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An anonymous reader shared this report from the blog It's FOSS: Canonical has committed funding to a three-year PhD project focused on building a system that can automatically translate large C codebases into Rust. And they are not alone; UK Research and Innovation is matching their funding for the project, which is set to run through the University of Bristol's Programming Languages Research Group. The PhD is aiming to build an all-encompassing platform that can take a C repository running into hundreds of thousands of lines and translate it into Rust that's "safe, behaviourally correct and maintainable Rust." The work will be carried out by a student, Alex Wood, who will be supported by Professor Meng Wang leading the work, with Dr. Cristina David and Canonical's Jon Seager serving as co-supervisors.

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Falling prices have made grid-scale storage batteries more attractive, reports Bloomberg. But after decades of stagnant investment, America's grids "are racing to make the upgrades needed to plug them in," with supplies straining for the necessary equipment. Demand for batteries has skyrocketed as electricity use across the U.S. swells, driven by data centers' booming energy needs and increasing electrification. It's also getting harder to get them connected to power grids... As those upgrades get delayed, storage projects are piling up in interconnection queues from coast to coast. For example, Consolidated Edison Inc., a major utility in New York state, says over the last two years the volume of battery storage projects waiting to be connected has grown by 300%... "The whole process of interconnecting these new power plants got really log-jammed and bottlenecked," said Joseph Rand, an energy policy researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory... Nationwide, some 750 gigawatts of energy storage projects — roughly equivalent to the generating capacity of more than 700 nuclear reactors — are in line to get grid connections, according to the lab's research. Not all of these projects will get built. Many developers already abandoned the queue because of delays. Still, the waiting time is increasing; the median was five years in 2025, up from a year and a half in 2015. The flood of battery projects is expected to continue. Wood Mackenzie, an energy consultancy, projects the U.S. energy storage market will quadruple in the next six years... [Shortages in key equipment] have driven up construction costs and time lines for grid upgrades, leaving utilities struggling to build fast enough. A drought of skilled workers is further slowing them down... In California, PG&E Corp., the state's largest utility, told regulators in January that a key driver of delays was long lead times for specialized equipment. Procuring certain breakers could take nearly four years, according to the utility, which reported a 300% increase in its interconnection workload compared to prior years. In Northern California, for example, holdups to circuit breaker upgrades to a substation in Solano County led to projected delays for two battery projects worth a combined 450 megawatts. Transmission line work in the Bay Area has put another 800 megawatts of energy storage at risk of delay, according to PG&E. Last year New York's Con Ed started requiring developers to help pay for upgrades if their projects will push power demand and strain infrastructure. But that also drew criticism: According to a survey conducted by the trade group New York Battery and Energy Storage Technology Consortium (NY-BEST), the new methodology raised costs by an average of $21 million per project, a 14-fold increase. At least 25 projects have been canceled as a result, according to the group. Battery advocates have appealed to state regulators to get Con Ed to abandon the new policy. Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the news.

