The DeepComputing RISC-V Mainboard that Framework announced last year for its 13-inch laptops is now available for $199. Liliputing reports: If you already have a Framework Laptop 13 with an Intel or AMD motherboard, the new board is a drop-in replacement. But if you don't have a Framework Laptop you can also use the mainboard as a standalone computer: Framework sells a $39 Cooler Master case that effectively turns its mainboards into mini desktop computers. The RISC-V Mainboard comes from a partnership between Framework and DeepComputing, the Chinese company behind the DC-ROMA laptops, which were some of the first notebook computers to ship with RISC-V processors.

The board features a StarFive JH7110 processor, which is a 1.5 GHz quad-core chip featuring SiFive U74 RISC-V CPU cores and Imagination BXE-4-32 graphics, 8GB of onboard RAM, and a a 64GB SD card for storage (there's also support for an optional eMMC module, but you'll need to bring your own). Since the board is designed to fit in existing laptop frames, it's the same size and shape as AMD or Intel models and has four USB ports in the same locations. But these ports are a little less versatile than the ones you might find on other Framework Laptop 13 Mainboards [...]. There's also a 3.5mm audio jack. You can check out the new board via the Framework Marketplace.

Further reading: Late last year, Framework CEO Nirav Patel delivered one of the best live demos we've ever seen at a tech conference -- modifying a Framework Laptop from x86 to RISC-V live on stage.

OpenAI has filed an application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to trademark hardware products under its brand name, signaling potential expansion into consumer devices. The filing covers AI-assisted headsets, smart wearables and humanoid robots with communication capabilities. CEO Sam Altman told The Elec on Sunday that OpenAI plans to develop AI hardware through multiple partnerships, though he estimated prototypes would take "several years" to complete.

To capitalize on the AI boom, many crypto miners "have begun to repurpose parts of their operations into data centers," reports Reuters, "given they already have most of the infrastructure" (including landing and "significant" power resources...) Toronto-based bitcoin miner Bitfarms has enlisted two consultants to explore how it can transform some of its facilities to meet the growing demand for artificial intelligence data centers, it said on Friday... Earlier this month, Riot Platforms launched a review of the potential AI and computing uses for parts of its facility in Navarro County, Texas.

Honda calls it their "second founding," as the company "continues to target 100% electric vehicle sales by 2040, and to have 'zero environmental impact' by 2050," writes Green Car Reports. "It's previously projected 40% EV sales in North America by 2030... "

Half of the Honda Accords sold in America are already electric, — but Honda "has admitted that it's hard to predict the trajectory of where the mix will be on the way to fully electric." So... To reconcile all this, it's prepared by committing to a new template for making both EVs and gasoline models, all on the same production line. This sea change in how it makes vehicles could keep its oldest U.S. assembly plant, its Marysville, Ohio, facility that opened in 1982, humming at capacity, no matter what the market presents. As Honda confirmed last April, Marysville will truly get the automaker to the point of EV mass production in North America, with a big asterisk. It has the capability to make hundreds of EVs per day, or many hundreds of gasoline models — depending on demand.

Marysville is one of four facilities set to make up what Honda is calling its Ohio EV Hub — including the Anna Engine Plant and East Liberty Auto Plant, all within 50 miles of each other, and a joint-venture battery plant between Honda and LG Energy solution in nearby Jeffersonville, Ohio. Battery plant aside, Honda says it encompasses more than a $1 billion investment in the three facilities, in redesigning the manufacturing process around being able to make ICE, hybrid, and EV models all on the same production line.

The investment in the Ohio facilities marks the global debut of changes in the way it builds vehicles, with expertise set to be shared across North America. And, according to Honda, it's aiming to set a global standard for Honda EV production.
The article explains that Honda "created a series of sub-assembly lines that could handle all the differences in the way an EV is assembled versus the way a gasoline or hybrid vehicle is assembled."

And CNBC reports that Honda's Ohio project includes "several new manufacturing processes and techniques to lower emissions and waste, including using a special form of structural aluminum for the EV battery packs that can be recycled and reused." Bob Schwyn, senior vice president of Honda Development and Manufacturing of America, describes it as part of Honda's "strategies to recapture our products at end-of-life and then recycle or reuse 100% of the materials, especially finite materials for EV batteries, to essentially make new Hondas out of old Hondas."

On January 24th Brooklyn blogger Jeffrey Emanuel made the case for shorting NVIDIA, remembers MarketWatch, "due to a number of shifting tides in the AI world, including the emergence of a China-based company called DeepSeek."

