HP "sought to take advantage of customers' sunk costs," printer owners claimed this week in a class action lawsuit against the hardware giant. The Register: Lawyers representing the aggrieved were responding in an Illinois court to an earlier HP motion to dismiss a January lawsuit. Among other things, the plaintiffs' filing stated that the printer buyers "never entered into any contractual agreement to buy only HP-branded ink prior to receiving the firmware updates." They allege HP broke several anti-competitive statutes, which they claim: "bar tying schemes, and certain uses of software to accomplish that without permission, that would monopolize an aftermarket for replacement ink cartridges, when these results are achieved in a way that 'take[s] advantage of customers' sunk costs.'"

In the case, which began in January, the plaintiffs are arguing that HP issued a firmware update between late 2022 and early 2023 that they allege disabled their printers if they installed a replacement cartridge that was not HP-branded. They are asking for damages that include the cost of now-useless third-party cartridges and an injunction to disable the part of the firmware updates that prevent the use of third-party ink.

A federal jury in Illinois on Wednesday said Amazon Web Services owes tech company Kove $525 million for violating three patents relating to its data-storage technology. From the report: The jury determined (PDF) that AWS infringed three Kove patents covering technology that Kove said had become "essential" to the ability of Amazon's cloud-computing arm to "store and retrieve massive amounts of data." An Amazon spokesperson said the company disagrees with the verdict and intends to appeal. Kove's lead attorney Courtland Reichman called the verdict "a testament to the power of innovation and the importance of protecting IP (intellectual property) rights for start-up companies against tech giants." Kove also sued Google last year for infringing the same three patents in a separate Illinois lawsuit that is still ongoing.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Hardware sold for years by the likes of Intel and Lenovo contains a remotely exploitable vulnerability that will never be fixed. The cause: a supply chain snafu involving an open source software package and hardware from multiple manufacturers that directly or indirectly incorporated it into their products. Researchers from security firm Binarly have confirmed that the lapse has resulted in Intel, Lenovo, and Supermicro shipping server hardware that contains a vulnerability that can be exploited to reveal security-critical information. The researchers, however, went on to warn that any hardware that incorporates certain generations of baseboard management controllers made by Duluth, Georgia-based AMI or Taiwan-based AETN are also affected.

BMCs are tiny computers soldered into the motherboard of servers that allow cloud centers, and sometimes their customers, to streamline the remote management of vast fleets of servers. They enable administrators to remotely reinstall OSes, install and uninstall apps, and control just about every other aspect of the system -- even when it's turned off. BMCs provide what's known in the industry as "lights-out" system management. AMI and AETN are two of several makers of BMCs. For years, BMCs from multiple manufacturers have incorporated vulnerable versions of open source software known as lighttpd. Lighttpd is a fast, lightweight web server that's compatible with various hardware and software platforms. It's used in all kinds of wares, including in embedded devices like BMCs, to allow remote administrators to control servers remotely with HTTP requests. [...] "All these years, [the lighttpd vulnerability] was present inside the firmware and nobody cared to update one of the third-party components used to build this firmware image," Binarly researchers wrote Thursday. "This is another perfect example of inconsistencies in the firmware supply chain. A very outdated third-party component present in the latest version of firmware, creating additional risk for end users. Are there more systems that use the vulnerable version of lighttpd across the industry?"