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Debian developers are voting on whether to ban AI-assisted contributions, reports the blog Linuxiac, with a ballot listing eight proposals and a "None of the above" option. The first one is still the original proposal to ban LLM-assisted contributions by changing the Debian Social Contract. This would stop generative AI from being used for direct Debian work like packaging, software, documentation, translations, websites, and project communication. However, upstream projects made with AI help would not be affected. The proposal gives several reasons for the ban, such as unclear copyright and licensing, doubts about the reliability of AI-generated work, extra review work for maintainers, aggressive scraping of Free Software resources, and the high resource use of large AI systems... The second option would clearly allow contributions that are partly or fully made by an LLM, as long as contributors check their technical quality, security, licensing, and usefulness, fully understand the changes, and disclose major AI help. It would also ban sending private or sensitive Debian information to untrusted external AI services. A similar fourth option recognizes worries about generative AI but says banning it would be hard to enforce and not helpful. This proposal would accept AI-assisted Debian work if it follows the Debian Free Software Guidelines, is properly reviewed and understood by the contributor, and is marked as AI-assisted when needed. The fifth proposal is even more open. It says Debian should not support or ban generative AI tools, but should apply the same standards for quality, correctness, maintainability, and legality to all contributions, no matter how they were made... One unique proposal is called "Debian is created by humans." Instead of banning AI tools for contributors, it focuses on what actually gets included in Debian. With this approach, contributors could use generative AI for research, analysis, exploration, or critique, but could not submit AI-generated output directly as Debian packaging, patches, documentation, bug reports, project communications, or other Debian work. As the proposal says: humans create Debian. Another, much stricter proposal asks Debian contributors to avoid LLM use as much as possible. It would require all Debian communication, like bug reports, mailing-list messages, Salsa discussions, and Planet Debian posts, to be written only by humans. Any AI use in Debian work would have to be disclosed, and violations could be handled under the project's Code of Conduct. The CEO/founder of AI-native compliance management platform company Strike Graph believes a Debian AI ban is "the wrong fix for the actual problem" at hand, reports The New Stack: "Debian's ban isn't really about banning AI," [CEO Justin] Beals says. "It's an admission that nobody has built a reliable way to verify what an AI agent actually produced before it lands in a codebase this many systems depend on, including infrastructure running in orbit. That's a legitimate thing to be worried about...." He thinks that any policy statement that says AI isn't allowed simply won't hold up, as the tooling keeps getting harder to detect... Looking across the complete set of tabled propositions, proposal A (no LLM contributions to Debian via social contract) needs a 3:1 majority to pass; the other seven proposals (B to H) need a simple majority.

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Retraction Watch reports: A trial date has been set in a $1 billion defamation case against Elsevier that alleges the company published what plaintiffs say was a manipulated study about an air purifying technology over objections from peer reviewers. The case has already cost Elsevier a $10,000 sanction from a judge. Global Plasma Solutions (GPS), which makes air quality products, sued Elsevier in 2022 after the publisher declined to retract a 2021 paper in Building and Environment about GPS' needlepoint bipolar ionization technology, which it heavily marketed during the COVID-19 pandemic as an air purifier. The complaint claims Elsevier is responsible for the authors' alleged omission of data and misleading conclusions in the paper that fueled "massive" financial losses for the company, its lawyers claim. Elsevier knew the paper "failed peer review" under its "own standards," but moved forward with the article despite this knowledge, according to GPS, which now goes by GPS Air. The complaint has survived a bid by Elsevier to dismiss the case, and a trial has been set for Dec. 7. In allowing the case to proceed, U.S. Magistrate Judge David Keesler said in a May 2024 opinion that GPS has "plausibly alleged actual malice" by Elsevier defined as "knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the truth." Chief Judge Martin Reidinger of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina upheld Keesler's recommendation in July 2025... Citing internal and discovery documents, GPS alleges an assessment of 19 journals revealed Elsevier has published more than 1,200 articles either without any peer review, or against the recommendations of the reviewers. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger for sharing the article.

