A Miami-based CEO will serve over six years in prison for selling counterfeit Cisco equipment to numerous buyers on Amazon and eBay, with some of the shoddy hardware ending up in sensitive US government systems. From a report: On Wednesday, 40-year-old Onur Aksoy was sentenced to six years and six months in prison for raking in at least $100 million from the counterfeit sales. Aksoy committed the fraud from at least 2013 to 2022 -- the year he was arrested -- by buying the fake Cisco equipment from suppliers in China. The counterfeits were then resold as legitimate Cisco products for an estimated retail value of over $1 billion.

"Aksoy sold hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of counterfeit computer networking equipment that ended up in US hospitals, schools, and highly sensitive military and other governmental systems, including platforms supporting sophisticated US fighter jets and military aircraft," Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Nicole Argentieri said in a statement.

If 2023 was the tech industry's year of the A.I. chatbot, 2024 is turning out to be the year of A.I. plumbing. From a report: It may not sound as exciting, but tens of billions of dollars are quickly being spent on behind-the-scenes technology for the industry's A.I. boom. Companies from Amazon to Meta are revamping their data centers to support artificial intelligence. They are investing in huge new facilities, while even places like Saudi Arabia are racing to build supercomputers to handle A.I. Nearly everyone with a foot in tech or giant piles of money, it seems, is jumping into a spending frenzy that some believe could last for years.

Microsoft, Meta, and Google's parent company, Alphabet, disclosed this week that they had spent more than $32 billion combined on data centers and other capital expenses in just the first three months of the year. The companies all said in calls with investors that they had no plans to slow down their A.I. spending. In the clearest sign of how A.I. has become a story about building a massive technology infrastructure, Meta said on Wednesday that it needed to spend billions more on the chips and data centers for A.I. than it had previously signaled. "I think it makes sense to go for it, and we're going to," Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's chief executive, said in a call with investors.

The eye-popping spending reflects an old parable in Silicon Valley: The people who made the biggest fortunes in California's gold rush weren't the miners -- they were the people selling the shovels. No doubt Nvidia, whose chip sales have more than tripled over the last year, is the most obvious A.I. winner. The money being thrown at technology to support artificial intelligence is also a reminder of spending patterns of the dot-com boom of the 1990s. For all of the excitement around web browsers and newfangled e-commerce websites, the companies making the real money were software giants like Microsoft and Oracle, the chipmaker Intel, and Cisco Systems, which made the gear that connected those new computer networks together. But cloud computing has added a new wrinkle: Since most start-ups and even big companies from other industries contract with cloud computing providers to host their networks, the tech industry's biggest companies are spending big now in hopes of luring customers.

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.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Jackson County, Missouri, has declared a state of emergency and closed key offices indefinitely as it responds to what officials believe is a ransomware attack that has made some of its IT systems inoperable. "Jackson County has identified significant disruptions within its IT systems, potentially attributable to a ransomware attack," officials wrote Tuesday. "Early indications suggest operational inconsistencies across its digital infrastructure and certain systems have been rendered inoperative while others continue to function as normal."

The systems confirmed inoperable include tax and online property payments, issuance of marriage licenses, and inmate searches. In response, the Assessment, Collection and Recorder of Deeds offices at all county locations are closed until further notice. The closure occurred the same day that the county was holding a special election to vote on a proposed sales tax to fund a stadium for MLB's Kansas City Royals and the NFL's Kansas City Chiefs. Neither the Jackson County Board of Elections nor the Kansas City Board of Elections have been affected by the attack; both remain open.

The Jackson County website says there are 654,000 residents in the 607-square-mile county, which includes most of Kansas City, the biggest city in Missouri. The response to the attack and the investigation into it have just begun, but so far, officials said they had no evidence that data had been compromised. Jackson County Executive Frank White, Jr. has issued (PDF) an executive order declaring a state of emergency. The County has notified law enforcement and retained IT security contractors to help investigate and remediate the attack. "The potential significant budgetary impact of this incident may require appropriations from the County's emergency fund and, if these funds are found to be insufficient, the enactment of additional budgetary adjustments or cuts," White wrote. "It is directed that all county staff are to take whatever steps are necessary to protect resident data, county assets, and continue essential services, thereby mitigating the impact of this potential ransomware attack."

