wiredmikey writes: As the dust settles following the massive Windows BSOD tech outages caused by CrowdStrike in July 2024, the question is now, how do we prevent this happening again? While there was no current way Microsoft could have prevented this incident, the OS firm is obviously keen to prevent anything similar happening in the future. SecurityWeek talked to David Weston, VP enterprise and OS security at Microsoft, to discuss Windows kernel access and safe deployment practices (or SDP).
Former Ukranian officer Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov created a Signal channel where military communications specialists could talk with civilian radio experts, reports MIT's Technology Review. But radio communications are crucial for drones, so... About once a month, he drives hundreds of kilometers east in a homemade mobile intelligence center: a black VW van in which stacks of radio hardware connect to an array of antennas on the roof that stand like porcupine quills when in use. Two small devices on the dash monitor for nearby drones. Over several days at a time, Flash studies the skies for Russian radio transmissions and tries to learn about the problems facing troops in the fields and in the trenches.

He is, at least in an unofficial capacity, a spy. But unlike other spies, Flash does not keep his work secret. In fact, he shares the results of these missions with more than 127,000 followers — including many soldiers and government officials — on several public social media channels. Earlier this year, for instance, he described how he had recorded five different Russian reconnaissance drones in a single night — one of which was flying directly above his van... Drones have come to define the brutal conflict that has now dragged on for more than two and a half years. And most rely on radio communications — a technology that Flash has obsessed over since childhood. So while Flash is now a civilian, the former officer has still taken it upon himself to inform his country's defense in all matters related to radio...

Flash has also become a source of some controversy among the upper echelons of Ukraine's military, he tells me. The Armed Forces of Ukraine declined multiple requests for comment, but Flash and his colleagues claim that some high-ranking officials perceive him as a security threat, worrying that he shares too much information and doesn't do enough to secure sensitive intel... [But] His work has become greatly important to those fighting on the ground, and he recently received formal recognition from the military for his contributions to the fight, with two medals of commendation — one from the commander of Ukraine's ground forces, the other from the Ministry of Defense...

And given the mounting evidence that both militaries and militant groups in other parts of the world are now adopting drone tactics developed in Ukraine, it's not only his country's fate that Flash may help to determine — but also the ways that armies wage war for years to come.
He's also written guides on building cheap anti-drone equipment...

Former Ukranian officer Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov created a Signal channel where military communications specialists could talk with civilian radio experts, reports MIT's Technology Review. But radio communications are crucial for drones, so... About once a month, he drives hundreds of kilometers east in a homemade mobile intelligence center: a black VW van in which stacks of radio hardware connect to an array of antennas on the roof that stand like porcupine quills when in use. Two small devices on the dash monitor for nearby drones. Over several days at a time, Flash studies the skies for Russian radio transmissions and tries to learn about the problems facing troops in the fields and in the trenches.

He is, at least in an unofficial capacity, a spy. But unlike other spies, Flash does not keep his work secret. In fact, he shares the results of these missions with more than 127,000 followers — including many soldiers and government officials — on several public social media channels. Earlier this year, for instance, he described how he had recorded five different Russian reconnaissance drones in a single night — one of which was flying directly above his van... Drones have come to define the brutal conflict that has now dragged on for more than two and a half years. And most rely on radio communications — a technology that Flash has obsessed over since childhood. So while Flash is now a civilian, the former officer has still taken it upon himself to inform his country's defense in all matters related to radio...

Flash has also become a source of some controversy among the upper echelons of Ukraine's military, he tells me. The Armed Forces of Ukraine declined multiple requests for comment, but Flash and his colleagues claim that some high-ranking officials perceive him as a security threat, worrying that he shares too much information and doesn't do enough to secure sensitive intel... [But] His work has become greatly important to those fighting on the ground, and he recently received formal recognition from the military for his contributions to the fight, with two medals of commendation — one from the commander of Ukraine's ground forces, the other from the Ministry of Defense...

