The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) blocked Amazon's bid to access more power from the Susquehanna nuclear plant for its Pennsylvania data center, citing grid reliability and consumer cost concerns. The Hill reports: In a 2-1 decision, the FERC found the regional grid operator, PJM Interconnection, failed to prove that the changes to the transmission agreement with Susquehanna power plant were necessary. The regulator's two Republican commissioners, Mark Christie and Lindsay See, outvoted Democratic chair Willie Phillips. The chair's two fellow Democratic commissioners, David Rosner and Judy Chang, sat out the vote. "Co-location arrangements of the type presented here present an array of complicated, nuanced and multifaceted issues, which collectively could have huge ramifications for both grid reliability and consumer costs," Christie wrote in a concurring statement.

In a dissenting statement, Phillips argued the deal with Amazon "represents a 'first of its kind' co-located load configuration" and that Friday's decision is a "step backward for both electric reliability and national security." "We are on the cusp of a new phase in the energy transition, one that is characterized as much by soaring energy demand, due in large part to AI, as it is by rapid changes in the resource mix," Phillips wrote.

Amazon purchased a 960-megawatt data center next to the Susquehanna power plant for $650 million earlier this year. Following the announcement, PJM sought to increase the amount of power running directly to the co-located data center. However, the move faced pushback from regional utilities, including Exelon and American Electric Power (AEP).

GitHub released its annual "State of the Octoverse" report this week. And while "Systems programming languages, like Rust, are also on the rise... Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, and Java remain the most widely used languages on GitHub."

In fact, "In 2024, Python overtook JavaScript as the most popular language on GitHub." They also report usage of Jupyter Notebooks "skyrocketed" with a 92% jump in usage, which along with Python's rise seems to underscore "the surge in data science and machine learning on GitHub..." We're also seeing increased interest in AI agents and smaller models that require less computational power, reflecting a shift across the industry as more people focus on new use cases for AI... While the United States leads in contributions to generative AI projects on GitHub, we see more absolute activity outside the United States. In 2024, there was a 59% surge in the number of contributions to generative AI projects on GitHub and a 98% increase in the number of projects overall — and many of those contributions came from places like India, Germany, Japan, and Singapore...

Notable growth is occurring in India, which is expected to have the world's largest developer population on GitHub by 2028, as well as across Africa and Latin America... [W]e have seen greater growth outside the United States every year since 2013 — and that trend has sped up over the past few years.
Last year they'd projected India would have the most developers on GitHub #1 by 2027, but now believe it will happen a year later. This year's top 10?

1. United States
2. India
3. China
4. Brazil
5. United Kingdom
6. Russia
7. Germany
8. Indonesia
9. Japan
10. Canada

Interestingly, the UK's population ranks #21 among countries of the world, while Germany ranks #19, and Canada ranks #36.)

GitHub's announcement argues the rise of non-English, high-population regions "is notable given that it is happening at the same time as the proliferation of generative AI tools, which are increasingly enabling developers to engage with code in their natural language." And they offer one more data point: GitHub's For Good First Issue is a curated list of Digital Public Goods that need contributors, connecting those projects with people who want to address a societal challenge and promote sustainable development...

Significantly, 34% of contributors to the top 10 For Good Issue projects... made their first contribution after signing up for GitHub Copilot.
There's now 518 million projects on GitHub — with a year-over-year growth of 25%...

Our bodies divest themselves of 60 billion cells every day through a natural process called "apoptosis". So Stanford medicine researchers are developing a new approach to cancer therapy that could "trick cancer cells into disposing of themselves," according to announcement from Stanford's medical school: Their method accomplishes this by artificially bringing together two proteins in such a way that the new compound switches on a set of cell death genes... One of these proteins, BCL6, when mutated, drives the blood cancer known as diffuse large cell B-cell lymphoma... [It] sits on DNA near apoptosis-promoting genes and keeps them switched off, helping the cancer cells retain their signature immortality.