The U.S. Department of Transportation has announced it will conduct a review of the data practices of the country's ten largest airlines, amid concerns over potential misuse of customer information for upselling, overcharging, targeted advertising, and third-party data sales, as well as the security of systems handling sensitive data such as passport numbers. From a report: The probe will look at air carriers' policies and procedures to determine if they are safeguarding personal info properly, unfairly or deceptively monetizing it, or sharing it with third parties, the agency said yesterday. If they're indeed doing anything "problematic," they can look forward to scrutiny, fines, and new rules, says the DOT. "Airline passengers should have confidence that their personal information is not being shared improperly with third parties or mishandled by employees," said US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

"This review of airline practices is the beginning of a new initiative by DOT to ensure airlines are being good stewards of sensitive passenger data." The ten airlines going under the magnifying glass are Delta, United, American, Southwest, Alaska, JetBlue, Spirit, Frontier, Hawaiian and Allegiant.

"A ransomware gang once thought to have been crippled by law enforcement has snarled prescription processing for millions of Americans over the past week..." reports the Washington Post.

"The hackers stole data about patients, encrypted company files and demanded money to unlock them, prompting the company to shut down most of its network as it worked to recover." Insurance giant UnitedHealthcare Group said the hackers struck its Change Health business unit, which routes prescription claims from pharmacies to companies that determine whether patients are covered by insurance and what they should pay... Change Health and a rival, CoverMyMeds, are the two biggest players in the so-called switch business, charging pharmacies a small fee for funneling claims to insurers. "When one of them goes down, obviously it's a major problem," said Patrick Berryman, a senior vice president at the National Community Pharmacists Association...

UnitedHealth estimated that more than 90 percent of the nation's 70,000-plus pharmacies have had to alter how they process electronic claims as a result of the Change Health outage. But it said only a small number of patients have been unable to get their prescriptions at some price. At CVS, which operates one of the largest pharmacy networks in the nation, a spokesperson said there are "a small number of cases in which our pharmacies are not able to process insurance claims" as a result of the outage. It said workarounds were allowing it to fill prescriptions, however...

For pharmacies that were not able to quickly route claims to a different company, the Change Health outage left pharmacists to try to manually calculate a patient's co-pay or offer them the cash price. Compounding the impact, thousands of organizations cut off Change Health from their systems to ensure the hackers did not infect their networks as well... The attack on Change Health has left many pharmacies in a cash-flow bind, as they face bills from the companies that deliver the medication without knowing when they will be reimbursed by insurers. Some pharmacies are requiring customers to pay full price for their prescriptions when they cannot tell if they are covered by insurance. In some cases, that means people are paying more than $1,000 out of pocket, according to social media posts.

The situation has been "extremely disruptive," said Erin Fox, associate chief pharmacy officer at University of Utah Health. "At our system, our retail pharmacies were providing three-day gratis emergency supplies for patients who could not afford to pay the cash price," Fox said by email. "In some cases, like for inhalers, we had to send product out at risk, not knowing if we will ever get paid, but we need to take care of the patients." Axis Pharmacy Northwest near Seattle is "going out on a limb and dispensing product with absolutely no inkling if we'll get paid or not," said Richard Molitor, the pharmacist in charge. UPDATE: CNN reports Change Healthcare has now announced "plans for a temporary loan program to get money flowing to health care providers affected by the outage." It's a stop-gap measure meant to give some financial relief to health care providers, which analysts say are losing millions of dollars per day because of the outage. Some US officials and health care executives told CNN it may be weeks before Change Healthcare returns to normal operations.
"Once standard payment operations resume, the funds will simply need to be repaid," the company said in a statement. Change Healthcare has been under pressure from senior US officials to get their systems back online. Officials from the White House and multiple federal agencies, including the department of Health and Human Services, have been concerned by the broad financial and health impact of the hack and have been pressing for ways to get Change Healthcare back online, sources told CNN...

In a message on its website Friday afternoon, Change Healthcare also said that it was launching a new version of its online prescribing service following the cyberattack.
Thanks to Slashdot reader CaptainDork for sharing the news.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Death is coming for the old-school gas furnace -- and its killer is the humble heat pump. They're already outselling gas furnaces in the US, and now a coalition of states has signed an agreement to supercharge the gas-to-electric transition by making it as cheap and easy as possible for their residents to switch. Nine states have signed a memorandum of understanding that says that heat pumps should make up at least 65 percent of residential heating, air conditioning, and water-heating shipments by 2030. ("Shipments" here means systems manufactured, a proxy for how many are actually sold.) By 2040, these states -- California, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, and Rhode Island -- are aiming for 90 percent of those shipments to be heat pumps.

