServe became a leader in digital innovations like email, online newspapers, and chat forums, with The Columbus Dispatch becoming the first online newspaper. "... it turned out that what was most popular is not reading reliable news sources, but just shooting the breeze with your friends or arguing with strangers over politics," said former tech journalist and early Compuserve user Dylan Tweney.

Despite competing with Prodigy and AOL through the 1990s, CompuServe struggled with the rise of the internet. AOL acquired the company in 1997, but CompuServe remains a digital pioneer for fostering online communities. "For a lot of people, CompuServe was a connection to the world and their first introduction to the idea that their computer could be more than a computer," said Tweney. "It was a communications device, an information device."

In 2022 about 346,000 electric cars were reportedly sold in California. But the same year its greenhouse gas emissions dropped a whopping 9.3 million metric tons — the amount produced by 2.2 million gas-powered cars — lowering emissions 2.4% from the year before. "The biggest drop came from transportation, due largely to the increased use of renewable fuels," according to the state's Air Resources Board, touting a newly-released report. (And electricity sector emissions also fell by 2.6 million metric tons, or 4.1%, "even as electricity usage rose," according to The Hill — "a dichotomy that the regulators attributed to an increase in solar and wind power generation.")

So despite a growing economy, "the latest data underscores a continued trend of steady emissions decline..." according to a statement from the Board. "Between 2000 to 2022, emissions fell by 20% while California's gross domestic product increased by 78%, pointing to the effectiveness of the state's climate change and air quality programs." And the amount of carbon dioxide equivalent emitted per unit of economic output ("carbon intensity") has also dropped 55% in the last 20 years: [In 2022] the electricity sector had its lowest carbon intensity since 2000. Wind and solar now represent 30% of generation and in-state solar increased by 15% from 2021, driven by requirements under the state's Cap-and-Trade Program and Renewables Portfolio Standard. Furthermore, California increased its battery storage by 757% from 2019 through 2023, bolstering its renewable energy efforts. The storage capacity is enough to power 6.6 million homes for up to four hours.

Industrial emissions declined by 2%, also falling to the lowest level in 22 years. While refinery emissions remained essentially flat, emissions from oil and gas extraction declined, as did emissions from other fuel use, cement manufacturing, and cogeneration facilities. [The Hill says 2022's industrial emissions were 21.7% below year-2000 levels, according to the report.]

Livestock emissions, which are responsible for 70% of agriculture's greenhouse gas emissions, peaked in 2012 and once again saw reductions in 2022. The decrease is driven by the use of methane digesters funded by the California Climate Investments and incentivized by the Low Carbon Fuel Standard, which capture emissions at the source and convert them to clean fuel.

Landfill methane emissions also continued to decline in 2022. This decline can be attributed in part to the state's efforts to reduce disposal of organic waste, as well as the California Landfill Methane Regulation, which requires landfill operators to monitor and capture emissions escaping from their facilities.
One local news site calls the drop in emissions "shocking," but adds that "the trend is expected to continue. In the second quarter of 2024, 118,181 zero-emission vehicles were purchased in the state, good for about one-quarter of all new car sales."

California governor Gavin Newsom said his state "is proving that climate action goes hand-in-hand with economic growth. We've slashed carbon pollution by a whopping 20% since the turn of the century all while building the world's fifth largest economy. Cleaner air, more good jobs — that's the California way."

German law enforcement seized 47 cryptocurrency exchange services "that facilitated illegal money laundering activities for cybercriminals," according to BleepingComputer, "including ransomware gangs."

Long-time Slashdot reader Arrogant-Bastard shares their report: The platforms allowed users to exchange cryptocurrencies without following applicable "Know Your Customer" regulations, meaning that users remained completely anonymous when making transactions. This created a low-risk environment for cybercriminals to launder their proceeds without fearing prosecution or being tracked. "Exchange services that enable such anonymous financial transactions and thus money laundering represent one of the most relevant building blocks in the criminal value chain of the cybercrime phenomenon," reads a Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) announcement... When visiting any of the seized exchanges, you are now redirected to a warning page titled "Operation Final Exchange," which warns visitors that they have been deceived by the promises of anonymity by the operators of these platforms.
The new site notes years-long promises from the exchanges "that their hosting cannot be found, that they do not store any customer data and that all data is deleted immediately after the transaction...

"We have found their servers and seized them — development servers, production servers, backup servers. We have their data — and therefore we have your data. Transactions, registration data, IP addresses.

"Our search for traces begins. See you soon."

