An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon built a $2 trillion company through years of aggressive spending on its retail and logistics businesses. Its future gains will likely be determined by the billions designated to fund its artificial-intelligence push. Amazon is planning to spend more than $100 billion over the next decade on data centers, an impressive level of investment even for a company known for its spending ways. The Seattle company is now devoting more investment money to its cloud computing and AI infrastructure than to its sprawling network of e-commerce warehouses.

Amazon Web Services, the arm that manages Amazon's cloud business, has opened data centers for years, but executives said there is a surge in investment now to meet demand triggered by the excitement around AI. "We have to dive in. We have to figure it out," said John Felton, who took over as AWS's chief financial officer this year after spending most of his career in Amazon's retail fulfillment operations. The company's financial commitment reflects the importance and high costs of AI. Felton said building for AI today feels like building that massive delivery network in years past. "It's a little uncertain," he said. AWS is expanding in Virginia, Ohio and elsewhere.

The Los Angeles Times reports that "multiple projects seeking to remove carbon dioxide from the air have been launched across Los Angeles County: When completed, Project Monarch and its wastewater component, Pure Water Antelope Valley, will purify up to 4.5 million gallons of water each day and capture 25,000 tons of atmospheric CO2 each year. (The typical gasoline-powered automobile spews 4.6 tons of carbon each year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency).... But the Palmdale project isn't the only new carbon-capture development in L.A. County. On Friday, officials from CarbonCapture Inc. gathered in Long Beach to introduce the first commercial-scale U.S. direct air capture, or DAC, system designed for mass production. The unit, which resembles a shipping container, can remove more than 500 tons of atmospheric CO2 per year... The L.A.-based company also announced that it will mass-produce up to 4,000 of its DAC modules annually at a new facility in Mesa, Arizona. It joins similar efforts from L.A.-based Captura, which is working to remove CO2 from the upper ocean; L.A.-based Avnos, which produces water while capturing carbon; and L.A.-based Equatic, which is working to remove atmospheric CO2 using the ocean...

[Equatic's] San Pedro facility pumps seawater through a series of electric plates that separate the water into hydrogen and oxygen as well as acidic and alkaline streams of liquid. The alkaline, or base, stream is exposed to the atmosphere, where it mineralizes CO2 into carbonates that are then dissolved and discharged back into the ocean for permanent storage, operators say Additionally, the hydrogen produced by the process is carbon-negative, making it a source of renewable energy that can be used to fuel the CO2 removal process or sold to other users, said Edward Sanders, chief operating officer at Equatic.

Equatic announced this month that it will partner with a Canadian carbon removal project developer, Deep Sky, to build North America's first commercial-scale ocean-based CO2 removal plant in Quebec, following the success of its effort in Los Angeles as well as another facility in Singapore. While the San Pedro facility can capture about 40 tons of CO2 per year, the Quebec facility will capture about 100,000 tons per year, Sanders said.
Meanwhile, two new projects by direct air capture company Heirloom were announced this week in Louisiana. Those projects are "expected to remove hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide from the air per year," according to the Associated Press, "and store it deep underground... part of "a slew of carbon removal and storage projects that have been announced in Louisiana." Heirloom estimates that they will eventually remove 320,000 tons of carbon dioxide each year... The company uses limestone, a natural absorbent, to extract carbon dioxide from the air. Heirloom's technology reduces the time it takes to absorb carbon dioxide in nature from years to just three days, according to the company's press release. The carbon dioxide is then removed from the limestone material and stored permanently underground.
In May America's Energy department also announced $3.5 billion in funding for its carbon-capture program — four large-scale, regional direct air capture hubs "that each comprise a network of carbon dioxide removal projects..." The hubs will have the capacity to capture and then permanently store at least one million metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere annually, either from a single unit or from multiple interconnected units.
And Shell Canada has a pair of carbon capture projects in Alberta it expects to have operational toward the end of 2028, according to the CBC: The Polaris project is designed to capture about 650,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide annually from the Scotford complex. That works out to approximately 40 per cent of Scotford's direct CO2 emissions from the refinery and 22 per cent of its emissions from the chemicals complex.

