172865956
submission
AmiMoJo writes:
As solar capacity in California continues to grow, the midday dip in net load (or duck curve) is getting lower, presenting both economic and grid stress challenges for grid operators, according to the California Independent System Operator (CAISO).
The duck curve presents two challenges related to increasing solar energy adoption. The first challenge is grid stress. The extreme swing in demand for electricity from conventional power plants from midday to late evenings, when energy demand is still high but solar generation has dropped off, means that conventional power must quickly ramp up electricity production to meet consumer demand.
That rapid ramp up makes it more difficult for grid operators to match grid supply with grid demand in real time. In addition, if more solar power is produced than the grid can use, operators might have to curtail solar power to prevent overgeneration.
The other challenge is economic. The dynamics of the duck curve can challenge the traditional economics of dispatchable power plants because the factors contributing to the curve reduce the amount of time a conventional power plant operates, which results in reduced energy revenues.
172653565
submission
AmiMoJo writes:
Chinese company BYD sold more electric vehicles than Elon Musk's Tesla in the last three months of 2023 as the two battled for top spot in the sector.
BYD said on Monday it had sold a record 526,000 battery-only vehicles in the final quarter of 2023.
It marked the first quarter its battery-only sales have outpaced Tesla's. The US-based firm has seen demand slow as borrowing costs climb.
However, for the whole of 2023, Mr Musk's Tesla still sold more.
On Tuesday, Tesla said it delivered a record 484,500 electric vehicles in the last three months of 2023 and 1.8 million for the year as a whole.
172361037
submission
AmiMoJo writes:
The UK’s most hazardous nuclear site, Sellafield, has been hacked into by cyber groups closely linked to Russia and China, the Guardian can reveal. The astonishing disclosure and its potential effects have been consistently covered up by senior staff at the vast nuclear waste and decommissioning site, the investigation has found. The Guardian has discovered that the authorities do not know exactly when the IT systems were first compromised. But sources said breaches were first detected as far back as 2015, when experts realised sleeper malware – software that can lurk and be used to spy or attack systems – had been embedded in Sellafield’s computer networks.
It is still not known if the malware has been eradicated. It may mean some of Sellafield’s most sensitive activities, such as moving radioactive waste, monitoring for leaks of dangerous material and checking for fires, have been compromised. Sources suggest it is likely foreign hackers have accessed the highest echelons of confidential material at the site, which sprawls across 6 sq km (2 sq miles) on the Cumbrian coast and is one of the most hazardous in the world.
172337067
submission
AmiMoJo writes:
Last month, we got our first true taste of the much-awaited Loongson 3A6000 CPU which is a brand new chip designed to serve China's PC market. In terms of specifications, the Loongson 3A6000 CPU features a quad-core design (4C/8T) and an operating frequency of 2.5 GHz (peak). The CPU uses a 4th Generation Dragon architecture which integrates LA664 cores with support for 128-bit vector processing extended instructions (LSX) and the 256-bit advanced vector processing extended instructions (LASX) along with SMT2.
The performance of the chip was measured within SPEC CPU 2006 and UnixBench benchmarks. Starting with SPEC CPU 2006, we first have the single-core tests where the Loongson 3A6000 CPU offered up to 75% performance uplift over its predecessor, the 3A5000. The chip also ended up very close to the Core i3-10100 while consuming lower power (42W vs 52W). The difference is that the Loongson 3A6000 CPU was running at a clock speed of 2.5 GHz whereas the Core i3-10100 peaked at 4.3 GHz. In multi-core tests, the chip once again showed almost 2x the performance uplift over the 3A5000 predecessor while offering nearly similar performance as the Core i3-10100 (4.3 GHz).
So to make things fair, the Loongson 3A6000 was pitted against the Core i3-10100 and Core i5-14600K at the same 2.5 GHz clock speeds. This allowed the 3A600 to easily surpass the Core i3-10100 CPU with a lead of up to 40% while the chip was also faster than the Core i5-14600K in the integer tests while falling slightly behind in the Floating Point tests.
