Slashdot

Syndicate content Slashdot
News for nerds, stuff that matters
Updated: 52 min 35 sec ago

Bankruptcy Took Down the Redbox Machine. If Only Someone Could Take Them Away.

Thu, 10/10/2024 - 18:50
Retailers across the U.S. are grappling with the aftermath of Redbox's bankruptcy, tasked with removing 24,000 abandoned DVD-dispensing machines. CVS, Walgreens, Walmart, and others are facing logistical challenges and potential safety hazards, according to WSJ. The 890-pound kiosks, often hardwired into stores' electrical systems, require specialized removal. Further reading: Redbox App Axed, Dashing People's Hopes of Keeping Purchased Content.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Categories: Geeky Stuff

Intel Unveils Arrow Lake Desktop Processors, Promising Power Efficiency Gains

Thu, 10/10/2024 - 18:14
Intel has announced its new Arrow Lake desktop processors, marking a significant shift in the company's approach to chip design and power efficiency. The Core Ultra 200S series, set to launch on October 24, 2024, introduces a disaggregated architecture manufactured using TSMC's advanced nodes. The flagship Core Ultra 9 285K boasts 24 cores (8 performance, 16 efficiency) and can boost up to 5.7 GHz, priced at $589. Intel claims the new chips offer comparable performance to their predecessors while consuming significantly less power, with reductions of up to 136 watts in some gaming scenarios. Arrow Lake utilizes a tiled design, combining compute, GPU, SoC, and I/O components manufactured by TSMC and packaged using Intel's Foveros technology. The compute tile is built on TSMC's N3B process, while the GPU tile uses TSMC's N5P, and the I/O and SoC tiles are on TSMC's N6. Intel's Roger Chandler stated, "Arrow Lake picks up the mantle of Raptor Lake's top-end gaming performance and delivers parity performance at about half the power." Intel acknowledges that gaming performance may lag slightly behind the previous generation, with a 5% deficit in some benchmarks compared to the Core i9-14900K. The company is positioning Arrow Lake as a balanced solution, emphasizing power efficiency and content creation capabilities. The new processors require a new LGA 1851 socket and Z890 chipset, necessitating motherboard upgrades. Memory support extends to DDR5-6400, with XMP profiles potentially reaching DDR5-8000.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Categories: Geeky Stuff

'Automattic is Doing Open Source Dirty,' Ruby on Rails Creator Says

Thu, 10/10/2024 - 17:24
David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails and co-founder and chief technology officer of Basecamp-maker 37signals, has criticized Automattic's demand for 8% of vendor WP Engine's revenues as a violation of open source principles and the GPL license. He argues this, among other things, undermines the clarity and certainty of open source licensing, threatening its integrity beyond WordPress. He writes: Ruby on Rails, the open-source web framework I created, has been used to create businesses worth hundreds of billions of dollars combined. Some of those businesses express their gratitude and self-interest by supporting the framework with dedicated developers, membership of The Rails Foundation, or conference sponsorships. But many also do not! And that is absolutely their right, even if it occasionally irks a little. That's the deal. That's open source. I give you a gift of code, you accept the terms of the license. There cannot be a second set of shadow obligations that might suddenly apply, if you strike it rich using the software. Then the license is meaningless, the clarity all muddled, and certainty lost. Look, Automattic can change their license away from the GPL any time they wish. The new license will only apply to new code, though, and WP Engine, or anyone else, are eligible to fork the project. That's what happened with Redis after Redis Labs dropped their BSD license and went with a commercial source-available alternative. Valkey was forked from the last free Redis version, and now that's where anyone interested in an open-source Redis implementation is likely to go. But I suspect Automattic wants to have their cake and eat it too. They want to retain WordPress' shine of open source, but also be able to extract their pound of flesh from any competitor that might appear, whenever they see fit. Screw that.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Categories: Geeky Stuff