The vulnerability makes it possible for hackers to identify memory addresses responsible for handling key functions. Operating systems take pains to randomize and conceal these locations so they can't be used in software exploits. By chaining an exploit for the lighttpd vulnerability with a separate vulnerability, hackers could defeat this standard protection, which is known as address space layout randomization. The chaining of two or more exploits has become a common feature of hacking attacks these days as software makers continue to add anti-exploitation protections to their code. Tracking the supply chain for multiple BMCs used in multiple server hardware is difficult. So far, Binarly has identified AMI's MegaRAC BMC as one of the vulnerable BMCs. The security firm has confirmed that the AMI BMC is contained in the Intel Server System M70KLP hardware. Information about BMCs from ATEN or hardware from Lenovo and Supermicro aren't available at the moment. The vulnerability is present in any hardware that uses lighttpd versions 1.4.35, 1.4.45, and 1.4.51. "A potential attacker can exploit this vulnerability in order to read memory of Lighttpd Web Server process," Binarly researchers wrote in an advisory. "This may lead to sensitive data exfiltration, such as memory addresses, which can be used to bypass security mechanisms such as ASLR." Advisories are available here, here, and here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Former Apple design lead Jony Ive and current OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are seeking funding for a new company that will produce an "artificial intelligence-powered personal device," according to The Information's sources, who are said to be familiar with the plans. The exact nature of the device is unknown, but it will not look anything like a smartphone, according to the sources. We first heard tell of this venture in the fall of 2023, but The Information's story reveals that talks are moving forward to get the company off the ground.

Ive and Altman hope to raise at least $1 billion for the new company. The complete list of potential funding sources they've spoken with is unknown, but The Information's sources say they are in talks with frequent OpenAI investor Thrive Capital as well as Emerson Collective, a venture capital firm founded by Laurene Powell Jobs. SoftBank CEO and super-investor Masayoshi Son is also said to have spoken with Altman and Ive about the venture. Financial Times previously reported that Son wanted Arm (another company he has backed) to be involved in the project. [...] Altman already has his hands in several other AI ventures besides OpenAI. The Information reports that there is no indication yet that OpenAI would be directly involved in the new hardware company.

Intel on Tuesday unveiled its new "Gaudi 3" AI chip that the company claims is over twice as power-efficient and can run AI models one-and-a-half times faster than Nvidia's H100 GPU. "It also comes in different configurations like a bundle of eight Gaudi 3 chips on one motherboard or a card that can slot into existing systems," adds CNBC. From the report: Intel tested the chip on models like Meta's open-source Llama and the Abu Dhabi-backed Falcon. It said Gaudi 3 can help train or deploy models, including Stable Diffusion or OpenAI's Whisper model for speech recognition. Intel says its chips use less power than Nvidia's. Intel said that the new Gaudi 3 chips would be available to customers in the third quarter, and companies including Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Supermicro will build systems with the chips. Intel didn't provide a price range for Gaudi 3.

Gaudi 3 is built on a five nanometer process, a relatively recent manufacturing technique, suggesting that the company is using an outside foundry to manufacture the chips. In addition to designing Gaudi 3, Intel also plans to manufacture AI chips, potentially for outside companies, at a new Ohio factory expected to open in 2027 or 2028, CEO Patrick Gelsinger told reporters last month. "We do expect it to be highly competitive" with Nvidia's latest chips, said Das Kamhout, vice president of Xeon software at Intel, on a call with reporters. "From our competitive pricing, our distinctive open integrated network on chip, we're using industry-standard Ethernet. We believe it's a strong offering."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Owners of Intel's latest 13th and 14th Gen Core i9 desktop processors have been noticing an increase in game crashes in recent months. It's happening in games like The Finals, Fortnite, and Tekken 8, and has even led Epic Games to issue a support notice to encourage Intel Core i9 13900K and 14900K owners to adjust BIOS settings. Now, Intel says it's investigating the reports. "Intel is aware of problems that occur when executing certain tasks on 13th and 14th generation core processors for desktop PCs, and is analyzing them with major affiliates," says an Intel spokesperson in a statement to ZDNet Korea.

The crashes vary in severity depending on the game, with some titles producing an "out of memory" error, others simply exiting out to the desktop, and some locking up a machine entirely. Most of the games affected seem to be based on the Unreal Engine, which could point to a stability issue that Intel needs to address. The only workarounds that seem to improve stability involve manually downclocking or undervolting Intel's processors. Epic Games has suggested changing the SVID behavior to Intel Fail Safe in the BIOS settings of Asus, Gigabyte, or MSI motherboards. Custom PC builders Power GPU recommend reducing the performance core ratio limit, which seems to help with stability in certain games.