172272591
submission
AmiMoJo writes:
The ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware operation has taken extortion to a new level by filing a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission complaint against one of their alleged victims for not complying with the four-day rule to disclose a cyberattack. Earlier today, the threat actor listed the software company MeridianLink on their data leak with a threat that they would leak allegedly stolen data unless a ransom is paid in 24 hours. MeridianLink is a publicly traded company that provides digital solutions for financial organizations such as banks, credit unions, and mortgage lenders.
According to DataBreaches.net, the ALPHV ransomware gang said they breached MeridianLink’s network on November 7 and stole company data without encrypting systems. The ransomware actor said that “it appears MeridianLink reached out, but we are yet to receive a message on their end” to negotiate a payment in exchange for not leaking the supposedly stolen data. The alleged lack of response from the company likely prompted the hackers to exert more pressure by sending a complaint to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) about MeridianLink not disclosing a cybersecurity incident that impacted “customer data and operational information.”
172271615
submission
AmiMoJo writes:
Google engineers have published a schedule for eliminating third-party cookies in Chrome. It will be tested on 1% of users from the first quarter of 2024, and then phased out from the third quarter. The original plan was to abolish third-party cookies in 2022 , but due to suspicions of antitrust violations, this was postponed to the end of 2023, and then again to 2024. The abolition of third-party cookies will make it possible to protect privacy-related data such as what sites users visit and what pages they view from advertising companies.
172204485
submission
AmiMoJo writes:
On Wednesday, the company and utility planning to build the first small, modular nuclear plant in the US announced it was cancelling the project. The US has approved a single design for a small, modular nuclear reactor developed by the company NuScale Power. The government's Idaho National Lab was working to help construct the first NuScale installation, the Carbon Free Power Project. Under the plan, the national lab would maintain a few of the first reactors at the site, and a number of nearby utilities would purchase power from the remaining ones.
With the price of renewables dropping precipitously, however, the project's economics have worsened, and backers started pulling out of the project. The final straw came on Wednesday, when NuScale and the primary utility partner, Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, announced that the Carbon Free Power Project no longer had enough additional utility partners, so it was being cancelled. In a statement, the pair accepted that "it appears unlikely that the project will have enough subscription to continue toward deployment."
172190098
submission
AmiMoJo writes:
Europe's Euclid telescope is ready to begin its quest to understand the greatest mysteries in the Universe. Exquisite imagery from the space observatory shows its capabilities to be exceptional. Over the next six years, Euclid will survey a third of the heavens to get some clues about the nature of so-called dark matter and dark energy.
The €1.4bn (£1.2bn) Euclid telescope went into space in July. Since then, engineers have been fine-tuning it. There were some early worries. Initially, Euclid's optics couldn't lock on to stars to take a steady image. This required new software for the telescope's fine guidance sensor. Engineers also found some stray light was polluting pictures when the observatory was pointed in a certain way. But with these issues all now resolved, Euclid is good to go — as evidenced by the release of five sample images on Tuesday.
172150782
submission
AmiMoJo writes:
The Space Age is leaving fingerprints on the stratosphere — which has potential implications for climate, the ozone layer and the continued habitability of Earth. Using tools hitched to the nose cone of their research planes and sampling more than 11 miles above the planet’s surface, researchers have discovered significant amounts of metals in aerosols in the atmosphere, likely from increasingly frequent launches and returns of spacecraft and satellites. That mass of metal is changing atmospheric chemistry in ways that may impact Earth’s atmosphere and ozone layer.
Led by Dan Murphy, an adjunct professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences and a researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the team detected more than 20 elements in ratios that mirror those used in spacecraft alloys. They found that the mass of lithium, aluminium, copper and lead from spacecraft reentry far exceeded those metals found in natural cosmic dust. Nearly 10% of large sulfuric acid particles — the particles that help protect and buffer the ozone layer — contained aluminium and other spacecraft metals.