And given the mounting evidence that both militaries and militant groups in other parts of the world are now adopting drone tactics developed in Ukraine, it's not only his country's fate that Flash may help to determine — but also the ways that armies wage war for years to come.
He's also written guides on building cheap anti-drone equipment...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceAlert: Imagine three people huddled in a circle so when one speaks, only one other hears. Scientists have created a device that works like that, ensuring sound waves ripple in one direction only. The device, developed by scientists at ETH Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, is made up of a disk-shaped cavity with three equally-spaced ports that can each send or receive sound. In an inactive state, sound transmitted from port 1 is audible to ports 2 and 3 at equal volumes. Sound waves bounce back to port 1 as an echo as well. When the system is running, however, only port 2 hears port 1's sounds.

The trick is to blow swirling air into the cavity at a specific speed and intensity, which allows the sound waves to synchronize in a repeating pattern. That not only guides the sound waves in a single direction, but gives more energy to those oscillations so they don't dissipate. It's kind of like a roundabout for sound. The scientists say their technique may inform the design of future communications technologies. New metamaterials could be made to manipulate not just sound waves but potentially electromagnetic waves too. "This concept of loss-compensated non-reciprocal wave propagation is, in our view, an important result that can also be transferred to other systems," says senior researcher Nicolas Noiray. The research was published in the journal Nature Communications.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Liliputing: The Fedora Asahi Remix GNU/Linux distribution is now shipping with alpha versions of OpenGL, OpenCL, and Vulkan graphics drivers that allow you to play some games on Macs with M1 or M2 series processors. But there are a few things to keep in mind. One is that most of the PC games you're likely going to want to play are designed to run on Windows PCs with DirectX drivers and x86 processors. So there's some emulation required to get them to run on Macs with ARM-based processors, a Linux-based operating system, and Vulkan drivers.

Some of the work was also made possible by the folks at Valve, who developed the Proton software that allows many PC games to run on Linux. And during a live demo at XDC 2024, developer Alyssa Rosenzweig demonstrated the Steam game client loading and running on an Apple Silicon Mac running Asahi Linux. For that reason, it takes a lot of RAM -- according to the Asahi team, "most games require 16GB of memory due to emulation overhead." So you're probably not going to be able to do much entry-level gaming on an entry-level Mac with just 8GB of RAM.

Some of the titles that have been confirmed to be playable include Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher 3, Fallout 4, Control, Portal 2, and Ghostrunner. But there's a difference between playable and smooth. Developers say performance improvements will be required before "newer AAA titles" can run at 60 frames per second or higher. But less demanding games like Hollow Knight should run at full speed.

Three scientists won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for their groundbreaking work in predicting and designing protein structures, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced in Stockholm. David Baker of the University of Washington shares the prize with Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind. Baker pioneered the creation of novel proteins, while Hassabis and Jumper developed AlphaFold, an AI model that predicts protein structures from amino acid sequences.

The laureates will split the 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) award for their contributions to computational protein design and structure prediction. Baker's team has produced proteins with applications in medicine and materials science since his initial breakthrough in 2003. Hassabis and Jumper's AlphaFold, announced in 2020, has predicted structures for nearly all 200 million known proteins. "We glimpsed at the beginning that it might be possible to create a whole new world of proteins that address a lot of the problems faced by humans in the 21st century," Baker said at a press briefing.

"Now it's becoming possible," Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel chemistry committee, called the discoveries "spectacular," noting they fulfilled a 50-year-old dream of predicting protein structures from amino acid sequences. The breakthroughs have wide-ranging implications, from understanding antibiotic resistance to developing enzymes that decompose plastic. Over 2 million researchers worldwide have already utilized AlphaFold in various applications.

Researchers at BitEnergy AI, Inc. have developed Linear-Complexity Multiplication (L-Mul), a technique that reduces AI model power consumption by up to 95% by replacing energy-intensive floating-point multiplications with simpler integer additions. This method promises significant energy savings without compromising accuracy, but it requires specialized hardware to fully realize its benefits. Decrypt reports: L-Mul tackles the AI energy problem head-on by reimagining how AI models handle calculations. Instead of complex floating-point multiplications, L-Mul approximates these operations using integer additions. So, for example, instead of multiplying 123.45 by 67.89, L-Mul breaks it down into smaller, easier steps using addition. This makes the calculations faster and uses less energy, while still maintaining accuracy. The results seem promising. "Applying the L-Mul operation in tensor processing hardware can potentially reduce 95% energy cost by element wise floating point tensor multiplications and 80% energy cost of dot products," the researchers claim. Without getting overly complicated, what that means is simply this: If a model used this technique, it would require 95% less energy to think, and 80% less energy to come up with new ideas, according to this research.