Researchers in South Africa have injected radioactive material into the horns of 20 rhinos to deter poaching, aiming to leverage existing radiation detectors at borders for early detection and interception of trafficked horns. The Associated Press reports: The research, which has included the participation of veterinarians and nuclear experts, begins with the animal being tranquilized before a hole is drilled into its horn and the nuclear material carefully inserted. This week, researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand's Radiation and Health Physics Unit in South Africa injected 20 live rhinos with these isotopes. They hope the process can be replicated to save other wild species vulnerable to poaching -- like elephants and pangolins. "We are doing this because it makes it significantly easier to intercept these horns as they are being trafficked over international borders, because there is a global network of radiation monitors that have been designed to prevent nuclear terrorism," said Professor James Larkin, who heads the project. "And we're piggybacking on the back of that."

According to figures by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, an international conservation body, the global rhino population stood at around 500,000 at the beginning of the 20th century. It now stands at around 27,000 due to continued demand for rhino horns on the black market. South Africa has the largest population of rhinos with an estimated 16,000, making it a hotspot with over 500 rhinos killed yearly. [...] While the idea has received support from some in the industry, the researchers have had to jump many ethical hurdles posed by critics of their methodology.

Pelham Jones, chairperson of the Private Rhino Owners Association, is among the critics of the proposed method and doubts that it would effectively deter poachers and traffickers. "(Poachers) have worked out other ways of moving rhino horn out of the country, out of the continent or off the continent, not through traditional border crossings," he said. "They bypass the border crossings because they know that is the area of the highest risk of confiscation or interception." Professor Nithaya Chetty, dean of the science faculty at Witwatersrand, said the dosage of the radioactivity is very low and its potential negative impact on the animal was tested extensively.

According to Interpol, nearly 4,000 people around the world have been arrested for a variety of online crimes, with $257 million in assets seized. The Record reports: The operation, dubbed First Light, was conducted by police officers from 61 countries and targeted phishing, investment fraud, fake online shopping sites, romance scams, and impersonation scams, according to a statement by Interpol. In addition to arresting thousands of potential cybercriminals, the police also identified over 14,600 other possible suspects across all continents.

During the searches, law enforcement seized suspects' real estate, high-end vehicles, expensive jewelry, and many other high-value items and collections. They also froze 6,745 bank accounts used for transferring money obtained through illegal operations. In one case, the police intercepted $331,000 gleaned from a business email compromise fraud involving a Spanish victim who unknowingly transferred money to someone in Hong Kong. In another case, authorities in Australia successfully recovered $3.7 million on behalf of an impersonation scam victim after the funds were fraudulently transferred to bank accounts in Malaysia and Hong Kong.

The criminal networks identified during the operation were spread around the globe. In Namibia, for example, the police rescued 88 local youths who were forced into conducting scams as part of a sophisticated international crime network, according to Interpol. Law enforcement from Singapore, Hong Kong, and China prevented an attempted tech support scam, saving a 70-year-old victim from losing $281,200 worth of savings.

TeamViewer, the company that makes widely used remote access tools for companies, has confirmed an ongoing cyberattack on its corporate network. TechCrunch: In a statement Friday, the company attributed the compromise to government-backed hackers working for Russian intelligence, known as APT29 (and Midnight Blizzard). The Germany-based company said its investigation so far points to an initial intrusion on June 26 "tied to credentials of a standard employee account within our corporate IT environment."

TeamViewer said that the cyberattack "was contained" to its corporate network and that the company keeps its internal network and customer systems separate. The company added that it has "no evidence that the threat actor gained access to our product environment or customer data." Martina Dier, a spokesperson for TeamViewer, declined to answer a series of questions from TechCrunch, including whether the company has the technical ability, such as logs, to determine what, if any, data was accessed or exfiltrated from its network.

A study from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) analyzed data from nearly 400,000 healthy adults over 20 years and determined that "multivitamin use to improve longevity is not supported." The findings were published in JAMA Network Open. ABC News reports: The study found no evidence that daily multivitamin consumption reduced the risk of death from conditions such as heart disease or cancer. Rather than living longer, otherwise healthy people who took daily multivitamins were slightly more likely (4%) than non-users to die in the study period, according to researchers. Researchers reported nearly 165,000 deaths occurring during the follow-up period of the study, out of the initial group of 390,000 participants. The study, however, did not analyze data from people with pre-existing vitamin deficiencies. "What this study shows is that, generally, multivitamins aren't going to help you live longer," Dr. Jade A Cobern, MD, MPH, board-certified physician in pediatrics and general preventive medicine, told ABC News. "Even though the cost of many multivitamins isn't high, this is still an expense that many people can be spared from."