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A rapidly developing El Nino is already reaching record-setting levels for this time of year and is expected to intensify further over the coming months. "The El Nino has blossomed. It is off the charts. Usual measures of El Nino have blown past prior record levels in the period with good data, even though maximum effects are still several months in the future," writes renowned climate scientist James Hansen at Columbia University in New York in a newsletter sent today. Climate scientists disagree over whether it has already surpassed previous "super El Nino" events on every metric, but several say the signal is unprecedented in forecasts and could ultimately become the strongest modern event on record. New Scientist reports: There are different ways of measuring El Ninos, which occur when warm surface waters spread eastwards along the equator across the surface of the tropical Pacific Ocean. Hansen thinks the best measure is how much warmer than usual the upper 300 meters of the eastern tropical Pacific becomes. "Our preferred metric, the heat anomaly in the upper 300 meters of the Equatorial Pacific Ocean... already exceeds the 1997-98 super El Nino," he writes. [...] What's clear is that this developing super El Nino will soon exceed previous events on all measures. "I have never seen an El Nino signal this intense in our forecasts," [Adam Scaife at the Met Office, the UK's national weather service] said in a statement released today. "If the forecast is accurate... then 2026 will far exceed our recent experience of El Nino and its worldwide climate influences." While Hansen is comparing the developing super El Nino to other modern events for which we have direct temperature records, Hayley Fowler at Newcastle University in the UK thinks it could also exceed historical events suspected to be even larger. "The super El Nino evolving in the Pacific will likely be the biggest ever recorded, reaching or exceeding the levels of the 1877-1878 El Nino which caused widespread impacts, including famines and around 50 million deaths (3-4 percent of the global population at the time), mostly across Asia and South America," Fowler said in a statement.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: According to a Bloomberg report, attributed to China's Ministry of State Security, the country has ordered some government agencies to drop Windows 10 China Government Edition for Chinese-made Linux distributions. Why not Windows 11? Because China, like many other non-US governments, no longer trusts American companies with their software and services. This approach is all about digital sovereignty. In addition, even before the recent trend of governments outside America moving away from Windows, Beijing has started a long-running push to replace foreign technology in sensitive systems with domestic, open-source alternatives. [...] The Chinese government did not specify which Linux versions would replace Windows 10. However, the stock prices of Chinese Linux suppliers, Kylin Software and Tongxin Software Technology (commonly known as UnionTech), immediately jumped. These companies' respective operating systems, Kylin OS (no relation to Ubuntu Kylin) and UnionTech OS (UOS), were already positioned as domestic desktop and server replacements for Windows in government, state-owned enterprise, and critical-infrastructure environments. [...] Huawei's HarmonyOS 2, which began as an Android variant but is now a proprietary mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) operating system, is also being developed into a PC platform. HarmonyOS 2 won't be deployed anytime soon. Kylin and UOS are the only mature desktops that are ready for institutional desktop deployments. [...] ... this transition won't be easy. For agencies now moving off the government Windows build, the issue will be more demanding than simply swapping one desktop interface for another. Migration requires application testing, peripheral and driver validation, identity system integration, document-format compatibility, staff retraining and, in many cases, replacement or adaptation of Windows-dependent line-of-business software. The report provides no details on exactly how this transformation will occur. But the speed of the shift suggests that these issues are already being addressed in China's centralized managed desktop stack.

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Ypsilanti Township, Michigan, has imposed a six-month moratorium on "major electric utility infrastructure" in its latest attempt to delay a proposed $1.2 billion University of Michigan-Los Alamos data center that would support nuclear-weapons research. Township leaders, who have already paused water service for data centers, say the project has moved forward without adequate consultation and want more time to study noise, grid impacts, and other effects on residents. 404 Media reports: Last year, the university announced it was partnering with LANL on the construction of a massive 220,000 square foot hyperscale data center in Ypsilanti Township and residents have been fighting it ever since. During a meeting of the Township Board on August 18, the council unanimously passed a resolution that will delay the construction of new electrical infrastructure for 180 days. Data centers need a lot of energy, and Michigan's power authority will have to build new substations in the Township to power the proposed facility. The moratorium asked the local power authorities to use the six month delay to study noise pollution and how the new infrastructure would affect existing customers. The moratorium is narrowly focused on "the nature and scale of electrical infrastructure necessary to serve new high-energy-demand land uses [...] including infrastructure associated, but not limited to hyper-scale data centers, mid-sized data centers, artificial intelligence computing facilities, and high-performance computational centers, industrial facilities, and other intensive electrical users." Earlier this month, the University of Michigan announced it had settled on a specific plot of land in Ypsilanti Township -- a 144-acre plot on Textile Road. In a press release about the decision, the University said the data center would have the "capacity to change the world" and insisted it would not be a "high value target risk" in a war, that it would not store any hazardous nuclear material, and was not a weapons production facility. LANL previously confirmed that the data center will be used for nuclear weapons research. Ypsilanti Township Supervisor Brenda Stumbo told WEMU news that the selection of the site was a "travesty of justice" because it ignores constituents' concerns about environmental impact. During the August 18 moratorium vote, the Board projected a large stock photograph of an electric substation behind its members. The photo was meant to remind people of the size of the incoming infrastructure and the lack of communication from the university about it. "This picture's really important to think about because U of M has been so crystal clear that they've been communicating to us abundantly -- which is not true," Township clerk Debbie Swanson said during the meeting. "That speaks to the lack of respect."