"It's a really strong signal from states that they're committed to accelerating this transition to zero-emissions residential buildings," says Emily Levin, senior policy adviser at the Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management (NESCAUM), an association of air-quality agencies, which facilitated the agreement. The states will collaborate, for instance, in pursuing federal funding, developing standards for the rollout of heat pumps, and laying out an overarching plan "with priority actions to support widespread electrification of residential buildings."

Instead of burning planet-warming natural gas, a heat pump warms a building by transferring heat from the outdoor air into the interior space. Run it in the opposite direction, and it can cool the inside of a building -- a heat pump is both a heater and AC unit. Because the system is electric, it can run off a grid increasingly powered by renewables like wind and solar. Even if you have to run a heat pump with electricity from fossil-fuel power plants, it's much more efficient than a furnace, because it's moving heat instead of creating it. A heat pump can save an average American household over $550 a year, according to one estimate. They've gotten so efficient that even when it's freezing out, they can still extract warmth from the air to heat a home. You can even install a heat pump system that also warms your water. "These states are aiming to further collaborate with those heat pump manufacturers by tracking sales and overall progress, sending a signal to the industry to ramp up production to meet the ensuing demand," reports Wired. "They'll also collaborate with each other on research and generally share information, working toward the best strategies for realizing the transition from gas to electric."

"Basically, they're pursuing a sort of standardization of the policies and regulations for getting more heat pumps built, bought, and installed, which other states outside of the coalition might eventually tap into."

Sam Altman was already trying to lead the development of human-level artificial intelligence. Now he has another great ambition: raising trillions of dollars to reshape the global semiconductor industry. From a report: The OpenAI chief executive officer is in talks with investors including the United Arab Emirates government to raise funds for a wildly ambitious tech initiative that would boost the world's chip-building capacity, expand its ability to power AI, among other things, and cost several trillion dollars, according to people familiar with the matter. The project could require raising as much as $5 trillion to $7 trillion, one of the people said.

The fundraising plans, which face significant obstacles, are aimed at solving constraints to OpenAI's growth, including the scarcity of the pricey AI chips required to train large language models behind AI systems such as ChatGPT. Altman has often complained that there aren't enough of these kinds of chips -- known as graphics processing units, or GPUs -- to power OpenAI's quest for artificial general intelligence, which it defines as systems that are broadly smarter than humans. Such a sum of investment would dwarf the current size of the global semiconductor industry. Global sales of chips were $527 billion last year and are expected to rise to $1 trillion annually by 2030. Global sales of semiconductor manufacturing equipment -- the costly machinery needed to run chip factories -- last year were $100 billion, according to an estimate by the industry group SEMI.

Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike shared this investigation by Time magazine's senior economics correspondent which argues that America's residential solar industry "is floundering." In late 2023 alone, more than 100 residential solar dealers and installers in the U.S. declared bankruptcy, according to Roth Capital Partners — six times the number in the previous three years combined. Roth expects at least 100 more to fail. The two largest companies in the industry, SunRun and Sunnova, both posted big losses in their most recent quarterly reports, and their shares are down 86% and 81% respectively from their peaks in January 2021... At the root of these struggles is the complicated financial engineering that helped companies raise money but that some investors and analysts say was built on a framework of lies — or at least exaggerations. Since at least 2016, big solar companies have used Wall Street money to fund their growth. This financialization raised the consumer cost of the panels and led companies to aggressively pursue sales to make the cost of borrowing Wall Street money worth it. National solar companies essentially became finance companies that happened to sell solar, engaging in calculations that may have been overly optimistic about how much money the solar leases and loans actually bring in.

"I've often heard solar finance and sales compared to the Wild West due to the creativity involved," says Jamie Johnson, the founder of Energy Sense Finance, who has been studying the residential solar industry for a decade. "It's the Silicon Valley mantra of 'break things and let the regulators figure it out.'"
Leasing the panels lets the companies claim green-energy tax credits (which they then sell to companies like Google). And meanwhile, bundles of solar-panel leases become asset-backed securities. By 2017, there were over $1 billion such securities... However, these financial innovations also increased the pressure on companies to grow quickly. Solar companies needed lots of new customers in order to package the loans into asset-backed securities and sell them to investors. Public companies especially faced intense scrutiny from investors who expected double-digit quarterly growth. And with upfront costs no longer a barrier for new customers, solar companies began to see almost every homeowner as a target, and they deployed expensive sales teams to go out and sell as aggressively as they could... Even today, about one-third of the upfront cost of a residential solar system goes to intermediaries like sales and financing people, says Pol Lezcano, an analyst with Bloomberg New Energy Finance. In Germany, where installation is done locally and there are fewer intermediaries, the typical residential system costs about 50% less than it costs in the U.S. "The upfront cost of these systems is stupidly high," says Lezcano, making residential solar not "scalable."