Al Michaels, the 79-year-old American broadcaster, who first covered the Olympics decades ago, is returning to broadcasting via an AI clone. NBCUniversal and Peacock will use AI-generated narration by Al Michaels for daily customized highlight reels of the Summer Olympics. Officials say they anticipate seven million different variations of the customized highlights throughout the games. The New York Times reports: Al Michaels, the 79-year-old American broadcaster, who first covered the Olympics decades ago, is coming back to primetime. It does raise a key question, one that recalls Mr. Michaels's most famous Olympic call: Do NBCUniversal executives believe in miracles? NBC has been exclusively broadcasting the Olympics in the United States since 1996, and the network frequently finds itself subject to intense public scrutiny for its coverage of the Games. [...]

Subscribers who want the daily Peacock highlight reel will be able choose the Olympic events that interest them most, and the types of highlights they want to see, such as viral clips, gold medalists or elimination events. From there, Peacock's A.I. machines will get to work each evening cranking out the most notable moments and putting them together in a tidy customized package. Mr. Michaels's recreated voice will be piped over the reels. (Humans will make quality control checks on the A.I. highlight reels.)

Many American subscribers are unable to use their phones overseas because all three major U.S. carriers are experiencing outages. According to The Register, the outages have been ongoing for several hours and stem from third-party communications technology company Syniverse. From the report: "Since the onset of these issues, Syniverse has been working closely with our network partners to restore full service," Syniverse, a US-based comms provider that focuses on roaming services, said in a statement confirming the breakdown. "We understand the inconvenience this has caused and appreciate your patience as we navigate this challenge."

"We're one of several providers impacted by a third-party vendor's issue that is intermittently affecting some international roaming service," T-Mo told us. "We're working with them to resolve it." Similarly, AT&T stated: "The AT&T network is operating normally. Some customers traveling internationally may be experiencing service disruptions due to an issue outside the AT&T network. We're working with one of our roaming connectivity providers to resolve the issue." Likewise, Verizon said, "An international third party communications provider is having issues with making voice and data connections with US based customers traveling overseas."

The international roaming outage has hit users' ability to do calls and texts, and reach the internet. According to Verizon, it's not a complete blackout. "70 percent of calls and data connections are going through at this time," the carrier firm told The Register in the past hour or so. Developing...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: In recent weeks, as so-called cheap fake video clips suggesting President Joe Biden is unfit for office have gone viral on social media, a Kremlin-affiliated disinformation network has been promoting a parody music video featuring Biden wearing a diaper and being pushed around in a wheelchair. The video is called "Bye, Bye Biden" and has been viewed more than 5 million times on X since it was first promoted in the middle of May. It depicts Biden as senile, wearing a hearing aid, and taking a lot of medication. It also shows him giving money to a character who seems to represent illegal migrants while denying money to US citizens until they change their costume to mimic the Ukrainian flag. Another scene shows Biden opening the front door of a family home that features a Confederate flag on the wall and allowing migrants to come in and take over. Finally, the video contains references to stolen election conspiracies pushed by former president Donald Trump.

The video was created by Little Bug, a group that mimics the style of Little Big, a real Russian band that fled the country in 2022 following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The video features several Moscow-based actors -- who spoke with Russian media outlet Agency.Media -- but also appears to use artificial intelligence technology to make the actors resemble Biden and Trump, as well as Ilya Prusikin, the lead singer of Little Big. "Biden and Trump appear to be the same actor, with deepfake video-editing changing his facial features until he resembles Biden in one case and Trump in the other case," says Alex Fink, an AI and machine-vision expert who analyzed the video for WIRED. "The editing is inconsistent, so you can see that in some cases he resembles Biden more and in others less. The facial features keep changing." An analysis by True Media, a nonprofit that was founded to tackle the spread of election-related deepfakes, found with 100 percent confidence that there was AI-generated audio used in the video. It also assessed with 78 percent confidence that some AI technology was used to manipulate the faces of the actors.