It's hypothetically capable of "delivering an exquisite portrait of the detailed surface features of any exoplanet within 100 light-years..." writes Space.com.

"It would be better than any telescope we could possibly build in any possible future for the next few hundred years..." While the sun may not look like a traditional lens or mirror, it has a lot of mass. And in Einstein's theory of general relativity, massive objects bend space-time around them. Any light that grazes the surface of the sun gets deflected and, instead of continuing in a straight line, heads toward a focal point, together with all the other light that grazes the sun at the same time... The "solar gravitational lens" leads to an almost unbelievably high resolution. It's as if we had a telescope mirror the width of the entire sun. An instrument positioned at the correct focal point would be able to harness the gravitational warping of the sun's gravity to allow us to observe the distant universe with a jaw-dropping resolution of 10^-10 arcseconds. That's roughly a million times more powerful than the Event Horizon Telescope.

Of course, there are challenges with using the solar gravitational lens as a natural telescope. The focal point of all this light bending sits 542 times greater than the distance between Earth and the sun. It's 11 times the distance to Pluto, and three times the distance achieved by humanity's most far-flung spacecraft, Voyager 1, which launched in 1977. So not only would we have to send a spacecraft farther than we ever have before, but it would have to have enough fuel to stay there and move around. The images created by the solar gravitational lens would be spread out over tens of kilometers of space, so the spacecraft would have to scan the entire field to build up a complete mosaic image.

Plans to take advantage of the solar lens go back to the 1970s. Most recently, astronomers have proposed developing a fleet of small, lightweight cubesats that would deploy solar sails to accelerate them to 542 AU. Once there, they would slow down and coordinate their maneuvers, building up an image and sending the data back to Earth for processing...

The telescope already exists — we just have to get a camera in the right position.
Thanks to Tablizer (Slashdot reader #95,088) for sharing the article.

"In the era of the open source rug pull, the role of open source foundations is more important than ever," argues the co-founder of the developer-focused industry analyst firm RedMonk: The "rug pull" here refers to companies that have used open source as a distribution mechanism, building a community and user base, before changing the license to be restricted, rather than truly open source. "This is capitalism, yo. We've got shareholders to satisfy. It's time to relicense that software, move to a Business Source license." [...] Where open source used to be a sustainable commitment, today too often it feels like a short term tactic. Commercial open source isn't what it used to be.

Which means that open source foundations, which provide ongoing governance and intellectual property management for open source projects, are in an interesting position, in some cases becoming more adversarial than they historically have been with vendors.... [T]he Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has done a great job of fostering sustainable, commercial, open source for decades now, most notably in the data infrastructure space — think Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, Flink etc. ["[C]ommercial open source would almost certainly never have achieved critical mass and continued success without foundations in the mix," the article notes later. "The ASF was founded in 1999, and underpinned the adoption of open source middleware in the enterprise..."] One premise behind the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is that user organisations can within reason trust it to stand behind the projects it incubates and manages. While not an explicit commitment, adopters generally, and enterprises specifically, have seen the CNCF imprimatur as one that they can rely on. In the era of the open source rug pull this kind of promise becomes even more important....

Sid Sijbrandij, CEO of GitLab has argued that open source companies should commit to an Open Charter as a mechanism to protect users from open source rug pulls. "Open source software isn't useful if people can't rely on the project remaining open source. Adopting Open Charter offers open source users predictability amidst the growing licensing switch trend." With a CNCF project, though, the need for this kind of charter becomes less important, because the code is by design not single source, but has a diverse set of contributors. Which is to say that open source foundations can make rug pulls a lot less likely than adoption of open source technology built by a single company. Relying on benevolent dictators is generally pretty risky. And recently the benevolent dictators have seemed... less benevolent.
In conclusion, "Open Source Foundations Considered Helpful," according to the post's title. It does argue that "Any company is within its rights to relicense its software, but it can certainly be problematic from a community and project health perspective.

"Which is exactly why open source foundations are more important than ever."

Friday the Wall Street Journal reported Qualcomm recently "made a takeover approach" to Intel, which has a market value of roughly $90 billion ("according to people familiar with the matter...") A deal is far from certain, the people cautioned. Even if Intel is receptive, a deal of that size is all but certain to attract antitrust scrutiny, though it is also possible it could be seen as an opportunity to strengthen the U.S.'s competitive edge in chips... Both Intel and Qualcomm have become U.S. national champions of sorts as chip-making gets increasingly politicized. Intel is in line to get up to $8.5 billion of potential grants for factories in the U.S. as Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger tries to build up a business making chips on contract for outsiders...
Both Intel and Qualcomm have been "overshadowed" by Nvidia's success in powering the AI boom, the article points out.