171890615
submission
AmiMoJo writes:
Heat pumps are more than twice as efficient as fossil fuel heating systems in cold temperatures, research shows. Even at temperatures approaching -30C, heat pumps outperform oil and gas heating systems, according to the research from Oxford University and the Regulatory Assistance Project thinktank. The research, published in the specialist energy research journal Joule, used data from seven field studies in North America, Asia and Europe. It found that at temperatures below zero, heat pumps were between two and three times more efficient than oil and gas heating systems.
Efficiency is important because even when heat pumps use electricity produced from fossil fuels, they require less of them and therefore produce less CO2/pollution.
171866776
submission
AmiMoJo writes:
Huawei is emulating Apple in developing the processors that power its latest smartphone, a breakthrough that will help the Chinese company to reduce its reliance on foreign technology as it confronts US sanctions.
Analysis of the main chip inside the Mate 60 Pro smartphone, which launched at the end of last month and immediately sold out, reveals that Huawei has joined the elite group of Big Tech companies capable of designing their own semiconductors.
Four of the eight central processing units in the Mate 60 Pro’s “system on a chip” (SoC) rely purely on a design by Arm, the British company whose chip architecture powers 99 percent of smartphones.
The other four CPUs are Arm-based but feature Huawei’s own designs and adaptations, according to three people familiar with the Mate’s development and Geekerwan, a Chinese technology testing company that took a closer look at the main chip.
171815106
submission
AmiMoJo writes:
France has ordered Apple to stop selling the iPhone 12 for emitting too much electromagnetic radiation. On Tuesday, the French watchdog which governs radio frequencies also told the tech giant to fix existing phones. The ANFR has advised Apple that if it cannot resolve the issue via a software update, it must recall every iPhone 12 ever sold in the country. France's digital minister Jean-Noel Barrot told French newspaper Le Parisien the decision was due to radiation levels above the acceptable threshold, according to Reuters.
He said the ANFR found the iPhone 12's Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) was above what is legally allowed. "Apple is expected to respond within two weeks," he said. "If they fail to do so, I am prepared to order a recall of all iPhones 12 in circulation. The rule is the same for everyone, including the digital giants."
171773218
submission
AmiMoJo writes:
In November 2022, the password manager service LastPass disclosed a breach in which hackers stole password vaults containing both encrypted and plaintext data for more than 25 million users. Since then, a steady trickle of six-figure cryptocurrency heists targeting security-conscious people throughout the tech industry has led some security experts to conclude that crooks likely have succeeded at cracking open some of the stolen LastPass vaults.
Taylor Monahan is founder and CEO of MetaMask, a popular software cryptocurrency wallet used to interact with the Ethereum blockchain. Since late December 2022, Monahan and other researchers have identified a highly reliable set of clues that they say connect recent thefts targeting more than 150 people, Collectively, these individuals have been robbed of more than $35 million worth of crypto.
171533388
submission
AmiMoJo writes:
In an important ruling a court in China has affirmed the significance of the GNU Public Licence (GPL). On October 8, 2021, the plaintiff Nanjing Mirai High Technology filed a complaint against Jiangsu Yunling Yun Yi Construction Information Technology for copyright infringement. A former employee of Nanjing Mirai took source code with him when he moved to Jiangsu Yunling, and subsequently released a very similar product.
However, Nanjing Mirai had used an open-source library, licenced under GPLv2. Under the terms of the licence, their entire source code that incorporated the library became GPLv2 licenced as well. The defendant successfully argued that Nanjing Mirai was in violation of the terms of the licence by not publishing their code, and that he had the right to a copy of it and to re-use it in any way he saw fit, confirming that the GPLv2 is legally valid and in China.
The judgement (in Chinese) is available online.
171025455
submission
AmiMoJo writes:
A German news outlet sifted through over 23,000 of Tesla’s internal files and found a disturbing trend of brushing off customers complaining about dangerous Autopilot glitches while covering the company’s ass.
The publication Handelsblatt got its hands on the data through an unnamed informant. Handelsblatt confirmed the data’s authenticity with Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology, which found no evidence of doctoring or fabrication in the files. Tesla attempted to stop the publication from using this data in its reporting and even threatened legal action against Handelsblatt. The publication, however, decided this was one of the extraordinary circumstances when reporting on such a data breach would be legal under European Union law.
