Brazil's government is partnering with OpenAI to use AI for expediting the screening and analysis of thousands of lawsuits to reduce costly court losses impacting the federal budget. Reuters reports: The AI service will flag to government the need to act on lawsuits before final decisions, mapping trends and potential action areas for the solicitor general's office (AGU). AGU told Reuters that Microsoft would provide the artificial intelligence services from ChatGPT creator OpenAI through its Azure cloud-computing platform. It did not say how much Brazil will pay for the services. AGU said the AI project would not replace the work of its members and employees. "It will help them gain efficiency and accuracy, with all activities fully supervised by humans," it said.

Court-ordered debt payments have consumed a growing share of Brazil's federal budget. The government estimated it would spend 70.7 billion reais ($13.2 billion) next year on judicial decisions where it can no longer appeal. The figure does not include small-value claims, which historically amount to around 30 billion reais annually. The combined amount of over 100 billion reais represents a sharp increase from 37.3 billion reais in 2015. It is equivalent to about 1% of gross domestic product, or 15% more than the government expects to spend on unemployment insurance and wage bonuses to low-income workers next year. AGU did not provide a reason for Brazil's rising court costs.

Copycats are stepping up their attacks on small businesses. Sellers of products including merino socks and hummingbird feeders say they have lost customers to online scammers who use the legitimate business owners' videos, logos and social-media posts to assume their identities and steer customers to cheap knockoffs or simply take their money. WSJ: "We used to think you'd be targeted because you have a brand everywhere," said Alastair Gray, director of anticounterfeiting for the International Trademark Association, a nonprofit that represents brand owners. "It now seems with the ease at which these criminals can replicate websites, they can cut and paste everything." Technology has expanded the reach of even the smallest businesses, making it easy to court customers across the globe. But evolving technology has also boosted opportunities for copycats; ChatGPT and other advances in artificial intelligence make it easier to avoid language or spelling errors, often a signal of fraud.

Imitators also have fine-tuned their tactics, including by outbidding legitimate brands for top position in search results. "These counterfeiters will market themselves just like brands market themselves," said Rachel Aronson, co-founder of CounterFind, a Dallas-based brand-protection company. Policing copycats is particularly challenging for small businesses with limited financial resources and not many employees. Online giants such as Amazon.com and Meta Platforms say they use technology to identify and remove misleading ads, fake accounts or counterfeit products.

Longtime Slashdot reader destinyland shared a story from Space.com reporting on Boeing's missed opportunity to dock with the International Space Station, after five of the 28 thrusters that help control Starliner's movement in space stopped operating. NASA has since been able to recover four of the thrusters to successfully dock Boeing's Starliner capsule with the ISS. From the report: There are now two U.S.-built crew spacecraft docked with the ISS for the first time. Boeing's Starliner joined SpaceX's Dragon capsule "Endeavour," which arrived in March. Boeing's Starliner launched successfully on Wednesday to begin the crew flight test. The mission represents a final major step before NASA certifies Boeing to fly crew on operational missions. [...]

NASA flight controllers called off a previously scheduled approach to resolve issues with Starliner's propulsion system. Starliner has 28 jets, known as its reaction control system, or RCS, engines, that help the spacecraft make small movements in orbit. The crew on Starliner, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, were told by NASA capsule communicator, or CAPCOM, Neal Nagata, that the 12:15 p.m. docking attempt had to be called off to resolve the spacecraft's propulsion issue. CAPCOM Nagata noted that the ISS has a zero fault tolerance for a spacecraft control problem.

The agency and Boeing had to troubleshoot five of the RCS jets that were not operating. Four of Starliner's malfunctioning jets were recovered after Wilmore and Williams worked with flight controllers to test fire the thrusters. CAPCOM Nagata had the astronauts hold the spacecraft beyond the "keep out sphere," an invisible boundary around the ISS that serves as a safety measure, while diagnosing the problematic thrusters.

"Chinese scientists develop cure for diabetes," reads the headline from the world's second-most widely read English-language newspaper. ("Insulin patient becomes medicine-free in just 3 months.")