But "To get the deal done, Qualcomm could intend to sell assets or parts of Intel to other buyers... A deal would significantly broaden Qualcomm's horizons, complementing its mobile-phone chip business with chips from Intel that are ubiquitous in personal computers and servers..." Qualcomm's approach follows a more than three-year turnaround effort at Intel under Gelsinger that has yet to bear significant fruit. For years, Intel was the biggest semiconductor company in the world by market value, but it now lags behind rivals including Qualcomm, Broadcom, Texas Instruments and AMD. In August, following a dismal quarterly report, Intel said it planned to lay off thousands of employees and pause dividend payments as part of a broad cost-saving drive. Gelsinger last month laid out a roadmap to slash costs by more than $10 billion in 2025, as the company reported a loss of $1.6 billion for the second quarter, compared with a $1.5 billion profit a year earlier...

Intel earlier this year began to report separate financial results of its manufacturing operations, which many on Wall Street saw as a prelude to a possible split of the company. Some analysts have argued Intel should be split into two, mirroring a shift in the industry toward specializing in either chip design or chip manufacturing. Splitting up immediately might not be possible, however, Bernstein Research analyst Stacy Rasgon said in a recent note. Intel's manufacturing arm is money-losing and hasn't gained strong traction with customers other than Intel itself since Gelsinger opened the factories to outside chip designers three years ago. Gelsinger has been doubling down on the company's factory ambitions, outlining spending of hundreds of billions of dollars building new plants in the U.S., Europe and Israel in recent years.

Given Intel's market value, a successful takeover of the entire company would rank as the all-time largest technology M&A deal, topping Microsoft's $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
Intel's stock "had its biggest one-day drop in over 50 years in August after the company reported disappointing earnings," reports CNBC. Partly because of that one-day, 26% drop, Intel's shares "are down 53% this year as investors express doubts about the company's costly plans to manufacture and design chips."

But the Register remains skeptical about Qualcomm taking over Intel: Chipzilla may not be worth much to Qualcomm unless it can renegotiate the x86/x86-64 cross-licensing patent agreement between Intel and AMD, which dates back to 2009. That agreement is terminated if a change in control happens at either Intel or AMD.

While a number of the patents expired in 2021, it's our understanding that agreement is still in force and Qualcomm would be subject to change of control rules. In other words, Qualcomm wouldn't be able to produce Intel-designed x86-64 chips unless AMD gave the green light. It's also likely one of the reasons why no one bought AMD when it was dire straits; whoever took over it would have to deal with Intel.

American Battery Technology and lithium-producer Albemarle are among 25 companies getting more than $3 billion in funding from the Biden administration to boost domestic production of advanced batteries and components. From a report: The funding -- part of a broader White House goal of creating an American battery supply chain -- is going to projects that are building, expanding or retrofitting facilities to process critical minerals, build components and batteries and recycle materials, the Energy Department said Friday.

American Battery Technology received $150 million to build a commercial-scale lithium-ion battery recycling facility in South Carolina. Albemarle is getting $67 million to retrofit a facility to manufacture commercial anode material for next-generation lithium-ion batteries around Charlotte, North Carolina. Other projects included $50 million for Cabot and $225 million for SWA Lithium, a joint venture of Standard Lithium and Equinor. Batteries -- which are used for electric vehicles as well as storing renewable energy for use on the electric grid -- are considered critical to reaching the administration's goal of net-zero emissions by 2050 and for boosting electric vehicles to half of all new light-duty vehicle sales by 2030.

Software developers who ship buggy, insecure code are the true baddies in the cyber crime story, Jen Easterly, boss of the US government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, has argued. From a report: "The truth is: Technology vendors are the characters who are building problems" into their products, which then "open the doors for villains to attack their victims," declared Easterly during a Wednesday keynote address at Mandiant's mWise conference. Easterly also implored the audience to stop "glamorizing" crime gangs with fancy poetic names. How about "Scrawny Nuisance" or "Evil Ferret," Easterly suggested.

Even calling security holes "software vulnerabilities" is too lenient, she added. This phrase "really diffuses responsibility. We should call them 'product defects,'" Easterly said. And instead of automatically blaming victims for failing to patch their products quickly enough, "why don't we ask: Why does software require so many urgent patches? The truth is: We need to demand more of technology vendors."