Porch Pirates Are Stealing AT&T iPhones Delivered by FedEx

Thu, 10/10/2024 - 16:47
Porch pirates across the country for months have been snatching FedEx packages that contain AT&T iPhones -- within minutes or even seconds of delivery. From a report: The key to these swift crimes, investigators say: The thieves are armed with tracking numbers. Another factor that makes packages from AT&T particularly vulnerable is that AT&T typically doesn't require signature on delivery. Doorbell camera videos show the thefts in New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, Michigan, Georgia, Florida and Texas. The details are similar: A FedEx driver drops off a box with an iPhone from AT&T. Then a person walks up -- sometimes wearing an Amazon delivery vest -- and plucks the package off the front step. The heist can be so quick that in some videos, the FedEx driver and thief cross paths. "They know what's getting delivered and the location," said Detective Lt. Matt Arsenault from the Gardner Police Department in Massachusetts, which is investigating several recent thefts. "They meet the delivery driver at the front door and take it." Since the pandemic, parcel carriers have reported a rise in porch thefts as workers have returned to offices and fewer people are home during the day to receive packages. Now, a spate of thefts that began a few months ago is targeting FedEx deliveries for AT&T. The two companies said they were working with law enforcement to investigate, and declined to disclose how many such packages have been stolen.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Categories: Geeky Stuff

FEMA Adds Misinformation To Its List of Disasters To Clean Up

Thu, 10/10/2024 - 16:00
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is fighting misinformation on top of a major storm cleanup in Florida as Hurricane Milton rapidly intensifies just after Hurricane Helene rocked the state. From a report: FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell told reporters on a call Tuesday that misinformation around the storms is "absolutely the worst I have ever seen," according to Politico. FEMA posted a rumor response page about the hurricane, and though it's not the first time it's taken that kind of approach, Criswell said, "I anticipated some of this, but not to the extent that we're seeing." FEMA's rumor response page includes fact-checks to claims made by former President Donald Trump, like that the agency will only provide $750 to disaster survivors. FEMA says that's just the amount provided quickly through "Serious Needs Assistance" for food and emergency supplies, but survivors could still be eligible for other types of funds, too. Other fact-checks include debunking the false claim that FEMA disaster response resources were diverted to border issues. FEMA says "Disaster Relief Fund money has not been diverted to other, non-disaster related efforts."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Categories: Geeky Stuff

Chinese Hack of US ISPs Show Why Apple Is Right About Backdoors

Thu, 10/10/2024 - 12:00
Alypius shares a report from 9to5Mac: It was revealed this weekend that Chinese hackers managed to access systems run by three of the largest internet service providers (ISPs) in the US. What's notable about the attack is that it compromised security backdoors deliberately created to allow for wiretaps by US law enforcement. [...] Apple famously refused the FBI's request to create a backdoor into iPhones to help access devices used by shooters in San Bernardino and Pensacola. The FBI was subsequently successful in accessing all the iPhones concerned without the assistance it sought. Our arguments against such backdoors predate both cases, when Apple spoke out on the issue in the wake of terrorist attacks in Paris more than a decade ago: "Apple is absolutely right to say that the moment you build in a backdoor for use by governments, it will only be a matter of time before hackers figure it out. You cannot have an encryption system which is only a little bit insecure any more than you can be a little bit pregnant. Encryption systems are either secure or they're not -- and if they're not then it's a question of when, rather than if, others are able to exploit the vulnerability." This latest case perfectly illustrates the point. The law required ISPs to create backdoors that could be used for wiretaps by US law enforcement, and hackers have now found and accessed them. Exactly the same would be true if Apple created backdoors into iPhones.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Categories: Geeky Stuff