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Apple is cutting more than 200 jobs as it shifts resources toward a rebuilt, AI-powered Siri and other future products. Roughly 100 positions are being eliminated from the Vision Pro organization, including much of its gaming team and some immersive-video staff. Another 100 cuts are hitting the Siri and software teams. Bloomberg reports: In a statement, Apple acknowledged that it was realigning some teams "to evolve our business to deliver the best experiences for our users." "While we will create new roles as part of this change, it will also impact a limited number of existing roles," the company said. "We are grateful to these team members for their contributions, and we are committed to supporting them throughout their transition, including opportunities to apply for other roles at Apple." The Siri reshuffling is tied to an upcoming AI-infused version of the assistant, which is built on a new technical architecture. That shift requires a change in the necessary expertise, prompting the company to eliminate a small number of existing roles, reallocate resources and create new positions supporting the updated Siri. The changes to the Intelligent Systems Experience team reflect an effort to reorganize work on AI-powered capabilities. As more groups bring AI functions to apps, features and services, Apple is realigning teams to match priorities and accelerate development. The restructuring will eliminate some existing positions while creating new roles.

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Federal prosecutors have charged activist Samuel Tunick with obstruction after he gave Customs and Border Protection officers a duress passcode that wiped his GrapheneOS-powered Pixel during a border search. "His prosecution is one of the earliest known instances of the federal authorities charging a person with destroying evidence using a program designed to wipe a device clean after a specific code is entered," reports The New York Times. From the report: "Obstructing federal law enforcement is a serious matter that has serious repercussions," Theodore Hertzberg, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, said in a statement. "Individuals who destroy or attempt to destroy property, including data, to prevent lawful search and seizure should expect to face prosecution and punishment for their actions." A spokeswoman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in a statement that the agency had the authority to search the electronic devices of anyone entering or leaving the United States, regardless of citizenship, to enforce laws addressing terrorism, child exploitation, drug- and human-smuggling, visa fraud and national security threats. "The border search will only include an examination of information that is present on the device at the time it is presented for inspection," the spokeswoman said, adding that it searched the electronic devices of fewer than 0.01 percent of all arriving international travelers in the last fiscal year. "Just the knowledge that the government is peering into your private life in this way, trying to dig up dirt on you, even though it's unsuccessful, is creepy," Tunick said, in response to a question about how the charges have affected him. His message: "The government doesn't own our communications, our relationships, as hard as they might try to. We have to defend our fundamental right to privacy; otherwise we can't say that we really live in a democracy."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Economist: Students and school children are increasingly using artificial intelligence. A survey last year by Chegg, an ed-tech firm, found that 80% of rich-world undergraduates used it in their studies. More recent polls put the figure at 94% in Britain and 93% in Germany. Such widespread adoption has fueled concerns about the impact the technology might be having on learning. Teachers report marking identikit essays that they suspect are churned out by ChatGPT. Yet firm evidence on AI's educational effects has been lacking. David Stromberg of Stockholm University and Victor Lei and Wu Yanhui of the University of Hong Kong set out to fill the gap. They tracked 27,000 pupils aged 12-18 in China, where AI adoption has been fast. Around 80% reported using models such as Doubao and DeepSeek; the other 20% formed the control group. The results are eye-opening. After six months, pupils using AI saw their average homework score rise by 18% across all subjects. The time they took to complete each assignment fell from an average of 64 minutes to 45. But come exam time, the same students scored 20% below their classmates who had not called on AI's help. Homework scores once predicted exam performance; now those who score highest are, perversely, more likely to do worse in exams. The takeaway: "AI can boost learning productivity, but only for those who use the technology intelligently," reports The Economist. "Students must resist the temptation to reach for an AI-generated answer before thinking things through for themselves."