Fink says the obvious nature of the deepfake technology on display here suggests that the video was created in a rush, using a small number of iterations of a generative adversarial network in order to create the characters of Biden and Trump. It is unclear who is behind the video, but "Bye, Bye Biden" has been promoted by the Kremlin-aligned network known as Doppelganger. The campaign posted tens of thousands of times on X and was uncovered by Antibot4Navalny, an anonymous collective of Russian researchers who have been tracking Doppelganger's activity for the past six months. The campaign first began on May 21, and there have been almost 4,000 posts on X promoting the video in 13 languages that were promoted by a network of almost 25,000 accounts. The Antibot4Navalny researchers concluded that the posts were written with the help of generative AI technology. The video has been shared 6.5 million times on X and has been viewed almost 5 million times.

Chinese undersea cable manufacturers are experiencing growth despite U.S. trade restrictions, as Beijing pushes for self-sufficiency in critical communications infrastructure, Nikkei is reporting. FiberHome International Technologies, blacklisted by the U.S. in 2020, reports increased business due to China's drive for domestic production. "We don't need foreign technologies," a FiberHome executive told Nikkei.

China is challenging U.S. dominance in the global undersea cable network, which spans 1.4 million kilometers and carries over 95% of the world's data. Chinese companies are expected to contribute 45% of new cable installations from 2023 to 2028, according to industry estimates. The Asia-Pacific region leads in subsea cable investment, with China spearheading multiple projects connecting to Southeast Asian nations. This aligns with President Xi Jinping's "Digital Silk Road" initiative, part of the broader Belt and Road strategy. However, geopolitical tensions have led to project delays and increased costs. Some cables are being rerouted to avoid contentious areas like the South China Sea, potentially creating parallel networks divided along geopolitical lines.

Researchers from UC Santa Cruz, UC Davis, LuxiTech, and Soochow University have developed a new method to run AI language models more efficiently by eliminating matrix multiplication, potentially reducing the environmental impact and operational costs of AI systems. Ars Technica's Benj Edwards reports: Matrix multiplication (often abbreviated to "MatMul") is at the center of most neural network computational tasks today, and GPUs are particularly good at executing the math quickly because they can perform large numbers of multiplication operations in parallel. [...] In the new paper, titled "Scalable MatMul-free Language Modeling," the researchers describe creating a custom 2.7 billion parameter model without using MatMul that features similar performance to conventional large language models (LLMs). They also demonstrate running a 1.3 billion parameter model at 23.8 tokens per second on a GPU that was accelerated by a custom-programmed FPGA chip that uses about 13 watts of power (not counting the GPU's power draw). The implication is that a more efficient FPGA "paves the way for the development of more efficient and hardware-friendly architectures," they write.

The paper doesn't provide power estimates for conventional LLMs, but this post from UC Santa Cruz estimates about 700 watts for a conventional model. However, in our experience, you can run a 2.7B parameter version of Llama 2 competently on a home PC with an RTX 3060 (that uses about 200 watts peak) powered by a 500-watt power supply. So, if you could theoretically completely run an LLM in only 13 watts on an FPGA (without a GPU), that would be a 38-fold decrease in power usage. The technique has not yet been peer-reviewed, but the researchers -- Rui-Jie Zhu, Yu Zhang, Ethan Sifferman, Tyler Sheaves, Yiqiao Wang, Dustin Richmond, Peng Zhou, and Jason Eshraghian -- claim that their work challenges the prevailing paradigm that matrix multiplication operations are indispensable for building high-performing language models. They argue that their approach could make large language models more accessible, efficient, and sustainable, particularly for deployment on resource-constrained hardware like smartphones. [...]

The researchers say that scaling laws observed in their experiments suggest that the MatMul-free LM may also outperform traditional LLMs at very large scales. The researchers project that their approach could theoretically intersect with and surpass the performance of standard LLMs at scales around 10^23 FLOPS, which is roughly equivalent to the training compute required for models like Meta's Llama-3 8B or Llama-2 70B. However, the authors note that their work has limitations. The MatMul-free LM has not been tested on extremely large-scale models (e.g., 100 billion-plus parameters) due to computational constraints. They call for institutions with larger resources to invest in scaling up and further developing this lightweight approach to language modeling.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Last week, an in-depth investigative report from JBTC revealed that Korean Internet provider KT, formerly known as Korea Telecom, distributed malware onto subscribers' computers to interfere with and block torrent traffic. File-sharing continues to be very popular in South Korea, but operates differently than in most other countries. "Webhard" services, short for Web Hard Drive, are particularly popular. These are paid BitTorrent-assisted services, which also offer dedicated web seeds, to ensure that files remain available.