He published his 12,000-word post "on his personal blog and then shared it with the Value Investors Club website and across Reddit, X and other platforms." The next day he saw 35 people read his post. "But then the post started to go viral..." Well-known venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya shared Emanuel's post on Nvidia's short case with his 1.8 million X followers. Successful early stage investor Naval Ravikant shared the post with his 2.6 million followers... Morgan Brown, a vice president of product and growth at Dropbox, pointed to it in a thread that was viewed over 13 million times. Emanuel's own X post got nearly half a million views. He also quickly gained about 13,000 followers on the platform, going from about 2,000 to more than 15,000 followers...

[Emanuel] pointed to the fact that so many people in San Jose were reading his blog post. He theorized that many of them were Nvidia employees with thousands — or even millions — of dollars worth of Nvidia stock tied up in employee stock options. With that much money in a single asset, Emanuel speculated that many were already debating whether to hold the stock or sell it to lock in profits. He believes his blog post helped convince some of them to sell. "A lot of the sell pressure you saw on Monday morning wasn't necessarily what you might think. I believe a fair amount of that was from shares that had never been active because they had been sitting in workplace.schwab.com accounts..."
Emanuel stresses he's "the most bullish on AI," with MarketWatch emphasizing that "while the points Emanuel laid out in his blog post might be bearish for Nvidia, he still thinks they paint a positive future for AI." Nevertheless, Monday NVIDIA's market capitalization dropped $600 billion, which MarketWatch calls "the largest single-day market-cap drop to date for any company." What countless Wall Street firms and investment analysts had seemingly missed was being pointed out by some guy in his apartment.... Matt Levine, the prominent Bloomberg News financial columnist, noted the online chatter that claimed Emanuel's post "was an important catalyst" for the stock-market selloff and said it was a "candidate for the most impactful short research report ever." Emanuel spent the rest of the week booked solid as hedge funds paid him $1,000 per hour to speak on the phone and give his take on Nvidia and AI...

Emanuel wrote that the industry may be running low on quality data to train that AI — that is, a potential "data wall" is looming that could slow down AI scaling and reduce some of that need for training resources... Some of these companies, like Alphabet, have also been investing in building out their own semiconductor chips. For a while, Nvidia's hardware has been the best for training AI, but that might not be the case forever as more companies, such as Cerebras, build better hardware. And other GPU makers like AMD are updating their drivers software to be more competitive with Nvidia... Add all these things together — unsustainable spending and data-center building, less training data to work with, better competing hardware and more efficient AI — and you get a future where it's harder to imagine Nvidia's customers spending as much as they currently are on Nvidia hardware... "If you know that a company will only earn supersized returns for a couple years, you don't apply a multiple. You certainly don't put a 30-times multiple," Emanuel told MarketWatch.
The article notes that DeepSeek "is open-source and has been publishing technical papers out in the open for the past few months... The $5.6 million training-cost statistic that many investors cited for sparking the DeepSeek market panic was actually revealed in the V3 technical paper published on Dec. 26."

"Sometimes, government makes a bad bet..." writes the Los Angeles Times. Opening in 2014, the Ivanpah concentrated solar plant "quickly became known as an expensive, bird-killing eyesore." Assuming that state officials sign off — which they most likely will, because the deal will lead to lower bills for PG&E customers — two of the three towers will shut down come 2026. Ivanpah's owners haven't paid off the project's $1.6-billion federal loan, and it's unclear whether they'll be able to do so. Houston-based NRG Energy, which operates Ivanpah and is a co-owner with Kelvin Energy and Google, said that federal officials took part in the negotiations to close PG&E's towers and that the closure agreement will allow the federal government "to maximize the recovery of its loans." It's possible Ivanpah's third and final tower will close, too. An Edison spokesperson told me the utility is in "ongoing discussions" with the project's owners and the federal government over ending the utility's contract.

It might be tempting to conclude government should stop placing bets and just let the market decide. But if it weren't for taxpayers dollars, large-scale solar farms, which in 2023 produced 17% of California's power, might never have matured into low-cost, reliable electricity sources capable of displacing planet-warming fossil fuels. More than a decade ago, federal loans helped finance some of the nation's first big solar-panel farms.

Not every government investment will be a winner. Renewable energy critics still raise the specter of Solyndra, a solar panel manufacturer that filed for bankruptcy in 2011 after receiving a $535-million federal loan. But on the whole, clean power investments have worked out. The U.S. Department of Energy reported that as of Dec. 31, it had disbursed $40.5 billion in loans. Of that amount, $15.2 billion had already been repaid. The federal government was on the hook for $1.03 billion in estimated losses but had reaped $5.6 billion in interest.
The article notes recent U.S. energy-related loans to a lithium mine in Nevada (close to $1 billion) and $15 billion to expand hydropower, upgrade power lines, and add batteries. Some of the loans won't get paid back "If federal officials are doing their jobs well," the article adds. "That's the risk inherent to betting on early-stage technologies." About the Ivanpah solar towers, they write "Maybe they never should have been built. They're too expensive, they don't work right, they kill too many birds... It's good that their time is coming to an end. But we should take inspiration from them, too: Don't get complacent. Keep trying new things."