The researchers' results were published earlier in May in Cell Discovery, and are now getting some serious scrutiny from the press. The Economic Times cites a University of British Columbia professor's assessment that the study "represents an important advance in the field of cell therapy for diabetes," in an article calling it a "breakthrough" that "marks a significant advancement in cell therapy for diabetes." Chinese scientists have successfully cured a patient's diabetes using a groundbreaking cell therapy... According to a South China Morning Post report, the patient underwent the cell transplant in July 2021. Remarkably, within eleven weeks, he no longer required external insulin. Over the next year, he gradually reduced and ultimately stopped taking oral medication for blood sugar control. "Follow-up examinations showed that the patient's pancreatic islet function was effectively restored," said Yin, one of the lead researchers. The patient has now been insulin-free for 33 months... The new therapy involves programming the patient's peripheral blood mononuclear cells, transforming them into "seed cells" to recreate pancreatic islet tissue in an artificial environment.
Their article calls it "a significant medical milestone" — noting that 140 million people in China have diabetes (according to figures from the International Diabetes Federation).

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

Benj Edwards and Ashley Belanger reports via Ars Technica: On Wednesday, Axios broke the news that OpenAI had signed deals with The Atlantic and Vox Media that will allow the ChatGPT maker to license their editorial content to further train its language models. But some of the publications' writers -- and the unions that represent them -- were surprised by the announcements and aren't happy about it. Already, two unions have released statements expressing "alarm" and "concern." "The unionized members of The Atlantic Editorial and Business and Technology units are deeply troubled by the opaque agreement The Atlantic has made with OpenAI," reads a statement from the Atlantic union. "And especially by management's complete lack of transparency about what the agreement entails and how it will affect our work."

The Vox Union -- which represents The Verge, SB Nation, and Vulture, among other publications -- reacted in similar fashion, writing in a statement, "Today, members of the Vox Media Union ... were informed without warning that Vox Media entered into a 'strategic content and product partnership' with OpenAI. As both journalists and workers, we have serious concerns about this partnership, which we believe could adversely impact members of our union, not to mention the well-documented ethical and environmental concerns surrounding the use of generative AI." [...] News of the deals took both journalists and unions by surprise. On X, Vox reporter Kelsey Piper, who recently penned an expose about OpenAI's restrictive non-disclosure agreements that prompted a change in policy from the company, wrote, "I'm very frustrated they announced this without consulting their writers, but I have very strong assurances in writing from our editor in chief that they want more coverage like the last two weeks and will never interfere in it. If that's false I'll quit.."

Journalists also reacted to news of the deals through the publications themselves. On Wednesday, The Atlantic Senior Editor Damon Beres wrote a piece titled "A Devil's Bargain With OpenAI," in which he expressed skepticism about the partnership, likening it to making a deal with the devil that may backfire. He highlighted concerns about AI's use of copyrighted material without permission and its potential to spread disinformation at a time when publications have seen a recent string of layoffs. He drew parallels to the pursuit of audiences on social media leading to clickbait and SEO tactics that degraded media quality. While acknowledging the financial benefits and potential reach, Beres cautioned against relying on inaccurate, opaque AI models and questioned the implications of journalism companies being complicit in potentially destroying the internet as we know it, even as they try to be part of the solution by partnering with OpenAI.

Similarly, over at Vox, Editorial Director Bryan Walsh penned a piece titled, "This article is OpenAI training data," in which he expresses apprehension about the licensing deal, drawing parallels between the relentless pursuit of data by AI companies and the classic AI thought experiment of Bostrom's "paperclip maximizer," cautioning that the single-minded focus on market share and profits could ultimately destroy the ecosystem AI companies rely on for training data. He worries that the growth of AI chatbots and generative AI search products might lead to a significant decline in search engine traffic to publishers, potentially threatening the livelihoods of content creators and the richness of the Internet itself.

David Snow reports via Cult of Mac: A new report from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) shows Apple News+ growing its subscription rate about four times as fast as major news sites are. CIRP showed Apple increased its News+ subscriptions in the United States from 15% to 24% between 2020 to 2024, a 9% increase. In that same period, The New York Times and The Washington Post managed a 2% bump apiece and The Wall Street Journal managed a 3% increase. The results come from data measuring how many Apple product buyers say they subscribe to the News+ service.