Webhard services rely on the BitTorrent-enabled 'Grid System', which became so popular in Korea that ISPs started to notice it. Since these torrent transfers use a lot of bandwidth, which is very costly in the country, providers would rather not have this file-sharing activity on their networks. KT, one of South Korea's largest ISPs with over 16 million subscribers, was previously caught meddling with the Grid System. In 2020, their throttling activities resulted in a court case, where the ISP cited 'network management' costs as the prime reason to interfere. The Court eventually sided with KT, ending the case in its favor, but that wasn't the end of the matter. An investigation launched by the police at the time remains ongoing. New reports now show that the raid on KT's datacenter found that dozens of devices were used in the 'throttling process' and they were doing more than just limiting bandwidth.

When Webhard users started reporting problems four years ago, they didn't simply complain about slow downloads. In fact, the main concern was that several Grid-based Webhard services went offline or reported seemingly unexplainable errors. Since all complaining users were KT subscribers, fingers were pointed in that direction. According to an investigation by Korean news outlet JBTC, the Internet provider actively installed malware on computers of Webhard services. This activity was widespread and effected an estimated 600,000 KT subscribers. The Gyeonggi Southern Police Agency, which carried out the raid and investigation, believes this was an organized hacking attempt. A dedicated KT team allegedly planted malware to eavesdrop on subscribers and interfere with their private file transfers. [...] Why KT allegedly distributed the malware and what it precisely intended to do is unclear. The police believe there were internal KT discussions about network-related costs, suggesting that financial reasons played a role.

An anonymous reader shares a report: We're at a transitional moment in streaming -- user growth is slowing and major players are looking to consolidate, but the long-promised dream of profitability finally seems within reach (especially if you're Netflix). The perfect time, then, for The New York Times to interview many of the industry's big names -- including Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, Amazon's Prime Video head Mike Hopkins, and IAC chairman Barry Diller -- about what they think comes next.

There seemed to be broad agreement on most of the big themes: More ads, higher prices, and fewer big swings on prestige TV. These changes are all united by the shift towards profitability, rather than growth-at-all-costs. If the initial prices of many streaming services seemed unsustainably low at launch, it turns out they were -- prices have been steadily rising, while the streamers have also introduced more affordable subscription tiers for viewers who are willing to watch ads. In fact, some execs told The Times that streamers will keep raising prices for the ad-free tiers with the aim of pushing more customers to sign up for ad-supported subscriptions instead. The growth of ad-supported streaming could also affect the kinds of movies and shows that get produced, since advertisers generally want to reach a mass audience -- think of the heyday of ad-supported network TV, with its endless shows about doctors and cops, compared to the more ambitious fare on subscription-supported HBO.

"The Short Happy Reign of the CD-ROM" was just one article in a Fast Company series called 1994 Week. As the week rolled along they also re-visited Yahoo, Netscape, and how the U.S. Congress "forced the videogame industry to grow up."

But another article argues that it's in web pages from 1994 that "you can start to see in those weird, formative years some surprising signs of what the web would be, and what it could be." It's hard to say precisely when the tipping point was. Many point to September '93, when AOL users first flooded Usenet. But the web entered a new phase the following year. According to an MIT study, at the start of 1994, there were just 623 web servers. By year's end, it was estimated there were at least 10,000, hosting new sites including Yahoo!, the White House, the Library of Congress, Snopes, the BBC, sex.com, and something called The Amazing FishCam. The number of servers globally was doubling every two months. No one had seen growth quite like that before. According to a press release announcing the start of the World Wide Web Foundation that October, this network of pages "was widely considered to be the fastest-growing network phenomenon of all time."

As the year began, Web pages were by and large personal and intimate, made by research institutions, communities, or individuals, not companies or brands. Many pages embodied the spirit, or extended the presence, of newsgroups on Usenet, or "User's Net." (Snopes and the Internet Movie Database, which landed on the Web in 1993, began as crowd-sourced projects on Usenet.) But a number of big companies, including Microsoft, Sun, Apple, IBM, and Wells Fargo, established their first modest Web outposts in 1994, a hint of the shopping malls and content farms and slop factories and strip mines to come. 1994 also marked the start of banner ads and online transactions (a CD, pizzas), and the birth of spam and phishing...