PG&E says their objective at the time was partly to "support new technologies," with one senior director of commercial procurement noting "It's not clear in the early stages what technologies will work best and be most affordable for customers. Solar photovoltaic panels and battery energy storage were once unaffordable at large scale." But today they've calculated that ending their power agreements with Ivanpah would cost customers "substantially less." And once deactivated, Ivanpah's units "will be decommissioned, providing an opportunity for the site to potentially be repurposed for renewable PV energy production," NRG said in a statement.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal notes that instead the 3,500-acre, 386-megawatt concentrated thermal power plant used a much older technology, "a system of mirrors to reflect sunlight and generate thermal energy, which is then concentrated to power a steam engine." Throughout the day, 350,000 computer-controlled mirrors track the sunlight and reflect it onto boilers atop 459-foot towers to generate AC. Nowadays, photovoltaic solar has surpassed concentrated solar power and become the dominant choice for renewable, clean energy, being more cost effective and flexible... So many birds have been victims of the plant's concentrated sun rays that workers referred to them as "streamers," for the smoke plume that comes from birds that ignite in midair. When federal wildlife investigators visited the plant around 10 years ago, they reported an average of one "streamer" every two minutes.
"Meanwhile, environmentalists continue to blame the Mojave Desert plant for killing thousands of birds and tortoises," reports the Associated Press. And a Sierra Club campaign organizer also says several rare plant species were destroyed during the plant's construction. "While the Sierra Club strongly supports innovative clean energy solutions and recognizes the urgent need to transition away from fossil fuels, Ivanpah demonstrated that not all renewable technologies are created equal."

A recent video from retro tech YouTuber Clint "LGR" Basinger takes a deep dive into the history of the SereneScreen Marine Aquarium, exploring how former Air Force pilot Jim Sachs transformed a lackluster Windows 95 screensaver into a 25-year digital phenomenon. PC Gamer reports: The story centers on Jim Sachs, a man with one of those "they don't make this type of guy anymore" life stories so common to '80s and '90s computing, one Sachs recounted to the website AmigaLove back in 2020. After a six-year career in the US Air Force flying C-141 Starlifters, Sachs taught himself programming and digital art and began creating games for Commodore 64 and Amiga computers. From his first game, Saucer Attack, to later efforts like Defender of the Crown or his large portfolio of promotional and commissioned pieces, Sach's pixel art remains gorgeous and impressive to this day, and he seems to be a bit of a legend among Commodore enthusiasts.

It's with this background in games and digital art that Sachs looked at Microsoft's simple aquarium-themed screensaver for Windows 95 and 98 and thought he could do better. "Microsoft had an aquarium that they gave away with Windows where it was just bitmaps of fish being dragged across the screen," Sachs told the Matt Chat podcast back in 2015. "And they had that for like, three or four years. And I thought, I've given them enough time, I'm taking them to market. I'm gonna do something which will just blow that away."

Using reference photographs of real aquariums -- Sachs thanked a specific pet shop that's still around in an early version of his website" -- Sachs created the 3D art by hand and programmed the screensaver in C++, releasing the initial version in July 2000. Even looking at it all these years later, the first iteration of the SereneScreen Marine Aquarium is pretty gorgeous, and it has the added charm of being such a distinctly Y2K, nostalgic throwback.

The standalone screensaver sold well, but then things came full circle with Microsoft licensing a version of the Marine Aquarium for the Windows XP Plus Pack and later standard releases of the OS. Since that time, the Marine Aquarium has continued to see new releases, and a section on the SereneScreen website keeps track of its various appearances in the background of movies and TV shows like Law and Order. Over on the SereneScreen website, you can purchase a real time, 3D-accelerated version of the Marine Aquarium for Mac, iOS, Android, and the original Windows. Echoing the Windows XP deal, Roku actually licensed this 3.0 version for its TVs, bringing it to a new generation of users.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: In the first serious fallout from President Donald Trump's early actions against offshore wind power, oil and gas giant Shell is walking away from a major project off the coast of New Jersey. Shell told The Associated Press it is writing off the project, citing increased competition, delays and a changing market. "Naturally we also take regulatory context into consideration," spokesperson Natalie Gunnell said in an email.