Google Cloud on Tuesday joined AWS and Azure in announcing its first custom-built Arm processor, dubbed Axion. From a report: Based on Arm's Neoverse 2 designs, Google says its Axion instances offer 30% better performance than other Arm-based instances from competitors like AWS and Microsoft and up to 50% better performance and 60% better energy efficiency than comparable X86-based instances. [...] "Technical documentation, including benchmarking and architecture details, will be available later this year," Google spokesperson Amanda Lam said. Maybe the chips aren't even ready yet? After all, it took Google a while to announce Arm-chips in the cloud, especially considering that Google has long built its in-house TPU AI chips and, more recently, custom Arm-based mobile chips for its Pixel phones. AWS launched its Graviton chips back in 2018.

Those taking public transport in the tech hub of San Francisco may be reassured to know that their rides will soon no longer be dependent on floppy disks. From a report: San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency's director of transportation Jeffrey Tumlin told ABC that the city's automatic light-rail control system is running on outdated tech and "relies on three five-inch floppy disks" to boot up. The reporter was holding a 3.5-inch disk in the broadcast, so may have just skipped the word "point."

"It's a question of risk," Tumlin explained in a three-minute segment about the floppy replacement project. "The system is currently working just fine, but we know that with each increasing year the risk of data degradation on the floppy disks increases and that at some point there will be a catastrophic failure." The agency noted that its system was installed in 1998, when floppies were still in common use and, er, "computers didn't have hard drives."

When Disneyland opened in 1955, its car-themed attraction Autopia "represented the future of what would become America's multilane limited-access highways," according to Wikipedia, " which were still being developed. President Eisenhower had yet to sign the Interstate Highway legislation..."

Wikipedia adds that the cars "generate a moderate level of exhaust from the Honda GX gasoline engines that propel the cars." But that may change, according to a climate-oriented newsletter from the Los Angeles Times: If anyone could get away with defending the toxic odor, it might be Bob Gurr. He designed the original Autopia cars in the mid-1950s, working closely with Walt himself. He's proud of what they built together. But today the 92-year-old Disney legend says the polluting motors need to go. "Get rid of those God-awful gasoline fumes," he told me.

Disney is finally preparing to do just that. In news shared exclusively with The Times ahead of this column's publication — after several weeks of my prodding the company for answers on the future of Autopia — Disney officials revealed that pure gasoline engines are on their way out... "As the industry moves toward alternative fuel sources, we have developed a roadmap to electrify this attraction and are evaluating technology that will enable us to convert from gas engines in the next few years," spokesperson Jessica Good said in an email. Good wouldn't confirm whether that means electric vehicles, or if hybrids are a possibility...

[Gurr] also expressed a grander vision for Tomorrowland as a hub for stories about renewable energy, public transit and other sustainable technologies that will help us create a better tomorrow... [H]ow about using the former Innoventions building, which once displayed futuristic technologies but is now closed to most guests, to showcase solar panels, lithium-ion batteries and other clean energy devices that guests might want in their homes...? Why not switch to electric cooking at the Alien Pizza Planet restaurant, and offer induction stove demos for diners? Maybe start screening some National Geographic films (Disney owns NatGeo) at the largely unused Magic Eye Theater...? Add some infotainment-style signs and voice-overs about the wonders of clean energy and public transit, and boom, you've got a Tomorrowland that should leave kids and their parents excited to help build a safer, happier, more sustainable world...

