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.

An anonymous reader shares a PC Gamer report: PCI Express 7.0 is coming. But don't feel as though you need to start saving for a new motherboard anytime soon. The PCI-SIG has just released the 0.5 version, with the final version set for release in 2025. That means supporting devices are not likely to land until 2026, with 2027-28 likely to be the years we see a wider rollout. PCIe 7.0 will initially be far more relevant to the enterprise market, where bandwidth-hungry applications like AI and networking will benefit. Anyway, it's not like the PC market is saturated with PCIe 5.0 devices, and PCIe 6.0 is yet to make its way into our gaming PCs.

PCI Express bandwidth doubles every generation, so PCIe 7.0 will deliver a maximum data rate up to 128 GT/s. That's a whopping 8x faster than PCIe 4.0 and 4x faster than PCIe 5.0. This means PCIe 7.0 is capable of delivering up to 512GB/s of bi-directional throughput via a x16 connection and 128GB/s for an x4 connection. More bandwidth will certainly be beneficial for CPU to chipset links, which means multiple integrated devices like 10G networking, WiFi 7, USB 4, and Thunderbolt 4 will all be able to run on a consumer motherboard without compromise. And just imagine what all that bandwidth could mean for PCIe 7.0 SSDs. In the years to come, a PCIe 7.0 x4 SSD could approach sequential transfer rates of up to 60GB/s. We'll need some serious advances in SSD controller and NAND flash technologies to see speeds in that range, but still, it's an attractive proposition. Further reading: PCIe 7.0 first official draft lands, doubling bandwidth yet again.

As reported by Bloomberg (paywalled), Apple is exploring the development of personal home robots following the shut down of its electric vehicle project. CNBC reports: Engineers at Apple have been looking into a robot that can follow users around their homes and a tabletop device that uses robotics to adjust a display screen, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the research team. [...] Apple's hardware engineering division and its artificial intelligence and machine learning group are overseeing the work on personal robotics, Bloomberg reported. The home robot project is still in the early research and development phase, according to the report.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: India's hydroelectricity output fell at the steepest pace in at least 38 years during the year ended March 31, a Reuters analysis of government data showed, as erratic rainfall forced further dependence on coal-fired power amid higher demand. The 16.3% drop in generation from the country's biggest clean energy source coincided with the share of renewables in power generation sliding for the first time since Prime Minister Narendra Modi made commitments to boost solar and wind capacity at the United Nations climate talks at Paris in 2015.

Renewables accounted for 11.7% of India's power output in the year that ended in March, down from 11.8% a year earlier, a Reuters analysis of daily load despatch data from the federal grid regulator Grid-India showed. India is the world's third-largest greenhouse gas emitter, and the government often points to lower per-capita emissions compared to developed nations to defend rising coal use. A five-year low in reservoir levels means hydro output will likely remain low during the hottest months of April-June, experts say, potentially boosting dependence on coal during a period of high demand before the monsoon starts in June. [...]

Globally, hydropower output fell for only the fourth time since 2000 due to lower rainfall and warmer temperature brought about by the El Nino weather pattern, according to energy think tank Ember. Hydro output in India, the sixth-biggest hydropower producer, fell nearly seven times faster than the global average, Ember data showed.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Android Police, written by Dhruv Bhutani: As someone who is an early adopter of all things smart and has invested a significant amount of money in building a fancy smart home, it saddens me to say that I feel cheated by the thousands of dollars I've spent on smart devices. And it's not a one-off. Amazon's recent move to block off local ADB connections on Fire TV devices is the latest example in a long line of grievances. A brand busy wrestling away control from the consumer after they've bought the product, the software update gimps a feature that has been present on the hardware ever since it launched back in 2014. ADB-based commands let users take deep control of the hardware, and in the case of the Fire TV hardware, it can drastically improve the user experience. [...] A few years ago, I decided to invest in the NVIDIA Shield. The premium streamer was marketed as a utopia for streaming online and offline sources with the ability to plug in hard drives, connect to NAS drives, and more. At launch, it did precisely that while presenting a beautiful, clean interface that was a joy to interact with. However, subsequent updates have converted what was otherwise a clean and elegant solution to an ad-infested overlay that I zoom past to jump into my streaming app of choice. This problem isn't restricted to just the Shield. Even my Google TV running Chromecast has a home screen that's more of an advertising space for Google than an easy way to get to my content.

But why stop at streaming boxes? Google's Nest Hubs are equal victims of feature deterioration. I've spent hundreds of dollars on Nest Hubs and outfitted them in most of my rooms and washrooms. However, Google's consistent degradation of the user experience means I use these speakers for little more than casting music from the Spotify app. The voice recognition barely works on the best of days, and when it does, the answers tend to be wildly inconsistent. It wasn't always the case. In fact, at launch, Google's Nest speakers were some of the best smart home interfaces you could buy. You'd imagine that the experience would only improve from there. That's decidedly not the case. I had high hopes that the Fuchsia update would fix the broken command detection, but that's also not the case. And good luck to you if you decided to invest in Google Assistant-compatible displays. Google's announcement that it would no longer issue software or security updates to third-party displays like the excellent Lenovo Smart Display, right after killing the built-in web browser, is pretty wild. It boggles my mind that a company can get away with such behavior.

Now imagine the plight of Nest Secure owners. A home security system isn't something one expects to switch out for many many years. And yet, Google decided to kill the Nest Secure home monitoring solution merely three years after launching the product range. While I made an initial investment in the Nest ecosystem, I've since switched over to a completely local solution that is entirely under my control, stores data locally, and won't be going out of action because of bad decision-making by another company. "It's clear to me that smart home devices, as they stand, are proving to be very poor investments for consumers," Bhutani writes in closing. "Suffice it to say that I've paused any future investments in smart devices, and I'll be taking a long and hard look at a company's treatment of its current portfolio before splurging out more cash. I'd recommend you do the same."

