Slashdot

"Oracle has informed us they won't voluntarily withdraw their trademark on 'JavaScript'." That's the word coming from the company behind Deno, the alternative JavaScript/TypeScript/WebAssembly runtime, which is pursuing a formal cancellation with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. So what happens next? Oracle "will file their Answer, and we'll start discovery to show how 'JavaScript' is widely recognized as a generic term and not controlled by Oracle." Deno's social media posts show a schedule of various court dates that extend through July of 2026, so "The dispute between Oracle and Deno Land could go on for quite a while," reports InfoWorld: Deno Land co-founder Ryan Dahl, creator of both the Deno and Node.js runtimes, said a formal answer from Oracle is expected before February 3, unless Oracle extends the deadline again. "After that, we will begin the process of discovery, which is where the real legal work begins. It will be interesting to see how Oracle argues against our claims — genericide, fraud on the USPTO, and non-use of the mark." The legal process begins with a discovery conference by March 5, with discovery closing by September 1, followed by pretrial disclosure from October 16 to December 15. An optional request for an oral hearing is due by July 8, 2026. Oracle took ownership of JavaScript's trademark in 2009 when it purchased Sun Microsystems, InfoWorld notes. But "Oracle does not control (and has never controlled) any aspect of the specification or how the phrase 'JavaScript' can be used by others," argues an official petition filed by Deno Land Inc. with the United States Patent and Trademark Office: Today, millions of companies, universities, academics, and programmers, including Petitioner, use "JavaScript" daily without any involvement with Oracle. The phrase "JavaScript" does not belong to one corporation. It belongs to the public. JavaScript is the generic name for one of the bedrock languages of modern programming, and, therefore, the Registered Mark must be canceled. An open letter to Oracle discussing the genericness of the phrase "JavaScript," published at https://javascript.tm/, was signed by 14,000+ individuals at the time of this Petition to Cancel, including notable figures such as Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, and the current editors of the JavaScript specification, Michael Ficarra and Shu-yu Guo. There is broad industry and public consensus that the term "JavaScript" is generic. The seven-page petition goes into great detail, reports InfoWorld. "Deno Land also accused Oracle of committing fraud in its trademark renewal efforts in 2019 by submitting screen captures of the website of JavaScript runtime Node.js, even though Node.js was not affiliated with Oracle."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Blue Origin is attempting its very first orbital flight tonight. And they'll also attempt to land their reusable Stage 1 on a drone in the Atlantic ocean. The rocket is fueled on its launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, awaiting ignition. Its three-hour launch window has just opened. And Blue Origin is webcasting it all live on their web page... But whatever happens tonight, Ars Technica's senior space editor Eric Berger got to talk to an "affable and anxious" Jeff Bezos: "It's pretty exciting, isn't it?" Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and Blue Origin, said by way of greeting... I asked what his expectations were for the launch of New Glenn, which has a three-hour window that opens at 1 am ET (06:00 UTC) on Monday, January 13... "We would certainly like to achieve orbit, and get the Blue Ring Pathfinder into orbit," Bezos said. "Landing the booster would be gravy on top of that. It's kind of insane to try and land the booster. A more sane approach would probably be to try to land it into ocean. But we're gonna go for it." Blue Origin has built a considerable amount of infrastructure on a drone ship, Jacklyn, that will be waiting offshore for the rocket to land upon. Was Bezos not concerned about putting that hardware at risk? "I'm worried about everything," he admitted. However, the rocket has been programmed to divert from the ship if the avionics on board the vehicle sense that anything is off-nominal. And there is, of course, a pretty good chance of that happening. "We've done a lot of work, we've done a lot of testing, but there are some things that can only be tested in flight," Bezos said. "And you can't be overconfident in these things... The reality is, there are a lot of things that go wrong, and you have to accept that, if something goes wrong, we'll pick ourselves up and get busy for the second flight." Bezos also pointed out that 7% of all the people who have ever flown into space have done so on a Blue Origin vehicle — including himself, an experience he told Ars Technica "is kind of hard to beat... That really was very meaningful for a whole bunch of reasons. "But this is, you know, the culmination of a lot of hard work by a lot of people. And it's a really big deal. You know, you don't get very many first flights, yeah, and here we go." The rocket's payload nose cone (or fairing) has the signatures of thousands of Blue Origin employees, according to a Blue Origin post on Instagram, calling it "a tribute to the hard work and passion for mission we all have here..." More details about the launch: Space.com notes that the launch "was initially scheduled for Jan. 10 and then Jan. 12, but Blue Origin postponed it due to rough offshore weather that could affect a rocket landing on the company's recovery ship in the Atlantic." Space Force officials forecast the chance of good liftoff conditions tonight are 50%. "We want to be clear about our objectives," Blue Origin posted tonight on X.com. "This is our first flight and we've prepared rigorously for it. But no amount of ground testing or mission simulations is a replacement for flying this rocket. Our key objective today is to reach orbit safely. Anything beyond that is icing on the cake. We know landing the booster on our first try offshore in the Atlantic is ambitious — but we're going for it. No matter what happens, we'll learn, refine, and apply that knowledge to our next launch." The rocket will be visible on the coasts of South Carolina and North Carolina, Blue Origin posted on X.com While Blue Origin's "New Shephard" capsule can hold up to six passengers, the New Glenn's capsule has 30 times that capacity. Space.com notes the rocket is carrying a payload: a test version of the company's new 'Blue Ring' spacecraft platform to validate its orbit-to-ground communications capabilities. To get the next generation excited about space travel, Blue Origin's web site is selling an 11.5-inch , 636-piece model of the New Glenn rocket (complete with a retractable launch tower).