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A man dressed as Darth Vader used a Public Safety and Livable Neighborhoods Committee meeting in San Diego to mock the city's use of Flock surveillance cameras, sarcastically arguing that the technology would help the "emperor" track "rebel scum" and find Luke Skywalker. "This is what the emperor needs. This technology will help us find the rebel scum and the hidden base on Hoth," he said. The Hill reports: He urged that the cameras be used to surveil any "rebel scum as they move from playground to playground, from playground to pool, from pool to gymnasium, because we all know that the Flock cameras are not only following the license plate readers, they are following children." The plea for the cameras shifted to raising taxes to clear out storm drains and to the clearing of homeless encampments in the city. The man said the council members can use "doublespeak" to say the police department is humanitarian. "And how will the people trust this City Council when this City Council continues to vote for surveillance technology that imprisons them? Ms. Campbell, you must work on your Jedi mind tricks," he said, addressing City Council member Jennifer Campbell, before waving his hand to the audience. "Do it like this." His last plea was for the Flock cameras to be used to "help us find Luke Skywalker as he traverses the universe in his X-wing." "This technology is a necessary, necessary force," he concluded. According to DeFlock, San Diego has more than 550 Flock cameras across the city.

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Micron says it will spend $10 billion over the next decade on a new research lab in Boise focused on advanced memory technologies, computing systems, and future chip manufacturing. Here are some details, as reported by Reuters: - Micron Research Labs will bring together customers, academia, government and the broader semiconductor ecosystem to pursue breakthroughs, the company said. - The latest investment builds on the more than $250 billion that Micron had separately committed to manufacturing and R&D across the United States. - The lab will be connected to Micron's research and technology footprint across the U.S., Europe, Japan, India, Singapore and Taiwan. - Growing adoption of AI workloads and infrastructure buildout have boosted demand for high-bandwidth memory, which rapidly feeds data to AI accelerators, making it a critical component of modern computing infrastructure. - The Trump administration has prioritized domestic chip manufacturing in a bid to reduce foreign dependence, boost the economic output and maintain its lead in the AI race. - Micron expects to break ground on the facility in 2027, which will be capable of hosting hundreds of researchers and facilitating international conferences and workshops.

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Linus Torvalds says AI "enormously helped" him track down a stubborn Intel Xe graphics driver bug that took 24 debugging patches and 18 kernel boots to isolate. "I'd like to call it my tireless helper, but the AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it," wrote Torvalds on the commit. "I suspect those things have been trained by people who may not be quite as stubborn as I am..." Phoronix reports: The patch by Linus Torvalds is for the Xe kernel driver and the change is no longer hand out the flat Compute Command Streamer (CCS) storage as usable vRAM. On a Battlemage G21 graphics card, he was hitting a scenario where there was a mismatch where the usable memory ended and hit a case where the GDM display manager would end up being endlessly restarted. [...] Linus Torvalds views AI as a useful tool and in this case reaffirmed he found it "enormously helped" his effort in tracking down this Intel graphics driver bug. The Intel Xe driver fix is merged to Linux 7.3 Git and is also marked to back-porting to the stable kernel branches.

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After years of refusing to adopt tap-to-pay technology in its stores, retail giant Walmart announced today that it is finally accepting payments via both Apple Pay and Google Pay. The rollout begins August 24 at select Walmart and Sam's Club locations and is expected to reach all stores by year-end. It will then expand to fuel stations by mid-2027. TechCrunch reports: The news is a surprise, as Walmart has long refused to adopt the ubiquitous payment technology to instead promote its own in-house solutions, like Walmart Pay and Scan-and-Go. In years past, Walmart even teamed up with other big retailers in an attempt to take down Apple Pay entirely with an alternative mobile payment system of their own, called CurrentC. The effort failed and was shut down back in 2016. All the while, Walmart customers have begged the company to support modern tap-and-pay technology, like Apple Pay, which is now accepted at 85% of retailers across the U.S., including most larger stores. For Walmart, the decision reads as a defeat. As one of the world's largest retailers, it believed it could push customers to its own payment solutions despite the growing adoption of Apple Pay and others of its kind. Ultimately, it had to admit that it was disadvantaging its own customers in the process.