After growing 31% in 2021 and 40% in 2022, residential solar will only grow by 13% in 2023 and then contract 12% in 2024, according to predictions from the research firm Wood Mackenzie... Meanwhile, the pressure for fast sales may have led some companies to look the other way when salespeople obscured the terms of the solar panel leases and loans they were selling in order to close a deal.
One customer complains the solar panel company actually took out a lien on his house without his knowledge, according to the article. He's "one of a growing number of consumers now saying in courts and in arbitration that salesmen from solar-panel and solar-panel-finance companies — including some of the biggest in the U.S., like GoodLeap, Mosaic, Sunnova, and SunRun — tricked them into taking out onerous loans they didn't want — or that someone signed them up for a loan without their knowledge." Even some people who voluntarily signed up for financing products say they were misled about the actual cost of the solar panels. That's because loans from companies like GoodLeap and Mosaic often include an unexplained and significant "dealer fee." For example, a customer buying a $30,000 solar panel system with a low interest rate may not know that price includes a $10,000 loan-dealer fee. In other words, the cost of the panels, had they paid cash, would have been just $20,000; the extra 30% is the price they paid for the low-interest loan, though many consumers allege this was not explained to them...

In some ways, the current situation in the residential solar market is analogous to the subprime lending crisis that set off the Great Recession, though on a smaller scale. Like in the subprime lending crisis, some companies issued loans to people who could not — or would not — pay them. Like in the subprime lending crisis, thousands of these loans — and in solar's case, also leases — were packaged and sold to investors as asset-backed securities with promised rates of return. The Great Recession was driven largely by the fact that people stopped paying their loans, and the asset-backed securities didn't deliver the promised rate of return to investors. Similar cracks may be forming in the solar asset-backed securities market. For instance, the rate of delinquencies of loans in one of Sunnova's asset-backed securities was approaching 5% in the fall of last year, according to an October 2023 report issued by KBRA, a bond ratings agency. Historically, delinquencies in solar asset-backed securities had been around 1%.

The firms that grade these asset-backed securities have long said delinquencies would be low because rooftop-solar customers had high credit scores. The problem is that they appear not to have considered that even customers with good credit scores may not want to pay for solar panels that they were told would be free — or that salesmen could be signing people up without their knowledge.
Besides consumer cases in court, there's the possibility that regulators may act against solar companies that used inflated projections to juice their tax credits. "As early as 2016, a researcher at MIT's Energy Initiative estimated that such companies were overstating this value by as much as 50%." The broad problems facing residential solar and financing companies are already causing some pain in the forms of layoffs — California alone lost 17,000 solar jobs in 2023, according to the California Solar and Storage Association. There are ripple effects in the industry; Enphase Energy, which makes microinverters for solar panels, said in December it was laying off 10% of its workforce amidst softening demand.

It could get a lot worse before it gets better, with not just lost jobs, but near-total collapse of the current system. Some analysts, like Lezcano of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, think that the big, national players are going to have to fall apart for residential solar to become affordable in the U.S., and that in the future, the solar industry in the U.S. will look more like it does in Germany, where installations are done locally and there's fewer door-to-door sales.
"Over the past few years, a handful of people got rich off of Americans who were told they could simultaneously save money and save the planet. For example, Hayes Barnard, GoodLeap's founder and chairman, was named by Forbes as one of the 400 richest people in the world in 2023..."

Japan is preparing regulations that would require tech giants like Apple and Google to allow outside app stores and payments on their mobile operating systems, in a bid to curb abuse of their dominant position in the Japanese market. From a report: Legislation slated to be sent to the parliament in 2024 would restrict moves by platform operators to keep users in the operators' own ecosystems and shut out rivals, focusing mainly on four areas: app stores and payments, search, browsers, and operating systems. The plan is to allow the Japan Fair Trade Commission to impose fines for violations. If this is modeled on existing antitrust law, the penalties would generally amount to around 6% of revenue earned from the problematic activities. The details will be worked out this spring.