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"In at least five of the 16 African countries where the service is available, a monthly Starlink subscription is cheaper than the leading fixed internet service provider," reports Rest of World. "Starlink, launched in 2019 by Elon Musk's SpaceX, has become the leading satellite internet provider in the world." Now available in more than 100 countries, Starlink can also be a relatively affordable option for users trying to log on in countries with limited internet service providers... A Rest of World analysis indicates that in at least five of the 16 African countries where the service is available, a monthly Starlink subscription is cheaper than the leading fixed internet service provider... [Kenya, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Cape Verde — though not including the upfront costs of Starlink hardware.] Historically, internet connections around the globe have typically been enabled by ground-based internet service providers using fiber-optic cables and mobile base stations. But in many parts of the world, that infrastructure is sparse or nonexistent. "This is where satellite providers come in," said Nitinder Mohan, a computer science professor at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands who has studied Starlink's performance around the world. "I can be in the middle of a forest and, if I have a direct view of the sky, I can get my internet connectivity," he told Rest of World. "Regions which are previously underconnected — where there was no way of getting internet connectivity to them — now with these satellites, you can actually enable that...." According to the latest figures by the International Telecommunication Union, a U.N. agency focused on information and communication technologies, 38% of the population in Africa uses the internet, compared to 91% of Europe... Since launching in Kenya in July 2023, Starlink has disrupted the existing internet service provider industry. Starlink offers high connectivity speeds and wide availability in remote areas, along with dramatically lower prices. The company also introduced a rental option... Starlink has become so popular in Kenya that the company paused new subscriptions in major cities in early November due to network overload. The company plans to deploy more infrastructure in Nairobi and Johannesburg in order to bring more people online, said Mohan, the computer science professor at Delft University. Starlink is less than half the cost of the leading ISP in Kenya Ghana, and especially in Zimbabwe (where the difference is dramatic): Starlink: $30 Leading ISP in Zimbabwe: $633.62 Now in Kenya legacy telecom providers like Safaricom "have responded by lowering prices and increasing internet speeds," according to the article. The head of the research wing of the Global Systems for Mobile Communications Association even told Rest of World ISPS are also developing their own satellite networks (like Vodacom's partnership with satellite mobile network AST SpaceMobile) — though ironically, AST SpaceMobile launched its first satellites with the help of SpaceX.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"I know, I know: 'Year of the Linux desktop ... yadda, yadda'," writes Steven Vaughan-Nichols, a ZDNet senior contributing editor. "You've heard it all before. But now there's a Linux-powered PC that many people will want..." He's talking about Nvidia's newly-announced Project Digits, describing it as "a desktop with AI supercomputer power that runs DGX OS, a customized Ubuntu Linux 22.04 distro." Powered by MediaTek and Nvidia's Grace Blackwell Superchip, Project DIGITS is a $3,000 personal AI that combines Nvidia's Blackwell GPU with a 20-core Grace CPU built on the Arm architecture... At CES, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang confirmed plans to make this technology available to everyone, not just AI developers. "We're going to make this a mainstream product," Huang said. His statement suggests that Nvidia and MediaTek are positioning themselves to challenge established players — including Intel and AMD — in the desktop CPU market. This move to the desktop and perhaps even laptops has been coming for a while. As early as 2023, Nvidia was hinting that a consumer desktop chip would be in its future... [W]hy not use native Linux as the primary operating system on this new chip family? Linux, after all, already runs on the Grace Blackwell Superchip. Windows doesn't. It's that simple. Nowadays, Linux runs well with Nvidia chips. Recent benchmarks show that open-source Linux graphic drivers work with Nvidia GPUs as well as its proprietary drivers. Even Linus Torvalds thinks Nvidia has gotten its open-source and Linux act together. In August 2023, Torvalds said, "Nvidia got much more involved in the kernel. Nvidia went from being on my list of companies who are not good to my list of companies who are doing really good work." Canonical, Ubuntu Linux's parent company, has long worked closely with Nvidia. Ubuntu already provides Blackwell drivers. The article strays into speculation, when it adds "maybe you wouldn't pay three grand for a Project DIGITS PC. But what about a $1,000 Blackwell PC from Acer, Asus, or Lenovo? All three of these companies are already selling MediaTek-powered Chromebooks...." "The first consumer products featuring this technology are expected to hit the market later this year. I'm looking forward to running Linux on it. Come on in! The operating system's fine."