An article in the Washington Post remembers a 1980s-era "glass box with metal water pipes running through it" that "converted sunlight into hot water. By trapping solar energy like a greenhouse, it heated the water to a scorching 180 degrees Fahrenheit.

"[T]oday, hardly anyone is using these solar water heaters even as photovoltaic panels have popped up on the roofs of nearly 4 million American homes." Unlike photovoltaic panels, which can power your home, solar thermal panels are mainly used to heat water. But they're smaller and more efficient. The technology converts 60 to 70 percent of the sun's energy into heat. Even the best photovoltaics, which generate electricity, only achieve 24 percent efficiency. Now, a new generation of solar water heater manufacturers is hoping subsidies under the Inflation Reduction Act, and growing interest in net-zero emissions, will reignite their growth.

Theoretically, solar thermal offers a big opportunity to slash emissions. Nearly 20 percent of an average home's energy is used to heat water, and nearly 50 percent globally, according to MIT. By adopting solar water heaters, the average household can keep 2 tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, the equivalent of not driving your car for four months, estimates the Environmental Protection Agency. Solar water heaters can also save money, cutting the average utility bill by $400 to $600 per year, the Energy Department estimates...

Only about 370,000 solar thermal systems were operating in the United States by the end of 2021, according to the International Energy Agency, many of them on larger commercial buildings...

Since they can cut fuel consumption to heat water by 50 percent to 70 percent, other countries are embracing the technology: Almost all new residential buildings in Israel must include solar thermal, while in countries as far north as Canada and Denmark, solar thermal energy warms millions of homes with district heating systems. Yet these systems represent a tiny fraction of the potential, supplying 0.4 percent of today's global energy demand for domestic hot water.
New U.S. subsidies can cut the price in half depending on location, the article points out.

Cheap photovoltaics still make economic sense for many homes (unless you're heating a pool). "But the cost of solar thermal could look like a bargain if we consider increasingly unreliable electric grids and the cost to the climate from burning fossil fuels."

Modern U.S. farming is being transformed by precision agriculture, writes Paul Roberts, the founder of securepairs.org and Editor in Chief at Security Ledger.

Theres autonomous tractors and "smart spraying" systems that use AI-powered cameras to identify weeds, just for starters. "Among the critical components of precision agriculture: Internet- and GPS connected agricultural equipment, highly accurate remote sensors, 'big data' analytics and cloud computing..." As with any technological revolution, however, there are both "winners" and "losers" in the emerging age of precision agriculture... Precision agriculture, once broadly adopted, promises to further reduce the need for human labor to run farms. (Autonomous equipment means you no longer even need drivers!) However, the risks it poses go well beyond a reduction in the agricultural work force. First, as the USDA notes on its website: the scale and high capital costs of precision agriculture technology tend to favor large, corporate producers over smaller farms. Then there are the systemic risks to U.S. agriculture of an increasingly connected and consolidated agriculture sector, with a few major OEMs having the ability to remotely control and manage vital equipment on millions of U.S. farms... (Listen to my podcast interview with the hacker Sick Codes, who reverse engineered a John Deere display to run the Doom video game for insights into the company's internal struggles with cybersecurity.)

Finally, there are the reams of valuable and proprietary environmental and operational data that farmers collect, store and leverage to squeeze the maximum productivity out of their land. For centuries, such information resided in farmers' heads, or on written or (more recently) digital records that they owned and controlled exclusively, typically passing that knowledge and data down to succeeding generation of farm owners. Precision agriculture technology greatly expands the scope, and granularity, of that data. But in doing so, it also wrests it from the farmer's control and shares it with equipment manufacturers and service providers — often without the explicit understanding of the farmers themselves, and almost always without monetary compensation to the farmer for the data itself. In fact, the Federal Government is so concerned about farm data they included a section (1619) on "information gathering" into the latest farm bill.