Shell co-owns the large Atlantic Shores project, which has most of its permits and would generate enough power for 1 million homes if both of two phases were completed. That's enough for one-third of New Jersey households. It's unclear whether Shell's decision kills the project -- partner EDF-RE Offshore Development says it remains committed to Atlantic Shores. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order singling out offshore wind for contempt with a temporary halt on all lease sales in federal waters and a pause on approvals, permits and loans. Perhaps most of interest to Shell, the order directs administration officials to review existing offshore wind energy leases and identify any legal reasons to terminate them.

[...] The Biden administration approved plans to build the Atlantic Shores project in two phases in October, but construction has not begun. Oliver Metcalfe, head of wind research at BloombergNEF, said the partners are facing significant uncertainty about their lease, and other developers are watching what happens with Atlantic Shores closely. "We're in uncertain territory here," he added. [...] Robin Shaffer, president of Protect Our Coast NJ, said that without Shell's financial backing, it appears the project is "dead in the water." Shell is writing off a nearly $1 billion investment. It announced its decision on Thursday, as it reported a 16% decline in full-year earnings of $23.7 billion from $28.3 billion. Most of its business is oil and gas.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: What exactly is wrong with the batteries in some of Google's Pixel 4a phones still out there? Google has not really said. Now that many Pixel 4a owners are experiencing drastically reduced battery life after an uncommon update for an end-of-life phone, they are facing a strange array of options with no path back to the phone they had.

Google's "Pixel 4a Battery Performance Program," announced in early January, told owners that an automatic update would, for some "Impacted Devices," reduce their battery's runtime and charging performance. "Impacted" customers could choose, within one year's time, between three "appeasement" options: sending in the phone for a battery replacement, getting $50 or the equivalent in their location, or receiving $100 in credit in the Google Store toward a new Pixel phone. No safety or hazard issue was mentioned in the support document.

Google did not explain why only certain devices were affected, but Hector Martin -- of Asahi Linux on Apple silicon, open source Kinect drivers, and other fame -- took apart the update's binary kernel and has some guesses. Martin points out that the updated Pixel 4a kernel has these interesting characteristics:

- It seems to have been built by a Google engineer "on their personal machine, not the proper buildsystem."
-- There is no source provided, as would normally be required of a Linux kernel build, though it may only need to be provided on request under the GNU General Public License.
- The maximum charge voltage of certain battery profiles changes from 4.44 volts to 3.95, which would mean batteries cannot charge to anywhere near their former potential.
- There are two main battery profiles, with distinct "ATL" and "LSN" markers; Martin suggests they relate to Amperex Technology Limited and Lishen, manufacturers of battery cells.
- LSN-tagged batteries assigned the "debug" profile can see capacity reduced from 3,080 milliamp hours (mAh) to 1,539 mAh. The big question is why Google pushed an automatic update to a phone from 2020. "No news or community reports have surfaced yet of Pixel 4a devices causing fires, or even simply failing to function, after four years," writes Ars' Kevin Purdy. "It's an automatic update with a strong fix, but for what?"

Google's support page only states that the update will "improve the stability of their battery's performance."

During the company's fourth-quarter earnings call Thursday, Intel co-CEO Michelle Johnston Holthaus announced that Intel has decided to cancel its Falcon Shores AI chip. Instead, it'll opt to use it as an internal test chip while shifting focus to Jaguar Shores for AI data center solutions. TechCrunch reports: "AI data center ... is an attractive market for us," Holthaus said during the call. "[B]ut I am not happy with where we are today. We're not yet participating in the cloud-based AI data center market in a meaningful way ... One of the immediate actions I have taken is to simplify our roadmap and concentrate our resources." The focus instead will be on Jaguar Shores, which Holthaus called Intel's opportunity to "develop a system-level solution at rack scale ... to address the AI data center more broadly."

Holthaus tempered expectations for Falcon Shores last month, when she implied that it was an "iterative" step over the company's previous dedicated AI data center chip, Gaudi 3. "One of the things that we've learned from Gaudi is, it's not enough to just deliver the silicon," Holthaus said during Thursday's earnings call. "Falcon Shores will help us in that process of working on the system, networking, memory -- all those component[s]. But what customers really want is that full-scale rack solution, and so we're able to get to that with Jaguar Shores."