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The U.K is looking to build a homegrown challenger to OpenAI and drastically increase national computing infrastructure," reports CNBC, "as Prime Minister Keir Starmer's government sets its sights on becoming a global leader in artificial intelligence." The government is primarily seeking to expand data center capacity across the U.K. to boost developers of powerful AI models which rely on high-performance computing equipment hosted in remote locations to train and run their systems. A target of increasing "sovereign," or public sector, compute capacity in the U.K. by twentyfold by 2030 has been set... To further bolster Britain's computing infrastructure, the government also committed to setting up several AI "growth zones," where rules on planning permission will be relaxed in certain places to allow for the creation of new data centers. Meanwhile, an "AI Energy Council" formed of industry leaders from both energy and AI will be set up to explore the role of renewable and low-carbon sources of energy, like nuclear... Britain plans to use the AI growth zones and a newly established National Data Library to connect public institutions — such as universities — to enhance the country's ability to create "sovereign" AI models which aren't reliant on Silicon Valley... Last month, the government announced a consultation on measures to regulate the use of copyrighted content to train AI models.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Due to a "rapid expansion of solar capacity," Germany generated 72.2 TWh of solar power in 2024, reports PV magazine, "accounting for 14% of its total electricity output, according to Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems. "Wind power remained Germany's largest source of electricity in 2024, generating 136.4 TWh..." Hydropower also saw a slight increase, contributing 21.7 TWh in 2024. Total renewable energy generation reached 275.2 TWh, up 4.4% from 2023. Biomass plants, with an installed capacity of 9.1 GW, generated 36 TWh of electricity. Generation from coal-fired power plants declined sharply in Germany in 2024, with lignite production dropping 8.4% and hard coal falling 27.6%, according to Energy Charts. Lignite-fired plants produced 71.1 TWh, roughly matching the total output from photovoltaic systems, while hard coal plants generated 24.2 TWh... Germany's CO2 emissions continued their downward trend, falling to 152 million tons in 2024, a 58% reduction from 1990 levels and more than half of 2014 levels... Battery storage capacity saw substantial growth, with installed capacity rising from 8.6 GW to 12.1 GW and associated energy storage increasing from 12.7 GWh to 17.7 GWh. Germany's battery storage capacity now surpasses pumped storage by approximately 10 GW, underscoring the shift toward renewable energy integration. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The University of Colorado Boulder's magazine recently wrote: What happened during the "Snowball Earth" period is perplexing: Just as the planet endured about 100 million years of deep freeze, with a thick layer of ice covering most of Earth and with low levels of atmospheric oxygen, forms of multicellular life emerged. Why? The prevailing scientific view is that such frigid temperatures would slow rather than speed evolution. But fossil records from 720 to 635 million years ago show an evolutionary spurt preceding the development of animals... Carl Simpson, a macroevolutionary paleobiologist at CU Boulder, has found evidence that cold seawater could have jump-started — rather than suppressed — evolution from single-celled to multicellular life forms. That evidence is described in Quanta magazine: Simpson proposes an answer linked to a fundamental physical fact: As seawater gets colder, it gets more viscous, and therefore more difficult for very small organisms to navigate. Imagine swimming through honey rather than water... To test the idea, Simpson, a paleobiologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and his team conducted an experiment designed to see what a modern single-celled organism does when confronted with higher viscosity... In an enormous, custom-made petri dish, [grad student Andrea] Halling and Simpson created a bull's-eye target of agar gel — their own experimental gauntlet of viscosity. At the center, it was the standard viscosity used for growing these algae in the lab. [Green algae, which swims with a tail-like flagellum.] Moving outward, each concentric ring had higher and higher viscosity, finally reaching a medium with four times the standard level. The scientists placed the algae in the middle, turned on a camera, and left them alone for 30 days — enough time for about 70 generations of algae to live, swim around for nutrients and die... After 30 days, the algae in the middle were still unicellular. As the scientists put algae from thicker and thicker rings under the microscope, however, they found larger clumps of cells. The very largest were wads of hundreds. But what interested Simpson the most were mobile clusters of four to 16 cells, arranged so that their flagella were all on the outside. These clusters moved around by coordinating the movement of their flagella, the ones at the back of the cluster holding still, the ones at the front wriggling. "One thing that you learn about small organisms from a physics point of view is that they don't experience the world the same way that we do, as larger-bodied organisms," Simpson says in the university's article. It says that instead unicellular organisms are specifically "affected by the viscosity, or thickness, of sea water," and Simpson adds that "basically, that would trigger the origin of animals, potentially." Last year Simpson posted a preprint on biorxiv.org. (And he also co-authored an article on "physical constraints during Snowball Earth drive the evolution of multicellularity.") There's a video showing algae in Simpson's lab clumping together in viscous water. "This observed behavior adds evidence to Simpson's hypothesis that single-celled organisms clumped together to their mutual advantage during the 'Snowball Earth' period," says