[B]ack in '94, the salesmen and oilmen and land-grabbers and developers had barely arrived. In the calm before the storm, the Web was still weird, unruly, unpredictable, and fascinating to look at and get lost in. People around the world weren't just writing and illustrating these pages, they were coding and designing them. For the most part, the design was non-design. With a few eye-popping exceptions, formatting and layout choices were simple, haphazard, personal, and — in contrast to most of today's web — irrepressibly charming. There were no table layouts yet; cascading style sheets, though first proposed in October 1994 by Norwegian programmer Håkon Wium Lie, wouldn't arrive until December 1996... The highways and megalopolises would come later, courtesy of some of the world's biggest corporations and increasingly peopled by bots, but in 1994 the internet was still intimate, made by and for individuals... Soon, many people would add "under construction" signs to their Web pages, like a friendly request to pardon our dust. It was a reminder that someone was working on it — another indication of the craft and care that was going into this never-ending quilt of knowledge.
The article includes screenshots of Netscape in action from browser-emulating site OldWeb.Today (albeit without using a 14.4 kbps modems). "Look in and think about how and why this web grew the way it did, and what could have been. Or try to imagine what life was like when the web wasn't worldwide yet, and no one knew what it really was."

Slashdot reader tedlistens calls it "a trip down memory lane," offering "some telling glimpses of the future, and some lessons for it too." The article revisits 1994 sites like Global Network Navigator, Time-Warner's Pathfinder, and Wired's online site HotWired as well as 30-year-old versions of the home pages for Wells Fargo and Microsoft.

What did they miss? Share your own memories in the comments.

What do you remember about the web in 1994?

In 2022, Red Hat announced plans to extend RHEL to the automotive industry through Red Hat In-Vehicle Operating System (providing automakers with an open and functionally-safe platform). And this week Red Hat announced it achieved ISO 26262 ASIL-B certification from exida for the Linux math library (libm.so glibc) — a fundamental component of that Red Hat In-Vehicle Operating System.

From Red Hat's announcement: This milestone underscores Red Hat's pioneering role in obtaining continuous and comprehensive Safety Element out of Context certification for Linux in automotive... This certification demonstrates that the engineering of the math library components individually and as a whole meet or exceed stringent functional safety standards, ensuring substantial reliability and performance for the automotive industry. The certification of the math library is a significant milestone that strengthens the confidence in Linux as a viable platform of choice for safety related automotive applications of the future...

By working with the broader open source community, Red Hat can make use of the rigorous testing and analysis performed by Linux maintainers, collaborating across upstream communities to deliver open standards-based solutions. This approach enhances long-term maintainability and limits vendor lock-in, providing greater transparency and performance. Red Hat In-Vehicle Operating System is poised to offer a safety certified Linux-based operating system capable of concurrently supporting multiple safety and non-safety related applications in a single instance. These applications include advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), digital cockpit, infotainment, body control, telematics, artificial intelligence (AI) models and more. Red Hat is also working with key industry leaders to deliver pre-tested, pre-integrated software solutions, accelerating the route to market for SDV concepts.
"Red Hat is fully committed to attaining continuous and comprehensive safety certification of Linux natively for automotive applications," according to the announcement, "and has the industry's largest pool of Linux maintainers and contributors committed to this initiative..."

Or, as Network World puts it, "The phrase 'open source for the open road' is now being used to describe the inevitable fit between the character of Linux and the need for highly customizable code in all sorts of automotive equipment."

Justine Calma writes via The Verge: A group of young plaintiffs reached a historic climate settlement with the state of Hawaii and Hawaii Department of Transportation in a deal that will push the state to clean up tailpipe pollution. The 13 youth plaintiffs filed suit in 2022 when they were all between the ages of 9 and 18. In the suit, Navahine F. v. Hawaii Department of Transportation (HDOT), they alleged that the state and HDOT had violated their right to "a clean and healthful environment," which is enshrined in Hawaii's constitution.

The settlement (PDF), reached on Thursday, affirms that right and commits the DOT to creating a plan to reach zero greenhouse gas emissions from transportation by 2045. To hit that goal, the state will have to dedicate at least $40 million to building out its EV charging network by the end of the decade and complete new pedestrian, bicycle, and transit networks over the next five years. The settlement also creates a new unit within HDOT tasked with coordinating CO2 emission reductions and a volunteer youth council to advise HDOT.