Over time, this massive transfer of knowledge from individual farmers or collectives to multinational corporations risks beggaring farmers by robbing them of one of their most vital assets: data, and turning them into little more than passive caretakers of automated equipment managed, controlled and accountable to distant corporate masters.
Weighing in is Kevin Kenney, a vocal advocate for the "right to repair" agricultural equipment (and also an alternative fuel systems engineer at Grassroots Energy LLC). In the interview, he warns about the dangers of tying repairs to factory-installed firmware, and argues that its the long-time farmer's "trade secrets" that are really being harvested today. The ultimate beneficiary could end up being the current "cabal" of tractor manufacturers.

"While we can all agree that it's coming...the question is who will own these robots?" First, we need to acknowledge that there are existing laws on the books which for whatever reason, are not being enforced. The FTC should immediately start an investigation into John Deere and the rest of the 'Tractor Cabal' to see to what extent farmers' farm data security and privacy are being compromised. This directly affects national food security because if thousands- or tens of thousands of tractors' are hacked and disabled or their data is lost, crops left to rot in the fields would lead to bare shelves at the grocery store... I think our universities have also been delinquent in grasping and warning farmers about the data-theft being perpetrated on farmers' operations throughout the United States and other countries by makers of precision agricultural equipment.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader chicksdaddy for sharing the article.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: SoftBank Group Chief Executive Officer Masayoshi Son is looking to raise up to $100 billion for a chip venture that will rival Nvidia, Bloomberg News reported on Friday, citing people with knowledge of the matter. The project, code named Izanagi, will supply semiconductors essential for artificial intelligence (AI), the report added. The company would inject $30 billion in the project, with an additional $70 billion potentially coming from Middle Eastern institutions, according to the report.

The Japanese group already holds about a 90% stake in British chip designer Arm, per LSEG. SoftBank is known for its tech investments with high conviction bets on startups at an unheard of scale. But it had adopted a defensive strategy after being hit by plummeting valuations in the aftermath of the pandemic, when higher interest rates eroded investor appetite for risk. It returned to profit for the first time in five quarters earlier this month, as the Japanese tech investment firm was buoyed by an upturn in portfolio companies.

After a 6-1 vote by the district board, San Francisco middle schools will teach Algebra I again this fall. Axios reports: Roughly a third of SFUSD middle schools this fall will begin offering the course to eighth graders at about a third of its 13 middle schools as well as six of its K-8 schools, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. Students at other campuses will have access to the course via online classes or summer school while their schools take three years to make the transition. Those eighth graders will otherwise have to wait until high school to take the course.

District officials plan to evaluate the best way to enroll students throughout the district in a pilot at the first schools this fall. The first approach would be to enroll all eighth graders. The second would prioritize students' interest or readiness. The third would give students the option of taking Algebra I on top of current eighth-grade math curricula.

The 6-1 vote by the San Francisco Unified School District board Tuesday followed a decadelong battle over eighth graders' access to higher-level math courses and a larger debate over academic opportunity and equity in math performance. SFUSD previously taught eighth-grade algebra. But in 2014, the board voted to wait until high school to try to address racial gaps that had emerged as some students moved quicker to advanced math classes. Studies have shown that inequities including socioeconomic status, language differences and implicit bias often impede Black and Latino students' educational pursuits and result in lower rates of enrollment in higher-level classes. Yes, but: Stanford researchers found last year that large racial and ethnic gaps in advanced math enrollment persisted even after the policy change.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is proposing legislation that would criminalize some deceptive and abusive uses of AI and require disclosure of AI in election campaign materials, her office told Axios. From the report: Hochul's proposed laws include establishing the crime of "unlawful dissemination or publication of a fabricated photographic, videographic, or audio record." Making unauthorized uses of a person's voice "in connection with advertising or trade" a misdemeanor offense. Such offenses are punishable by up to one year jail sentence. Expanding New York's penal law to include unauthorized uses of artificial intelligence in coercion, criminal impersonation and identity theft.