the video's description, "thus adding momentum to the rise of multicellular organisms." But Simpson says in the university's article, "To actually see it empirically means there's something to this idea." Simpson and colleagues have now received a $1 million grant to study grains of sand made from calcium carbonate and called ooids, since their diameter "could be a proxy measurement of Earth's temperature for the last 2.5 billion years," according to the university's article. Geologist Lizzy Trower says the research "can tell us something about the chemistry and water temperature in which they formed." And more importantly, "Does the fossil record agree with the predictions we would make based on this theory from this new record of temperature?" Trower and Simpson's work also has potential implications for the human quest to find life elsewhere in the universe, Trower said. If extremely harsh and cold environments can spur evolutionary change, "then that is a really different type of thing to look for in exoplanets (potentially life-sustaining planets in other solar systems), or think about when and where (life) would exist."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SC Media reports on a new jailbreak method for large language models (LLMs) that "takes advantage of models' ability to identify and score harmful content in order to trick the models into generating content related to malware, illegal activity, harassment and more. "The 'Bad Likert Judge' multi-step jailbreak technique was developed and tested by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, and was found to increase the success rate of jailbreak attempts by more than 60% when compared with direct single-turn attack attempts..." For the LLM jailbreak experiments, the researchers asked the LLMs to use a Likert-like scale to score the degree to which certain content contained in the prompt was harmful. In one example, they asked the LLMs to give a score of 1 if a prompt didn't contain any malware-related information and a score of 2 if it contained very detailed information about how to create malware, or actual malware code. After the model scored the provided content on the scale, the researchers would then ask the model in a second step to provide examples of content that would score a 1 and a 2, adding that the second example should contain thorough step-by-step information. This would typically result in the LLM generating harmful content as part of the second example meant to demonstrate the model's understanding of the evaluation scale. An additional one or two steps after the second step could be used to produce even more harmful information, the researchers found, by asking the LLM to further expand on and add more details to their harmful example. Overall, when tested across 1,440 cases using six different "state-of-the-art" models, the Bad Likert Judge jailbreak method had about a 71.6% average attack success rate across models. Thanks to Slashdot reader spatwei for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"This year, superconductivity — the flow of electric current with zero resistance — was discovered in three distinct materials," reports Quanta magazine. "Two instances stretch the textbook understanding of the phenomenon. The third shreds it completely...." After four years of reserch a team at Columbia assembled a "two-sheet device, cooled it down, and watched it superconduct..." A lab at Cornell found "a species of superconductivity that no one had seen coming." And then "Over the summer, a graphene device produced a mythical form of superconductivity: The discoveries stem from a recent revolution in materials science: All three new instances of superconductivity arise in devices assembled from flat sheets of atoms. These materials display unprecedented flexibility; at the touch of a button, physicists can switch them between conducting, insulating, and more exotic behaviors — a modern form of alchemy that has supercharged the hunt for superconductivity. It now seems increasingly likely that diverse causes can give rise to the phenomenon. Just as birds, bees and dragonflies all fly using different wing structures, materials seem to pair electrons together in different ways. Even as researchers debate exactly what's happening in the various two-dimensional materials in question, they anticipate that the growing zoo of superconductors will help them achieve a more universal view of the alluring phenomenon... [C]ustomizable 2D devices had freed them from the drudgery of designing, growing, and testing new crystals one by one. Researchers would now be able to quickly re-create the effects of many different atomic lattices in a single device and find out exactly what electrons are capable of. The research strategy is now paying off. This year, physicists found the first instances of superconductivity in 2D materials other than graphene, along with a completely novel form of superconductivity in a new graphene system. The discoveries have established that the earlier graphene superconductors mark just the outskirts of a wild new jungle... The experimentalists are amassing a treasure trove of data for theorists to explain. [Cornell's superconductivity-discovering researchers] Mak and Shan hope that this abundance will let theorists predict ways to create superconductivity that experiments can confirm. That would demonstrate a true understanding of the phenomenon, which would mark both an academic achievement and a key step toward designing materials for revolutionary new technologies. The article points out that already, superconductivity has "enabled the development of MRI machines and powerful particle colliders. "If physicists could fully understand how and when the phenomenon arises, perhaps they could engineer a wire that superconducts electricity under everyday conditions rather than exclusively at low temperatures, as is currently the case. World-altering technologies — lossless power grids, magnetically levitating vehicles — might follow."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As an ecological disaster devastated two coastal California cities, more than 7,500 firefighters pushed back against the wildfires. 