CIRP also cited a report indicating that the Apple News+ partnership program is increasingly becoming a lifeline for news websites losing revenue, according to major publishers. And as far as the growth of Apple News+ subscription growth is concerned, it may keep growing as long as the user install base for devices keeps growing. "One-quarter of the U.S. base of Apple customers represents tens of millions of users, an enormous audience relative to what individual media outlets can expect on their own," CIRP noted.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A team of physicists has discovered that it's possible to build a real, actual, physical warp drive and not break any known rules of physics. One caveat: the vessel doing the warping can't exceed the speed of light, so you're not going to get anywhere interesting any time soon. But this research still represents an important advance in our understanding of gravity. [...] In a paper accepted for publication in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity, [an international team of physicists led by Jared Fuchs at the University of Alabama in Huntsville] dug deep into relativity to explore if any version of a warp drive could work. The equations of general relativity are notoriously difficult to solve, especially in complex cases such as a warp drive. So the team turned to software algorithms; instead of trying to solve the equations by hand, they explored their solutions numerically and verified that they conformed to the energy conditions.

The team did not actually attempt to construct a propulsion device. Instead, they explored various solutions to general relativity that would allow travel from point to point without a vessel undergoing any acceleration or experiencing any overwhelming gravitational tidal forces within the vessel, much to the comfort of any imagined passengers. They then checked whether these solutions adhered to the energy conditions that prevent the use of exotic matter. The researchers did indeed discover a warp drive solution: a method of manipulating space so that travelers can move without accelerating. There is no such thing as a free lunch, however, and the physicality of this warp drive does come with a major caveat: the vessel and passengers can never travel faster than light. Also disappointing: the fact that the researchers behind the new work don't seem to bother with figuring out what configurations of matter would allow the warping to happen. The findings have been published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity.

Microsoft's Windows Recall feature is attracting controversy before even venturing out of preview. From a report: The principle is simple. Windows takes a snapshot of a user's active screen every few seconds and dumps it to disk. The user can then scroll through the snapshots and, when something is selected, the user is given options to interact with the content.

Mozilla's Chief Product Officer, Steve Teixeira, told The Register: "Mozilla is concerned about Windows Recall. From a browser perspective, some data should be saved, and some shouldn't. Recall stores not just browser history, but also data that users type into the browser with only very coarse control over what gets stored. While the data is stored in encrypted format, this stored data represents a new vector of attack for cybercriminals and a new privacy worry for shared computers.

"Microsoft is also once again playing gatekeeper and picking which browsers get to win and lose on Windows -- favoring, of course, Microsoft Edge. Microsoft's Edge allows users to block specific websites and private browsing activity from being seen by Recall. Other Chromium-based browsers can filter out private browsing activity but lose the ability to block sensitive websites (such as financial sites) from Recall. "Right now, there's no documentation on how a non-Chromium based, third-party browser, such as Firefox, can protect user privacy from Recall. Microsoft did not engage our cooperation on Recall, but we would have loved for that to be the case, which would have enabled us to partner on giving users true agency over their privacy, regardless of the browser they choose."

With JPMorgan and Mastercard piloting biometric payment options, a future where consumers can pay with their face is rapidly approaching. "Our focus on biometrics as a secure way to verify identity, replacing the password with the person, is at the heart of our efforts in this area," said Dennis Gamiello, executive vice president of identity products and innovation at Mastercard. Based on the positive feedback received thus far, Gamiello says the biometric checkout technology will roll out to more new markets later this year. CNBC reports: Biometric payment options are becoming more common. Amazon introduced pay-by-palm technology in 2020, and while its cashier-less store experiment has faltered, it installed the tech in 500 of its Whole Foods stores last year. Mastercard, which is working with PopID, launched a pilot for face-based payments in Brazil back in 2022, and it was deemed a success -- 76% of pilot participants said they would recommend the technology to a friend. Late last year, Mastercard said it was teaming with NEC to bring its Biometric Checkout Program to the Asia-Pacific region.