Amending existing intimate images and revenge porn statutes to include "digital images" -- ranging from realistic Photoshop-produced work to advanced AI-generated content. Codifying the right to sue over digitally manipulated false images. Requiring disclosures of AI use in all forms of political communication "including video recording, motion picture, film, audio recording, electronic image, photograph, text, or any technological representation of speech or conduct" within 60 days of an election.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has denied OpenAI's attempt to trademark "GPT," ruling that the term is "merely descriptive" and therefore unable to be registered. From a report: [...] The name, according to the USPTO, doesn't meet the standards to register for a trademark and the protections a "TM" after the name affords. (Incidentally, they refused once back in October, and this is a "FINAL" in all caps denial of the application.) As the denial document puts it: "Registration is refused because the applied-for mark merely describes a feature, function, or characteristic of applicant's goods and services."

OpenAI argued that it had popularized the term GPT, which stands in this case for "generative pre-trained transformer," describing the nature of the machine learning model. It's generative because it produces new (ish) material, pre-trained in that it is a large model trained centrally on a proprietary database, and transformer is the name of a particular method of building AIs (discovered by Google researchers in 2017) that allows for much larger models to be trained. But the patent office pointed out that GPT was already in use in numerous other contexts and by other companies in related ones.

An anonymous reader shares a report: More than 1,000 Ubiquiti routers in homes and small businesses were infected with malware used by Russian-backed agents to coordinate them into a botnet for crime and spy operations, according to the Justice Department. That malware, which worked as a botnet for the Russian hacking group Fancy Bear, was removed in January 2024 under a secret court order as part of "Operation Dying Ember," according to the FBI's director. It affected routers running Ubiquiti's EdgeOS, but only those that had not changed their default administrative password. Access to the routers allowed the hacking group to "conceal and otherwise enable a variety of crimes," the DOJ claims, including spearphishing and credential harvesting in the US and abroad.

Unlike previous attacks by Fancy Bear -- that the DOJ ties to GRU Military Unit 26165, which is also known as APT 28, Sofacy Group, and Sednit, among other monikers -- the Ubiquiti intrusion relied on a known malware, Moobot. Once infected by "Non-GRU cybercriminals," GRU agents installed "bespoke scripts and files" to connect and repurpose the devices, according to the DOJ. The DOJ also used the Moobot malware to copy and delete the botnet files and data, according to the DOJ, and then changed the routers' firewall rules to block remote management access. During the court-sanctioned intrusion, the DOJ "enabled temporary collection of non-content routing information" that would "expose GRU attempts to thwart the operation." This did not "impact the routers' normal functionality or collect legitimate user content information," the DOJ claims. "For the second time in two months, we've disrupted state-sponsored hackers from launching cyber-attacks behind the cover of compromised US routers," said Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco in a press release.

Amazon has joined rocket maker SpaceX and grocery chain Trader Joe's in claiming that a U.S. labor agency's in-house enforcement proceedings violate the U.S. Constitution, as the retail giant faces scores of cases claiming it interfered with workers' rights to organize. From a report: Amazon in a filing made with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on Thursday said it plans to argue that the agency's unique structure violates the company's right to a jury trial. The company also said that limits on the removal of administrative judges and the board's five members, who are appointed by the president, are unconstitutional. The filing came in a pending case accusing Amazon of illegally retaliating against workers at a warehouse in the New York City borough of Staten Island, where employees voted to unionize in 2022.

schwit1 writes: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. won a preliminary injunction against the White House and other federal defendants in his suit alleging government censorship of his statements against vaccines on social media. The injunction, however, will be stayed until the US Supreme Court rules in a related case brought by Missouri and Louisiana. An injunction is warranted because Kennedy showed he is likely to succeed on the merits of his claims, Judge Terry A. Doughty of the US District Court for the Western District of Louisiana said Wednesday.

The White House defendants, the Surgeon General defendants, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defendants, the Federal Bureau of Investigation defendants, and the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency defendants likely violated the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment, Doughty said. Kennedy's class action complaint, brought with health care professional Connie Sampognaro and Kennedy's nonprofit, Children's Health Defense, alleges that the federal government, beginning in early 2020, began a campaign to induce Facebook, Google (YouTube), and X, formerly known as Twitter, to censor constitutionally protected speech.