Rises In Life Expectancy Have Slowed Dramatically, Analysis Finds

Thu, 10/10/2024 - 09:00
The rapid increases in life expectancy seen in the 20th century have slowed significantly, according to a new analysis published in the journal Nature. The Guardian reports: According to the study, children born recently in regions with the oldest people are far from likely to become centenarians. At best, the researchers predict 15% of females and 5% of males in the oldest-living areas will reach 100 this century. "If you're planning for retirement, it's probably not a good idea to assume you're going to make it to 100," said Jay Olshansky, professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "You'd probably have to work for at least 10 years longer than you'd think. And you want to enjoy the last phase of your life, you don't necessarily want to spend it working to save for time you're not going to experience." Advances in public health and medicine sparked a longevity revolution in the 20th century. In the previous 2,000 years, life expectancy crept up, on average, one year every century or two. In the 20th century, average life expectancy rocketed, with people gaining an extra three years every decade. For the latest study, Olshansky delved into national statistics from the US and nine regions with the highest life expectancies, focusing on 1990 to 2019, before the Covid pandemic struck. The data from Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Australia, France, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden, and Spain showed that rises in life expectancy had slowed dramatically. In the US, life expectancy fell [T]he researchers describe how on average, life expectancy in the longest-living regions rose only 6.5 years between 1990 and 2019. They predict that girls born recently in the regions have only a 5.3% chance of reaching 100 years old, while boys have a 1.8% chance. "In the modern era we have, through public health and medicine, manufactured decades of life that otherwise would not exist," Olshansky said. "These gains must slow down. The longevity game we're playing today is different to the longevity game we played a century ago when we were saving infants and children and women of child-bearing age and the gains in life expectancy were large. Now the gains are small because we're saving people in their 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s." Olshansky said it would take radical new treatments that slow ageing, the greatest risk factor for many diseases, to achieve another longevity revolution. Research in the field is afoot with a dozen or so drugs shown to increase the lifespan of mice.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Categories: Geeky Stuff

Google Identifies Low Noise 'Phase Transition' In Its Quantum Processor

Thu, 10/10/2024 - 05:30
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Back in 2019, Google made waves by claiming it had achieved what has been called "quantum supremacy" -- the ability of a quantum computer to perform operations that would take a wildly impractical amount of time to simulate on standard computing hardware. That claim proved to be controversial, in that the operations were little more than a benchmark that involved getting the quantum computer to behave like a quantum computer; separately, improved ideas about how to perform the simulation on a supercomputer cut the time required down significantly. But Google is back with a new exploration of the benchmark, described in a paper published in Nature on Wednesday. It uses the benchmark to identify what it calls a phase transition in the performance of its quantum processor and uses it to identify conditions where the processor can operate with low noise. Taking advantage of that, they again show that, even giving classical hardware every potential advantage, it would take a supercomputer a dozen years to simulate things.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Categories: Geeky Stuff

DIY Photographer Builds Full-Frame Camera, Open-Sources the Project

Thu, 10/10/2024 - 04:10
Boston-based engineer and photographer Wenting Zhang built his own full-frame camera and open-sourced the project on GitLab for anyone else to build upon. The camera, named Sitina S1, features a 10MP CCD sensor, custom electronics, and a 3D-printed body. Digital Photography Review reports: Zhang says he started the project in 2017, and it's not finished yet. "Engineers are usually bad at estimating how long things will take. I am probably particularly bad at that. I expected this project to be challenging, so it would take a bit longer, like probably one year. Turned out my estimation was off," he says. He makes clear to point out that this is a hobby project, purely for fun, and that his camera isn't going to achieve the level of image quality found in commercially available products from established companies. Despite that, his project provides a fascinating look into what's involved in building a camera from the ground up. Although CMOS has become the dominant sensor technology in consumer cameras, owing to factors like speed, lower power consumption and cost, Zhang's camera is built around a 10MP Kodak KAI-11000CM CCD sensor with a global electronic shutter, which he selected for a rather pragmatic reason: it was easy to source. "Most manufacturers (like Sony) aren't going to just sell a sensor to a random hobbyist, so I have to buy whatever is available on eBay. This 10MP CCD turned out to be available," he explains. The choice of sensor has a useful benefit. As he explains in one of his videos, designing and building a mechanical shutter is complicated and beyond his area of expertise, so his DIY design is based on using an electronic shutter. For similar reasons, he chose to use an LCD screen as a viewfinder rather than a prism-based optical design, resulting in a mirrorless camera. Zhang wanted his design to be compatible with existing lenses. His mirrorless design, with a short flange distance, provided a great deal of flexibility to adapt different lenses to the camera, and he's currently using E-mount with active electrical contacts. And that's just the start. Zhang also needed to integrate a CCD signal processor with an ADC (analog to digital converter), a CPU, battery, an LCD screen and buttons. He also designed and built his own circuit board with a power-only USB port, flash sync terminal, power button and SD card slot, and create the software and user interface to tie it all together. Finally, everything fits inside a 3D-printed enclosure that, to my eye, looks rather attractive.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Categories: Geeky Stuff