[Gurr] told me that if he could, he'd tear out everything in Tomorrowland except the Monorail and rebuild it as a version of the public transit-oriented futuristic city that Walt once planned for Florida — only with clean energy at the core of its storytelling... At the very least, he said it's time for an Autopia where guests "don't smell the fumes, don't hear that racket of the little motor going putt-putt-putt."
The newsletter agrees electric vehicles for Autopia are "the obvious starting point" for remodeling Tomorrowland with "a buzz of optimism and futuristic energy." ("Solar-panel shade structures over the line would be great too.") They even add that "it's not that it's my job to make money for Disney, but I'm sure the company could find sponsors for this vision of Tomorrowland. There are plenty of renewable energy companies, electric utilities and environmental groups eager to tout their causes and their credentials."

And it shares this observation from climate scientist and communicator Katharine Hayhoe (paraphrasing another scientist who studies climate communications): "Showing people what climate solutions look like is one of the most effective ways to get them to support action." The newsletter's conclusion? "This is where Tomorrowland could prove especially valuable in the fight to save the planet."


Some additional context... Disney's current CEO once said he was "particuarly proud" of the 270-acre, 50+-megawatt solar facility the company brought online in Orlando." And the Washington Post reports that Disney's plans to electrify Autopia "comes as the park is taking steps to decarbonize as part of an effort to reach a goal of net-zero emissions by 2030."

This week America's Department of Energy announced "a comprehensive plan to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from buildings by 65% by 2035 and 90% by 2050." The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) led the Blueprint's development in collaboration with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Environmental Protection Agency, and other federal agencies. The Blueprint is the first sector-wide strategy for building decarbonization developed by the federal government... "America's building sector accounts for more than a third of the harmful emissions jeopardizing our air and health..." said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. "As part of a whole-of-government approach, the Department of Energy is outlining for the first time ever a comprehensive federal plan to reduce energy in our homes, schools, and workplaces — lowering utility bills and creating healthier communities while combating the climate crisis."

Buildings account for more than one third of domestic climate pollution and $370 billion in annual energy costs... The Blueprint projects reductions of 90% of total greenhouse gas emissions from the buildings sector, which will save consumers more than $100 billion in annual energy costs and avoid $17 billion in annual health costs.
Just for example, the Department of Energy's Affordable Home Energy Shot program "aims to reduce the upfront cost of upgrading a home by at least 50% and reduce energy bills by 20% within a decade." (Meanwhile, the federal government's role in making more change happen faster includes financing, funding R&D on lower-cost technologies, expanding markets, and "supporting the development and implementation of emissions-reducing building codes and appliance standards.")

Besides the national blueprint, the Department also announced an expansion of its Better Buildings Commercial Building Heat Pump Accelerator initiative. In this program, "manufacturers will produce higher efficiency and life cycle cost-effective heat pump rooftop units and commercial organizations will evaluate and adopt next-generation heat pump technology."

U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm said the program "builds on more than a decade of public-private partnerships to get cutting edge clean technologies from lab to market, helping to slash harmful carbon emissions throughout our economy." On average, between 20% and 30% of the nation's energy is wasted, presenting a significant opportunity to increase energy efficiency. Through the Better Buildings Initiative, DOE partners with public and private sector stakeholders to pursue ambitious portfolio-wide energy, waste, water, and/or emissions reduction goals and publicly share solutions. By improving building design, materials, equipment, and operations, energy efficiency gains can be achieved across broad segments of the nation's economy.

The Accelerator initiative was developed with commercial end users like Amazon, IKEA, and Target, and already includes manufacturers AAON, Carrier Global Corp., Lennox International, Rheem Manufacturing Co., Trane Technologies, and York International Corp. The Accelerator aims to bring more efficient, affordable next-generation heat pump rooftop units to market as soon as 2027 — which will slash both emissions and energy costs in half compared to natural gas-fueled heat pumps. If deployed at scale, they could save American businesses and commercial entities $5 billion on utility bills every year.

Thursday America's Environmental Protection Agency "awarded $20 billion to help finance clean-energy projects across the country," reports the Washington Post. The money comes from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund established by President Biden's signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act. The fund seeks to leverage public and private dollars to invest in clean-energy technologies such as solar panels, heat pumps and more.