"As I think about our AI opportunity, my focus is on the problems our customers are trying to solve, most notably the need to lower the cost and increase the efficiency of compute," Holthaus said. "As such, a one-size-fits-all approach will not work, and I can see clear opportunities to leverage our core assets in new ways to drive the most compelling total cost of ownership across the continuum."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Datasets aggregated on data.gov, the largest repository of U.S. government open data on the internet, are being deleted, according to the website's own information. Since Donald Trump was inaugurated as president, more than 2,000 datasets have disappeared from the database. As people in the Data Hoarding and archiving communities have pointed out, on January 21, there were 307,854 datasets on data.gov. As of Thursday, there are 305,564 datasets. Many of the deletions happened immediately after Trump was inaugurated, according to snapshots of the website saved on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Harvard University researcher Jack Cushman has been taking snapshots of Data.gov's datasets both before and after the inauguration, and has worked to create a full archive of the data.

"Some of [the entries link to] actual data," Cushman told 404 Media. "And some of them link to a landing page [where the data is hosted]. And the question is -- when things are disappearing, is it the data it points to that is gone? Or is it just the index to it that's gone?" For example, "National Coral Reef Monitoring Program: Water Temperature Data from Subsurface Temperature Recorders (STRs) deployed at coral reef sites in the Hawaiian Archipelago from 2005 to 2019," a NOAA dataset, can no longer be found on data.gov but can be found on one of NOAA's websites by Googling the title. "Stetson Flower Garden Banks Benthic_Covage Monitoring 1993-2018 -- OBIS Event," another NOAA dataset, can no longer be found on data.gov and also appears to have been deleted from the internet. "Three Dimensional Thermal Model of Newberry Volcano, Oregon," a Department of Energy resource, is no longer available via the Department of Energy but can be found backed up on third-party websites. [...]

Data.gov serves as an aggregator of datasets and research across the entire government, meaning it isn't a single database. This makes it slightly harder to archive than any individual database, according to Mark Phillips, a University of Northern Texas researcher who works on the End of Term Web Archive, a project that archives as much as possible from government websites before a new administration takes over. "Some of this falls into the 'We don't know what we don't know,'" Phillips told 404 Media. "It is very challenging to know exactly what, where, how often it changes, and what is new, gone, or going to move. Saving content from an aggregator like data.gov is a bit more challenging for the End of Term work because often the data is only identified and registered as a metadata record with data.gov but the actual data could live on another website, a state .gov, a university website, cloud provider like Amazon or Microsoft or any other location. This makes the crawling even more difficult."

Phillips said that, for this round of archiving (which the team does every administration change), the project has been crawling government websites since January 2024, and that they have been doing "large-scale crawls with help from our partners at the Internet Archive, Common Crawl, and the University of North Texas. We've worked to collect 100s of terabytes of web content, which includes datasets from domains like data.gov." [...] It is absolutely true that the Trump administration is deleting government data and research and is making it harder to access. But determining what is gone, where it went, whether it's been preserved somewhere, and why it was taken down is a process that is time intensive and going to take a while. "One thing that is clear to me about datasets coming down from data.gov is that when we rely on one place for collecting, hosting, and making available these datasets, we will always have an issue with data disappearing," Phillips said. "Historically the federal government would distribute information to libraries across the country to provide greater access and also a safeguard against loss. That isn't done in the same way for this government data."

The Register's Dan Robinson reports: Google promised a decade of updates for its Chromebooks in 2023 to stop them being binned so soon after purchase, but many are still set to reach the end of the road sooner than later. The appliance-like laptop devices were introduced by megacorp in 2011, running its Linux-based ChromeOS platform. They have been produced by a number of hardware vendors and proven popular with buyers such as students, thanks to their relatively low pricing. The initial devices were designed for a three-year lifespan, or at least this was the length of time Google was prepared to issue automatic updates to add new features and security fixes for the onboard software.

Google has extended this Auto Update Expiration (AUE) date over the years, prompted by irate users who purchased a Chromebook only to find that it had just a year or two of software updates left if that particular model had been on the market for a while. The latest extension came in September 2023, when the company promised ten years of automatic updates, following pressure from the US-based Public Interest Research Group (PIRG). The advocacy organization had recommended this move in its Chromebook Churn report, which criticized the devices as not being designed to last.

PIRG celebrated its success at the time, claiming that Google's decision to extend support would "save millions of dollars and prevent tons of e-waste from being disposed of." But Google's move actually meant that only Chromebooks released from 2021 onward would automatically get ten years of updates, starting in 2024. For a subset of older devices, an administrator (or someone with admin privileges) can opt in to enable extended updates and receive the full ten years of support, a spokesperson for the company told us. This, according to PIRG, still leaves many models set to reach end of life this year, or over the next several years. "According to my research, at least 15 Chromebook models have already expired across most of the top manufacturers (Google, Acer, Dell, HP, Samsung, Asus, and Lenovo). Models released before 2021 don't have the guaranteed ten years of updates, so more devices will continue to expire each year," Stephanie Markowitz, a Designed to Last Campaign Associate at PIRG, told The Register.

