A U.S. Department of Commerce spokesperson on Thursday said the Biden administration "has not blocked chip sales to the Middle East." From a report: The comments come after artificial intelligence chip firms Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices received notifications from U.S. officials about new export licensing requirements to ship chips to some countries in the Middle East.

"Terraform, arguably the most popular Infrastructure as Code products, has been forked after the parent company HashiCorp changed its license from the Mozilla Public License (MPL) to the Business Source License v1.1 (BSL)," writes long-time Slashdot reader ochinko. "Our view is that we're actually not the fork because we're just changing the name but it's the same project under the same license," Sebastian Stadil, co-founder and CEO of DevOps automation biz Scalr told The Register. "Our position is that the fork is actually HashiCorp that has forked its own projects under a different license." From the report: HashiCorp's decision to issue new licensing terms for its software follows a path trodden by numerous other organizations formed around open source projects to limit what competitors can do with project code. As the biz acknowledged in its statement about the transition, firms like Cockroach Labs, Confluent Sentry, Couchbase, Elastic, MariaDB, MongoDB, and Redis Labs have similarly adopted less-permissive software licenses to create a barrier for competitors. You can see the OpenTF manifesto here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: The Environmental Protection Agency removed federal protections for a majority of the country's wetlands on Tuesday to comply with a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling. The EPA and Department of the Army announced a final rule amending the definition of protected "waters of the United States" in light of the decision in Sackett v. EPA in May, which narrowed the scope of the Clean Water Act and the agency's power to regulate waterways and wetlands. A 2006 Supreme Court decision determined that wetlands would be protected if they had a "significant nexus" to major waterways. This year's court decision undid that standard. The EPA's new rule "removes the significant nexus test from consideration when identifying tributaries and other waters as federally protected," the agency said.

In May, Justice Samuel Alito said the navigable U.S. waters regulated by the EPA under the Clean Water Act do not include many previously regulated wetlands. Writing the court's decision, he said the law includes only streams, oceans, rivers and lakes, and wetlands with a "continuous surface connection to those bodies." The EPA said the rule will take effect immediately. "The agencies are issuing this amendment to the 2023 rule expeditiously -- three months after the Supreme Court decision -- to provide clarity and a path forward consistent with the ruling," the agency said. As a result of the rule change, protections for many waterways and wetlands will now fall to states.

Hundreds of thousands of people are being forcibly engaged by organised criminal gangs into online criminality in Southeast Asia - from romance-investment scams and crypto fraud to illegal gambling - a report issued today by the UN Human Rights Office shows. From a report: Victims face a range of serious violations and abuses, including threats to their safety and security; and many have been subjected to torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment, arbitrary detention, sexual violence, forced labour, and other human rights abuses, the report says. "People who are coerced into working in these scamming operations endure inhumane treatment while being forced to carry out crimes. They are victims. They are not criminals," said UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk.

"In continuing to call for justice for those who have been defrauded through online criminality, we must not forget that this complex phenomenon has two sets of victims." The enormity of online scam trafficking in Southeast Asia is difficult to estimate, the reports says, because of the clandestine nature and gaps in the official response. Credible sources indicate that at least 120,000 people across Myanmar may be held in situations where they are forced to carry out online scams, with estimates in Cambodia similarly at around 100,000. Other States in the region, including Lao PDR, the Philippines and Thailand, have also been identified as main countries of destination or transit where at least tens of thousands of people have been involved. The scam centres generate revenue amounting to billions of US dollars each year.

The European Union is stoking its power plants with fewer lumps of coal and barrels of oil and gas than it has ever recorded, data shows. From a report: The 27 member states burned 17% less fossil fuel to make electricity between January and June 2023 than over the same period the year before, a study from the clean energy thinktank Ember found. The EU made 410TWh of electricity from sources that release planet-heating gases, which analysts say is the lowest level since 2015 -- the first year for which they have monthly data -- and "very likely" since 2000.

The drop in fossil fuel generation was driven by a fall in demand for electricity, as well as some growth in clean power, the study found. "We're glad to see fossil fuels down, but in the long-term it is not going to be sustainable to rely on the fall in demand to do this," said Matt Ewen, a data analyst at Ember and author of the report. "We have to be replacing this energy rather than just expecting it to go away and not be used." To try to stop the planet heating, the EU has promised to cut greenhouse gas pollution by at least 55% from 1990 levels by the end of the decade, and hit net zero emissions by 2050. To get there, it will probably have to use less energy but more electricity than it does today, as more people heat homes and drive cars with electricity instead of fossil fuels.