The government will determine which companies the legislation applies to, based on criteria such as sales and user numbers. It is expected to affect mainly multinational giants, with no Japanese companies likely to be caught in the net. Apple does not allow apps to be downloaded onto iPhones through channels other than its own App Store. In-app payments also must go through Apple's system, which takes a cut of up to 30%. And although Google permits third-party app distribution platforms, it still requires apps to use its billing system. These effective monopolies on in-app payments can lead to users paying more for the same content or services on mobile devices than on personal computers.

Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft said at an AMD investor event today that they will use AMD's newest AI chip, the Instinct MI300X, as an alternative to Nvidia's expensive graphic processors. "If AMD's latest high-end chip is good enough for the technology companies and cloud service providers building and serving AI models when it starts shipping early next year, it could lower costs for developing AI models and put competitive pressure on Nvidia's surging AI chip sales growth," reports CNBC. From the report: "All of the interest is in big iron and big GPUs for the cloud," AMD CEO Lisa Su said Wednesday. AMD says the MI300X is based on a new architecture, which often leads to significant performance gains. Its most distinctive feature is that it has 192GB of a cutting-edge, high-performance type of memory known as HBM3, which transfers data faster and can fit larger AI models. Su directly compared the MI300X and the systems built with it to Nvidia's main AI GPU, the H100. "What this performance does is it just directly translates into a better user experience," Su said. "When you ask a model something, you'd like it to come back faster, especially as responses get more complicated."

The main question facing AMD is whether companies that have been building on Nvidia will invest the time and money to add another GPU supplier. "It takes work to adopt AMD," Su said. AMD on Wednesday told investors and partners that it had improved its software suite called ROCm to compete with Nvidia's industry standard CUDA software, addressing a key shortcoming that had been one of the primary reasons AI developers currently prefer Nvidia. Price will also be important. AMD didn't reveal pricing for the MI300X on Wednesday, but Nvidia's can cost around $40,000 for one chip, and Su told reporters that AMD's chip would have to cost less to purchase and operate than Nvidia's in order to persuade customers to buy it.

On Wednesday, AMD said it had already signed up some of the companies most hungry for GPUs to use the chip. Meta and Microsoft were the two largest purchasers of Nvidia H100 GPUs in 2023, according to a recent report from research firm Omidia. Meta said it will use MI300X GPUs for AI inference workloads such as processing AI stickers, image editing, and operating its assistant. Microsoft's CTO, Kevin Scott, said the company would offer access to MI300X chips through its Azure web service. Oracle's cloud will also use the chips. OpenAI said it would support AMD GPUs in one of its software products, called Triton, which isn't a big large language model like GPT but is used in AI research to access chip features.

Barriers to entry in an industry dominated by TSMC and Nvidia are very high. From a report: In the drama that has just played out in Silicon Valley over the future of OpenAI, one side plot concerned an ambitious chip venture by its chief executive Sam Altman. Before he was ousted and reinstated to the helm of the company, Altman had sought to raise as much as $100bn from investors in the Middle East and SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son to build a rival to compete with sector giants Nvidia and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. This would be a vast undertaking. And one where $100bn may not go very far. Given that the US chip designer and Taiwanese chipmaker are critical to all things generative AI, Altman is unlikely to be the only one with hopes of taking them on. But the barriers to entry -- moats in Silicon Valley parlance -- are formidable.

Nvidia has about 95 per cent of the markets for GPU, or graphics processing units. These computer processors were originally designed for graphics but have become increasingly important in areas such as machine learning. TSMC has about 90 per cent of the world's advanced chip market. These businesses are lucrative. TSMC runs on gross margins of nearly 60 per cent, Nvidia at 74 per cent. TSMC makes $76bn in sales a year. The impressive figures make it seem as though there is plenty of room for more contenders. A global shortage of Nvidia's AI chips makes the prospect of vertical integration yet more attractive. As the number of GPUs required to develop and train advanced AI models grows rapidly, the key to profitability for AI companies lies in having stable access to GPUs.

[...] It is one thing for companies to design customised chips. But Nvidia's profitability comes not from making chips cost-efficient, but by providing a one-stop solution for a wide range of tasks and industries. For example, Nvidia's HGX H100 systems, which can go for about $300,000 each, are used to accelerate workloads for everything from financial applications to analytics. Coming up with a viable rival for the HGX H100 system, which is made up of 35,000 parts, would take much more than just designing a new chip. Nvidia has been developing GPUs for more than two decades. That head start, which includes hardware and related software libraries, is protected by thousands of patents. Even setting aside the challenges of designing a new AI chip, manufacturing is where the real challenge lies.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from UploadVR: Magic Leap 1 AR headsets will 'cease to function' from December 31, 2024, the company announced. Magic Leap 1 launched in mid 2018 as the first transparent AR headset marketed and sold to consumers. The headset is powered by a tethered waist-mounted compute pack and came with a single tracked controller, though it got hand tracking support too. Content for the device included avatar chat, a floating web browser, a Wayfair app for seeing how furniture might look in your room, two games made by Insomniac Games, and a Spotify background app.