"In general, end-of-support dates for consumer tech like laptops act as 'slow death' dates," according to Markowitz. "The devices won't necessarily lose function immediately, but without security updates and bug patches, the device will eventually become incompatible with the most up-to-date software, and the device itself will no longer be secure against malware and other issues."

A full ist of end-of-life dates for Chromebook models can be viewed here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple-designed chips powering Macs, iPhones, and iPads contain two newly discovered vulnerabilities that leak credit card information, locations, and other sensitive data from the Chrome and Safari browsers as they visit sites such as iCloud Calendar, Google Maps, and Proton Mail. The vulnerabilities, affecting the CPUs in later generations of Apple A- and M-series chip sets, open them to side channel attacks, a class of exploit that infers secrets by measuring manifestations such as timing, sound, and power consumption. Both side channels are the result of the chips' use of speculative execution, a performance optimization that improves speed by predicting the control flow the CPUs should take and following that path, rather than the instruction order in the program. [...]

The researchers published a list of mitigations they believe will address the vulnerabilities allowing both the FLOP and SLAP attacks. They said that Apple officials have indicated privately to them that they plan to release patches. In an email, an Apple representative declined to say if any such plans exist. "We want to thank the researchers for their collaboration as this proof of concept advances our understanding of these types of threats," the spokesperson wrote. "Based on our analysis, we do not believe this issue poses an immediate risk to our users." FLOP, short for Faulty Load Operation Predictor, exploits a vulnerability in the Load Value Predictor (LVP) found in Apple's A- and M-series chipsets. By inducing the LVP to predict incorrect memory values during speculative execution, attackers can access sensitive information such as location history, email content, calendar events, and credit card details. This attack works on both Safari and Chrome browsers and affects devices including Macs (2022 onward), iPads, and iPhones (September 2021 onward). FLOP requires the victim to interact with an attacker's page while logged into sensitive websites, making it highly dangerous due to its broad data access capabilities.

SLAP, on the other hand, stands for Speculative Load Address Predictor and targets the Load Address Predictor (LAP) in Apple silicon, exploiting its ability to predict memory locations. By forcing LAP to mispredict, attackers can access sensitive data from other browser tabs, such as Gmail content, Amazon purchase details, and Reddit comments. Unlike FLOP, SLAP is limited to Safari and can only read memory strings adjacent to the attacker's own data. It affects the same range of devices as FLOP but is less severe due to its narrower scope and browser-specific nature. SLAP demonstrates how speculative execution can compromise browser process isolation.

In the first 11 months of 2024, solar energy generation in the US grew by 30%, enabling wind and solar combined to surpass coal for the first time. However, as Ars Technica's John Timmer reports, "U.S. energy demand saw an increase of nearly 3 percent, which is roughly double the amount of additional solar generation." He continues: "Should electric use continue to grow at a similar pace, renewable production will have to continue to grow dramatically for a few years before it can simply cover the added demand." From the report: Another way to look at things is that, between the decline of coal use and added demand, the grid had to generate an additional 136 TW-hr in the first 11 months of 2024. Sixty-three of those were handled by an increase in generation using natural gas; the rest, or slightly more than half, came from emissions-free sources. So, renewable power is now playing a key role in offsetting demand growth. While that's a positive, it also means that renewables are displacing less fossil fuel use than they might.

In addition, some of the growth of small-scale solar won't show up on the grid, since it offset demand locally, and so also reduced some of the demand for fossil fuels. Confusing matters, this number can also include things like community solar, which does end up on the grid; the EIA doesn't break out these numbers. We can expect next year's numbers to also show a large growth in solar production, as the EIA says that the US saw record levels of new solar installations in 2024, with 37 Gigawatts of new capacity. Since some of that came online later in the year, it'll produce considerably more power next year. And, in its latest short-term energy analysis, the EIA expects to see over 20 GW of solar capacity added in each of the next two years. New wind capacity will push that above 30 GW of renewable capacity each of these years.

That growth will, it's expected, more than offset continued growth in demand, although that growth is expected to be somewhat slower than we saw in 2024. It also predicts about 15 GW of coal will be removed from the grid during those two years. So, even without any changes in policy, we're likely to see a very dynamic grid landscape over the next few years. But changes in policy are almost certainly on the way.

"Looking for a quick fix for their fast-growing electricity diets, tech giants are increasingly looking to strike deals with power plant owners to plug in directly," reports the Associated Press, "avoiding a potentially longer and more expensive process of hooking into a fraying electric grid that serves everyone else." (It can take up to four years to connect a data center to the grid, one data center trade group says in the article — years longer than it takes to build a new data center.)