Fossil fuel companies pumped at least $5.6bn of sponsorship money into motorsports, football, golf and even snow sports in an effort to "buy social licence to operate," according to a new report. From a report: Almost no major spectator sport remains untouched by oil and gas money, according to research carried out by the New Weather Institute (NWI), a climate thinktank, which traced more than 200 sponsorship deals between sports teams and the industry. In addition, sports stars such as Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua have all been successfully recruited to spend time in the Middle East as part of sponsorship deals, the report says.

It comes as concern grows about the fossil fuel industry's increasing efforts to launder its global standing through "sportswashing" -- a practice, long used by nation states, of building associations with sporting events to improve tarnished reputations. In 2023, Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, said: "If sportswashing is going to increase my GDP by 1%, then we'll continue doing sportswashing." According to NWI's Dirty Money report, Aramco, Saudi Arabia's national oil company, was the biggest single investor in sports sponsorship identified by NWI's report, handing out almost $1.3bn across 10 deals. The petrochemical company Ineos was second, with $777m in sponsorship deals; Shell had sponsored sports to the tune of $470m; and TotalEnergies, France's leading oil company, had $340m in deals.

Google's philanthropic arm is partially funding a new initiative that "aims to deploy more than 50 small satellites in low-Earth orbit to pinpoint flare-ups as small as a classroom anywhere in the world," reports Ars Technica. From the report: The FireSat constellation, managed by a nonprofit called Earth Fire Alliance (EFA), will be the first satellite fleet dedicated to detecting and tracking wildfires. Google announced a fresh investment of $13 million in the FireSat constellation Monday, building on the tech giant's previous contributions to support the development of custom infrared sensors for the FireSat satellites. Google's funding commitment will maintain the schedule for the launch of the first FireSat pathfinder satellite next year, EFA said. The first batch of satellites to form an operational constellation could launch in 2026.

The FireSat satellites will be built by Muon Space, a California-based satellite manufacturing startup. Each of the Muon Space-built microsatellites will have six-band multispectral infrared instruments, eyeing a swath of Earth some 900 miles (1,500 kilometers) wide, to pinpoint hotspots from wildfires. The satellites will have the sensitivity to find wildfires as small as 16 by 16 feet (5 by 5 meters). The network will use Google AI to rapidly compare observations ofany area of this size with previous imagery to determine if there is a fire, according to Google. AI will also take into account factors like nearby infrastructure and local weather in each fire assessment.

Google said it validated its detection model for smaller fires and established a baseline dataset for the AI by flying sensors over controlled burns. FireSat's partners announced the constellation in May after five years of development. The Environmental Defense Fund, the Moore Foundation, and the Minderoo Foundation also support the FireSat program. After detecting a wildfire, it's crucial for FireSat to quickly disseminate the location and size of a fire to emergency responders. With the first three satellites, the FireSat constellation will observe every point on Earth at least twice per day. "At full capability with 50+ satellites, the revisit times for most of the globe improve to 20 minutes, with the most wildfire-prone regions benefitting from sampling intervals as short as nine minutes," Muon Space said in a statement. "Today's announcement marks a significant milestone and step towards transforming the way we interact with fire," Earth Fire Alliance said in a statement. "As fires become more intense, and spread faster, we believe radical collaboration is key to driving much needed innovation in fire management and climate action."

An EFF article calls out a "brazen attempt to privatize" a wireless frequency band (900 MHz) which America's FCC's left " as a commons for all... for use by amateur radio operators, unlicensed consumer devices, and industrial, scientific, and medical equipment." The spectrum has also become "a hotbed for new technologies and community-driven projects. Millions of consumer devices also rely on the range, including baby monitors, cordless phones, IoT devices, garage door openers." But NextNav would rather claim these frequencies, fence them off, and lease them out to mobile service providers. This is just another land-grab by a corporate rent-seeker dressed up as innovation. EFF and hundreds of others have called on the FCC to decisively reject this proposal and protect the open spectrum as a commons that serves all.

NextNav [which sells a geolocation service] wants the FCC to reconfigure the 902-928 MHz band to grant them exclusive rights to the majority of the spectrum... This proposal would not only give NextNav their own lane, but expanded operating region, increased broadcasting power, and more leeway for radio interference emanating from their portions of the band. All of this points to more power for NextNav at everyone else's expense.