The program is potentially one of the most consequential — yet least understood — parts of the climate law...

Simply put, the program allows people to access low-interest loans for clean-energy projects that they might not otherwise have received. Imagine a community group that wants to install electric vehicle charging stations at its neighborhood recreation center but can't get a loan from a bank or a lender. As is often the case, potential lenders say they're hesitant to support a novel green technology or a business without a track record of success. Low-income and minority communities have long encountered such obstacles in trying to attract private capital. The program aims to overcome this problem by providing a huge influx of federal cash — $27 billion in total — for nonprofit organizations to dole out to clean-energy projects nationwide. Each nonprofit will serve as a "green bank" that offers more favorable lending rates than commercial banks. "It's just really hard to get banks to bring capital into low-income communities, especially for these new projects that they're not used to financing," said Adrian Deveny, the founder of the firm Climate Vision and the former director of energy and environmental policy for Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), a key architect of the Inflation Reduction Act....

The EPA is awarding money to eight nonprofits, which have committed to leverage nearly $7 in private capital for every $1 of federal investment. The nonprofits have also pledged to ensure that at least 70 percent of the funds will benefit disadvantaged communities, and that the financed projects will reduce up to 40 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year — equivalent to the annual emissions of nearly 9 million gasoline-powered cars... [The nonprofit] Coalition for Green Capital, will use a $5 billion award to establish a "national green bank," co-founder and CEO Reed Hundt said. "We're going to be able to cause about $100 billion of total additional investment over a seven-year time period with that number, because we can leverage it," Hundt said.

Longtime Slashdot reader DrunkenTerror shares a report from AnandTech: SK hynix this week announced plans to build its advanced memory packaging facility in West Lafayette, Indiana. The move can be considered as a milestone both for the memory maker and the U.S., as this is the first advanced memory packaging facility in the country and the company's first significant manufacturing operation in America. The facility will be used to build next-generation types of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) stacks when it begins operations in 2028. Also, SK hynix agreed to work on R&D projects with Purdue University.

The facility will handle assembly of HBM known good stacked dies (KGSDs), which consist of multiple memory devices stacked on a base die. Furthermore, it will be used to develop next-generations of HBM and will therefore house a packaging R&D line. However, the plant will not make DRAM dies themselves, and will likely source them from SK hynix's fabs in South Korea. The plant will require SK hynix to invest $3.87 billion, which will make it one of the most advanced semiconductor packaging facilities in the world. Meanwhile, SK hynix held the investment agreement ceremony with representatives from Indiana State, Purdue University, and the U.S. government, which indicates parties financially involved in the project, but this week's event did not disclose whether SK hynix will receive any money from the U.S. government under the CHIPS Act or other funding initiatives.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Daily Hive: It is now the third consecutive day a major housing funding announcement has been made by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Friday's announcement entails over $600 million in investments targeted to help lower the construction cost of homes and speed up building timelines, with a new focus on creating new building innovation technologies. This includes a new $50 million Homebuilding Technology and Innovation Fund, which the federal government aims to leverage an additional $150 million from the private sector and other levels of government. Another $50 million will be invested in ideas and technology such as prefabricated housing factories, mass timber production, panelization, 3D printing, and pre-approved home design catalogues -- specifically projects already funded.