The researchers developed a molecule that tethers BCL6 to a protein known as CDK9, which acts as an enzyme that catalyzes gene activation, in this case, switching on the set of apoptosis genes that BCL6 normally keeps off. "The idea is, Can you turn a cancer dependency into a cancer-killing signal?" asked Nathanael Gray, PhD, co-senior author with Crabtree, the Krishnan-Shah Family Professor and a chemical and systems biology professor. "You take something that the cancer is addicted to for its survival and you flip the script and make that be the very thing that kills it...."

When the team tested the molecule in diffuse large cell B-cell lymphoma cells in the lab, they found that it indeed killed the cancer cells with high potency. They also tested the molecule in healthy mice and found no obvious toxic side effects, even though the molecule killed off a specific category of of the animals' healthy B cells, a kind of immune cell, which also depend on BCL6. They're now testing the compound in mice with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma to gauge its ability to kill cancer in a living animal. Because the technique relies on the cells' natural supply of BCL6 and CDK9 proteins, it seems to be very specific for the lymphoma cells — the BCL6 protein is found only in this kind of lymphoma cell and in one specific kind of B cell. The researchers tested the molecule in 859 different kinds of cancer cells in the lab; the chimeric compound killed only diffuse large cell B-cell lymphoma cells.
Scientists have been trying to shut down cancer-driving proteins, one of the researchers says, but instead, "we're trying to use them to turn signaling on that, we hope, will prove beneficial for treatment."

The two researchers have co-founded the biotech startup Shenandoah Therapeutics, which "aims to further test this molecule and a similar, previously developed molecule," according to the article, "in hopes of gathering enough pre-clinical data to support launching clinical trials of the compounds.

"They also plan to build similar molecules that could target other cancer-driving proteins..."

Zoox, an Amazon-owned autonomous vehicle company, is set to roll out dozens of its purpose-built robotaxis in San Francisco and Las Vegas, starting with employee rides in San Francisco's SoMa neighborhood and the Las Vegas Strip. "We have achieved that internal safety readiness" required to launch the service, said co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson on the TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 stage. TechCrunch reports: The announcement comes a decade after Zoox was founded and four years since it was acquired by Amazon and unveiled its purpose-built robotaxi. In that time, the nascent autonomous vehicle industry has gone through the full hype cycle that led to multi-billion-dollar valuations and later a wave of shutdowns and consolidation. "We still exist," Levinson said, in a nod to the tumult the industry has gone through in recent years.

Levinson said Zoox is going to take a "measured approach" to rolling out its robotaxi service, and noted that his company has been working closely with local and federal safety regulators. "I can say that in the next few weeks, we're actually going to have a couple dozen Zoox robotaxis across our Foster City, San Francisco and Las Vegas, geofences that will expand several fold over the next year," he said. "And then, you know, 2026 is when we're going to really start cranking out production vehicles at very large scale."

He also said Zoox will launch an "explorer" program of early riders who will be able to use the robotaxis for free before opening the service up to paying customers. (Rival Waymo operated a similar invite-only early rider program before opening its service to the paying public.) These early riders, or explorers, will gain access to the Zoox vehicles early next year starting with Las Vegas, Levinson said. The Zoox AVs will operate throughout the "most busy 16 hours" of the day, Levinson said, noting that it's "so boring at four in the morning, we don't think we would learn very much."

Comcast says the latest installment of Call of Duty, released on October 25th, resulted in a whopping 19 percent of its overall traffic last week. The ISP says it's the company's "biggest weak in internet history." The Verge reports: It's not really possible to quantify that further, given Comcast didn't provide any specific numbers -- either about how many customers were downloading the game or how big their downloads were. Ranging between 84.4GB for the PlayStation version and 102GB for the PC edition Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is, in the grand tradition of Call of Duty games, a hefty download. It can be as much as 300GB if players choose to go ahead and download Modern Warfare II and III and all the associated content packs and languages, as Activision explained in June. The announcement underscores "just how restrictive its 1.2TB data cap can be in 2024," notes The Verge. "For any players who did download the whole massive 300GB package, they'll have wiped out a huge chunk of their 1.2TB Xfinity data cap in one fell swoop."

"If they used their internet as normal otherwise, that could put them right up against or even blow past that cap. Given that my family used nearly 800GB last month without any notably large game downloads, it wouldn't be that hard at all."