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Google is giving publishers a new way to fight declining referral traffic from AI-powered search by letting them embed a "Preferred Sources" button that readers can use to favor their sites across Search, Discover, and Google News. "The idea is to make it easier for readers to find links from the sites they know and trust when they're searching for content or interacting with Google's AI to learn about a topic or read the latest news," reports TechCrunch. "As of May's launch, the company said that people across the web had already selected over 345,000 unique sources through this method." From the report: Becoming a preferred source can drive more traffic to publishers' websites, Google said. In earlier studies, it found that people are twice as likely to click through to a preferred source when available. By offering publishers these additional tools, Google is trying to assuage the damage that the rapid growth of AI-powered search features has had on traffic-dependent businesses. Alongside the new button, Google said that readers will soon be able to customize their Discover feed in Google's app in their own words. To use this feature, readers will tap any three-dot menu in the feed and then tell Google what topics they'd like to see more or less of, using natural language commands. This helps Google refine the feed in real time.

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Microsoft is expanding Windows Task Manager to show per-process NPU and GPU neural-engine usage, giving users more visibility into which apps are consuming hardware for AI workloads. The Register reports: The Processes tab can show NPU use alongside CPU and GPU activity, while the Performance tab displays overall utilization. [...] Microsoft was keen to point out the metrics that can be monitored. "As AI workloads become more common on Windows devices, visibility into NPU and GPU neural engine utilization can help you make better-informed decisions," the company said. "With the latest Task Manager improvements, you can monitor AI processing activity alongside CPU, memory, storage, and networking data from a familiar interface."

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China's Chang'e 7 mission is set to launch for the moon's south pole, where it will attempt the first-ever landing directly at the pole and search the region's dark craters for water ice. "It's an amazing mission," says Norbert Schorghofer, a Hawaii-based senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute. "There has never been a landed mission to find water [on the moon]." If successful, China "will be the leader in lunar science," Schorghofer adds. Scientific American reports: Chang'e 7, China's seventh moon mission, is scheduled to launch on a Long March 5 rocket from the coastal Wenchang Space Launch Site on the island of Hainan, with the launch window opening on the morning of August 24 local time (the evening of August 23 EDT). The mission includes an orbiter, as well as a lander, which totes a rover and a novel "hopping" robot. The spacecraft will take up to six days to reach lunar orbit, where it will then spend two months preparing for a November landing meant to be a near bull's-eye on the lunar south pole. The mission also includes equipment from several international partners, highlighting China's growing global influence -- both on and off Earth. The mission's lunar target is Shackleton Crater, a 21-kilometer-wide (13-mile-wide) pit with a rim that grazes the moon's south pole. No other spacecraft has ever landed so close. That proximity should allow Chang'e 7 to prospect for water ice trapped in smaller depressions near Shackleton that, because of the moon's tilt, never see sunlight and have temperatures just a few dozen degrees above absolute zero. "There are big reservoirs of ice water at the poles," says Simone Dell'Agnello, a physicist at Italy's National Institute for Nuclear Physics. No one knows, however, just how big those reservoirs are or what their actual distribution is across the lunar south pole's crater-pocked desolation. And because that ice might be used as for manufacturing rocket fuel or to make potable water for thirsty astronauts, answering those questions is key for the U.S.'s and China's competing plans to construct crewed lunar outposts.