But Magic Leap 1's eye-watering $2300 price and the limitations of transparent optics (even today) meant it reportedly fell significantly short of sales expectations. Transparent AR currently provides a much smaller field of view than the opaque display systems of VR-style headsets, despite costing significantly more. And Magic Leap 1's form factor wasn't suitable for outdoor use, so it didn't provide the out-of-home functionality AR glasses promise to one day like on-foot navigation, translation, and contextual information. The Information reported that Magic Leap's founder, the CEO at the time, originally expected it to sell over one million units in the first year. In reality it reportedly sold just 6000 units in the first six months.

The "vast majority of battery-powered and hybrid cars" don't have a spare tire, reports the Los Angeles Times.

Honda told one complaining customer that "if the vehicle is in an accident, the spare tire can cause damage to the electric battery which could cause a failure in the battery." But according to the Times, "car design experts said that explanation was plausible but far-fetched." There's a simpler explanation for the move away from spare tires: They're too big and heavy, and people don't really need them anymore... Car manufacturers have been ridding their sedans and smaller SUVs of full-sized spares for some time. In 2018, Consumer Reports said, 60% of the vehicles it had tested over the previous five years came with small-sized temporary tires ("doughnuts"), and only 10% came with full-sized spares... The best-selling models of electric sedans and SUVs — Teslas, the Chevy Bolt, the Volkswagen ID.4, the Ford Mustang Mach-E, the Hyundai Ioniq 5, the BMW i4 and the Mercedes EQS — have no spare of any kind, even if they come with a premium price tag. Ditto for hybrids; the Toyota Prius, for example, hasn't included a spare since 2016.

That's not because people magically stopped having flat tires. U.S. drivers suffer 94 million flat tires a year, according to LookupAPlate.com, a site that collects reports about bad drivers... Finding space for a spare is particularly challenging for a car powered by something other than gasoline, designers say. "Pushing the range of EVs requires batteries, electrical systems control units or hydrogen tanks to encroach into the traditional places that spare tires are found: under the trunk floor," said Geoff Wardle, executive director of transportation systems and design at the ArtCenter College of Design. The space crunch is worse for hybrids, which require room for both a battery system and an internal combustion engine, said Scott Grasman, dean of the College of Engineering at Kettering University in Flint, Mich.
The extra weight always made it a little harder to meet fuel efficiency requirements — but spare tires also increase manufacturing costs, the article notes. "And tires for an EV may be more expensive than those for a gas-powered vehicle of the same size. That's because EVs tend to be heavier than their gas-fueled counterparts, so they require sturdier tires. And with comparatively quiet engines, they need tires that don't generate as much road noise."

But Gil Tal, director of the Electric Vehicle Research Center at UC Davis, also pointed out to the Times that today's tires are just much better and more durable than they used to be: And because federal regulations require new cars to have tire pressure indicators, he said, drivers are alerted as soon as their tires need air. "In most cases, flat tires ... are the outcome of long low-pressure driving," he said. "And if you drive a modern car, it will tell you [that] you have low pressure long before you get into the catastrophic failure" of a flat.
So what are car manufacturers doing now? According to the article...

• Some manufacturers swap in inflatable spares that take up just a third of the space.

• Some cars ship with puncture kits since, the article points out, many people don't know how to change a tire anyways, and will probably just call a tow truck. "For these drivers, carmakers may safely assume that a can of Fix-a-Flat will be more useful..." (Others like Tesla and GM offer roadside assistance programs.)

Some car manufacturers are also using self-sealing or run-flat tires — but Wardle tells the Times these are "good if it is just a puncture from a nail but useless if you hit a pothole and split the rim and sidewall."

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Measuring, tracking, and benchmarking developer productivity has long been considered a black box. It doesn't have to be that way." So begins global management consulting firm McKinsey in Yes, You Can Measure Software Developer Productivity... "Compared with other critical business functions such as sales or customer operations, software development is perennially undermeasured. The long-held belief by many in tech is that it's not possible to do it correctly—and that, in any case, only trained engineers are knowledgeable enough to assess the performance of their peers.