900 of them are inmates, reports NPR. That's about 12%: California is one of more than a dozen states that operates conservation camps, commonly known as fire camps, for incarcerated people to train to fight fires and respond to other disasters... There are now 35 such camps in California, all of which are minimum-security facilities... When they are not fighting fires, they also respond to floods and other disasters and emergencies. Otherwise, the crews do community service work in areas close to their camp, according to the state corrections department... A 2018 Time investigation found that incarcerated firefighters are at a higher risk for serious injuries. They also are more than four times as likely to get cuts, bruises or broken bones compared to professional firefighters working the same fires, the report found. They were also more than eight times as likely to face injuries after inhaling smoke, ash and other debris compared with other firefighters, the report said. "Two of the camps are for incarcerated women," reports the BBC. One of them — since released — remembers that "It felt like you were doing something that mattered instead of rotting away in a cell," according to the nonprofit new site CalMatters. They can also earn credits that help reduce their prison sentences, the BBC learned from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Friday one local California news report shared the perspective of formerly incarcerated Californian, Matthew Hahn (from a 2021 Washington Post column). "Yes, the decision to take part is largely made under duress, given the alternative. Yes, incarcerated firefighters are paid pennies for an invaluable task. And yes, it is difficult though not impossible for participants to become firefighters after leaving prison," Hahn said. "Despite this, fire camps remain the most humane places to do time in the California prison system." From that 2021 Washington Post column: California prisons have, on average, three times the murder rate of the country overall and twice the rate of all American prisons. These figures don't take into account the sheer number of physical assaults that occur behind prison walls. Prison feels like a dangerous place because it is. Whether it's individual assaults or large-scale riots, the potential for violence is ever-present. Fire camp represents a reprieve from that risk. Sure, people can die in fire camp as well — at least three convict-firefighters have died working to contain fires in California since 2017 — but the threat doesn't weigh on the mind like the prospect of being murdered by a fellow prisoner. I will never forget the relief I felt the day I set foot in a fire camp in Los Angeles County, like an enormous burden had been lifted... [When his 12-man crew was called to fight the Jesusita Fire], the fire had ignited one home's deck and was slowly burning its way to the structure. We cut the deck off the house, saving the home. I often fantasize about the owners returning to see it still standing, unaware and probably unconcerned that an incarcerated fire crew had saved it. There was satisfaction in knowing that our work was as valuable as that of any other firefighter working the blaze and that the gratitude expressed toward first responders included us. There are other reasons for prisoners to choose fire camp if given the opportunity. They are often located in secluded natural settings, giving inmates the chance to live in an environment that doesn't remotely resemble a prison. There are no walls, and sometimes there aren't even fences. Gun towers are conspicuously absent, and the guards aren't even armed.... [C]onsider the guy pushing a broom in his cell block making the equivalent of one Top Ramen noodle packet per day, just so he can have the privilege of making a collect call to his mother. Or think of the man scrubbing the streaks out of the guards' toilets, making seven cents an hour, half of which goes to pay court fees and restitution, just so he can have those couple of hours outside his cage for the day... So, while we may have faced the heat of a wildfire for a few bucks a day, and we may have saved a few homes and been happy doing so, understand that we were rational actors. We wanted to be there, where some of our dignity was returned to us.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader rzack writes: Since 1999, I've written a huge amount of PHP code, for dozens of applications and websites. Most of it has been continually updated, and remains active and in-production, in one form or another. Here's the thing. It's all hand-written using vi, even to this day. Is there any benefit to migrating this codebase to a more modern PHP framework, like Laravel? And is there an easy and minimally intrusive way this can be done en-masse, across dozens of applications and websites? Or at this point should I just stick with vi? Share your thoughts and suggestions in the comments. What's the best way to transfer legacy PHP code to a modern framework?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the New York Times: Russia fined TikTok for not removing prohibited content. The results of a presidential election in Romania were thrown out over concerns the app had been used to spread foreign influence. Albania banned TikTok for a year following the stabbing death of a teenager by another one after the two quarreled online... That was all in just the last month... TikTok has confronted legal and political scrutiny around the world in recent years, facing outright or partial bans in at least 20 countries, as governments have grown alarmed by its ties to China and its wide influence, especially among young people... [A]s TikTok's algorithm captured attention spans around the world, it alarmed lawmakers, who say TikTok has quickly turned from a domain of cat videos and dance trends into a potentially disruptive social, political and economic force. Officials from Montana to New Zealand have warned that TikTok could be used to incite violence, spread false information and worsen mental health. Lawmakers also worry TikTok could share user data like location and browsing history with the Chinese government. Young people need to be protected from "the frightening pitfalls of the algorithm," [Albania prime minister Edi] Rama said. TikTok lost its largest audience (India) "after India's simmering geopolitical conflict with China boiled over into hand-to-hand combat along their shared border" — resulting in a total ban in the world's single most-populous country. And the article notes TikTok is also blocked on government devices in Taiwan, Britain, Australia, France, and Canada, "as well as the executive arm of the European Union and New Zealand's Parliament..." But "Despite the mounting scrutiny, TikTok remains incredibly popular worldwide. More than a billion people use the app every month."