Visa and Mastercard are planning to increase fees that many merchants pay when they accept customers' credit cards. From a report: The fee increases are scheduled to start in October and April, according to people familiar with the matter and documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal. Many of the increases are for online purchases. The changes could result in merchants paying an additional $502 million annually in fees, according to CMSPI, a consulting company that works with merchants.

Increases in network fees will make up a little more than half of that revenue, CMSPI estimated. The rest will come from increases in interchange fees, also called swipe fees. Merchants pay these fees when shoppers pay via credit card. The economy of interchange fees is largely hidden from shoppers. But the fees are a major source of contention between the card networks and merchants large and small, from giant online retailers to corner coffee shops. U.S. merchants paid an estimated $93 billion in Visa and Mastercard credit-card fees last year, according to the Nilson Report, an industry publication. That was up from about $33 billion in 2012. Merchants pass along at least some of that cost to consumers in the form of higher prices. More small businesses have started offering discounts to shoppers who pay by debit card, cash or check.

ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols shares what's new in the release of Linux 6.5: The biggest news for servers -- and cloud Linux users -- is AMD Ryzen processors' P-State support. This support should mean better performance and power use across CPU cores. Intel Alder Lake CPUs have also received improved load balancing in a related development. RISC-V architecture fans will be pleased to find Linux now has Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) support. ACPI is used in Linux and other operating systems for power management. It's vital for laptops and other battery-powered systems.

For better security, people using virtual machines or sandboxes based on Usermode Linux for testing, or running multiple versions of Linux at once, now have Landlock support. Landock is a Linux Security Module that enables applications to sandbox themselves by selecting access rights to directories. It's designed to be used by unprivileged processes while following the system security policy. To make talking with the rest of the world easier, Linux 6.5 now supports USB 4v2. This new USB-C standard will support up to an eye-watering 120Gbps. And while we're still getting used to Wi-Fi 6E, the Wi-Fi Alliance is already working on bringing us Wi-Fi 7. When Wi-Fi 7 arrives, with its theoretical maximum speed of 46Gbps, Linux will be ready. As usual, the new Linux has many more built-in audio and graphics drivers. The Bcachefs filesystem didn't make it into Linux 6.5, notes Vaughan-Nichols. "While the Bcachefs filesystem looks good, there's been a lot of developers fighting about the development process. These personal arguments have led Torvalds to decide not to incorporate Bcachefs into Linux 6.5."

Linus Torvalds announced Linux 6.5's delivery in a brief post on August 27.

Flights in and out of Britain will be disrupted for days, the U.K. government said on Tuesday, after a technical issue with the country's air traffic control system left thousands of passengers stranded abroad or facing severe delays. From a report: Around 280 flights were canceled on Tuesday, about 5 percent of the total scheduled to leave or arrive in Britain, according to Cirium, an aviation analytics company, compounding travel woes for British holidaymakers after more than a thousand flights were canceled the day before. The trouble came at a particularly busy time for travelers in Britain, many of whom were returning home from summer vacation or long weekends because Monday was a public holiday in the country.

"The timing was not at all helpful for people," Mark Harper, the government minister responsible for transport policy, told the BBC on Tuesday morning. "It's disrupted thousands of people. Lots of flights were canceled yesterday because of the imperative to keep the system working safely, and it is going to take some days to get completely everybody back to where they should be." He added that the government's technical experts had concluded that the episode was not a cyberattack. Britain's National Air Traffic Service, which runs air traffic control, said on Monday that a failure of the automatic system that processes plane routes meant that, for several hours, flight plans had to be entered manually.

Cigarette smoking and other uses of tobacco shave an average of 2.2 years off lifespans globally. But merely breathing -- if the air is polluted -- is more damaging to human health. From a report: That is the conclusion of a report published Tuesday by the University of Chicago's Energy Policy Institute, which identified air pollution as the world's top threat to public health, responsible for reducing average life expectancy by 2.3 years worldwide. China, once the poster child for smog-filled skies, has been a surprise success story. Between 2013 and 2021, the world's second-largest economy improved overall air quality by more than 40% while the average lifespan of residents increased by more than two years, according to the report.