Phoronix's Michael Larabel reports: CVE-2024-9632 was made public today as the latest security vulnerability affecting the X.Org Server. The CVE-2024-9632 security issue has been present in the codebase now for 18 years and can lead to local privilege escalation. Introduced in the X.Org Server 1.1.1 release back in 2006, CVE-2024-9632 affects the X.Org Server as well as XWayland too. By providing a modified bitmap to the X.Org Server, a heap-based buffer overflow privilege escalation can occur.

This security issue is within _XkbSetCompatMap() and stems from not updating the heap size properly and can lead to local privilege escalation if the server is run as root or as a remote code execution with X11 over SSH. You can read the security advisory announcement here.

Ars Technica's Stephen Clark reports: For those who follow NASA's human spaceflight program, a burning question for the last year-and-a-half has been what caused the Orion spacecraft's heat shield to crack and chip away during atmospheric reentry on the unpiloted Artemis I test flight in late 2022. Multiple NASA officials said Monday they now know the answer, but they're not telling. Instead, agency officials want to wait until more reviews are done to determine what this means for Artemis II, the Orion spacecraft's first crew mission around the Moon, officially scheduled for launch in September 2025.

"We have gotten to a root cause," said Lakiesha Hawkins, assistant deputy associate administrator for NASA's Moon to Mars program office, in response to a question from Ars on Monday at the Wernher von Braun Space Exploration Symposium. "We are having conversations within the agency to make sure that we have a good understanding of not only what's going on with the heat shield, but also next steps and how that actually applies to the course that we take for Artemis II," she said. "And we'll be in a position to be able to share where we are with that hopefully before the end of the year."

While the space program is far down the list of most voters' priorities, this means a decision and announcement on what will happen with Artemis II won't come until the post-election lame duck period in the waning weeks of the Biden administration, and likely Bill Nelson's tenure as NASA administrator. This is several months later than NASA officials expected to make a decision. The question here is whether NASA managers decide it is safe enough to fly the Orion heat shield as-is on Artemis II, or if it is too risky with people onboard. Artemis II will be a 10-day mission taking its four-person crew on a path around the far side of the Moon, then back to Earth. This will be the first time people travel to such distances since the Apollo program ended more than 50 years ago.

"We passed Berkeley air — just outdoor air — into the material to see how it would perform," says U.C. Berkeley chemistry professor Omar Yaghi, "and it was beautiful.

"It cleaned the air entirely of CO2," Yaghi says in an announcement from the university. "Everything."

SFGate calls it "a discovery that could help potentially mitigate the effects of climate change..." Yaghi's lab has worked on carbon capture since the 1990s and began work on these crystalline structures in 2005. The innovative substance has lots of tiny holes, making it "great for storing gases or liquids, much like a sponge holds water," Yaghi said... While it could take one to two years for the powder to be usable in large-scale applications, Yaghi co-founded Atoco, an Irvine company, to commercialize his research and expand it beyond just carbon capture and storage.
"Capturing carbon from the air just got easier," says the headline on the anouncement from the university, which explains why this technology is crucial: [T]oday's carbon capture technologies work well only for concentrated sources of carbon, such as power plant exhaust. The same methods cannot efficiently capture carbon dioxide from ambient air, where concentrations are hundreds of times lower than in flue gases. Yet direct air capture, or DAC, is being counted on to reverse the rise of CO2 levels, which have reached 426 parts per million, 50% higher than levels before the Industrial Revolution. Without it, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we won't reach humanity's goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degreesC (2.7 degreesF) above preexisting global averages.

A new type of absorbing material developed by chemists at the University of California, Berkeley, could help get the world to negative emissions... According to Yaghi, the new material could be substituted easily into carbon capture systems already deployed or being piloted to remove CO2 from refinery emissions and capture atmospheric CO2 for storage underground. UC Berkeley graduate student Zihui Zhou, the paper's first author, said that a mere 200 grams of the material, a bit less than half a pound, can take up as much CO2 in a year — 20 kilograms (44 pounds) — as a tree.
Their research was published this week in the journal Nature.