"Yet that status quo is no longer sustainable."

"All C-suite leaders who are not engineers or who have been in management for a long time will need a primer on the software development process and how it is evolving," McKinsey advises companies starting on a developer productivity initiative. "Assess your systems. Because developer productivity has not typically been measured at the level needed to identify improvement opportunities, most companies' tech stacks will require potentially extensive reconfiguration. For example, to measure test coverage (the extent to which areas of code have been adequately tested), a development team needs to equip their codebase with a tool that can track code executed during a test run."

Before getting your hopes up too high over McKinsey's 2023 developer productivity silver bullet suggestions, consider that Googling to "find a tool that can track code executed during a test run" will lead you back to COBOL test coverage tools from the 80's that offered this kind of capability and 40+ year-old papers that offered similar advice (1, 2, 3). A cynic might also suggest considering McKinsey's track record, which has had some notable misses.

America's teens hate Android phones, according to a new article from the Wall Street Journal: Melissa Jones, a former teacher in Lebanon, Ind., observes that, among students, it's considered most important to own a new, up-to-date phone. And judging by the copious TikTok content that pits users of the two operating systems against each other — with Android most frequently the butt of the joke — many teens associate Androids with older technology, and older people, no matter how new the phone actually is.

"You're telling me in 2023, you still have a 'Droid?" says 20-year-old online creator Abdoul Chamberlain during a video posted in April. "You gotta be at least 50 years old." The video goes on to say that only parents have Androids, and despite the persistent claims from Android users that features like the cameras or battery life are better on the Android than the iPhone, Chamberlain refuses to get one. Other videos more somberly describe the experience of showing up to high school with an Android phone and being called "broke" or "medieval" by the poster's peers. Still more describe the feeling of being the lone Android user in a group chat of iPhone owners, shamed by texts which, when rendered in Apple's proprietary iMessage platform, appear in a revelatory bright green rather than the cool blue of messages sent between Apple devices.

Apple holds 57% of the phones market versus Android's 42% in the U.S., according to web traffic analysis site Statcounter. The data skews worse for Android when narrowed down to teenagers. According to a survey of 7,100 American teens last year conducted by investment bank Piper Sandler, 87% of teens currently have an iPhone, and 87% plan on sticking with the brand for their next phone.

But the stigma regarding Android phones is mostly an American phenomenon, at least to the degree to which it affects purchase habits. Worldwide, per the same Statcounter report, Androids represent the significant majority of all smartphones, holding a 71% share of sales compared with Apple's 28%.
Two years ago someone asked Reddit's "Ask Teens" forum, do teenagers really hate Android phones? But the responses were a lot more balanced.

"No," replied one (presumably teenaged) Reddit user. "Apple fanboys are just obnoxious, probably because they're knowingly getting scammed."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Home buyers, sellers, real estate agents, and listing websites throughout the US have been stymied for five days by a cyberattack on a California company that provides a crucial online service used to track home listings. The attack, which commenced last Wednesday, hit Rapottoni, a software and services provider that supplies Multiple Listing Services to regional real estate groups nationwide. Better known as MLS, it provides instant access to data on which homes are coming to the market, purchase offers, and sales of listed homes. MLS has become essential for connecting buyers to sellers and to the agents and listing websites serving them.

"If you're an avid online refresher on any real estate website, you may have noticed a real nosedive in activity the last couple of days," Peg King, a realty agent in California's Sonoma County, wrote in an email newsletter she sent clients on Friday. "Real estate MLS systems across the country have been unusable since Wednesday after a massive cyberattack against major MLS provider, Rapattoni Corporation. This means that real estate markets (like ours!) can't list new homes, change prices, mark homes as pending/contingent/sold, or list open houses."

While Rapattoni has referred to the incident as a cyberattack, it has been widely reported that the event is a ransomware attack, in which criminals gain unauthorized access to a victim's network, encrypt or download crucial data and demand payment in exchange for decrypting the data or promising not to publish it. Rapattoni has so far not said publicly what sort of attack shut it down or other details. Rapattoni has yet to say whether personal information has been compromised. [...] Not all regional listing services are affected because some use data vendors other than Rapattoni. The damage the outage is causing to agents, buyers, renters, and sellers could get worse unless services are restored in the next few days. On Sunday, Rapattoni wrote: "We are continuing to investigate the nature and scope of the cyberattack that has caused a system outage and we are working diligently to get systems restored as soon as possible. All technical resources at our disposal are continuing to work around the clock through the weekend until this matter is resolved. We still do not have an ETA at this time, but we will continue to update you and keep you informed of our efforts."