"If you want to see what the cutting edge of next-gen clean energy innovation looks like, it'd be hard to find a place better than Texas," Bill Gates wrote recently on his blog," saying "amazing companies" are breaking ground across the state. "Each one represents a huge boon for the local economy, America's energy security, and the fight against climate change." The world is undergoing an energy transition right now, fueled by the development and deployment of new clean energy technologies. The pace of innovation at the heart of this transition is happening faster than many people (including me!) dared hope. The progress makes me optimistic about the future — and excited about the role that American communities will play, especially in places like Texas.

Breakthrough Energy and I have invested more than $130 million into Texas-based entrepreneurs, institutions, and projects. It's a big bet, but it's one I'm confident in. Why? Because of the people. Nearly half a million Texans work in the oil and gas industry, and their skills are directly transferrable to next-generation industries. This workforce will help form the backbone of the world's new clean energy economy, and it will cement Texas's energy leadership for generations to come.

Many of the companies I'm seeing on this trip already employ or plan to employ oil and gas workers. One of those companies is Infinium, which is working on next-generation clean fuels for trucks, ships, and even planes. I'm visiting their first demonstration plant in Corpus Christi, where they're turning waste CO2 and renewable energy into electrofuels — or eFuels — for trucks. They've already signed a deal with Amazon, and sometime soon, if you live in the area, you might get a delivery supported by Infinium eDiesel. The key to Infinium's approach is that their fuels can be dropped into existing engines... I'm especially excited about the work they're doing on sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF — which could reduce emissions from air travel by as much as 90 percent, according to company estimates. Infinium is in the process of converting an old gas-to-liquid plant in West Texas into a new facility that will increase the company's capacity for producing eFuels ten-fold. Breakthrough Energy's Catalyst program has invested in this first-of-its-kind plant, and I can't wait to see it when it's done.

Another company I'll see is Mars Materials. They're a Breakthrough Energy Fellows project working on a different way to reuse CO2. The company is developing a clever technique for turning captured carbon into one of the key components in carbon fiber, an ultra-light, ultra-strong material that is used in everything from clothing to car frames... The Mars Materials team relocated from California to Texas in part because of the skilled oil and gas talent that they could access in the state, and they aren't the first Breakthrough Energy company to do that. I'm going to check out their lab, where their scientists are hard at work optimizing the conversion process.
Both companies assume abundant CO2, Gates writes, but "fortunately for them, Texas is also in the process of becoming a capital for direct air capture... A recent study found that Texas has the greatest DAC deployment potential in the country and could create as many as 400,000 jobs by 2050." Already a direct air capture "hub" in Kingsville, Texas is expected to create 2,500 jobs over the next five years, while Houston has been selected as the site for one of America's seven Regional Clean Hydrogen Hubs.

"If you want to catch a glimpse of our country's clean energy future," Gates writes, "you should head on down to the Lone Star State."

In November of 2021 America passed a "Bipartisan Infrastructure Law" which included $7.5 billion for up to 20,000 EV charging spots, or around 5,000 stations, notes the Washington Post (citing an analysis from the EV policy analyst group Atlas Public Policy).

And new stations are now already open in Hawaii, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania, "and under construction in four other states. Twelve additional states have awarded contracts for constructing the charging stations." A White House spokesperson said America should reach its goal of 500,000 charging stations by 2026.

So why is it that right now — more than two years after the bill's passage — why does the Federal Highway System say the program has so far only delivered seven open charging stations with a total of 38 charging spots? Nick Nigro, founder of Atlas Public Policy, said that some of the delays are to be expected. "State transportation agencies are the recipients of the money," he said. "Nearly all of them had no experience deploying electric vehicle charging stations before this law was enacted." Nigro says that the process — states have to submit plans to the Biden administration for approval, solicit bids on the work, and then award funds — has taken much of the first two years since the funding was approved. "I expect it to go much faster in 2024," he added.

"We are building a national EV charging network from scratch, and we want to get it right," a spokesperson for the Federal Highway Administration said in an email. "After developing program guidance and partnering with states to guide implementation plans, we are hitting our stride as states move quickly to bring National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure stations online...."

Part of the slow rollout is that the new chargers are expected to be held to much higher standards than previous generations of fast chargers. The United States currently has close to 10,000 "fast" charging stations in the country, of which over 2,000 are Tesla Superchargers, according to the Department of Energy. Tesla Superchargers — some of which have been opened to drivers of other vehicles — are the most reliable fast-charging systems in the country. But many non-Tesla fast chargers have a reputation for poor performance and sketchy reliability. EV advocates have criticized Electrify America, the company created by Volkswagen after the company's "Dieselgate" emissions scandal, for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on chargers that don't work well. The company has said they are working to improve reliability. The data analytics company J.D. Power has estimated that only 80 percent of all charging attempts in the country are successful.

Biden administration guidance requires the new publicly funded chargers to be operational 97% of the time, provide 150kW of power at each charger, and be no more than one mile from the interstate, among many other requirements.EV policy experts say those requirements are critical to building a good nationwide charging program — but also slow down the build-out of the chargers. "This funding comes with dozens of rules and requirements," Laska said. "That is the nature of what we're trying to accomplish....

"States are just not operating with the same urgency that some of the rest of us are."
The article notes that private companies are also building charging stations — but the publicly-funded spots would increase America's car-charging capacity by around 50 percent, "a crucial step to alleviating 'range anxiety' and helping Americans shift into battery electric cars.

"States just have to build them first."