And it's also interesting that they're using AI, according to the university's announcement: Yaghi is optimistic that artificial intelligence can help speed up the design of even better COFs and MOFs for carbon capture or other purposes, specifically by identifying the chemical conditions required to synthesize their crystalline structures. He is scientific director of a research center at UC Berkeley, the Bakar Institute of Digital Materials for the Planet (BIDMaP), which employs AI to develop cost-efficient, easily deployable versions of MOFs and COFs to help limit and address the impacts of climate change. "We're very, very excited about blending AI with the chemistry that we've been doing," he said.
Another potential use could be for harvesting water from desert air for drinking water, Yaghi told SFGate. But he seems very focused specifically on carbon capture.

"Another thing is that we need a strong determination among officials and industries to make carbon capture a high priority. Things have to change, but I believe that direct carbon capture from air is very doable."

The Register's Laura Dobberstein reports: Huawei formally launched its home-brewed operating system, HarmonyOS NEXT, on Wednesday, marking its official separation from the Android ecosystem. Huawei declared it released and "officially started public beta testing" of the OS for some of its smartphones and tablets that run its own Kirin and Kunpeng chips.

Unlike previous iterations of HarmonyOS, HarmonyOS NEXT no longer supports Android apps. Huawei maintains top Chinese outfits aren't deterred by that. It cited Meituan, Douyin, Taobao, Xiaohongshu, Alipay, and JD.com as among those who have developed native apps for the OS. In case you're not familiar, they're China's top shopping, payment, and social media apps.

Huawei also claimed that at the time of its announcement, over 15,000 HarmonyOS native applications and meta-services were also launched. That's a nice number, but well short of the millions of apps found on the Google Play Store and Apple's App Store. The Chinese tech player also revealed that the operating system has 110 million lines of code and claimed it improves the overall performance of mobile devices running it by 30 percent. It also purportedly increases battery life by 56 minutes and leaves an average of 1.5GB of memory for purposes other than running the OS.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Qualcomm has a new chip for flagship phones, and the best part is that it uses an improved version of the Oryon CPU architecture that the Snapdragon X Elite chips brought to Windows PCs earlier this year. The Snapdragon 8 Elite is the follow-up to last year's Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 -- yet another change to the naming convention that Qualcomm uses for its high-end phone chips, though, as usual, the number 8 is still involved. The 8 Elite uses a "brand-new, 2nd-generation Qualcomm Oryon CPU" with clock speeds up to 4.32 GHz, which Qualcomm says will improve performance by about 45 percent compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.

Rather than a mix of large, medium, and small CPU cores as it has used in the past, the 8 Elite has two "Prime" cores for hitting that high peak clock speed, while the other six are all "Performance" cores that peak at a lower 3.53 GHz. But it doesn't look like Qualcomm is using a mix of different CPU architectures anymore, choosing to distinguish the higher-performing core from the lower-performing ones by clock speed alone. Qualcomm promises a similar 40 percent performance boost from the new Adreno 830 GPU. The chip also includes a marginally improved Snapdragon X80 5G modem, up from an X75 modem in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 -- its main improvement appears to be support for additional antennas, for a total of six, but the download speed still tops out at a theoretical 10Gbps. Wi-Fi 7 support appears to be the same as in the 8 Gen 3, but the 8 Elite does support the Bluetooth 6.0 standard, up from Bluetooth 5.4 in the 8 Gen 3.

Qualcomm says the new chip's CPU features "44% improved power efficiency" and "40% greater power efficiency" for the GPU, which ought to keep power usage in line despite the performance improvements -- these gains are probably attributable to the new 3 nm TSMC manufacturing process, compared to the 4 nm process used for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. And no 2024 chip announcement would be complete without some kind of AI mention: Qualcomm's image signal processor is now an "AI ISP," which Qualcomm says "recognizes and enhances virtually anything in the frame, including faces, hair, clothing, objects, backgrounds, and beyond." These capabilities can allow it to remove objects from the background of photos, among other things, using the on-device processing power of the chip's Hexagon neural processing unit (NPU). The NPU is 45 percent faster than the one in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. Phones using the Snapdragon 8 Elite should begin appearing in "the coming weeks."