The algorithm's impact extends beyond energy savings. L-Mul outperforms current 8-bit standards in some cases, achieving higher precision while using significantly less bit-level computation. Tests across natural language processing, vision tasks, and symbolic reasoning showed an average performance drop of just 0.07% -- a negligible tradeoff for the potential energy savings. Transformer-based models, the backbone of large language models like GPT, could benefit greatly from L-Mul. The algorithm seamlessly integrates into the attention mechanism, a computationally intensive part of these models. Tests on popular models such as Llama, Mistral, and Gemma even revealed some accuracy gain on certain vision tasks.

At an operational level, L-Mul's advantages become even clearer. The research shows that multiplying two float8 numbers (the way AI models would operate today) requires 325 operations, while L-Mul uses only 157 -- less than half. "To summarize the error and complexity analysis, L-Mul is both more efficient and more accurate than fp8 multiplication," the study concludes. But nothing is perfect and this technique has a major achilles heel: It requires a special type of hardware, so the current hardware isn't optimized to take full advantage of it. Plans for specialized hardware that natively supports L-Mul calculations may be already in motion. "To unlock the full potential of our proposed method, we will implement the L-Mul and L-Matmul kernel algorithms on hardware level and develop programming APIs for high-level model design," the researchers say.

Along with 343 Industries now becoming Halo Studios, future Halo games will be developed using Unreal Engine 5. The Verge's Tom Warren reports: Halo moving to Unreal Engine 5 is being positioned as the first step of a transformation for Halo Studios to change its technology, structure, processes, and even culture. "We're not just going to try improve the efficiency of development, but change the recipe of how we make Halo games," says Pierre Hintze, studio head at Halo Studios. The team building Halo will move from the studio's Slipspace Engine to Unreal, after the proprietary engine it built for Halo Infinite became difficult to use and strained development. Halo Studios has had to dedicate a lot of staff to developing the Slipspace Engine, and parts of it are almost 25 years old.

"One of the primary things we're interested in is growing and expanding our world so players have more to interact with and more to experience," says Chris Matthews, art director at Halo Studios. "Nanite and Lumen [Unreal's rendering and lighting technologies] offer us an opportunity to do that in a way that the industry hasn't seen before. As artists, it's incredibly exciting to do that work." Halo Studios isn't committing to any release dates or new Halo game announcements just yet, but the team has been building some examples of Halo running in Unreal. Dubbed Project Foundry, the work is "neither a game nor a tech demo," but more of a research, development, and training tool. It's also the foundation for how the studio is changing up the way it builds Halo games.

Project Foundry has been built as if it was a shipping game so that a bunch of it can appear in Halo games in the future. "It's fair to say that our intent is that the majority of what we showcased in Foundry is expected to be in projects which we are building, or future projects," says Hintze. Project Foundry includes more detailed landscapes for Halo biomes, as well as foliage levels we haven't seen in Halo games in the past. Master Chief's armor has even been remodeled in this footage [...]. Halo Studios is now working on multiple Halo games, while the Slipstream Engine will continue to power Halo Infinite. "We had a disproportionate focus on trying to create the conditions to be successful in servicing Halo Infinite," says Hintze. "[But switching to Unreal] allows us to put all the focus on making multiple new experiences at the highest quality possible."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The companies behind the streaming industry, including smart TV and streaming stick manufacturers and streaming service providers, have developed a "surveillance system" that has "long undermined privacy and consumer protection," according to a report from the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) published today and sent to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Unprecedented tracking techniques aimed at pleasing advertisers have resulted in connected TVs (CTVs) being a "privacy nightmare," according to Jeffrey Chester, report co-author and CDD executive director, resulting in calls for stronger regulation.