Specifically, Kennedy said, the government suppressed "facts and opinions about the COVID vaccines that might lead people to become 'hesitant' about COVID vaccine mandates." Kennedy has sufficiently shown that these defendants "jointly participated in the actions of the social media" platforms by '"insinuating' themselves into the social-media companies' private affairs and blurring the line between public and private action," Doughty said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC.ca: Air Canada has been ordered to pay compensation to a grieving grandchild who claimed they were misled into purchasing full-price flight tickets by an ill-informed chatbot. In an argument that appeared to flabbergast a small claims adjudicator in British Columbia, the airline attempted to distance itself from its own chatbot's bad advice by claiming the online tool was "a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions."

"This is a remarkable submission," Civil Resolution Tribunal (CRT) member Christopher Rivers wrote. "While a chatbot has an interactive component, it is still just a part of Air Canada's website. It should be obvious to Air Canada that it is responsible for all the information on its website. It makes no difference whether the information comes from a static page or a chatbot." In a decision released this week, Rivers ordered Air Canada to pay Jake Moffatt $812 to cover the difference between the airline's bereavement rates and the $1,630.36 they paid for full-price tickets to and from Toronto bought after their grandmother died.

Dumping chemicals in the ocean? Spraying saltwater into clouds? Injecting reflective particles into the sky? Scientists are resorting to once unthinkable techniques to cool the planet because global efforts to check greenhouse gas emissions are failing. From a report: These geoengineering approaches were once considered taboo by scientists and regulators who feared that tinkering with the environment could have unintended consequences, but now researchers are receiving taxpayer funds and private investments to get out of the lab and test these methods outdoors. The shift reflects growing concern that efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions aren't moving fast enough to prevent the destructive effects of heat waves, storms and floods made worse by climate change. Geoengineering isn't a substitute for reducing emissions, according to scientists and business leaders involved in the projects. Rather, it is a way to slow climate warming in the next few years while buying time to switch to a carbon-free economy in the longer term.

Three field experiments are under way in the U.S. and overseas. This month, researchers aboard a ship off the northeastern coast of Australia near the Whitsunday Islands are spraying a briny mixture through high-pressure nozzles into the air in an attempt to brighten low-altitude clouds that form over the ocean. Scientists hope bigger, brighter clouds will reflect sunlight away from the Earth, shade the ocean surface and cool the waters around the Great Barrier Reef, where warming ocean temperatures have contributed to massive coral die-offs. The research project, known as marine cloud brightening, is led by Southern Cross University as part of the $64.55 million, or 100 million Australian dollars, Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program. The program is funded by the partnership between the Australian government's Reef Trust and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation and includes conservation organizations and several academic institutions.

The UK has entered a recession after GDP contracted 0.3% in the fourth quarter of 2023, the Office for National Statistics said Thursday. This follows a 0.1% GDP decline in Q3. The data shows meager 0.1% growth for the full year, the worst performance since 2009 barring 2020. All main sectors declined in Q4, with manufacturing, construction and wholesale facing the biggest drops, only partially offset by upticks in rentals and hotels. The recession deals a blow to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's economic pledges ahead of local elections Thursday and the national vote expected this year, potentially widening the lead held by the opposition Labour Party in polls.

Nvidia is now the third most valuable company in the U.S., surpassing Google parent Alphabet and Amazon. It's only behind Apple and Microsoft in terms of market cap. CNBC reports: Nvidia rose over 2% to close at $739.00 per share, giving it a market value of $1.83 trillion to Google's $1.82 trillion market cap. The move comes one day after Nvidia surpassed Amazon in terms of market value. The symbolic milestone is more confirmation that Nvidia has become a Wall Street darling on the back of elevated AI chip sales, valued even more highly than some of the large software companies and cloud providers that develop and integrate AI technology into their products.