Cybersecurity startup Watchtowr "was founded by hacker-turned-entrepreneur Benjamin Harris," according to a recent press release touting their Fortune 500 customers and $29 million investments from venture capital firms. ("If there's a way to compromise your organization, watchTowr will find it," Harris says in the announcement.)

This week they shared their own research on a Fortinet FortiGate SSLVPN appliance vulnerability (discovered in February by Gwendal Guégniaud of the Fortinet Product Security team — presumably in a static analysis for format string vulnerabilities). "It affected (before patching) all currently-maintained branches, and recently was highlighted by CISA as being exploited-in-the-wild... It's a Format String vulnerability [that] quickly leads to Remote Code Execution via one of many well-studied mechanisms, which we won't reproduce here..."

"Tl;dr SSLVPN appliances are still sUpEr sEcurE," their post begains — but the details are interesting. When trying to test an exploit, Watchtowr discovered instead that FortiGate always closed the connection early, thanks to an exploit mitigation in glibc "intended to hinder clean exploitation of exactly this vulnerability class." Watchtowr hoped to "use this to very easily check if a device is patched — we can simply send a %n, and if the connection aborts, the device is vulnerable. If the connection does not abort, then we know the device has been patched... " But then they discovered "Fortinet added some kind of certificate validation logic in the 7.4 series, meaning that we can't even connect to it (let alone send our payload) without being explicitly permitted by a device administrator." We also checked the 7.0 branch, and here we found things even more interesting, as an unpatched instance would allow us to connect with a self-signed certificate, while a patched machine requires a certificate signed by a configured CA. We did some reversing and determined that the certificate must be explicitly configured by the administrator of the device, which limits exploitation of these machines to the managing FortiManager instance (which already has superuser permissions on the device) or the other component of a high-availability pair. It is not sufficient to present a certificate signed by a public CA, for example...

Fortinet's advice here is simply to update, which is always sound advice, but doesn't really communicate the nuance of this vulnerability... Assuming an organisation is unable to apply the supplied workaround, the urgency of upgrade is largely dictated by the willingness of the target to accept a self-signed certificate. Targets that will do so are open to attack by any host that can access them, while those devices that require a certificate signed by a trusted root are rendered unexploitable in all but the narrowest of cases (because the TLS/SSL ecosystem is just so solid, as we recently demonstrated)...

While it's always a good idea to update to the latest version, the life of a sysadmin is filled with cost-to-benefit analysis, juggling the needs of users with their best interests.... [I]t is somewhat troubling when third parties need to reverse patches to uncover such details.
Thanks to Slashdot reader Mirnotoriety for sharing the article.

Libreboot is a distribution of coreboot "aimed at replacing the proprietary BIOS firmware contained by most computers."

So then what exactly is GNU Boot? Its home page explains... In November 2022, Libreboot began to include non-libre code. We have made repeated efforts to continue collaboration with those developers to help their version of Libreboot remain libre, but that was not successful. Now we've stepped forward to stand up for freedom, ours and that of the wider community, by maintaining our own version — a genuinely libre Libreboot, that after some hurdles gave birth to this project: GNU Boot.
But today, Phoronix writes: While priding itself on being "100% free", last December [GNU Boot] had to drop some motherboard support and CPU code after discovering they were shipping some files that are non-free by their free software standards. Today they announced another mistake in having inadvertently been shipping additional non-free code.

GNU Boot discovered an issue with non-free code affecting not only them but also some of the Linux distributions that pride themselves on being fully free software / 100% open-source. This latest snafu they say is "more problematic" than their prior non-free code discover due to impacting the free software Linux distributions too. The issue at hand though comes down to test data contained within the archive and that containing non-free code in the form of microcode, BIOS bits, and Intel Management Engine firmware.
"We also contacted Replicant..." according to the announcement, "a free Android distro that also ships vboot source code." And in addition, "We had to re-release all the affected tarballs." (Which at this point is three release candidates...)

A California oil refinery that produces 8% of the state's gasoline is shutting down late next year — a decision the Los Angeles Times says is "driven by climate change, the transition to electric vehicles and demands for cleaner air."