The 48-page report, How TV Watches Us: Commercial Surveillance in the Streaming Era [PDF], cites Ars Technica, other news publications, trade publications, blog posts, and statements from big players in streaming -- from Amazon to NBCUniversal and Tubi, to LG, Samsung, and Vizio. It provides a detailed overview of the various ways that streaming services and streaming hardware target viewers in newfound ways that the CDD argues pose severe privacy risks. The nonprofit composed the report as part of efforts to encourage regulation. Today, the CDD sent letters to the FTC [PDF], Federal Communications Commission (FCC), California attorney general [PDF], and California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA) [PDF], regarding its concerns. "Not only does CTV operate in ways that are unfair to consumers, it is also putting them and their families at risk as it gathers and uses sensitive data about health, children, race, and political interests,â Chester said in a statement.

The decline of journalism has been attributed to many factors, from slow adaptation to the internet to the dominance of tech giants in advertising. But a veteran journalist offers a new perspective: the death of the hyperlink could be changing the fundamental nature of the internet, with significant implications for the news industry. Matt Pearce: There is a real bias against hyperlinking that has developed on platforms and apps over the last five years in particular. It's something that's kind of operating hand-in-hand with the rise of algorithmic recommendations. You see this on Elon Musk's version of Twitter, where posts with hyperlinks are degraded. Facebook itself has decided to detach itself from displaying a lot of links. That's why you get so much AI scum on Facebook these days. Instagram itself has always been kind of hostile to linking. TikTok as well...

If you degrade hyperlinks, and you degrade this idea of the internet as something that refers you to other things, you instead have this stationary internet where a generative AI agent will hoover up and summarize all the information that's out there, and place it right in front of you so that you never have to leave the portal... That was a real epiphany to me, because the argument against one form of this legislation was, "My God, you'll destroy this fundamental way of how the internet works." I'm like, dude, these companies are already destroying the fundamental way of how the internet works.

[...] If you look at what technology has done to journalism over the last 10 years, it was journalists who figured out how to make Twitter work for them. It was journalists who figured out how to be really good on Instagram and Tik Tok. I know there's this argument about content creators and versus journalists, but I'm like, we're all in the same ecosystem. If you're performing the functions of a journalist, you're a journalist. Some people are really good on different platforms. But it's hard to imagine a scenario where Google is going to be the party that creates a more humane, intelligent, responsive form of journalism.

"Pine64 has confirmed that its open-source e-ink tablet is returning," reports the blog OMG Ubuntu: The [10.1-inch e-ink display] PineNote was announced in 2021, building on the success of its non-SBC devices like the PinePhone (and later Pro model), the PineTab, and PineBook devices. Like most of Pine64's devices, software support is largely tackled by the community. But only a small batch of developer units were ever sold, primarily by enthusiasts within the open-source community who had the knowledge and desire to work on getting a modern Linux OS to run on the hardware, and adapt to the e-ink display.

That process has taken a while, as Pine64's community bloggers explain:

"The PineNote was stuck in a chicken-and-egg situation because of the very high cost of manufacturing the device (ePaper screens are sadly still expensive), and so the risk of manufacturing units that then didn't have a working Linux OS and would not sell was huge."

However, the proverbial egg has finally hatched. The PineNote now has a reliable Debian-based OS, developed by Maximilian Weigand. This is described as "not only a bare-bones capable OS but a genuinely daily-usable system that 'just works'" according to the Pine64 blog. ["This is excellent as it also moves the target audience from developers to every day users. You should be able to power on the device and drop into a working Gnome experience."] It is said to use the GNOME desktop plus a handful of extensions designed to ensure the UI adapts to working well with an e-ink display. Software pre-installed includes Xournal++ for note taking, Firefox for web browsing, and Foliate for reading ebooks, among others. [And it even runs Doom...]