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Every Ford EV model set a new sales record in 2024 with double-digit growth," reports Electrek, with Ford's total U.S. electric vehicle sales jumping to 97,865, an increase of 34.8% from 2023. And in the last three months of 2024 Ford sold 30,176 EVs — which is also a new record. The Mustang Mach-E had its best sales quarter since launching in late 2020, with 16,119 models sold in Q4. With 51,745 Mach-Es sold last year, it was the second-best-selling electric SUV in the US, behind the Tesla Model Y. Even more impressive, the Mach-E outsold every gas-powered Ford Mustang model in 2024. Ford sold just over 48,600 gas Mustangs last year, down 9.5% from 2023. The article adds that to thank customers, Ford has now extended its "Power Promise" promotion, "which gives all new EV buyers a free Level 2 home charger, and Ford is covering the cost of standard installation."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is reintroducing "digital fingerprinting" in five weeks, reports Mashable, describing it as "a data collection process that ingests all of your online signals (from IP address to complex browser information) and pinpoints unique users or devices." Or, to put it another way, Google "is tracking your online behavior in the name of advertising." The UK's Information Commissioner's Office called Google's decision "irresponsible": it is likely to reduce people's choice and control over how their information is collected. The change to Google's policy means that fingerprinting could now replace the functions of third-party cookies... Google itself has previously said that fingerprinting does not meet users' expectations for privacy, as users cannot easily consent to it as they would cookies. This in turn means they cannot control how their information is collected. To quote Google's own position on fingerprinting from 2019: "We think this subverts user choice and is wrong...." When the new policy comes into force on 16 February 2025, organisations using Google's advertising technology will be able to deploy fingerprinting without being in breach of Google's own policies. Given Google's position and scale in the online advertising ecosystem, this is significant. Their post ends with a warning that those hoping to use fingerprinting for advertising "will need to demonstrate how they are complying with the requirements of data protection law. These include providing users with transparency, securing freely-given consent, ensuring fair processing and upholding information rights such as the right to erasure." But security and privacy researcher Lukasz Olejnik asks if Google's move is the biggest privacy erosion in 10 years.... Could this mark the end of nearly a decade of progress in internet and web privacy? It would be unfortunate if the newly developing AI economy started from a decrease of privacy and data protection standards. Some analysts or observers might then be inclined to wonder whether this approach to privacy online might signal similar attitudes in other future Google products, like AI... The shift is rather drastic. Where clear restrictions once existed, the new policy removes the prohibition (so allows such uses) and now only requires disclosure... [I]f the ICO's claims about Google sharing IP addresses within the adtech ecosystem are accurate, this represents a significant policy shift with critical implications for privacy, trust, and the integrity of previously proposed Privacy Sandbox initiatives. Their post includes a disturbing thought. "Reversing the stance on fingerprinting could open the door to further data collection, including to crafting dynamic, generative AI-powered ads tailored with huge precision. Indeed, such applications would require new data..." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Unanimous AI's founder Louis Rosenberg predicts a "wave" of new superhuman abilities is coming soon that we experience profoundly "as self-embodied skills that we carry around with us throughout our lives"... "[B]y 2030, a majority of us will live our lives with context-aware AI agents bringing digital superpowers into our daily experiences." They will be unleashed by context-aware AI agents that are loaded into body-worn devices that see what we see, hear what we hear, experience what we experience, and provide us with enhanced abilities to perceive and interpret our world... The majority of these superpowers will be delivered through AI-powered glasses with cameras and microphones that act as their eyes and ears, but there will be other form factors for people who just don't like eyewear... [For example, earbuds with built in cameras] We will whisper to these intelligent devices, and they will whisper back, giving us recommendations, guidance, spatial reminders, directional cues, haptic nudges, and other verbal and perceptual content that will coach us through our days like an omniscient alter ego... When you spot that store across the street, you simply whisper to yourself, "I wonder when it opens?" and a voice will instantly ring back into your ears, "10:30 a.m...." By 2030, we will not need to whisper to the AI agents traveling with us through our lives. Instead, you will be able to simply mouth the words, and the AI will know what you are saying by reading your lips and detecting activation signals from your muscles. I am confident that "mouthing" will be deployed because it's more private, more