"There's no question we are going to lose refineries over time, because demand is going to go down as we transition to electric vehicles, but I did not expect to see any of them exiting this quickly," said Severin Borenstein, faculty director of the Energy Institute at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. California "over the medium term" will have to rely more on imports, he said. "I think part of the response the state's going to need to consider is how to make sure that we can import sufficient gasoline to meet our needs...."

David Hackett, chairman of Stillwater Associates, an Irvine oil consultancy, said he was contacted by Phillips just before the announcement, and was told the closure was a business decision. He said that although the timing was somewhat surprising, the closure wasn't, given the age of the refineries, their relatively small size and the inefficient layout that connects them by a pipeline. "That plant has been for sale for years. It hasn't found any buyers and I think that this has been an economic decision on their part. They looked at the profitability of the place and compared it with the other businesses that they have, and it didn't make the cut," he said.
"The closure is likely to increase California's already high prices at the gas pump, given that much of the replacement gasoline will be shipped in by ocean vessel, analysts say..." according to another article from the Los Angeles Times.

"Environmentalists and community activists cheered the news, however, saying it will mean cleaner air for the thousands who live in the area and that the state must continue the transition away from its dependence on fossil fuels."

"The foundation behind the Gnome desktop environment is having to go through some serious belt-tightening..." writes Linux Magazine.

From an October 7th announcement by The Gnome Foundation: Our plan for the previous financial year was to operate a break-even budget. We raised less than expected last year, due to a very challenging fundraising environment for nonprofits, on top of internal changes such as the departure of our previous Executive Director, Holly Million. The Foundation has a reserves policy which requires us to keep a certain amount of money in the bank account, to preserve core operations in the event of interruptions to our income. In order to meet our reserves policy, this year's budget had to reduce our expenditure to below expected income, and generate a small surplus to reinstate the Foundation's financial reserves to the necessary level...

We're asking for your support in several ways:

- Look out for opportunities to volunteer your time and skills in areas where we've had to reduce staff involvement.

- Share ideas on how to organize and improve our activities in this new context.

- Consider making donations to support the GNOME Foundation's core priorities, if you're able...

Through these difficult decisions, the GNOME Foundation is able to meet its reserves policy, ensuring sufficient funds for the coming year. Our budget for the new financial year is realistic and supports four full time staff, who are able to support key operations like finance, infrastructure and events. We are additionally contracting a number of other individuals on a short term or part time basis, to help with fund raising, websites and delivering on our project commitments.

We are going to be looking to the GNOME community to help with the areas that are most affected by our reduced staffing. If you would like to help GNOME with its events, marketing, or fundraising, we would love to hear from you.
In their new budget, "expenses have been greatly reduced," according to an October 10 update: We are also very relieved to be able to provide a surplus budget for the first time in many years, and doing so while still being able to support the community: events, infrastructure, internships, travel funding, and meeting our commitment to donors for work done in some parts of the stack, e.g.: Flathub, parental controls and GNOME Software.

"Biden forgives more student loans," read Thursday's headline at CNBC.

While this time it was $4.5 billion in student debt for over 60,000 public service workers, "The Biden-Harris Administration has approved $175 billion in student debt relief for nearly 5 million borrowers through various actions," according to an announcement from the White House on Thursday. (So the average amount received by each of the 5 million students is $35,000.) CNN calculates this eliminates roughly 11% of all outstanding U.S. federal student loan debt.

This latest round of forgiveness fixed a loophole in a bipartisan program (passed during the Bush administration in 2007) called Public Service Loan Forgiveness: "For too long, the government failed to live up to its commitments, and only 7,000 people had ever received forgiveness under Public Service Loan Forgiveness before Vice President (Kamala) Harris and I took office," Biden said in a statement. "We vowed to fix that," he added... Thursday's announcement impacts about 60,000 borrowers who are now approved for approximately $4.5 billion in student debt relief under PSLF.
CNN points out the total $175 billion in forgiven student debt is more than under any other president — though it's still "less than half of the $430 billion that would've been canceled under the president's one-time forgiveness plan, which was struck down by the Supreme Court last year." The Biden administration has made it easier for about 572,000 permanently disabled borrowers to receive the debt relief to which they are entitled. It also has granted student loan forgiveness to more than 1.6 million borrowers who were defrauded by their college... The Biden administration is conducting a one-time recount of borrowers' past payments and making adjustments if they had been counted incorrectly, bringing many people closer to debt relief.