This is the first settlement agreement in which "government defendants have decided to resolve a constitutional climate case in partnership with youth plaintiffs," according to nonprofit legal groups Our Children's Trust and Earthjustice, which represent the plaintiffs. Back in 2018, Hawaii committed to reaching net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2045 -- in line with what climate research determined was necessary to meet the Paris climate accord goal of stopping global warming. But the state wasn't doing enough to reach that goal, the plaintiffs alleged. Transportation makes up the biggest chunk of the state's greenhouse gas pollution. Justine Calma is a senior science reporter covering energy and the environment with more than a decade of experience. She is also the host of Hell or High Water: When Disaster Hits Home, a podcast from Vox Media and Audible Originals.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) yesterday rejected AT&T's request to end its landline phone obligations. The state agency also urged AT&T to upgrade copper facilities to fiber instead of trying to shut down the outdated portions of its network. AT&T asked the state to eliminate its Carrier of Last Resort (COLR) obligation, which requires it to provide landline telephone service to any potential customer in its service territory. A CPUC administrative law judge recommended rejection of the application last month, and the commission voted to dismiss AT&T's application with prejudice on Thursday.

"Our vote to dismiss AT&T's application made clear that we will protect customer access to basic telephone service... Our rules were designed to provide that assurance, and AT&T's application did not follow our rules," Commissioner John Reynolds said in a CPUC announcement. State rules require a replacement COLR in order to relieve AT&T of its duties, and AT&T argued that VoIP and mobile services could fill that gap. But residents "highlighted the unreliability of voice alternatives" at public hearings, the CPUC said. "Despite AT&T's contention that providers of voice alternatives to landline service -- such as VoIP or mobile wireless services -- can fill the gap, the CPUC found AT&T did not meet the requirements for COLR withdrawal," the agency said. "Specifically, AT&T failed to demonstrate the availability of replacement providers willing and able to serve as COLR, nor did AT&T prove that alternative providers met the COLR definition."

The administrative law judge's proposed decision said AT&T falsely claimed that commission rules require it "to retain outdated copper-based landline facilities that are expensive to maintain." The agency stressed that its rules do not prevent AT&T from upgrading to fiber. "COLR rules are technology-neutral and do not distinguish between voice services offered... and do not prevent AT&T from retiring copper facilities or from investing in fiber or other facilities/technologies to improve its network," the agency said yesterday. AT&T California President Marc Blakeman said the company is lobbying to change the state law. "No customer will be left without voice and 911 services. We are focused on the legislation introduced in California, which includes important protections, safeguards, and outreach for consumers and does not impact our customers in rural locations. We are fully committed to keeping our customers connected while we work with state leaders on policies that create a thoughtful transition that brings modern communications to all Californians," Blakeman said.

According to SFGATE, the legislation pushed by AT&T "would create a way for AT&T to remain as COLR in rural regions, which the company estimates as being about 100,000 customers, while being released from COLR obligations everywhere else."

Twenty years ago, FedEx established its own police force. Now it's working with local police to build out an AI car surveillance network. From a report: Forbes has learned the shipping and business services company is using AI tools made by Flock Safety, a $4 billion car surveillance startup, to monitor its distribution and cargo facilities across the United States. As part of the deal, FedEx is providing its Flock video surveillance feeds to law enforcement, an arrangement that Flock has with at least five multi-billion dollar private companies. But publicly available documents reveal that some local police departments are also sharing their Flock feeds with FedEx -- a rare instance of a private company availing itself of a police surveillance apparatus.

To civil rights activists, such close collaboration has the potential to dramatically expand Flock's car surveillance network, which already spans 4,000 cities across over 40 states and some 40,000 cameras that track vehicles by license plate, make, model, color and other identifying characteristics, like dents or bumper stickers. Lisa Femia, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said because private entities aren't subject to the same transparency laws as police, this sort of arrangement could "[leave] the public in the dark, while at the same time expanding a sort of mass surveillance network."

Bipartisan agreement on government internet subsidies seems unlikely as Democrats and Republicans propose conflicting bills to reauthorize the FCC's spectrum auctions. The Democratic bill aims to fund the now-defunct Affordable Connectivity Program, while the Republican version does not. "While some Republicans supported earlier efforts to extend the subsidy program, those efforts did not go through in time to keep it from ending," notes The Verge. From the report: The Senate Commerce Committee canceled a Tuesday morning markup meeting in which it was set to consider the Spectrum and National Security Act, led by committee chair Maria Cantwell (D-WA). When she introduced it in April, Cantwell said the bill would provide $7 billion to continue funding the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), the pandemic-era internet subsidy for low-income Americans that officially ran out of money and ended at the end of May. The main purpose of the bill is to reauthorize the Federal Communications Commission's authority to run auctions for spectrum. The proceeds from spectrum auctions are often used to fund other programs. In addition to the ACP, Cantwell's bill would also fund programs including incentives for domestic chip manufacturing and a program that seeks to replace telecommunications systems that have been deemed national security concerns. The markup was already postponed several times before.