Nvidia shares are up over 221% over the past 12 months on robust demand for its AI server chips that can cost more than $20,000 each. Companies like Google and Amazon need thousands of them for their cloud services. Before the recent AI boom, Nvidia was best known for consumer graphics processors it sold to PC makers to build gaming computers, a less lucrative market.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced a lawsuit against four of the nation's largest social media companies, accusing them of fueling a "national youth mental health crisis." From a report: The lawsuit was filed to hold TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and YouTube Accountable for their damaging influence on the mental health of children, Adams said. The lawsuit, filed in California Superior Court, alleged the companies intentionally designed their platforms to purposefully manipulate and addict children and teens to social media applications. The lawsuit pointed to the use of algorithms to generate feeds that keep users on the platforms longer and encourage compulsive use.

"Over the past decade, we have seen just how addictive and overwhelming the online world can be, exposing our children to a non-stop stream of harmful content and fueling our national youth mental health crisis," Adams said. "Our city is built on innovation and technology, but many social media platforms end up endangering our children's mental health, promoting addiction, and encouraging unsafe behavior." The lawsuit accused the social media companies of manipulating users by making them feel compelled to respond to one positive action with another positive action.

"These platforms take advantage of reciprocity by, for example, automatically telling the sender when their message was seen or sending notifications when a message was delivered, encouraging teens to return to the platform again and again and perpetuating online engagement and immediate responses," the lawsuit said. The city is joining hundreds of school districts across the nation in filing litigation to force the tech companies to change their behavior and recover the costs of addressing the public health threat.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The U.S. Department of Defense is notifying tens of thousands of individuals that their personal information was exposed in an email data spill last year. According to the breach notification letter sent out to affected individuals on February 1, the Defense Intelligence Agency -- the DOD's military intelligence agency -- said, "numerous email messages were inadvertently exposed to the Internet by a service provider," between February 3 and February 20, 2023. TechCrunch has learned that the breach disclosure letters relate to an unsecured U.S. government cloud email server that was spilling sensitive emails to the open internet. The cloud email server, hosted on Microsoft's cloud for government customers, was accessible from the internet without a password, likely due to a misconfiguration.

The DOD is sending breach notification letters to around 20,600 individuals whose information was affected. "As a matter of practice and operations security, we do not comment on the status of our networks and systems. The affected server was identified and removed from public access on February 20, 2023, and the vendor has resolved the issues that resulted in the exposure. DOD continues to engage with the service provider on improving cyber event prevention and detection. Notification to affected individuals is ongoing," said DOD spokesperson Cdr. Tim Gorman in an email to TechCrunch.

Lyft Chief Executive Officer David Risher's response to a clerical error that unintentionally inflated the company's earnings outlook on Tuesday and sent shares soaring: "My bad." From a report: "First of all, it's on me," Risher said in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Wednesday, taking the blame for a typo in a company press release Tuesday that erroneously projected a particular measure of earnings margin to expand by an eye-watering 500 basis points. (In reality, Lyft expects margins to grow by 50 basis points.) "This was a bad error," he said, "but it was one zero in a press release."

The typo, which actually appeared in multiple company documents on Tuesday, helped drive a 67% surge in Lyft's shares in after-hours trading. The mistake was a serious one, Risher said. But it shouldn't take away from Lyft's "butt-kicking" financial performance, he said. Risher said his team at Lyft was taking the error very seriously and noted it was corrected "within seconds of finding it." But in fact, on a call with analysts to discuss the quarterly results, Lyft executives didn't immediately note the error in their opening remarks. Lyft Chief Financial Officer Erin Brewer just began referring to the company's outlook for a 50-basis-point expansion. It wasn't until later in the call, when an analyst pointed out the discrepancy, that Brewer acknowledged her outlook was "actually a correction from the press release."