The blockchain-based identity verification company founded by Sam Altman is now called "World." It also unveiled a new version of the "Orb" biometric devices the company uses to scan users' eyes. CoinTelegraph reports: World, as it's now known, also revealed a slew of other updates including a new version of its Orb biometric scanning devices, new options for identity verification and partnership integrations with popular apps including FaceTime, WhatsApp, and Zoom. [...] The new Orb, powered by Nvidia hardware, will be more efficient and "five times" more powerful than its predecessor with a smaller footprint and fewer parts. The company also said the new Orb would eventually be available in self-service kiosks in some markets.

World also announced that users will soon be able to verify their identity through methods other than the firm's Orb hardware. Through a program called World ID Credentials, the company says users with NFC-enabled government issued passports will allow them to verify their identity on the World app. Another major announcement came in the form of World ID Deep Face, a service the company claims has "solved deepfakes." According to the company, its software can be implemented into just about any app where video can be uploaded or streamed to determine whether videos featuring verified persons are real or have been faked using AI. Finally, the company also announced that so far 15 million users have signed up for its World app service; among them, seven million are verified.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Robinhood launched its long-awaited desktop platform and added futures and index options trading features to its mobile app on Wednesday, as the fintech firm aims to take market share from traditional brokerages. The 11-year-old commission-free trading app, which became synonymous with mom-and-pop investors in 2021, is now seeking to mature into a full-fledged financial services provider and compete with established brokerages that serve institutional investors. The Menlo Park, California-based company said its desktop trading platform, dubbed "Robinhood Legend," will focus on active traders.

The platform, available at no additional cost, will offer advanced trading tools, real-time data, as well as custom and preset layouts. Meanwhile, the app will allow users to trade futures on the benchmark S&P 500 index, oil and bitcoin, among others. Customers can also trade index options. [...] Subscribers to Robinhood's premium Gold tier will be able to trade futures for as low as 50 cents per contract, while non-Gold users will need to pay a commission of 75 cents. You can tune in to the company's live product announcement on YouTube.

Google announced it will purchase power from Kairos Power's small modular reactors (SMRs) to support its clean energy goals and data center demands. The company did not disclose the financial terms of the deal. CNBC reports: There are only three SMRs that are operating in the world, and none in the U.S. The hope is that SMRs are a more cost-effective way to scale up nuclear power. In the past, large, commercial-scale nuclear reactor projects have run over budget and behind schedule, and many hope SMRs won't suffer that same fate. But it is uncharted territory to some extent. Kairos Power, which is backed by the Department of Energy, was founded in 2016. In July, the company began construction on its Hermes Low-Power Demonstration Reactor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Rather than use water as the reactor coolant -- as is used in traditional nuclear reactors -- Kairos Power uses molten fluoride salt.

Google said the first reactor will be online by 2030, with more reactors going live through 2035. In total, 500 megawatts will be added to the grid. That's much smaller than commercial reactors -- Unit 4 at Plant Vogtle, which came online this year, is 1.1 gigawatts, for example -- but there's a lot of momentum behind SMRs. Advocates point to lower costs, faster completion times, as well as location flexibility as reasons. Monday's announcement is another example of the growing partnership between tech companies and nuclear power. Data centers need 24/7 reliable power, and right now nuclear is the only source of emissions-free baseload power. Many hyperscalers have ambitious emissions-reduction targets, which is why they're turning to nuclear power.

Thursday the Associated Press reported: One of the two companies that manufacture high-purity quartz used for making semiconductors and other high-tech products from mines in a western North Carolina community severely damaged by Hurricane Helene is operating again. Sibelco announced on Thursday that production has restarted at its mining and processing operations in Spruce Pine, located 50 miles (80 kilometers) northeast of Asheville. [Per Wikipedia, its pre-hurricane population was 2,175.] Production and shipments are progressively ramping up to full capacity, the company said in a news release.