A deal that PopID recently signed with JPMorgan is a sign of things to come in the U.S., said John Miller, PopID CEO, and what he thinks will be a "breakthrough" year for pay-by-face technology. The consumer case is tied to the growing importance of loyalty programs. Most quick-service restaurants require consumers to provide their loyalty information to earn rewards -- which means pulling out a phone, opening an app, finding the link to the loyalty QR code, and then presenting the QR code to the cashier or reader. For payment, consumers are typically choosing between pulling out their wallet, selecting a credit card, and then dipping or tapping the card or pulling out their phone, opening it with Face ID, and then presenting it to the reader. Miller says PopID simplifies this process by requiring just tapping an on-screen button, and then looking briefly at a camera for both loyalty check-in and payment.

"We believe our partnership with JPMorgan is a watershed moment for biometric payments as it represents the first time a leading merchant acquirer has agreed to push biometric payments to its merchant customers," Miller said. "JPMorgan brings the kind of credibility and assurance that both merchants and consumers need to adopt biometric payments." Juniper Research forecasts over 100% market growth for global biometric payments between 2024 and 2028, and by 2025, $3 trillion in mobile, biometric-secured payments. Sheldon Jacobson, a professor in computer science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, said he sees biometric identification as part of a technology continuum that has evolved from payment with a credit card to smartphones. "The next natural step is to simply use facial recognition," he said.

According to the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), the U.S. has officially surpassed 5 million solar installations. "The 5 million milestone comes just eight years after the U.S. achieved its first million in 2016 -- a stark contrast to the four decades it took to reach that initial milestone since the first grid-connected solar project in 1973," reports Electrek. From the report: Since the beginning of 2020, more than half of all U.S. solar installations have come online, and over 25% have been activated since the Inflation Reduction Act became law 20 months ago. Solar arrays have been installed on homes and businesses and as utility-scale solar farms. The U.S. solar market was valued at $51 billion in 2023. Even with changes in state policies, market trends indicate robust growth in solar installations across the U.S. According to SEIA forecasts, the number of solar installations is expected to double to 10 million by 2030 and triple to 15 million by 2034.

The residential sector represents 97% of all U.S. solar installations. This sector has consistently set new records for annual installations over the past several years, achieving new highs for five straight years and in 10 out of the last 12 years. The significant growth in residential solar can be attributed to its proven value as an investment for homeowners who wish to manage their energy costs more effectively. California is the frontrunner with 2 million solar installations, though recent state policies have significantly damaged its rooftop solar market. Meanwhile, other states are experiencing rapid growth. For example, Illinois, which had only 2,500 solar installations in 2017, now boasts over 87,000. Similarly, Florida has seen its solar installations surge from 22,000 in 2017 to 235,000 today. By 2030, 22 states or territories are anticipated to surpass 100,000 solar installations. The U.S. has enough solar installed to cover every residential rooftop in the Four Corners states of Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico.

schwit1 shares a report: Fake studies have flooded the publishers of top scientific journals, leading to thousands of retractions and millions of dollars in lost revenue. The biggest hit has come to Wiley, a 217-year-old publisher based in Hoboken, N.J., which Tuesday announced that it was closing 19 journals, some of which were infected by large-scale research fraud. In the past two years, Wiley has retracted more than 11,300 papers that appeared compromised, according to a spokesperson, and closed four journals. It isn't alone: At least two other publishers have retracted hundreds of suspect papers each. Several others have pulled smaller clusters of bad papers.

Although this large-scale fraud represents a small percentage of submissions to journals, it threatens the legitimacy of the nearly $30 billion academic publishing industry and the credibility of science as a whole. The discovery of nearly 900 fraudulent papers in 2022 at IOP Publishing, a physical sciences publisher, was a turning point for the nonprofit. "That really crystallized for us, everybody internally, everybody involved with the business," said Kim Eggleton, head of peer review and research integrity at the publisher. "This is a real threat." The sources of the fake science are "paper mills" -- businesses or individuals that, for a price, will list a scientist as an author of a wholly or partially fabricated paper. The mill then submits the work, generally avoiding the most prestigious journals in favor of publications such as one-off special editions that might not undergo as thorough a review and where they have a better chance of getting bogus work published.