Kim Dotcom Fends Off Arrest Before Conspiracy Theories and Reality Collide

Thu, 10/10/2024 - 03:30
TorrentFreak's Andy Maxwell reports: In August, New Zealand's Justice Minister authorized Kim Dotcom's immediate arrest and extradition. Dotcom's response to his followers on X was simple: "I'm not leaving." Another post mid-September -- "we are very close to disaster" -- led to Dotcom disappearing for three weeks. On his return, Dotcom said X had suspended his account, based on an extremely serious allegation. After accusing Elon Musk of failing to help, yesterday Dotcom warned that a Trump loss would see Musk indicted and "fighting for his life." Dotcom has a plan to avoid extradition; chaos like this provides the fuel. The details of Dotcom's "plan" to stay in New Zealand are yet to be revealed. Given Dotcom's history, exhausting the judiciary with every possible avenue of appeal is pretty much guaranteed, no matter how unlikely the prospects of success. At the same time, it's likely that Dotcom will use social media to preach to the existing choir. He will also try to appeal to those who loathe him, and those who merely hate him, by focusing on a common grievance. "People keep suggesting that I should leave this corrupt US colony like a fugitive on the run. Hell no," he told 1.7 million X followers recently. "Corrupt US colony" and the interchangeable "obedient" variant are clearly derogatory, catering to theories of joint complicity and sniveling weakness. This rhetoric has been visible on Dotcom's social media accounts for some time, but the main theme is Dotcom's belligerent, out-of-the-blue support for Russia's invasion of Ukraine. [...] Some people believe that Dotcom genuinely supports Russia and, with his quotes regularly appearing on state-run news channels, arguing otherwise is a pretty tough ask. A different assessment starts with the things Dotcom values most -- his family, his wealth, and his freedom -- and applies that to a reputation of doing whatever it takes to protect and maintain those three, non-negotiable aspects of his life. Right now, his best chance is to tilt the chess board via a change at the White House, and then carefully exploit a change in policy. Dotcom's colleagues took a plea deal from the U.S. and New Zealand that Dotcom insists he would never accept; certainly not if Biden was in power. A Donald Trump win, on the other hand, would introduce an administration Dotcom could be seen to negotiate with, on previously unthinkable terms, without losing face. Previous reluctance to admit any wrongdoing could suddenly seem trivial after the prevention of World War 3. [Since 2022, Dotcom supported narratives more closely aligned with those of the Kremlin, in particular the claim that United States policy is the root cause of the current conflict. The amplification of anti-Ukraine rumors in the United States, strategically links alleged U.S. policy failures to billions of dollars in military aid, all at taxpayers' expense. This toxic mix, Dotcom insists, heralds the collapse of the dollar, the dismantling of the "US Empire," and ultimately a global human catastrophe; World War 3, no holds barred.]

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Categories: Geeky Stuff

Turkey Blocks Discord

Thu, 10/10/2024 - 02:50
Turkey has blocked access to Discord after the messaging platform refused to share potentially illegal information with authorities. Reuters reports: Justice minister Yilmaz Tunc said an Ankara court decided to block access to Discord from Turkey due to sufficient suspicion that crimes of "child sexual abuse and obscenity" had been committed by some using the platform. The block comes after public outrage in Turkey caused by the murder of two women by a 19-year-old man in Istanbul this month. Content on social media showed Discord users subsequently praising the killing. Transport and infrastructure minister Abdulkadir Uraloglu said the nature of the Discord platform made it difficult for authorities to monitor and intervene when illegal or criminal content is shared. "Security personnel cannot go through the content. We can only intervene when users complain to us about content shared there," he told reporters in parliament. "Since Discord refuses to share its own information, including IP addresses and content, with our security units, we were forced to block access." Russia also recently blocked Discord for violating Russian law, after previously fining the company for failing to remove banned content.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Categories: Geeky Stuff