This land-grab is purportedly to implement a Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) network to serve as a US-specific backup of the Global Positioning System(GPS). This plan raises red flags off the bat. Dropping the "global" from GPS makes it far less useful for any alleged national security purposes, especially as it is likely susceptible to the same jamming and spoofing attacks as GPS. NextNav itself admits there is also little commercial demand for PNT. GPS works, is free, and is widely supported by manufacturers. If Nextnav has a grand plan to implement a new and improved standard, it was left out of their FCC proposal. What NextNav did include however is its intent to resell their exclusive bandwidth access to mobile 5G networks. This isn't about national security or innovation; it's about a rent-seeker monopolizing access to a public resource. If NextNav truly believes in their GPS backup vision, they should look to parts of the spectrum already allocated for 5G.

The open sections of the 900 MHz spectrum are vital for technologies that foster experimentation and grassroots innovation. Amateur radio operators, developers of new IoT devices, and small-scale operators rely on this band. One such project is Meshtastic, a decentralized communication tool that allows users to send messages across a network without a central server. This new approach to networking offers resilient communication that can endure emergencies where current networks fail. This is the type of innovation that actually addresses crises raised by Nextnav, and it's happening in the part of the spectrum allocated for unlicensed devices while empowering communities instead of a powerful intermediary. Yet, this proposal threatens to crush such grassroots projects, leaving them without a commons in which they can grow and improve.

This isn't just about a set of frequencies. We need an ecosystem which fosters grassroots collaboration, experimentation, and knowledge building. Not only do these commons empower communities, they avoid a technology monoculture unable to adapt to new threats and changing needs as technology progresses. Invention belongs to the public, not just to those with the deepest pockets. The FCC should ensure it remains that way.

NextNav's proposal is a direct threat to innovation, public safety, and community empowerment. While FCC comments on the proposal have closed, replies remain open to the public until September 20th. The FCC must reject this corporate land-grab and uphold the integrity of the 900 MHz band as a commons.

In 2015 Amazon purchased chip designer Annapurna Labs, remembers IEEE Spectrum, "and proceeded to design CPUs, AI accelerators, servers, and data centers as a vertically-integrated operation."

The article argues that while AMD, Nvidia, and other big-name processor companies may also want to control the full stack (purchasing server, software, and interconnect companies) — Amazon Web Services "got there ahead of most of the competition." (IEEE Spectrum interviews Ali Saidi, technical lead for the AWS Graviton series of CPUs, and Rami Sinno, director of engineering at Annapurna Labs, on "the advantage of vertically-integrated design — and Amazon-scale...") Sinno: I was working at Arm, and I was looking for the next adventure, looking at where the industry is heading and what I want my legacy to be. I looked at two things: One is vertically integrated companies, because this is where most of the innovation is — the interesting stuff is happening when you control the full hardware and software stack and deliver directly to customers.

And the second thing is, I realized that machine learning, AI in general, is going to be very, very big. I didn't know exactly which direction it was going to take, but I knew that there is something that is going to be generational, and I wanted to be part of that. I already had that experience prior when I was part of the group that was building the chips that go into the Blackberries; that was a fundamental shift in the industry. That feeling was incredible, to be part of something so big, so fundamental. And I thought, "Okay, I have another chance to be part of something fundamental."

[...] At the end of the day, our responsibility is to deliver complete servers in the data center directly for our customers. And if you think from that perspective, you'll be able to optimize and innovate across the full stack. It might not be at the transistor level or at the substrate level or at the board level. It could be something completely different. It could be purely software. And having that knowledge, having that visibility, will allow the engineers to be significantly more productive and delivery to the customer significantly faster. We're not going to bang our head against the wall to optimize the transistor where three lines of code downstream will solve these problems, right...?

We've had very good luck with recent college grads. Recent college grads, especially the past couple of years, have been absolutely phenomenal. I'm very, very pleased with the way that the education system is graduating the engineers and the computer scientists that are interested in the type of jobs that we have for them.
It's an interesting glimpse into the unique world of designing chips at Amazon.

Graviton technical lead Saidi: I've been here about seven and a half years. When I joined AWS, I joined a secret project at the time. I was told: "We're going to build some Arm servers. Tell no one...

"In chip design, there are many different competing optimization points. You have all of these conflicting requirements, you have cost, you have scheduling, you've got power consumption, you've got size, what DRAM technologies are available and when you're going to intersect them... It ends up being this fun, multifaceted optimization problem to figure out what's the best thing that you can build in a timeframe. And you need to get it right."

Wired published some thoughts from Hans Peter Brondmo, the former head of "Google's seven-year mission to give AI a robot body".