A panel of judges in the Netherlands has found Alexey Pertsev, one of the developers behind crypto anonymizing tool Tornado Cash, guilty of money laundering. Wired: Over the course of two days in March, the Russian national was tried on the allegation that the tool he developed had allowed criminals -- among them hackers with ties to North Korea -- to freely launder $1.2 billion in stolen cryptocurrency. "The management of Tornado Cash welcomed the bank robbers with open arms," the prosecutors wrote in a March court filing.

Dutch judges sentenced Pertsev to five years and four months in prison on Tuesday, which was the term requested by prosecutors in the case. "With Tornado Cash, the defendant created a shortcut for financing crimes and terrorism," said the court in a statement, translated from Dutch. "He chose to look away from the abuse and did not take any responsibility." The purpose of tools like Tornado Cash, known as crypto mixers or tumblers, is to mask the origin and destination of users' coins. Funds belonging to many parties are pooled, jumbled up, and spat out into brand-new wallets, by which time it is no longer clear whose crypto is whose. These services are promoted as a way to improve the level of privacy available to crypto users, but have been readily co-opted for the purpose of money laundering.

On August 8, 2022, Tornado Cash was sanctioned in the United States, making it illegal for US citizens to use the service. Any product that "indiscriminately facilitates anonymous transactions," wrote the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, represents a "threat to US national security." Two days later, Pertsev was arrested in the Netherlands, where he resided. Money laundering activity, the Dutch prosecutors claim, accounted for more than 30 percent of the funds that passed through Tornado Cash between 2019 and 2022. [...] Pertsev built his defense on the argument that Tornado Cash, which remains in operation, is under nobody's control -- including his own -- as a piece of software that runs on the Ethereum blockchain, a distributed network of computers. Further reading: Coinbase Employees and Ethereum Backers Sue US Treasury Over Tornado Cash Sanctions (September 2022).

An anonymous reader shares a report: Sonos has responded to the avalanche of feedback -- some good, plenty bad -- about the company's redesigned mobile app that was released on May 7th. In the days since, customers have complained about missing features like sleep timers, broken local music library management, and no longer having the ability to edit playlists or the upcoming song queue. More alarmingly, the Sonos app's accessibility has also taken a hit, something the company says it's aiming to resolve by next month.

In a statement provided to The Verge, Sonos confirms that it's keenly aware of the gripes that customers have expressed about the new app. It's hearing their response and is working to address the functionality that has (for now) gone missing. But the company is also standing behind its decision to roll out the app this week, basically describing it as a rough patch that will, in theory, lead to a much better experience for everyone down the line. "Redesigning the Sonos app is an ambitious undertaking that represents just how seriously we are committed to invention and re-invention," said chief product officer Maxime Bouvat-Merlin. "It takes courage to rebuild a brand's core product from the ground up, and to do so knowing it may require taking a few steps back to ultimately leap into the future."

Markos Moulitsas is the poll-watching founder of the political blog Daily Kos. Thursday he wrote that in 2021, future third-party presidential candidate RFK Jr. had sued their web site.

"Things are not going well for him." Back in 2021, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sued Daily Kos to unmask the identity of a community member who posted a critical story about his dalliance with neo-Nazis at a Berlin rally. I updated the story here, here, here, here, and here.

To briefly summarize, Kennedy wanted us to doxx our community member, and we stridently refused.
The site and the politician then continued fighting for more than three years. "Daily Kos lost the first legal round in court," Moulitsas posted in 2021, "thanks to a judge who is apparently unconcerned with First Amendment ramifications given the chilling effect of her ruling."

But even then, Moulitsas was clear on his rights: Because of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, [Kennedy] cannot sue Daily Kos — the site itself — for defamation. We are protected by the so-called safe harbor. That's why he's demanding we reveal what we know about "DowneastDem" so they can sue her or him directly.
Moulitsas also stressed that his own 2021 blog post was "reiterating everything that community member wrote, and expanding on it. And so instead of going after a pseudonymous community writer/diarist on this site, maybe Kennedy will drop that pointless lawsuit and go after me... consider this an escalation." (Among other things, the post cited a German-language news account saying Kennedy "sounded the alarm concerning the 5G mobile network and Microsoft founder Bill Gates..." Moulitsas also noted an Irish Times article which confirmed that at the rally Kennedy spoke at, "Noticeable numbers of neo-Nazis, kitted out with historic Reich flags and other extremist accessories, mixed in with the crowd.")