By contrast, four countries in South Asia -- India, Bangladesh Nepal and Pakistan -- accounted for more than half of the total years of life lost globally due to pollution in the atmosphere over the same eight years. India alone was responsible for nearly 60% of the growth in air pollution across the globe during that time. If India were to meet World Health Organization guidelines for particulate pollution, the life expectancy for residents of capital city New Delhi would increase by 12 years. An increase in wildfires in places such as California and Canada has renewed attention on the dangers of polluted air. Around 350 cities globally suffer the same level of dangerous haze that enveloped New York City in June at least once a year, according to calculations from environmental think tank Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, which aggregates data from dozens of official government sources.

Meta's decision to block news links in Canada this month has had almost no impact on Canadians' usage of Facebook, data from independent tracking firms indicated on Tuesday, as the company faces scorching criticism from the Canadian government over the move. From a report: Daily active users of Facebook and time spent on the app in Canada have stayed roughly unchanged since parent company Meta started blocking news there at the start of August, according to data shared by Similarweb, a digital analytics company that tracks traffic on websites and apps, at Reuters' request. Another analytics firm, Data.ai, likewise told Reuters that its data was not showing any meaningful change to usage of the platform in Canada in August. The estimates, while early, appear to support Meta's contention that news holds little value for the company as it remains locked in a tense standoff in Canada over a new law requiring internet giants to pay publishers for the news articles shared on their platforms.

Under an ambitious program, dubbed Replicator, the Pentagon aims to field thousands of autonomous systems within two years to counter China. The effort is being spearheaded by Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks. Politico reports: Hicks said the time is right to push to rapidly scale up innovative technology. The move comes as the U.S. looks to get creative to deter China in the Indo-Pacific and Pentagon leadership has taken stock of how Ukraine has fended off Russia's invasion. "Industry is ready. The culture is ready to shift," Hicks said. "We have to drive that from the top, and we need to give it a hard target." "The great paradox of military innovation is you're going to have to make big bets and you've got to execute on those bets," she added.

With Replicator, the Pentagon aims to have thousands of autonomous systems across various domains produced and delivered in 18 to 24 months. Hicks declined to discuss what specific platforms might be produced under the program -- such as aerial drones or unmanned ships -- citing the "competition landscape" in the defense industry as well as concerns about tipping DOD's hand to China. The Pentagon will instead "say more as we get to production on capabilities."

Autonomous weapons are seen as a potential way to counter China's numerical advantages in ships, missiles and troops in a rapidly narrowing window. Fielding large numbers of cheap, expendable drones, proponents argue, is faster and lower-cost than exquisite weapons systems and puts fewer troops at risk. Another major aim of the Replicator initiative is to provide a template for future efforts to rapidly field military technology. She said lessons from the Replicator program could be applied throughout the Pentagon, military services and combatant commands.

Microsoft has made some of its certification exams open book affairs, allowing access to its learning portal while candidates sit tests. From a report: "On August 22, we will begin updating our exams so that you will be able to access Microsoft Learn as you complete your exam," wrote Liberty Munson, director of psychometrics at Microsoft's Worldwide Learning organization. Microsoft Learn is a portal that links to product documentation, tutorials, code fragments, and other technical material.

Much of that content will be available during exams, although a technical Q&A service will remain hidden. The open book exams will be offered to candidates sitting exams for the role-based certifications Microsoft offers for job titles including Azure Administrator, Developer, Solutions Architect, DevOps Engineer; Microsoft 365 Modern Desktop Administrator, and Enterprise Administrator. Exams at Associate, Expert, and Specialty levels of competency will all offer access to the Learn portal. The material will become available for all role-based and specialty exams, in all languages, by mid-September 2023. Looking up material on Learn won't stop the clock during an exam, and the experience of taking the test will remain unchanged -- other than allowing candidates to open a window in which to view the educational portal.

Chess.com and Hans Niemann have reached a settlement in which Niemann has agreed to drop a $100 million lawsuit against Chess.com and Magnus Carlsen, and will be allowed to return to compete, the company announced Monday. From a report: This puts an end to the legal aspect of a cheating scandal that captivated the chess world for nearly a year. As part of the settlement, chess world champion Carlsen said "there is no determinative evidence that Niemann cheated in his game against me at the Sinquefield Cup. I am willing to play Niemann in future events, should we be paired together."

In an enforcement action announced on Monday, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Los Angelesâ"based entertainment company Impact Theory with conducting an unregistered offering of securities via non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. From a report: As the SEC expands its definition of which types of crypto assets qualify as securities, the case breaks new ground by determining that NFTs fall under the agency's jurisdiction. "Absent a valid exemption, offerings of securities, in whatever form, must be registered," Antonia Apps, director of the SEC's New York Regional Office, said in a statement.