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RAMageddon could soon push car prices higher as modern vehicles rely on ever more RAM and powerful centralized computers to run everything from infotainment to driver-assistance systems. Analysts cited by The Atlantic estimate the shortage could add a few percentage points to vehicle prices, which might not sound like much, but could potentially translate to around $2,000 on a $50,000 vehicle. The broader shift toward software-heavy vehicles could also make used cars even less affordable. An anonymous reader quotes an excerpt from the report: Just like laptops, cars depend on microprocessors and RAM, or random-access memory, to run all of their computations. "There's just a baseline level of tech, and thus a baseline level of cost, required of every vehicle," Karl Brauer, the executive analyst at iSeeCars, an automotive-research platform, told me. Technology is a major reason the average price of a new car in the U.S. has reached some $50,000, and that was before RAM became one of the most prized commodities in the world. AI companies are snatching up as much memory as possible for their data centers, causing a RAM shortage that has significantly raised the prices of phones, laptops, and just about any consumer-electronic device. Cars are next. [...] Over the next year, the memory shortage -- sometimes known as RAMageddon -- will likely raise vehicle prices by a few percentage points, on average, [said Sam Abuelsamid, an analyst at Telemetry and a former automotive engineer]. The relative amount would be smaller than the shocking double-digit jumps for gaming consoles and MacBooks but in some ways more significant: A 4 percent price hike for cars amounts to some $2,000 on average. Cars with those centralized computers will be affected the most, but no vehicle will be spared. "Even if you don't need the high-end chips, you're going to pay more even for the low-end chips just because of the supply constraint," Abuelsamid said. On a recent earnings call, Ford's chief financial officer said that the company had paid $1 billion in higher materials costs due to the memory shortage and inflation. GM and Volkswagen, too, have noted rising chip costs to investors. (Ford and GM did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Volkswagen told me that the company has "recognized an increased demand for memory chips, primarily driven by growing requirements in other industries," and that in recent years, Volkswagen has taken measures to "mitigate supply risks.") RAMageddon is poised to last for several years, but the consequences for car buyers may be permanent. Consider what happened during the pandemic, when supply-chain disruptions and rising demand for electronics produced a major chip shortage. Nearly every major car company had to slash production because they simply couldn't procure enough chips, and shifted their focus to selling higher-end and higher-profit vehicles. Potential customers already willing to spend six figures on a car are much less likely to care about a 5 or 10 percent price hike, [said Ivan Drury, the director of insights at Edmunds]. Even now, car companies are continuing to focus on selling more profitable models. Since the pandemic, the average price of a new vehicle has jumped $11,000. The AI-fueled chip crisis could play out more severely. The average price of a new car could, before long, jump to $60,000 and beyond. These rising costs are making cars even more similar to computers and all of the software they run: Perhaps in an effort to mitigate higher prices, some automakers are also introducing in-car advertisements and putting certain features, such as heated seats, behind a paywall. As cars have morphed into computers, the inevitable next step is for automakers to behave like modern tech companies.

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Bilibili, often described as China's answer to YouTube, is relaunching its international app and preparing an English-language site as part of a broader push into the U.S., Europe, Japan, and other markets. The company is courting Western creators like MrBest, hiring community and moderation staff globally, and building tools for brand partnerships. Semafor reports: The revamped international app no longer requires identity verification -- meaning users can sign up without having to provide a passport or ID document, which were long required of overseas users on its main Chinese platform, according to what appears to be a newly created account on X marketing the platform to global creators. "Yes bilibili is going global," the account wrote, adding that content-wise, the US and Chinese sites will be the same. In a document recently shared in a Discord chat for Bilibili creators, the company pitched itself as a place for influencers to make money and connect with "Gen Z Coded, affluent and well-educated" users. A marketplace for international users to connect with brands for sponsored content is "in development," according to the presentation. The deck also showed creators how to post videos on its Chinese website, adding that an English version is "coming soon. We are working hard."

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Independent music publisher Round Hill is suing Suno and Anthropic for allegedly using hundreds of copyrighted songs without permission to train their AI systems. The company says potential damages could exceed $1 billion, arguing there is "nothing fair" about building multibillion-dollar AI businesses on copyrighted material while rights holders receive nothing. From The Hollywood Reporter: Round Hill is a prominent music publisher whose copyrights include the Goo Goo Dolls' "Iris," Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart," the Kinks' "Lola" and Dio's "Holy Diver." The company provided a list of 500 songs that the defendants had infringed upon. Round Hill said in the suits that the company plans to "amend to list potentially ten thousand or more of their musical compositions," with those damages potentially exceeding $1 billion. "While in other cases for copyright infringement, Defendant has waxed poetic about the necessity of progress and AI's value to society, there is simply no reason -- other than rote expediency -- to have that progress come at the cost of copyrights holders," prominent music attorney Richard Busch, representing Round Hill, wrote in the suits. Round Hill further argued that the latter "'expediency' arguments completely falter" when taking into account Suno and Anthropic's significant cash valuations they've earned while "exploiting illicit copies of copyrighted works, including the Round Hill Works." "There is simply nothing fair about a company using theft to build for purely commercial purposes a multi-billion dollar business while those from which they steal receive nothing," Round Hill said. Suno also faces a lawsuit from Universal Music Group and Sony Music Group.

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