So what happened? Moulitsas posted an update Thursday: Shockingly, Kennedy got a trial court judge in New York to agree with him, and a subpoena was issued to Daily Kos to turn over any information we might have on the account. However, we are based in California, not New York, so once I received the subpoena at home, we had a California court not just quash the subpoena, but essentially signal that if New York didn't do the right thing on appeal, California could very well take care of it.

It's been a while since I updated, and given a favorable court ruling Thursday, it's way past time to catch everyone up.
New York is one of the U.S. states that doesn't have a strict "Dendrite standard" law protecting anonymous speech. But soon the blog founder discovered he had allies: The issues at hand are so important that The New York Times, the E.W.Scripps Company, the First Amendment Coalition, New York Public Radio, and seven other New York media companies joined the appeals effort with their own joint amicus brief. What started as a dispute over a Daily Kos diarist has become a meaningful First Amendment battle, with major repercussions given New York's role as a major news media and distribution center.

After reportedly spending over $1 million on legal fees, Kennedy somehow discovered the identity of our community member sometime last year and promptly filed a defamation suit in New Hampshire in what seemed a clumsy attempt at forum shopping, or the practice of choosing where to file suit based on the belief you'll be granted a favorable outcome. The community member lives in Maine, Kennedy lives in California, and Daily Kos doesn't publish specifically in New Hampshire. A perplexed court threw out the case this past February on those obvious jurisdictional grounds....

Then, last week, the judge threw out the appeal of that decision because Kennedy's lawyer didn't file in time — and blamed the delay on bad Wi-Fi...

Kennedy tried to dismiss the original case, the one awaiting an appellate decision in New York, claiming it was now moot. His legal team had sued to get the community member's identity, and now that they had it, they argued that there was no reason for the case to continue. We disagreed, arguing that there were important issues to resolve (i.e., Dendrite), and we also wanted lawyer fees for their unconstitutional assault on our First Amendment rights...

On Thursday, in a unanimous decision, a four-judge New York Supreme Court appellate panel ordered the case to continue, keeping the Dendrite issue alive and also allowing us to proceed in seeking damages based on New York's anti-SLAPP law, which prohibits "strategic lawsuits against public participation."
Thursday's blog post concludes with this summation. "Kennedy opened up a can of worms and has spent millions fighting this stupid battle. Despite his losses, we aren't letting him weasel out of this."

Richard Speed reports via The Register: NASA's optical communications demonstration has hit 25 Mbps in a test transmitting engineering data back to Earth from 140 million miles (226 million kilometers) away. The payload is riding aboard the Psyche probe, which is headed for an asteroid of the same name. On December 11, when the spacecraft was 19 million miles (30 million kilometers) away, it reached 267 Mbps, which NASA described as "comparable to broadband internet download speeds."

However, as Psyche has continued on its trajectory, the distances have become greater, and the rate at which data can be transmitted and received has tumbled. At 140 million miles, the project's goal was to reach a lofty 1 Mbps. Instead, engineers managed to get 25 Mbps out of the demonstration. Earlier demonstrations tested the technology using preloaded data, such as a cat video. The latest experiment used a copy of engineering data also sent via Psyche's radio transmitter.

"We downlinked about 10 minutes of duplicated spacecraft data during a pass on April 8," said Meera Srinivasan, the project's operations lead at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California. "Until then, we'd been sending test and diagnostic data in our downlinks from Psyche. This represents a significant milestone for the project by showing how optical communications can interface with a spacecraft's radio frequency comms system." The demonstrator is only along for the ride -- Psyche uses conventional radio technology for its mission. However, the demonstration does point to the potential for higher-bandwidth communications in future projects.

1,000 petabytes.
A million terabytes.
One quintillion bytes (or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000).

That's the amount of storage reported by users of the Ceph storage solution (across more than 3,000 Ceph clusters).