An anonymous reader shares a report: When California state legislators passed a 2014 law banning single-use plastic bags, the hope was that it would notably reduce the amount of discarded plastic. But fast-forward nearly a decade: Californians are tossing more pounds of plastic bags than before the legislation was passed. That's according to a recent report by the consumer advocacy group CALPIRG, which took population changes into account and found the tonnage of discarded bags rose from 4.08 per 1,000 people in 2014 to 5.89 per 1,000 people in 2022. How could this happen?

As Susanne Rust reported this week, plastic bag manufacturers replaced one kind of plastic bag for another. You've probably noticed them at grocery stores or had them loaded into your car during a drive-up order. These newer bags are thicker and meet technical specifications to be called "reusable." As Jenn Engstrom, CALPIRG'S state director, explained to Susanne, the switch created a loophole because the newer bags -- which typically cost 10 cents -- "are clearly not being reused and don't look like reusable bags and ... just circumvent the law's intent." The pandemic was also a contributing factor. COVID restrictions led many to get groceries, restaurant dishes and other products delivered to our doors, often in thick plastic bags.

There's an effort to close the loophole, though. New legislation is being proposed that would also ban the thicker plastic bags from grocery and large retail stores. Clearly, not enough consumers have changed their plastic bag habits at the checkout stand. But the onus isn't on individuals. Plastic manufacturers create these products. Businesses buy the bags so customers have somewhere to put the goods they buy from businesses. [...] Under the new law, at least 30% of plastic items sold, distributed or imported into California must be recyclable by Jan. 1, 2028. It also stipulates that single-use plastic waste be reduced 25% by 2032. But as Susanne pointed out, plastics companies will have notable oversight and authority over the program "via a Producer Responsibility Organization, which will be made up of industry representatives."

The U.S. Navy has ramped up efforts to recruit young gamers and esports fans to meet recruitment goals, allocating up to $4.3 million this year for esports marketing. This includes hosting video game tournaments and having sailors compete as the esports team "Goats & Glory." Critics argue targeting minors for military marketing normalizes war and raises ethical concerns, The Guardian reports. While the military cannot formally recruit those under 17, advertising and direct interaction with minors for recruitment purposes is permitted. Veterans groups oppose this, noting the military relies on gaming's appeal to young teens, whose brains are still developing, to influence future decisions about military service, the report adds.

Michael Larabel writes via Phoronix: While there have been efforts by AMD over the years to make it easier to port codebases targeting NVIDIA's CUDA API to run atop HIP/ROCm, it still requires work on the part of developers. The tooling has improved such as with HIPIFY to help in auto-generating but it isn't any simple, instant, and guaranteed solution -- especially if striving for optimal performance. Over the past two years AMD has quietly been funding an effort though to bring binary compatibility so that many NVIDIA CUDA applications could run atop the AMD ROCm stack at the library level -- a drop-in replacement without the need to adapt source code. In practice for many real-world workloads, it's a solution for end-users to run CUDA-enabled software without any developer intervention. Here is more information on this "skunkworks" project that is now available as open-source along with some of my own testing and performance benchmarks of this CUDA implementation built for Radeon GPUs. [...]

For those wondering about the open-source code, it's dual-licensed under either Apache 2.0 or MIT. Rust fans will be excited to know the Rust programming language is leveraged for this Radeon implementation. [...] Those wanting to check out the new ZLUDA open-source code for Radeon GPUs can do so via GitHub.

Less than a week after naming Laura Chambers as interim CEO, Firefox's maker Mozilla said it is cutting about 60 jobs, or 5% of its workforce. The cuts are primarily in the product development organization. Bloomberg reports: "We're scaling back investment in some product areas in order to focus on areas that we feel have the greatest chance of success," Mozilla said in a statement. "We intend to re-prioritize resources against products like Firefox Mobile, where there's a significant opportunity to grow and establish a better model for the industry."

Mozilla last cut a significant number of jobs four years ago at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. The not-for-profit company, which competes with Alphabet Inc.'s Google Chrome, Apple Inc.'s Safari and Microsoft Corp.'s Edge, has been grappling with sliding market share of its Firefox web browser in recent years. So far in 2024, the tech sector has cut 32,000 jobs.