resilient to noisy spaces, and most importantly, it will feel more personal, internal, and self-embodied. By 2035, you may not even need to mouth the words. That's because the AI will learn to interpret the signals in our muscles with such subtlety and precision — we will simply need to think about mouthing the words to convey our intent... When you grab a box of cereal in a store and are curious about the carbs, or wonder whether it's cheaper at Walmart, the answers will just ring in your ears or appear visually. It will even give you superhuman abilities to assess the emotions on other people's faces, predict their moods, goals, or intentions, coaching you during real-time conversations to make you more compelling, appealing, or persuasive... I don't make these claims lightly. I have been focused on technologies that augment our reality and expand human abilities for over 30 years and I can say without question that the mobile computing market is about to run in this direction in a very big way. Instead of Augmented Reality, how about Augmented Mentality? The article notes Meta has already added context-aware AI to its Ray-Ban glasses and suggests that within five years Meta might try "selling us superpowers we can't resist". And Google's new AI-powered operating system Android XR hopes to augment our world with seamless context-aware content. But think about where this is going. "[E]ach of us could find ourselves in a new reality where technologies controlled by third parties can selectively alter what we see and hear, while AI-powered voices whisper in our ears with targeted advice and guidance." And yet " by 2030 the superpowers that these devices give us won't feel optional. After all, not having them could put us at a social and cognitive disadvantage." Thanks to Slashdot reader ZipNada for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists said the world just reached a grim milestone: the first full year where global temperatures exceeded 1.5C above pre-industrial times. Reuters reports: The milestone was confirmed by the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), which said climate change is pushing the planet's temperature to levels never before experienced by modern humans. "The trajectory is just incredible," C3S director Carlo Buontempo told Reuters, describing how every month in 2024 was the warmest or second-warmest for that month since records began. The planet's average temperature in 2024 was 1.6 degrees Celsius higher than in 1850-1900, the "pre-industrial period" before humans began burning CO2-emitting fossil fuels on a large scale, C3S said. Last year was the world's hottest since records began, and each of the past ten years was among the ten warmest on record. Britain's Met Office confirmed 2024's likely breach of 1.5C, while estimating a slightly lower average temperature of 1.53C for the year. U.S. scientists will also publish their 2024 climate data on Friday. Governments promised under the 2015 Paris Agreement to try to prevent average temperatures exceeding 1.5C, to avoid more severe and costly climate disasters. The first year above 1.5C does not breach that target, which measures the longer-term average temperature. Buontempo said rising greenhouse gas emissions meant the world was on track to soon also blow past the Paris goal - but that it was not too late for countries to rapidly cut emissions to avoid warming rising further to disastrous levels. "It's not a done deal. We have the power to change the trajectory from now on," Buontempo said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Some of the world's most popular apps are likely being co-opted by rogue members of the advertising industry to harvest sensitive location data on a massive scale, with that data ending up with a location data company whose subsidiary has previously sold global location data to US law enforcement. The thousands of apps, included in hacked files from location data company Gravy Analytics, include everything from games likeCandy Crushand dating apps like Tinder to pregnancy tracking and religious prayer apps across both Android and iOS. Because much of the collection is occurring through the advertising ecosystem -- not code developed by the app creators themselves -- this data collection is likely happening without users' or even app developers' knowledge. "For the first time publicly, we seem to have proof that one of the largest data brokers selling to both commercial and government clients appears to be acquiring their data from the online advertising 'bid stream,'" rather than code embedded into the apps themselves, Zach Edwards, senior threat analyst at cybersecurity firm Silent Push and who has followed the location data industry closely, tells 404 Media after reviewing some of the data. The data provides a rare glimpse inside the world of real-time bidding (RTB). Historically, location data firms paid app developers to include bundles of code that collected the location data of their users. Many companies have turned instead to sourcing location information through the advertising ecosystem, where companies bid to place ads inside apps. But a side effect is that data brokers can listen in on that process and harvest the location of peoples' mobile phones. "This is a nightmare scenario for privacy, because not only does this data breach contain data scraped from the RTB systems, but there's some company out there acting like a global honey badger, doing whatever it pleases with every piece of data that comes its way," Edwards says. Included in the hacked Gravy data are tens of millions of mobile phone coordinates of devices inside the US, Russia, and Europe. Some of those files also reference an app next to each piece of location data. 404 Media extracted the app names and built a list of mentioned apps. The list includes dating sites Tinder and Grindr; massive games such asCandy Crush,Temple Run,Subway Surfers, andHarry Potter: Puzzles & Spells; transit app Moovit; My Period Calendar & Tracker, a period-tracking app with more than 10 million downloads; popular fitness app MyFitnessPal; social network Tumblr; Yahoo's email client; Microsoft's 365 office app; and flight tracker Flightradar24. The list also mentions multiple religious-focused apps such as Muslim prayer and Christian Bible apps, various pregnancy trackers, and many VPN apps, which some users may download, ironically, in an attempt to protect their privacy. 