The Ceph Foundation is a "directed fund" of the Linux Foundation, providing a neutral home for Ceph, "the most popular open source storage solution for modern data storage challenges" (offering an architecture that's "highly scalable, resilient, and flexible"). It's a software-defined storage platform, providing object storage, block storage, and file storage built on a common distributed cluster foundation.

And Friday they announced the release of Ceph Squid, "which comes with several performance and space efficiency features along with enhanced protocol support." Ceph has solidified its position as the cornerstone of open source data storage. The release of Ceph Squid represents a significant milestone toward providing scalable, reliable, and flexible storage solutions that meet the ever-evolving demands of digital data storage.

Features of Ceph Squid include improvements to BlueStore [a storage back end specifically designed for managing data on disk for Ceph Object Storage Daemon workloads] to reduce latency and CPU requirements for snapshot intensive workloads. BlueStore now uses RocksDB compression by default for increased average performance and reduced space usage. [And the next-generation Crimson OSD also has improvements in stability and read performance, and "now supports scrub, partial recovery and osdmap trimming."]

Ceph continues to drive the future of storage, and welcomes developers, partners, and technology enthusiasts to get involved.
Ceph Squid also brings enhancements for the CRUSH algorithm [which computes storage locations] to support more flexible and cost effective erasure coding configurations.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Darktrace is set to go private in a deal that values the U.K.-based cybersecurity giant at around $5 billion. A newly formed entity called Luke Bidco Ltd., formed by private equity giant Thoma Bravo, has tabled an all-cash bid of $7.75 per share, which represents a 44% premium on its average price for the three-month period ending April 25. However, this premium drops to just 20% when juxtaposed against Darktrace's closing price Thursday, as the company's shares had risen 20% to 5.18 pounds in the past month.

Founded out of Cambridge, U.K., in 2013, Darktrace is best known for AI-enabled threat detection smarts, using machine learning to identify abnormal network activity and attempts at ransomware attacks, insider attacks, data breaches and more. The company claims big-name customers including Allianz, Airbus and the city of Las Vegas. After raising some $230 million in VC funding and hitting a private valuation of $1.65 billion, Darktrace went public on the London Stock Exchange in April 2021, with an opening-day valuation of $2.4 billion. Its shares hit an all-time high later that year of 9.45 pounds and plummeted to an all-time low of 2.29 pounds last February. But they had been steadily rising since the turn of the year and hadn't fallen below 4 pounds since the beginning of March.

The full valuation based on Thoma Bravo's offer amounts to $5.3 billion on what is known as a full-diluted basis, which takes into account all convertible securities and is designed to give a more comprehensive view of a company's valuation. However, the enterprise value in this instance is approximately $4.9 billion, which includes additional considerations such as debt and cash positions. [...] The deal is of course still subject to shareholder approval, but the companies said that they expect to complete the transaction by the end of 2024. "The proposed offer represents an attractive premium and an opportunity for shareholders to receive the certainty of a cash consideration at a fair value for their shares," Darktrace chair Gordon Hurst said. "The proposed acquisition will provide Darktrace access to a strong financial partner in Thoma Bravo, with deep software sector expertise, who can enhance the company's position as a best-in-class cyber AI business headquartered in the U.K."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: The Biden administration marked the close of tax season Monday by announcing it had met a modest goal of getting at least 100,000 taxpayers to file through the Internal Revenue Service's new tax software, Direct File -- an alternative to commercial tax preparers. Although the government had billed Direct File as a small-scale pilot, it still represents one of the most significant experiments in tax filing in decades -- a free platform letting Americans file online directly to the government. Monday's announcement aside, though, Direct File's success has proven highly subjective.

By and large, people who tried the Direct File software -- which looks a lot like TurboTax or other commercial tax software, with its question-and-answer format -- gave it rave reviews. "Against all odds, the government has created an actually good piece of technology," a writer for the Atlantic marveled, describing himself as "giddy" as he used the website to chat live with a helpful IRS employee. The Post's Tech Friend columnist Shira Ovide called it "visible proof that government websites don't have to stink." Online, people tweeted praise after filing their taxes, like the user who called it the "easiest tax experience of my life."