Existing PineNote owners can download the the new OS image, flash it to their device, and help test it... Touch and stylus input are major selling points of the PineNote, positioning it as a libre alternative to leading e-ink note-taking devices like the Remarkable 2, Onyx BOOX, and Amazon Scribe.
"I do not (yet) have a launch date target," according to the blog post, "as behind-the-scenes the Pine Store team are still working on all things production."

But the update also links to some blog posts about their free and open source smartwatch PineTime...

"China Telecom, one of the largest wireless carriers in mainland China, says that it has developed two large language models (LLMs) relying solely on domestically manufactured AI chips..." reports Tom's Hardware. "If the information is accurate, this is a crucial milestone in China's attempt at becoming independent of other countries for its semiconductor needs, especially as the U.S. is increasingly tightening and banning the supply of the latest, highest-end chips for Beijing in the U.S.-China chip war." Huawei, which has mostly been banned from the U.S. and other allied countries, is one of the leaders in China's local chip industry... If China Telecom's LLMs were indeed fully trained using Huawei chips alone, then this would be a massive success for Huawei and the Chinese government.
The project's GitHub page "contains a hint about how China Telecom may have trained the model," reports the Register, "in a mention of compatibility with the 'Ascend Atlas 800T A2 training server' — a Huawei product listed as supporting the Kunpeng 920 7265 or Kunpeng 920 5250 processors, respectively running 64 cores at 3.0GHz and 48 cores at 2.6GHz. Huawei builds those processors using the Arm 8.2 architecture and bills them as produced with a 7nm process."

The South China Morning Post says the unnamed model has 1 trillion parameters, according to China Telecom, while the TeleChat2t-115B model has over 100 billion parameters.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader hackingbear for sharing the news.

Concern over potential human-to-human transmission of bird flu has risen after six Missouri healthcare workers developed mild respiratory symptoms following contact with a patient infected with H5N1. The CDC reports only the original patient has tested positive for the virus. Scientists are ramping up efforts to develop mRNA vaccines against H5N1, with researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and major pharmaceutical companies like Moderna, Pfizer, and GSK leading the charge. While mRNA technology offers rapid vaccine production, clinical trials have shown mixed results, particularly against influenza B strains. Wired adds: [...] Traditionally, flu vaccines contain inactivated viruses that are grown in hens' eggs. This works reasonably well, but it takes a long time to make such jabs, which means health authorities have to publish their predictions about which strains of flu will be circulating during the upcoming winter well in advance. If you could manufacture vaccines more quickly, you could make more accurate predictions nearer to flu season.

Not only that, researchers hope that a single mRNA shot could one day target 20 or more strains of flu at once, relieving the need for some of this guesswork. Scher's colleagues are working on such a "universal" flu vaccine. With clinical trials ongoing, it's still early days. Sheena Cruickshank, an immunologist at the University of Manchester, has watched reports about emerging mRNA flu jabs with interest but says that questions remain. "We don't yet know how long-lasting the immunity they produce is," she says. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, concurs, though he notes that all flu jabs, regardless of how they are made, have a waning immunity problem -- your protection could decline by around 10 percent every month following injection.

Two Harvard students have developed smart glasses with facial recognition capabilities, sparking debate over privacy and surveillance. The project, dubbed I-XRAY, uses Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses coupled with facial recognition software to identify strangers and retrieve personal information about them. AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, the creators, tested the technology on unsuspecting individuals in public spaces. The glasses scan faces, match them against online databases, and display personal details on a smartphone within seconds. The students claim their project aims to raise awareness about potential privacy risks.

Cerebras Systems, an AI chip startup, filed (PDF) for an IPO and plans to trade under the ticker "CBRS" on Nasdaq. CNBC reports: Cerebras competes with Nvidia, whose graphics processing units are the industry's choice for training and running AI models. Cerebras says on its website that its WSE-3 chip comes with more cores and memory than Nvidia's popular H100. It's also a physically larger chip. In addition to selling chips, Cerebras offers cloud-based services that rely on its own computing clusters. [...] In addition to Nvidia, Cerebras cites AMD, Intel, Microsoft and Google as competitors, "as well as internally developed custom application-specific integrated circuits and a variety of private companies." Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company makes the Cerebras chips. Cerebrus warned investors that any possible supply chain disruptions may hurt the company.