As well, $11.6 million will go towards the federal government's previously announced Housing Design Catalogue to create a standardized home structure design for simplicity as well as construction and cost efficiencies. The vast majority of today's announced funding will go into the federal Apartment Construction Loan Program, which provides low-cost financing to support new rental housing projects using innovative construction techniques from prefabricated and modular housing manufacturers as well as other homebuilders. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in a statement: "We're changing the way we build homes in Canada. In Budget 2024, we're supporting a new approach to construction, with a focus on innovation and technology. This will make it easier and more cost-effective to build more homes, faster. You should be able to live in the community you love, at a price you can afford."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Streaming was supposed to kill physical media, and has come very close. The DVD and Blu-ray market fell from $4.7bn in revenue in 2017 to barely $1.5bn in 2022. In September, Netflix ended its movie-by-mail service. Best Buy has removed physical media from its brick-and-mortar stores, and Target and Walmart may follow. Some new films may never be released physically at all. Yet a counterrevolution has been gathering. Some film fans never gave up physical media: they've spent years quietly buying thrift-store discs, discarded by the many US households that no longer have DVD or Blu-ray players, and waiting for their chance to rise again. Other fans, frustrated by streaming's limitations, have recently rediscovered physical media and trickled to join its rear-guard army.

Physical media will never regain its heights, but it may live to fight a little longer -- supported by loyalists and by a cottage industry of independent and boutique film distributors that license classic and cult films and sell high-quality physical editions to eager, sometimes frantic, fans. Some of these labels offer streaming channels or video-on-demand as well, but still find business in Blu-rays. "We've grown rather than shrunk," Umbrella Entertainment, a distributor in Australia, told me.

And when Universal released Oppenheimer on 4K Blu-ray this fall, the initial run sold out, with feverish Christopher Nolan fans pillaging the same megastores that are moving to drop physical media. 4K Blu-rays are currently the smallest slice of the film disc market, and require ultra-high-definition players and TVs, meaning that the Oppenheimer run was driven by a niche within a niche. But the episode seemed to indicate that a market exists -- especially when it has champions. Nolan himself had encouraged fans to rally to physical media: "If you buy a 4K UHD, you buy a Blu-ray, it's on your shelf, it's yours," he told IGN last year. "[Y]ou own it. That's never really the case with any form of digital distribution."

Matthew Connatser reports via The Register: An ASIC designed to display the infamous Rickroll meme is here, alongside 164 other assorted functions. The project is a product of Matthew Venn's Zero to ASIC Course, which offers prospective chip engineers the chance to "learn to design your own ASIC and get it fabricated." Since 2020, Zero to ASIC has accepted several designs that are incorporated into a single chip called a multi-project wafer (MPW), a cost-saving measure as making one chip for one design would be prohibitively expensive. Zero to ASIC has two series of chips: MPW and Tiny Tapeout. The MPW series usually includes just a handful of designs, such as the four on MPW8 submitted in January 2023. By contrast, the original Tiny Tapeout chip included 152 designs, and Tiny Tapeout 2 (which arrived last October) had 165, though could bumped up to 250. Of the 165 designs, one in particular may strike a chord: Design 145, or the Secret File, made by engineer and YouTuber Bitluni. His Secret File design for the Tiny Tapeout ASIC is designed to play a small part of Rick Astley's music video for Never Gonna Give You Up, also known as the Rickroll meme.

Bitluni was a late inclusion on the Tiny Tapeout 2 project, having been invited just three days before the submission deadline. He initially just made a persistence-of-vision controller, which was revised twice for a total of three designs. "At the end, I still had a few hours left, and I thought maybe I should also upload a meme project," Bitluni says in his video documenting his ASIC journey. His meme of choice was of course the Rickroll. One might even call it an Easter egg. However, given that there were 250 total plots for each design, there wasn't a ton of room for both the graphics processor and the file it was supposed to render, a short GIF of the music video. Ultimately, this had to be shrunk from 217 kilobytes to less than half a kilobyte, making its output look similar to games on the Atari 2600 from 1977. Accessing the Rickroll rendering processor and other designs isn't simple. Bitluni created a custom circuit board to mount the Tiny Tapeout 2 chip, creating a device that could then be plugged into a motherboard capable of selecting specific designs on the ASIC. Unfortunately for Bitluni, his first PCB had a design error on it that he had to correct, but the revised version worked and was able to display the Rickroll GIF in hardware via a VGA port.