Open-Source AI Definition Finally Gets Its First Release Candidate

Thu, 10/10/2024 - 02:10
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Getting open-source and artificial intelligence (AI) on the same page isn't easy. Just ask the Open Source Initiative (OSI). The OSI, the open-source definition steward organization, has been working on creating an open-source artificial intelligence definition for two years now. The group has been making progress, though. Its Open Source AI Definition has now released its first release candidate, RC1. The latest definition aims to clarify the often contentious discussions surrounding open-source AI. It specifies four fundamental freedoms that an AI system must grant to be considered open source: the ability to use the system for any purpose without permission, to study how it works, to modify it for any purpose, and to share it with or without modifications. So far, so good. However, the OSI has opted for a compromise regarding training data. Recognizing it's not easy to share full datasets, the current definition requires "sufficiently detailed information about the data used to train the system" rather than the full dataset itself. This approach aims to balance transparency with practical and legal considerations. That last phrase is proving difficult for some people to swallow. From their perspective, if all the data isn't open, then AI large language models (LLM) based on such data can't be open-source. The OSI summarized these arguments as follows: "Some people believe that full, unfettered access to all training data (with no distinction of its kind) is paramount, arguing that anything less would compromise full reproducibility of AI systems, transparency, and security. This approach would relegate Open-Source AI to a niche of AI trainable only on open data." The OSI acknowledges that the definition of open-source AI isn't final and may need significant rewrites, but the focus is now on fixing bugs and improving documentation. The final version of the Open Source AI Definition is scheduled for release at the All Things Open conference on October 28, 2024.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Categories: Geeky Stuff

OpenBSD 7.6 Released

Thu, 10/10/2024 - 01:30
Phoronix's Michael Larabel reports: OpenBSD 7.6 is out this evening as another major step forward for this BSD operating system with enhanced hardware support, security improvements, updating various user-space software, and enabling other kernel enhancements. There are a ton of changes to find with the just-released OpenBSD 7.6. Some of the new OpenBSD 7.6 features include: - OpenBSD 7.6 provides initial support for Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite (X1E80100) SoCs. The 7.6 release also has initial Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge boot support in ACPI mode with OpenBSD 7.6. - ARM64 has additional CPU security mitigations with Spectre-V4 now in place on ARM64 and adding Spectre-BHB for Cortex-A57 cores. - OpenBSD 7.6 on RISC-V now supports the Milk-V Pioneer board. - OpenBSD 7.6 on AMD64 has finally implemented support for AVX-512. - Various SMP kernel improvements. You can view the full list of features and download the OpenBSD 7.6 release via OpenBSD.org.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Categories: Geeky Stuff

Internet Archive Suffers 'Catastrophic' Breach Impacting 31 Million Users

Thu, 10/10/2024 - 00:50
BleepingComputer's Lawrence Abrams: Internet Archive's "The Wayback Machine" has suffered a data breach after a threat actor compromised the website and stole a user authentication database containing 31 million unique records. News of the breach began circulating Wednesday afternoon after visitors to archive.org began seeing a JavaScript alert created by the hacker, stating that the Internet Archive was breached. "Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!," reads a JavaScript alert shown on the compromised archive.org site. The text "HIBP" refers to is the Have I Been Pwned data breach notification service created by Troy Hunt, with whom threat actors commonly share stolen data to be added to the service. Hunt told BleepingComputer that the threat actor shared the Internet Archive's authentication database nine days ago and it is a 6.4GB SQL file named "ia_users.sql." The database contains authentication information for registered members, including their email addresses, screen names, password change timestamps, Bcrypt-hashed passwords, and other internal data. Hunt says there are 31 million unique email addresses in the database, with many subscribed to the HIBP data breach notification service. The data will soon be added to HIBP, allowing users to enter their email and confirm if their data was exposed in this breach.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Categories: Geeky Stuff