While the users might be a happy group, however, there weren't many of them compared to other tax filing options -- and their positive reviews likely won't budge the opposition that Direct File has faced from tax software companies and Republicans from the outset. These headwinds will likely continue if the IRS wants to renew it for another tax season. The program opened to the public midway through tax season, when many low-income filers had already claimed their refunds -- and was restricted to taxpayers in 12 states, with only four types of income (wages, interest, Social Security and unemployment). But it gained popularity as tax season went on: The Treasury Department said more than half of the total users of Direct File completed their returns during the last week.

Meanwhile, in Southern California, nonprofit news site Canary Media reports that an old gas combustion plant is being replaced by a "power bank" named Nova.

It's expected to store "more electricity than all but one battery plant currently operating in the U.S." The billion-dollar project, with 680 megawatts and 2,720 megawatt-hours, will help California shift its nation-leading solar generation into the critical evening and nighttime hours, bolstering the grid against the heat waves that have pushed it to the brink multiple times in recent years... The town of Menifee gets to move on from the power plant exhaust that used to join the smog flowing from Los Angeles... And the grid gets a bunch more clean capacity that can, ideally, displace fossil fuels...

Moreover, [the power bank] represents Calpine's grand arrival in the energy storage market, after years operating one of the biggest independent gas power plant fleets in the country alongside Vistra and NRG... Federal analysts predict 2024 will be the biggest-ever year for grid battery installations across the U.S., and they highlighted Calpine's project as one of the single largest projects. The 620 megawatts the company plans to energize this year represent more than 4% of the industry's total expected new additions.

Many of these new grid batteries will be built in California, which needs all the dispatchable power it can get to meet demand when its massive solar fleet stops producing, and to keep pace with the electrification of vehicles and buildings. The Menifee Power Bank, and the other gigawatts worth of storage expected to come online in the state this year, will deliver much-needed reinforcement.
The company says it's planning "a portfolio" of 2,000 megawatts of California battery capacity.

But even this 680-megawatt project consists of 1,096 total battery containers holding 26,304 battery modules (or a total of 3 million cells), "all manufactured by Chinese battery powerhouse BYD, according to Robert Stuart, an electrical project manager with Calpine. That's enough electricity to supply 680,000 homes for four hours before it runs out." What's remarkable is just how quickly the project came together. Construction began last August, and is expected to hit 510 megawatts of fully operational capacity over the course of this summer, even as installation continues on other parts of the plant. Erecting a conventional gas plant of comparable scale would have taken three or four years of construction labor, due to the complexity of the systems and the many different trades required for it, Stuart told Canary Media... That speed and flexibility makes batteries a crucial solution as utilities across the nation grapple with a spike in expected electricity demand unlike anything seen in the last few decades.
The article notes a 2013 Caifornia policy mandating battery storage for its utility companies, which "kicked off a decade-long project to will an energy storage market into existence through methodical policies and regulations, and the knock-on effects of building the nation's foremost solar fleet." Those energy storage policies succeeded in jumpstarting the modern grid battery market: California leads the nation with more than 7 gigawatts of batteries installed as of last year (though Texas is poised to overtake California in battery installations this year, on the back of no particular policy effort but a general openness to building energy projects)... California's interlocking climate regulations effectively rule out new gas construction. The state's energy roadmap instead calls for massive expansion of battery capacity to shift the ample amounts of solar generation into the evening peaks.
"These trends, along with the falling price of batteries and maturing business model for storage, nudged Calpine to get into the battery business, too."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon has built one of the world's most efficient delivery systems. Yet people regularly ship junk back to sellers and claim they are returns, often with little to no penalty, merchants say. Amazon has long believed in a system based on pleasing customers above all, including easy returns, but that ethos has hurt the merchants who make up most of its online sales.

Return theft represents one sore point in what has become an often contentious relationship between Amazon and its independent sellers. The Federal Trade Commission's continuing lawsuit against the retail giant deals in part with how the company treats its sellers. Amazon is also facing new competition for its merchants from other e-commerce firms.

The National Retail Federation says return fraud has become a "major issue for our industry." About 13.7% of returns in 2023 were fraudulent, accounting for $101 billion in overall losses for retailers, the federation said. As more consumers have adopted online shopping, return theft has become prevalent and Amazon hasn't done enough to stop it, sellers said.