Cerebras was founded in 2016 and is based in Sunnyvale, California. Andrew Feldman, the startup's co-founder and CEO, sold server startup SeaMicro to AMD for $355 million in 2012. The company said in 2021 that it was valued at over $4 billion in a $250 million funding round.In May, G42 committed to purchasing $1.43 billion in orders from Cerebras before March 2025, according to the filing. G42 currently owns under 5% of Cerebras' Class A shares, and the firm has an option to purchase more depending on how much Cerebras product it buys.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Mazda recently surprised customers by requiring them to sign up for a subscription in order to keep certain services. Now, notable right-to-repair advocate Louis Rossmann is calling out the brand. He points to several moves by Mazda as reasons for his anger toward them. However, it turns out that customers might still have a workaround. Previously, the Japanese carmaker offered connected services, that included several features such as remote start, without the need for a subscription. At the time, the company informed customers that these services would eventually transition to a paid model.

It's important to clarify that there are two very different types of remote start we're talking about here. The first type is the one many people are familiar with where you use the key fob to start the vehicle. The second method involves using another device like a smartphone to start the car. In the latter, connected services do the heavy lifting. What is wild is that Mazda used to offer the first option on the fob. Now, it only offers the second kind, where one starts the car via phone through its connected services for a $10 monthly subscription, which comes to $120 a year. Rossmann points out that one individual, Brandon Rorthweiler, developed a workaround in 2023 to enable remote start without Mazda's subscription fees.

At a time when tech companies are paying eye-popping sums to hire the best minds in artificial intelligence, Google's deal to rehire Noam Shazeer has left others in the dust. From a report: A co-author of a seminal research paper that kicked off the AI boom, Shazeer quit Google in 2021 to start his own company after the search giant refused to release a chatbot he developed. When that startup, Character.AI, began to flounder, his old employer swooped in.

Google wrote Character a check for around $2.7 billion, according to people with knowledge of the deal. The official reason for the payment was to license Character's technology. But the deal included another component: Shazeer agreed to work for Google again. Within Google, Shazeeer's return is widely viewed as the primary reason the company agreed to pay the multibillion-dollar licensing fee. The arrangement has thrust him into the middle of a debate in Silicon Valley about whether tech giants are overspending in the race to develop cutting-edge AI, which some believe will define the future of computing.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Hollywood Reporter: In a major coup for the artificial intelligence company, Stability AI says that Avatar, Terminator and Titanic director James Cameron will join its board of directors. Stability AI is the firm that developed the Stable Diffusion text-to-image generative AI model, an image- and video-focused model that is among those being closely watched by many in Hollywood, particularly in the visual effects industry. In fact, Stability AI's CEO, Prem Akkaraju, is no stranger to the business, having previously served as the CEO of visual effects firm WETA Digital. Sean Parker, the former president of Facebook and founder of Napster, also recently joined the AI firm as executive chairman.

As a director, Cameron has long been eager to push the boundaries of what is technologically possible in filmmaking (anyone who has seen the Terminator franchise knows that he is also familiar with the pitfalls of technology run amok). He was among the earliest directors to embrace the potential of computer-generated visual effects, and he continued to use his films (most recently Avatar: The Way of Water) to move the entire field forward. "I've spent my career seeking out emerging technologies that push the very boundaries of what's possible, all in the service of telling incredible stories," Cameron said in a statement. "I was at the forefront of CGI over three decades ago, and I've stayed on the cutting edge since. Now, the intersection of generative AI and CGI image creation is the next wave. The convergence of these two totally different engines of creation will unlock new ways for artists to tell stories in ways we could have never imagined. Stability AI is poised to lead this transformation. I'm delighted to collaborate with Sean, Prem, and the Stability AI team as they shape the future of all visual media."

joshuark shares a report: Microsoft has officially announced that Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) is now deprecated, but plans to maintain current functionality and continue publishing updates through the channel. This move isn't surprising, as Microsoft first listed WSUS as one of the "features removed or no longer developed starting with Windows Server 2025" on August 13. In June, the company also revealed that it would also soon deprecate WSUS driver synchronization.

