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Submission + - Wolves Descend on Finnish Villages After Google Hacked Down 1,300 Acres of trees (futurism.com)

fjo3 writes: Earlier in October, Finnish authorities ordered Google’s affiliate data center developer Tuike Finland Oy to immediately suspend the illegal cutting of some 1,300 acres of forest. The tech giant was given a week to draft a report explaining its actions, which soon became a flashpoint for Europe’s growing outrage over the data center boom.

As the anger grew, reporters descended on the scene — and what they found is a clear-cut example of the AI revolution’s impact on the environment.

New reporting by the Guardian shed fresh light on the impacts of Google’s deforestation. After the 1,300 acres of pristine boreal forests were reduced to tracts of mud and stumps, fauna which once called the woods home has been forced to vacate.

Comment Re:uh no (Score 1) 173

They have? I thought they conquered parts of Ukraine years ago, and the occupants (especially the ones closest to Russian border and away from the fighting) are doing just "fine" (for whatever definition of that word describes living under military occupation).

I'm no fan of Russia or anything they are doing but *genocide* seems inaccuate.

Comment Re: The cutting edge cuts back. (Score 2) 101

They're brilliant at making games. They have their suite of exclusives that people love and will buy the console for. And they keep a consistently high quality bar for those games. Even the worst Mario game was still good. Same for Zelda. Same for Metroid. As long as they keep that the case, and their consoles are reasonably priced they'll sell. Which, combined with cheaper parts, is why they generally made a profit per console rather than a loss.

Xbox and PS don't have that. They used to each have some exclusives- but they've gone away from that road due to the high cost of creating them (Nintendo's focus on gameplay over high end graphics also reduced the cost of making a game). Even the exclusives they do have don't have the reputation for quality- they tend to run hot and cold. And MS in particular has waffled between wanting to push xbox vs PC gaming, reducing the number of exclusives as they launch on PC. It leaves them in a place where there's no driver for their new product other than better graphics quality. And with the economy tightening, that's something that will be dropped first.

Submission + - Trump DHS asked CISA to Secretly Aquire and Hack a Voting Machine (propublica.org)

fahrbot-bot writes: ProPublica (and others) is reporting that a few months into President Donald Trump’s second term, political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) wanted Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to secretly acquire a voting machine and hack it.

In addition, the agency had been directed not to alert the voting machine company if it uncovered flaws, contrary to its standard practices. The request made the CISA employees fear they were being asked to take part in political interference.

“My thought was they could keep it in their back pocket to invalidate any [election] results they don’t like,” one of the former officials said. “This goes against everything CISA represents.” [Or, perhaps do something worse?]

The CISA employees repeatedly told the political appointees that their request was impossible, in part because the agents capable of pulling off such an operation had just been laid off by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative. The appointees eventually stopped pressing CISA.

Comment Re:Achievements (Score 1) 35

It depends on the game/player. Some people are completionists who want to experience the entire game, and achievements help them do that.

Some people don't give a crap about achievements ... but still get a small serotonin boost when Steam pops that "You just got achievement X" message.

But really instead of asking "do lots of gamers want achievements" ... just ask "would Steam and almost all game creators bother with achievements at all (that's a lot of effort across a whole lot of companies) ... if they weren't something a significant number of gamers wanted?"

Comment It's not crazy ... (Score 1) 81

That valuation is not at all a crazy if you think Anthropic has a key new technology, that will be wildly in demand in the future, with a business "moat" to help protect it (eg. a huge % of market share from being the first mover, or a set of government regulations that only it and maybe 1-2 companies can navigate) ...

... and if you think Anthropic still has that, over halfway in to 2026 ... well then actually I guess you are crazy.

Good luck to Anthropic's IPO investors ... they will need it.

Comment This Was Broadcom's Entire Plan (Score 5, Insightful) 90

Let me be clear: Broadcom did not buy VMWare to go into the virtualization business!

They bought them with the following plan:

1. Jack up the prices (by an insane amount) while reducing costs in extreme ways
2. Most customers are large enterprise users: they will change eventually ... but it will take the time, and in the meantime they will pay
3. Eventually everyone leaves VMWare ... but Broadcom (or rather the people behind it) have already pocketed enough from step #2 to pay for acquiring VMWare in the first place, plus a profit
4. VMWare, even with few/no customers, still has tons of assets like real estate: you liquidate all that and now you've made a massive profit over what it cost to buy VMWare

This was not some secret: it's a playbook Broadcom has used on acquisitions before. Maintaining a virtualization company was never their goal: it was to make money fleecing the company's corpse.

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