Bankrupt Fisker Unable To Port EV Data, Risking Multi-Million Dollar Fleet Deal

Thu, 10/10/2024 - 00:10
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Fisker's Chapter 11 bankruptcy has hit a major snag, as the company buying the startup's remaining fleet of electric SUVs says it might not complete the purchase because of a surprising technical issue. The buyer, a New York-area leasing company called American Lease, says in a new filing that Fisker now believes there is no way to transfer the information connected to each SUV to a new server not owned by the bankrupt EV startup. Since American Lease needs that information to operate the vehicles after Fisker is dissolved, the leasing company has filed an emergency objection to the startup's liquidation plan. Fisker was expected to have that plan confirmed in bankruptcy court as early as this Wednesday. American Lease has already handed over "tens of millions of dollars" after the purchase agreement of the 3,000-plus Ocean SUVs was approved in July. These funds have been crucial because Fisker was using them to pay for the bankruptcy process. Fisker needed that money to keep itself alive long enough to settle its debts and also prepare to liquidate what it says is around $1 billion in assets that were, until recently, under control of an Austrian subsidiary that was going through its own insolvency process. [...] American Lease says in its filing that Fisker first brought up the possibility that it wouldn't be able to transfer the information to a new server on Friday, October 4, at 8 p.m. ET. And it says that this week, Fisker informed American Lease that it won't be possible at all. "[American Lease] cannot overstate the significance of this unwelcome news, conveyed to it only after it has paid [Fisker] tens of millions of dollars under the Purchase Agreement," the leasing company's lawyers write in the filing. "It is unclear at the present time what, if anything, Debtor representatives have known about the impossibility or impracticability of implementing Porting of the Purchased Vehicles, and when they learned or otherwise knew of that critical information." American Lease is asking to delay Wednesday's hearing and be allowed to perform "expedited and targeted discovery" of Fisker and its representatives to find out more about when Fisker learned of this problem.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Categories: Geeky Stuff

80% of Software Engineers Must Upskill For AI Era By 2027, Gartner Warns

Wed, 09/10/2024 - 23:30
80% of software engineers will need to upskill by 2027 to keep pace with generative AI's growing demands, according to Gartner. The consultancy predicts AI will transform the industry in three phases. Initially, AI tools will boost productivity, particularly for senior developers. Subsequently, "AI-native software engineering" will emerge, with most code generated by AI. Long-term, AI engineering will rise as enterprise adoption increases, requiring a new breed of professionals skilled in software engineering, data science, and machine learning.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Categories: Geeky Stuff

After Winning Nobel Prize, Geoffrey Hinton Said He Was Proud Ilya Sutskever 'Fired Sam Altman'

Wed, 09/10/2024 - 22:50
An anonymous reader shares a report: Geoffrey Hinton accepted a Nobel Prize this week, recognizing the foundational work on artificial neural networks that earned him the nickname "godfather of AI." In a speech Tuesday, Professor Hinton praised one student -- alluding to OpenAI's former Chief Scientist, Ilya Sutskever -- for revolting against OpenAI's CEO. "I was particularly fortunate to have many very clever students -- much cleverer than me -- who actually made things work," said Hinton. "They've gone on to do great things. I'm particularly proud of the fact that one of my students fired Sam Altman."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Categories: Geeky Stuff