While new features and development for WSUS will cease, Microsoft said today that it plans to continue supporting the service's existing functionality and updates, which will still be distributed, even after deprecation. "Specifically, this means that we are no longer investing in new capabilities, nor are we accepting new feature requests for WSUS," Microsoft's Nir Froimovici said on Friday. "However, we are preserving current functionality and will continue to publish updates through the WSUS channel. We will also support any content already published through the WSUS channel."

The Washington Post reports that electric vehicles made by General Motors now can use Tesla's Superchargers. (GM's charger adapters "will first be made available to customers in the United States, followed by availability for Canadian customers later this year.") The Post writes that the move "expands the number of vehicles compatible with the North American Charging Standard developed by Tesla" — and also marks "another step forward for efforts to settle on a universal public charger network for battery-powered cars and trucks in the U.S.

"It could also allay some GM customers' concerns about a lack of charging options." The new changes take effect immediately, along with sales of the GM-approved power adapters... The deal makes roughly 17,800 Tesla Superchargers available to drivers of GM-manufactured vehicles such as the Chevy Bolt, Cadillac Lyriq and Silverado EV, with the help of an adapter that costs $225... GM estimates that the partnership with Tesla contributes to an overall network of 231,800 fast chargers across the United States available to drivers of its vehicles. GM is also part of IONNA, a joint venture of eight automakers that plans to build at least 30,000 high-powered chargers nationwide.
GM's statement calls it "a move that will help accelerate fast and convenient charging options for current and future EV drivers." And the move comes 15 months after GM announced it was adopting the standard — a move followed within weeks by similar announcements from Rivian, Ford, Volvo, Nissan, Hyundai and Kia. "Ford and Rivian have started distributing adapters for their EVs," the Washington Post points out, "while others, such as BMW, Honda, Hyundai and Mercedes-Benz have promised to start making their vehicles compatible this year or next."

"Knowing we will now have access to Tesla Supercharger locations means that range anxiety has now virtually evaporated..." argues a Chevy owner at CleanTechnica: This is mostly good news for drivers of electric cars from GM. Tesla and The General have been bitter enemies in the past, with GM opposing Tesla's direct sales model in many states. The once fierce battle has cooled in recent years, but GM essentially won by keeping Tesla from selling direct to the public in several US states, including its new home of Texas. Nevertheless, the two companies are now cooperating, which is a bonus for drivers...

Despite some niggling concerns, this is a big deal for EV drivers in North America. Tesla Superchargers are the gold standard in the industry today. There are fast, reliable, and always located in clean, well-lit places where restrooms and fresh foods are available. This could very well change the conversation about electric cars to the point where by the time GM, Ford, and Stellantis get their plug-in hybrids into showrooms, the demand for them will have shrunk considerably.
One GM executive says in this week's statement that "GM's ongoing efforts to help accelerate the expansion of public charging infrastructure is an integral part of our commitment to an all-electric future."

New submitter LazarusQLong shares a report: In late 1965, at what's now London Heathrow airport, a commercial flight coming from Paris made history by being the first to land automatically. The plane -- A Trident 1C operated by BEA, which would later become British Airways -- was equipped with a newly developed extension of the autopilot (a system to help guide the plane's path without manual control) known as "autoland." Today, automatic landing systems are installed on most commercial aircraft and improve the safety of landings in difficult weather or poor visibility.

Now, nearly 60 years later, the world's third largest aircraft manufacturer, Brazil's Embraer, is introducing a similar technology, but for takeoffs. Called "E2 Enhanced Take Off System," after the family of aircraft it's designed for, the technology would not only improve safety by reducing pilot workload, but it would also improve range and takeoff weight, allowing the planes that use it to travel farther, according to Embraer. "The system is better than the pilots," says Patrice London, principal performance engineer at Embraer, who has worked on the project for over a decade. "That's because it performs in the same way all the time. If you do 1,000 takeoffs, you will get 1,000 of exactly the same takeoff."