An anonymous reader shared this report from Axios: Building AI-powered robots that can flexibly operate in the real world is going to take much longer than Silicon Valley believes and promises, according to the former head of Google's robotics moonshot project, writing in Wired...

Everyday Robotics spent seven years and a small Google fortune developing a one-armed robot on a wheeled platform. By the time Google pulled the plug on the project in February 2023, the robots were helping clean up researchers' desks and sorting trash during the daytime; in the evening, they were improvising dances. [Google hired a professional dancer as an artist-in-residence who teamed with "a few other engineers" to build an AI algorithm trained on the dancer's choreography preferences...]

Google founder Larry Page — favored moving directly to "end to end" (e2e) learning, where you'd hand robots a general task and they'd be able to figure out how to execute it. That, Page felt, was a goal worthy of a moonshot. But it also turned out to be out of reach. "I have come to believe," Brondmo writes, "it will take many, many thousands, maybe even millions of robots doing stuff in the real world to collect enough data to train e2e models that make the robots do anything other than fairly narrow, well-defined tasks...." ["Building robots that perform useful services — like cleaning up and wiping all the tables in a restaurant, or making the beds in a hotel — will require both AI and traditional programming for a long time to come. In other words, don't expect robots to go running off outside our control, doing something they weren't programmed to do, anytime soon."]

The bottom line: So far, robot hype is outpacing robot reality. Boston Dynamics' back-flipping humanoid and quadruped bots have wowed YouTube viewers — but you wouldn't want to let them anywhere near your office or home.
It's an interesting look back. "My job: help figure out what to do with the employees and technology left over from nine robot companies that Google had acquired," Brondmo writes: Andy "the father of Android" Rubin, who had previously been in charge, had suddenly left. Larry Page and Sergey Brin kept trying to offer guidance and direction during occasional flybys in their "spare time...." I knew from firsthand experience how hard it was to build a company that, in Steve Jobs' famous words, could put a dent in the universe, and I believed that Google was the right place to make certain big bets. AI-powered robots, the ones that will live and work alongside us one day, was one such audacious bet.

Eight and a half years later — and 18 months after Google decided to discontinue its largest bet in robotics and AI — it seems as if a new robotics startup pops up every week. I am more convinced than ever that the robots need to come. Yet I have concerns that Silicon Valley, with its focus on "minimum viable products" and VCs' general aversion to investing in hardware, will be patient enough to win the global race to give AI a robot body. And much of the money that is being invested is focusing on the wrong things...

When I arrived, the lab had already hatched Waymo, Google Glass, and other science-fiction-sounding projects like flying energy windmills and stratospheric balloons that would provide internet access to the underserved... [But] in January 2023, two months after OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, Google shut down Everyday Robots, citing overall cost concerns. The robots and a small number of people eventually landed at Google DeepMind to conduct research. In spite of the high cost and the long timeline, everyone involved was shocked.
They'd tackled the problem with earnestness. ("[S]even robots working for months to learn how to pick up a rubber duckling? That wasn't going to cut it... So we built a cloud-based simulator and, in 2021, created more than 240 million robot instances in the sim.ma")

Brondmo adds this his mother had advanced Parkinson's disease, and hoped that one day robots could support her. "Our frequent conversations toward the end of her life convinced me more than ever that a future version of what we started at Everyday Robots will be coming. In fact, it can't come soon enough.

"So the question we are left to ponder becomes: How does this kind of change and future happen? I remain curious, and concerned."

An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: Haiku (the MIT-licensed operating system, inspired by BeOS) has released its fifth beta for Haiku R1.

Some new features include improved UI color management, improved dark mode coloring, Tracker improvements, TUN/TAP support for VPN connections, TCP throughput improvements, performance optimizations, UFS2 (BSD's filesystem) read-only support, new FAT filesystem driver, improved hardware support, improved POSIX compliance, improved performance, and more.
Slashdot has been covering the fate of the BeOS since 2000 (as well as the short-lived derivative project ZETA — and Haiku).

And now "With a history of over two decades and previously known as OpenBeOS, today's Haiku is pushing forward..." writes the site NotebookCheck: Haiku is a spiritual successor to BeOS, with a focus on a clean and user-friendly design paired with low system requirements. The minimum system requirements are still an Intel Pentium II/AMD Athlon CPU or better, at least 384 MB RAM, an 800x600 screen, and at least 3GB storage. It works on both 32-bit and 64-bit x86 PCs, and the 32-bit version can run many unmodified BeOS applications. It might be the best desktop open-source operating system not based on Linux or Unix... It works well in a virtual machine like VirtualBox or UTM.