But the idea of bypassing the grid is "raising questions over whether diverting power to higher-paying customers will leave enough for others and whether it's fair to excuse big power users from paying for the grid." Front and center is the data center that Amazon's cloud computing subsidiary, Amazon Web Services, is building next to the Susquehanna nuclear plant in eastern Pennsylvania. The arrangement between the plant's owners and AWS — called a "behind the meter" connection — is the first such to come before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. For now, FERC has rejected a deal that could eventually send 960 megawatts — about 40% of the plant's capacity — to the data center. That's enough to power more than a half-million homes... [But the FERC's 2-1 rejection "was procedural. Recent comments by commissioners suggest they weren't ready to decide how to regulate such a novel matter without more study."]

In theory, the AWS deal would let Susquehanna sell power for more than they get by selling into the grid... The profit potential is one that other nuclear plant operators, in particular, are embracing after years of financial distress and frustration with how they are paid in the broader electricity markets. Many say they have been forced to compete in some markets against a flood of cheap natural gas as well as state-subsidized solar and wind energy. Power plant owners also say the arrangement benefits the wider public, by bypassing the costly buildout of long power lines and leaving more transmission capacity on the grid for everyone else...

Monitoring Analytics, the market watchdog in the mid-Atlantic grid, wrote in a filing to FERC that the impact would be "extreme" if the Susquehanna-AWS model were extended to all nuclear power plants in the territory. Energy prices would increase significantly and there's no explanation for how rising demand for power will be met even before big power plants drop out of the supply mix, it said.

Earlier this month a major fire erupted at a California battery plant. But several factors contributed to its rapid spread, the fire district's chief told the Los Angeles Times: A fire suppression system that is part of every battery rack at the plant failed and led to a chain reaction of batteries catching on fire, he said at a news conference last week. Then, a broken camera system in the plant and superheated gases made it challenging for firefighters to intervene. Once the fire began spreading, firefighters were not able to use water, because doing so can trigger a violent chemical reaction in lithium-ion batteries, potentially causing more to ignite or explode.
The county's Board of Supervisors has now requested that the plant remain offline until an investigation is completed. A county supervisor told the newspaper "What we're doing with this technology is way ahead of government regulations and ahead of the industry's ability to control it."

And plans for a new battery storage site nearby are now being questioned, with an online petition to halt all new battery-storage facilities in the county drawing over 3,200 signatures. The fire earlier this month was the fourth at Moss Landing since 2019, and the third at buildings owned by Texas-based Vistra Energy... Already, the fire has prompted calls for additional safety regulations around battery storage, and more local control over where storage sites are located...

California Assemblymember Dawn Addis (D-Morro Bay) has introduced Assembly Bill 303 — the Battery Energy Safety & Accountability Act — which would require local engagement in the permitting process for battery or energy storage facilities, and establish a buffer to keep such sites a set distance away from sensitive areas like schools, hospitals and natural habitats... Gov. Gavin Newsom, a fierce advocate of clean energy, agrees an investigation is needed to determine the fire's cause and supports taking steps to make Moss Landing and similar facilities safer, his spokesperson Daniel Villaseñor said in a statement. Addis and two other state legislators sent a letter to the California Public Utilities Commission Thursday requesting an investigation.

"The Moss Landing facility has represented a pivotal piece of our state's energy future, however this disastrous fire has undermined the public's trust in utility scale lithium-ion battery energy storage systems," states the letter. "If we are to ensure California moves its climate and energy goals forward, we must demonstrate a steadfast commitment to safety..."

initial testing from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ruled that the levels of toxic gases released by the batteries, including hydrogen fluoride, did not pose a threat to public health during the fire. [The EPA says their monitoring "showed concentrations of particulate matter to be consistent with the air quality index throughout the Monterey Bay and San Francisco Bay regions, with no measurements exceeding the moderate air quality level... In addition to EPA's monitoring, Vistra Energy brought in a third-party environmental consultant with air monitoring expertise, right after the fire started"]

Still, many residents remain on edge about potential long-term impacts on the nearby communities of Watsonville, Castroville, Salinas and the ecologically sensitive Elkhorn Slough estuary.

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shared this report from the Guardian: More electricity was made from sunshine than coal in the EU last year, a report has found, in what analysts called a "milestone" for the clean energy transition. Solar panels generated 11% of the EU's electricity in 2024, while coal-burning power plants generated 10%, according to data from climate thinktank Ember...

Coal-burning in the EU power sector peaked in 2003 and has fallen by 68% since then. At the same time, clean sources of electricity have boomed. Wind and solar energy rose to 29% of EU electricity generation in 2024, while hydropower and nuclear energy continued to rebound from the 2022 lows...