404 Media's full list of apps included in the data can be found here. There are also other lists available from other security researchers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Christie Wilcox reports via Science.org: Both longhorn crazy ants (Paratrechina longicornis) and humans can figure out how to work together to move an unwieldy object through a series of obstacles. So scientists pitted the two against each other. They had individuals and groups of different sizes of both species maneuver a T-shaped object through holes in walls (as seen in the video above), both of which were scaled to the body size of the participants. This kind of puzzle is hard for ants because their pheromone-based communication doesn't account for the kind of geometry needed to get the object through the doors. To make the experiments even more comparable, the team also took away the humans' communication in some of the trials by making them wear sunglasses and masks and forbidding talking and gestures. So the people, like the ants, had to work together without language, relying on the forces generated by their fellow participants to figure out how to move the T-shaped piece. The groups of ants were much better at solving the puzzle than individual ants, exhibiting what the researchers described as "emergent" collective memory -- an intelligence greater than the sum of its parts. The groups of humans, on the other hand, often didn't do better when working together, especially if they weren't allowed to talk. In fact, multiple people sometimes performed worse than individuals -- and worse than the ants. The researchers posit that, in the absence of the ability to discuss and debate, individuals attempt to reach a consensus quickly rather than fully assessing the problem. This "groupthink," they suggest, leads people toward fruitless "greedy" efforts where they directly pull the T toward the gaps in the wall, rather than the less obvious, correct solution of pulling the object into the space between first. Whereas the ants "excel in cooperation," they write, humans need to be able to talk through their reasoning to avoid simply going with what they think the crowd wants. The study has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Biden administration plans one additional round of restrictions on the export of AI chips before leaving office, "a final push in his effort to keep advanced technologies out of the hands of China and Russia," reports Bloomberg. From the report: The US wants to curb the sale of AI chips used in data centers on both a country and company basis, with the goal of concentrating AI development in friendly nations and getting businesses around the world to align with American standards, according to people familiar with the matter. The result would be an expansion of semiconductor caps to most of the world -- an attempt to control the spread of AI technology at a time of soaring demand. The regulations, which could be issued as soon as Friday, would create three tiers of chip trade restrictions, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private. At the top level, a small number of US allies would maintain essentially unmitigated access to American chips. A group of adversaries, meanwhile, would be effectively blocked from importing the semiconductors. And the vast majority of the world would face limits on the total computing power that can go to one country. Countries in the last group would be able to bypass their national limits -- and get their own, significantly higher caps -- by agreeing to a set of US government security requirements and human rights standards, one of the people said. That type of designation -- called a validated end user, or VEU -- aims to create a set of trusted entities that develop and deploy AI in secure environments around the world.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said quantum computers won't be very useful for another 20 years, causing stocks in this emerging sector to plunge more than 40% for a total market value loss of over $8 billion. "If you kind of said 15 years for very useful quantum computers, that'd probably be on the early side. If you said 30, is probably on the late side. But if you picked 20, I think a whole bunch of us would believe it," Huang said during a Q&A with analysts. PCMag reports: The field of quantum computing hasn't gotten nearly as much hype as generative AI and the tech giants promoting it in the past few years. Right now, part of the reason quantum computers aren't currently that helpful is because of their error rates. Nord Quantique CEO Julien Lemyre previously told PCMag that quantum error correction is the future of the field, and his firm is working on a solution. The errors that qubits, the basic unit of information in a quantum machine, currently make result in quantum computers being largely unhelpful. It's an essential hurdle to overcomeâ"but we don't currently know if or when quantum errors will be eliminated. Chris Erven, CEO and co-founder of Kets Quantum, believes quantum computers will eventually pose a significant threat to cybersecurity. "China is making some of the largest investments in quantum computing, pumping in billions of dollars into research and development in the hope of being the first to create a large-scale, cryptographically relevant machine," Erven tells PCMag in a statement. "Although they may be a few years away from being fully operational, we know a quantum computer will be capable of breaking all traditional cyber defenses we currently use. So they, and others, are actively harvesting now, to decrypt later." "The 15 to 20-year timeline seems very realistic," said Ivana Delevska, investment chief of Spear Invest, which holds Rigetti and IonQ shares in an actively managed ETF. "That is roughly what it took Nvidia to develop accelerated computing."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.