Cantwell blamed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), the top Republican on the Senate Commerce Committee, for standing in the way of the legislation. "We had a chance to secure affordable broadband for millions of Americans, but Senator Cruz said 'no,'" Cantwell said in a statement late Monday. "He said 'no' to securing a lifeline for millions of Americans who rely on the Affordable Connectivity Program to speak to their doctors, do their homework, connect to their jobs, and stay in touch with loved ones -- including more than one million Texas families." In remarks on the Senate floor on Tuesday, Cantwell said her Republican colleagues on the committee offered amendments to limit the ACP funding in the bill. She said the ACP shouldn't be a partisan issue and stressed the wide range of Americans who've relied on the program for high-speed connections, including elderly people living on fixed incomes and many military families. "I hope my colleagues will stop with obstructing and get back to negotiating on important legislation that will deliver these national security priorities and help Americans continue to have access to something as essential as affordable broadband," she said.

Cruz has his own spectrum legislation with Sen. John Thune (R-SD) that would reauthorize the FCC's spectrum auction authority, with a focus on expanding commercial access to mid-band spectrum, commonly used for 5G. But it doesn't have the same ACP funding mechanism. Some large telecom industry players prefer Cruz's bill, in part because it allows for exclusive licensing. Wireless communications trade group CTIA's SVP of government affairs, Kelly Cole, told Fierce Network that the Cruz bill "is a better approach because it follows the historical precedent set by prior bipartisan legislation to extend the FCC's auction authority." But other tech groups like the Internet Technology Industry Council (ITI), which represents companies including Amazon, Apple, Google, and Meta, support Cantwell's bill, in part because of the programs it seeks to fund.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Butterflies is a social network where humans and AIs interact with each other through posts, comments and DMs. After five months in beta, the app is launching Tuesday to the public on iOS and Android. Anyone can create an AI persona, called a Butterfly, in minutes on the app. After that, the Butterfly automatically creates posts on the social network that other AIs and humans can then interact with. Each Butterfly has backstories, opinions and emotions.

Butterflies was founded by Vu Tran, a former engineering manager at Snap. Vu came up with the idea for Butterflies after seeing a lack of interesting AI products for consumers outside of generative AI chatbots. Although companies like Meta and Snap have introduced AI chatbots in their apps, they don't offer much functionality beyond text exchanges. Tran notes that he started Butterflies to bring more creativity to humans' relationships with AI. "With a lot of the generative AI stuff that's taking flight, what you're doing is talking to an AI through a text box, and there's really no substance around it," Vu told TechCrunch. "We thought, OK, what if we put the text box at the end and then try to build up more form and substance around the characters and AIs themselves?" Butterflies' concept goes beyond Character.AI, a popular a16z-backed chatbot startup that lets users chat with customizable AI companions. Butterflies wants to let users create AI personas that then take on their own lives and coexist with other. [...]

The app is free-to-use at launch, but Butterflies may experiment with a subscription model in the future, Vu says. Over time, Butterflies plans to offer opportunities for brands to leverage and interact with AIs. The app is mainly being used for entertainment purposes, but in the future, the startup sees Butterflies being used for things like discovery in a way that's similar to Instagram. Butterflies closed a $4.8 million seed round led by Coatue in November 2023. The funding round included participation from SV Angel and strategic angels, many of whom are former Snap product and engineering leaders. Vu says that Butterflies is one of the most wholesome ways to use and interact with AI. He notes that while the startup isn't claiming that it can help cure loneliness, he says it could help people connect with others, both AI and human.

"Growing up, I spent a lot of my time in online communities and talking to people in gaming forums," Vu said. "Looking back, I realized those people could just have been AIs, but I still built some meaningful connections. I think that there are people afraid of that and say, 'AI isn't real, go meet some real friends.' But I think it's a really privileged thing to say 'go out there and make some friends.' People might have social anxiety or find it hard to be in social situations."