The New York Times points out that so-called "shadow libraries," like Library Genesis, Z-Library or Bibliotik, "are obscure repositories storing millions of titles, in many cases without permission — and are often used as A.I. training data." A.I. companies have acknowledged in research papers that they rely on shadow libraries. OpenAI's GPT-1 was trained on BookCorpus, which has over 7,000 unpublished titles scraped from the self-publishing platform Smashwords. To train GPT-3, OpenAI said that about 16 percent of the data it used came from two "internet-based books corpora" that it called "Books1" and "Books2." According to a lawsuit by the comedian Sarah Silverman and two other authors against OpenAI, Books2 is most likely a "flagrantly illegal" shadow library.

These sites have been under scrutiny for some time. The Authors Guild, which organized the authors' open letter to tech executives, cited studies in 2016 and 2017 that suggested text piracy depressed legitimate book sales by as much as 14 percent.

Efforts to shut down these sites have floundered. Last year, the F.B.I., with help from the Authors Guild, charged two people accused of running Z-Library with copyright infringement, fraud and money laundering. But afterward, some of these sites were moved to the dark web and torrent sites, making it harder to trace them. And because many of these sites are run outside the United States and anonymously, actually punishing the operators is a tall task.

Tech companies are becoming more tight-lipped about the data used to train their systems.

"While some states have taken steps to protect cell phone information, Massachusetts could become the first state to outright ban the sale of location data from cell phones," reports WBUR: Data brokers are able to buy and sell cell phone location data to anyone with a credit card without many restrictions. "There's very little in terms of law that prevents companies from doing this, as long as they at least include somewhere in their privacy policies that this is something that they're doing," said Andrew Sellars, a Boston University law professor and director of the Technology Law Clinic. Sellars said that there have been recent updates to operating systems that can alert users when their data is being tracked or obscure the specificity of the users' location, but overall there's little protection for buying and selling location data.

Can law enforcement agencies buy cell phone data? Yes. Sellars says that under the current law, law enforcement can circumvent obtaining a warrant to get data by buying data directly from brokers. "The Electronic Privacy Information Center has done some studies on this recently and shown that there's been a growing market of consumer location data that's handled by data brokers being bought by law enforcement at all different levels: federal, state, and local law enforcement," said Sellars...

The bill provides a defined scope of purpose in which companies can collect and use a customer's location data. Under the legislation, companies would only be allowed to use location data to provide a product or service that a consumer wants. "For example, if you are ordering food on a food app and it's using your location to know where to deliver the food, that would be a permissible use," said Sellars. "But aside from that, you are essentially prohibited from doing anything else with the data."
Earlier this week WBUR noted that the Massachusetts bill is "pending" before a state-government committee, "which has not scheduled a hearing on it."

The company behind Flipper Zero expects $80 million in sales this year, which ZDNet estimates at around 500,000 unit sales.

In its Kickstarter days the company sold almost $5 million as preorders, remembers TechCrunch, and the company claims it sold $25 million worth of the devices last year: So what are they selling? Flipper Zero is a "portable gamified multi-tool" aimed at everyone with an interest in cybersecurity, whether as a penetration tester, curious nerd or student — or with more nefarious purposes. The tool includes a bunch of ways to manipulate the world around you, including wireless devices (think garage openers), RFID card systems, remote keyless systems, key fobs, entry to barriers, etc. Basically, you can program it to emulate a bunch of different lock systems.

The system really works, too — I'm not much of a hacker, but I've been able to open garages, activate elevators and open other locking systems that should be way beyond my hacking skill level. On the one hand, it's an interesting toy to experiment with, which highlights how insecure much of the world around us actually is. On the other hand, I'm curious if it's a great idea to have 300,000+ hacking devices out in the wild that make it easy to capture car key signals and gate openers and then use them to open said apertures.
The company points out that their firmware is open source, and can be inspected by anyone.

ZDNet calls it "incredibly user-friendly" and "a fantastic educational tool and a stepping stone to get people — young and old — into cybersecurity," with "a very active community of users that are constantly finding new things to do with it". (Even third-party operating systems are available).

"Instead of looking like some scary hacking tool, all black and bristling with antennas, it looks like a kid's toy, all plastic and brightly colored," writes ZDNet. "It reminds me of Tamagotchis..."

Thanks to Slashdot reader ZipNada for suggesting the article.