How the US Lost the Solar Power Race To China

Wed, 09/10/2024 - 22:11
An anonymous reader shares a report: Washington blames China's dominance of the solar industry on what are routinely dubbed "unfair trade practices." But that's just a comforting myth. China's edge doesn't come from a conspiratorial plot hatched by an authoritarian government. It hasn't been driven by state-owned manufacturers, subsidized loans to factories, tariffs on imported modules or theft of foreign technological expertise. Instead, it's come from private businesses convinced of a bright future, investing aggressively and luring global talent to a booming industry â" exactly the entrepreneurial mix that made the US an industrial powerhouse. The fall of America as a solar superpower is a tragedy of errors where myopic corporate leadership, timid financing, oligopolistic complacency and policy chaos allowed the US and Europe to neglect their own clean-tech industries. That left a yawning gap that was filled by Chinese start-ups, sprouting like saplings in a forest clearing. If rich democracies are playing to win the clean technology revolution, they need to learn the lessons of what went wrong, rather than just comfort themselves with fairy tales. To understand what happened, I visited two places: Hemlock, Michigan, a tiny community of 1,408 people that used to produce about one-quarter of the world's PV-grade polysilicon, and Leshan, China, which is now home to some of the world's biggest polysilicon factories. The similarities and differences between the towns tell the story of how the US won the 20th century's technological battle -- and how it risks losing its way in the decades ahead. [...] Meanwhile, the core questions are often almost impossible to answer. Is Tongwei's cheap electricity from a state-owned utility a form of government subsidy? What about Hemlock's tax credits protecting it from high power prices? Chinese businesses can often get cheap land in industrial parks, something that's often considered a subsidy. But does zoning US land for industrial usage count as a subsidy too? Most countries have tax credits for research and development and compete to lower their corporate tax rates to encourage investment. The factor that determines whether such initiatives are considered statist industrial policy (bad), or building a business-friendly environment (good), is usually whether they're being done by a foreign government, or our own.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Categories: Geeky Stuff

Eating Less Can Lead To a Longer Life: Massive Study in Mice Shows Why

Wed, 09/10/2024 - 21:30
Cutting calorie intake can lead to a leaner body -- and a longer life, an effect often chalked up to the weight loss and metabolic changes caused by consuming less food. Now, one of the biggest studies of dietary restrictions ever conducted in laboratory animals challenges the conventional wisdom about how dietary restriction boosts longevity. From a report: The study, involving nearly 1,000 mice fed low-calorie diets or subjected to regular bouts of fasting, found that such regimens do indeed cause weight loss and related metabolic changes. But other factors -- including immune health, genetics and physiological indicators of resiliency -- seem to better explain the link between cutting calories and increased lifespan. "The metabolic changes are important," says Gary Churchill, a mouse geneticist at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, who co-led the study. "But they don't lead to lifespan extension." To outside investigators, the results drive home the intricate and individualized nature of the body's reaction to caloric restriction. "It's revelatory about the complexity of this intervention," says James Nelson, a biogerontologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio. The study was published today in Nature by Churchill and his co-authors, including scientists at Calico Life Sciences in South San Francisco, California, the anti-ageing focused biotech company that funded the study. Scientists have long known that caloric restriction, a regimen of long-term limits on food intake, lengthens lifespan in laboratory animals. Some studies have shown that intermittent fasting, which involves short bouts of food deprivation, can also increase longevity.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Categories: Geeky Stuff

Bitcoin Creator Suspect Says He is Not Bitcoin Creator Suspect

Wed, 09/10/2024 - 20:54
The man identified as Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto in a new HBO documentary has something to say: Wrong again, world. From a report: In the just-released HBO film on the history of the world's biggest digital currency -- Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery -- documentary filmmaker Cullen Hoback comes to the conclusion that the anonymous creator of Bitcoin was none other than a long-time member of the community and early Bitcoin developer Peter Todd. Todd dismissed the claim in the documentary, released yesterday, and denied it again when asked by The Register. "[Hoback's] evidence for me being Satoshi is the same kind of coincidence-based, circumstantial thinking that fuels conspiracies like QAnon," Todd told us in an email. "Which is ironic, given that [Hoback's] previous big project was a documentary on QAnon. He clearly didn't try to debunk his theories either." Hoback's previous project -- Q: Into the Storm -- aimed to unmask the person behind QAnon, perhaps giving him an interest in uncovering the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. Todd, however, thinks Hoback was just trying to drum up interest in his new film. "I think [Hoback] only included the Satoshi claim as a marketing ploy: he was really creating a documentary about Bitcoin, and needed a hook to get media attention," Todd said. "He picked me to accuse mainly because I was an unlikely candidate, which helped drum up even more attention. I don't think he had any interest in finding the real truth."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Categories: Geeky Stuff