The report found the share of coal fell in 16 of the 17 countries that still used it in 2024. It said the fuel has become "marginal or absent" in most systems. Germany and Poland, the two countries that burn most of the EU's coal, were among those where there was a shift to cleaner sources of energy. The share of coal in Germany's electricity grid fell 17% year-on-year, while in Poland it dropped8%, the report found.
Fossil gas also fell for the fifth year in a row, declining in 14 of the 26 countries, according to the article, and now accounting for just 16% of the electricity mix.

"The findings come despite a small increase in electricity demand after two years of steep decline brought on by Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine."

Two computer scientists at the University of Waterloo in Canada believe changing 30 lines of code in Linux "could cut energy use at some data centers by up to 30 percent," according to the site Data Centre Dynamics.

It's the code that processes packets of network traffic, and Linux "is the most widely used OS for data center servers," according to the article: The team tested their solution's effectiveness and submitted it to Linux for consideration, and the code was published this month as part of Linux's newest kernel, release version 6.13. "All these big companies — Amazon, Google, Meta — use Linux in some capacity, but they're very picky about how they decide to use it," said Martin Karsten [professor of Computer Science in the Waterloo's Math Faculty]. "If they choose to 'switch on' our method in their data centers, it could save gigawatt hours of energy worldwide. Almost every single service request that happens on the Internet could be positively affected by this."

The University of Waterloo is building a green computer server room as part of its new mathematics building, and Karsten believes sustainability research must be a priority for computer scientists. "We all have a part to play in building a greener future," he said. The Linux Foundation, which oversees the development of the Linux OS, is a founder member of the Green Software Foundation, an organization set up to look at ways of developing "green software" — code that reduces energy consumption.
Karsten "teamed up with Joe Damato, distinguished engineer at Fastly" to develop the 30 lines of code, according to an announcement from the university. "The Linux kernel code addition developed by Karsten and Damato was based on research published in ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review" (by Karsten and grad student Peter Cai).

Their paper "reviews the performance characteristics of network stack processing for communication-heavy server applications," devising an "indirect methodology" to "identify and quantify the direct and indirect costs of asynchronous hardware interrupt requests (IRQ) as a major source of overhead...

"Based on these findings, a small modification of a vanilla Linux system is devised that improves the efficiency and performance of traditional kernel-based networking significantly, resulting in up to 45% increased throughput..."

CleanTechnicareports that last year Americans "bought 37% more air source heat pumps than the next most popular heating appliance — gas furnaces."

And Americans bought 21% more heat pumps than they did in 2023. Canary Media is quick to point out that in many homes, more than one heat pump is required, so that data should be interpreted with that in mind. Typically, a home uses only one furnace. Nevertheless, the trend for heat pumps is up. Russell Unger, the head of decarbonizing buildings at RMI, said, "There's just been this long term, consistent trend."

It's easy to understand why heat pumps are gaining in popularity. In addition to providing heated air in the winter and cool air in the summer, they are far more efficient than conventional heat sources — delivering three to four times more heat per dollar spent than oil- or gas-fired heating equipment or old fashioned electric baseboard heat. They also create far less carbon pollution. How much less depends on the source of electricity in the local area,
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.

2021: "Automotive Startup Canoo Debuts a Snub-Nosed Electric Pickup"
2025: Canoo "Goes Belly-Up After Moving to Texas"

"Its production volumes paled in comparison to Canoo's rate of cash burn, which was substantial, with net losses in 2023 totaling just over $300 million..." reports AutoWeek. "It was able to deliver small batches of vans to a few customers, but apparently remained distant from anything approaching volume production."

"Back in 2020, electric vehicle maker Canoo snagged a $2.4 billion valuation before it had shipped a single car," remembers SFGate. "Now, just months after yanking its headquarters from Los Angeles County to Texas, the company has gone belly-up." In its four-year span as a public company, Canoo battled investor lawsuits, Securities and Exchange Commission charges, executive departures and a mixed reception of its cars. Auto tech blogger Steven Symes recently likened Canoo's cargo-style van to an "eraser on wheels."
"Canoo is the latest EV startup to go bankrupt after merging with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) as a shortcut to going public," notes TechCrunch. "Electric Last Mile Solutions was the first in June 2022. But since then, Fisker, Lordstown Motors, Proterra, Lion Electric, and Arrival all filed for different levels of bankruptcy protection in their various home countries." In the years since it went public, [Canoo] made a small number of its bubbly electric vans and handed them over to partners — some paying — willing to trial the vehicles. The U.S. Postal Service, Department of Defense, and NASA all have or had Canoo vehicles.