"While the road to full recovery for our communities will be long, restarting our operations and resuming shipments to customers are important contributors to rebuilding the local economy," Sibelco CEO Hilmar Rode said... A Spruce Pine council member said recently that an estimated three-quarters of the town has a direct connection to the mines, whether through a job, a job that relies on the mines or a family member who works at the facilities.
An announcement last week from Sibelco attributed its resilience to their long-standing commitment to sustainability, "which includes measures to mitigate the impact of extreme weather events such as Hurricane Helene." Initial assessments indicated their operating facilities sustained only minor damage.

And "the company previously announced that all its employees are safe," Sibelco reaffirmed in its announcement Thursday: Sibelco, with support from its contractors, has been contributing to the local recovery efforts by clearing debris, repairing roads, providing road building materials to the North Carolina Department of Transportation, installing temporary power generators for emergency shelters and local businesses, and working with the town of Spruce Pine to restart water supply to residents.

Additionally, Sibelco has incorporated the Sibelco Spruce Pine Foundation to further support the community's recovery. The company previously announced that it is making an immediate $1 million donation as seed money for the foundation. Anyone interested in learning more or contributing to this initiative should contact the foundation by email or by visiting our website for additional information and donation opportunities.

In mid-2021 Ameria's National Security Advisor set up a new directorate focused on "advanced chips, quantum computing, and other cutting-edge tech," reports Wired. And the next year as Congress was working on boosting America's semiconductor sector, he was "closing in on a plan to cripple China's... In October 2022, the Commerce Department forged ahead with its new export controls."

So what happened next? In a phone call with President Biden this past spring, Xi Jinping warned that if the US continued trying to stall China's technological development, he would not "sit back and watch." And he hasn't. Already, China has answered the US export controls — and its corresponding deals with other countries — by imposing its own restrictions on critical minerals used to make semiconductors and by hoovering up older chips and manufacturing equipment it is still allowed to buy. For the past several quarters, in fact, China was the top customer for ASML and a number of Japanese chip companies. A robust black market for banned chips has also emerged in China. According to a recent New York Times investigation, some of the Chinese companies that have been barred from accessing American chips through US export controls have set up new corporations to evade those bans. (These companies have claimed no connection to the ones who've been banned.) This has reportedly enabled Chinese entities with ties to the military to obtain small amounts of Nvidia's high-powered chips.

Nvidia, meanwhile, has responded to the US actions by developing new China-specific chips that don't run afoul of the US controls but don't exactly thrill the Biden administration either. For the White House and Commerce Department, keeping pace with all of these workarounds has been a constant game of cat and mouse. In 2023, the US introduced the first round of updates to its export controls. This September, it released another — an announcement that was quickly followed by a similar expansion of controls by the Dutch. Some observers have speculated that the Biden administration's actions have only made China more determined to invest in its advanced tech sector.

And there's clearly some truth to that. But it's also true that China has been trying to become self-sufficient since long before Biden entered office. Since 2014, it has plowed nearly $100 billion into its domestic chip sector. "That was the world we walked into," [NSA Advisor Jake] Sullivan said. "Not the world we created through our export controls." The United States' actions, he argues, have only made accomplishing that mission that much tougher and costlier for Beijing. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger estimated earlier this year that there's a "10-year gap" between the most powerful chips being made by Chinese chipmakers like SMIC and the ones Intel and Nvidia are working on, thanks in part to the export controls.

If the measure of Sullivan's success is how effectively the United States has constrained China's advancement, it's hard to argue with the evidence. "It's probably one of the biggest achievements of the entire Biden administration," said Martijn Rasser, managing director of Datenna, a leading intelligence firm focused on China. Rasser said the impact of the US export controls alone "will endure for decades." But if you're judging Sullivan's success by his more idealistic promises regarding the future of technology — the idea that the US can usher in an era of progress dominated by democratic values — well, that's a far tougher test. In many ways, the world, and the way advanced technologies are poised to shape it, feels more unsettled than ever.

Four years was always going to be too short for Sullivan to deliver on that promise. The question is whether whoever's sitting in Sullivan's seat next will pick up where he left off.