The question of whether NFTs qualify as securities has remained open for several years. Before the SEC weighed in, a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York remained the highest-profile case to tackle the issue, with a group of NFT collectors suing Dapper Labs. The plaintiffs alleged that the crypto firm had earned hundreds of millions of dollars by selling unregistered securities. Although Dapper Labs motioned for the case to be dismissed last year, a judge ruled in February that it could move forward, concluding that it was "plausible" NFTs could qualify as securities.

The United States has enough geothermal energy to power the entire country. Some are trying to unlock it by using techniques from the fracking boom. From a report: Traditional geothermal plants, which have existed for decades, work by tapping natural hot water reservoirs underground to power turbines that can generate electricity 24 hours a day. Few sites have the right conditions for this, however, so geothermal only produces 0.4 percent of America's electricity currently. But hot, dry rocks lie below the surface everywhere on the planet. And by using advanced drilling techniques developed by the oil and gas industry, some experts think it's possible to tap that larger store of heat and create geothermal energy almost anywhere. The potential is enormous: The Energy Department estimates there's enough energy in those rocks to power the entire country five times over and has launched a major push to develop technologies to harvest that heat.

Dozens of geothermal companies have emerged with ideas. Fervo is using fracking techniques -- similar to those used for oil and gas -- to crack open dry, hot rock and inject water into the fractures, creating artificial geothermal reservoirs. Eavor, a Canadian start-up, is building large underground radiators with drilling methods pioneered in Alberta's oil sands. Others dream of using plasma or energy waves to drill even deeper and tap "superhot" temperatures that could cleanly power thousands of coal-fired power plants by substituting steam for coal. Still, obstacles to geothermal expansion loom. Investors are wary of the cost and risks of novel geothermal projects. Some worry about water use or earthquakes from drilling. Permitting is difficult. And geothermal gets less federal support than other technologies.

An advertising watchdog has recommended that YouTube TV, Google's growing pay-TV streaming service, drops an ad claim that the service is "$600 less than cable." The recommendation from the National Advertising Division (NAD) stems from a complaint lodged by Charter Communications. From a report: NAD, which used an expedited process for single-issue advertising cases in making this decision, found that YouTube TV's pricing claim, which identifies "comparable standalone cable" as the basis of comparison, doesn't hold up. NAD noted that the price calculation underlying the challenged claim includes the cost of two set-top boxes per household for "standalone cable" services," but argued that such a comparison isn't a good fit because operators such as Charter offer pay-TV streaming options that may not require a set-top box. In Charter's case, its Spectrum TV app, billed as a platform that can "stream outside the cable box," is compatible with iOS and Android mobile devices along with several retail streaming devices and/or integrated connected TVs from companies such as Apple, Roku, Google and Samsung. "In the context of the 'cable' comparison, NAD found the claim reasonably conveys the cost of YouTube TV is compared to all cable services," the organization explained.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo opened talks with Chinese government officials on Monday, saying it is "profoundly important" for the world's two largest economies to have a stable economic relationship. From a report: Raimondo is looking to boost business ties as U.S. firms have reported increasing challenges with operating in China, while China has sharply criticized U.S. efforts to block its access to advanced semiconductors. Raimondo said the entire world expects the United States and China will have a stable economic relationship; the two countries share more than $700 billion in annual trade. "It's a complicated relationship. "It's a challenging relationship. We will of course disagree on certain issues," Raimondo said. "I think we can make progress if we are direct, open and practical."

To meet climate goals, some European countries are asking farmers to reduce livestock, relocate or shut down -- and an angry backlash has begun reshaping the political landscape before national elections in the fall. The New York Times: This summer, scores of farmers descended on the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, to protest against new E.U. rules aimed at restoring natural areas and cutting emissions that contribute to climate change. Farmers have protested in Belgium, Italy and Spain, too. The discontent has underscored a widening divide on a continent that is on the one hand committed to acting on climate change but on the other often deeply divided about how to do it and who should pay for it.

[...] For many farmers, the feelings run deep. The prominent role of agriculture was enshrined in the European Union's founding documents as a way of ensuring food security for a continent still traumatized by the deprivations of World War II. But it was also a nod to national identities and a way to protect competing farming interests in what would become a common market. To that end, from its outset, the bloc established a fund that, to this day, provides farmers with billions of euros in subsidies every year. Increasingly, however, those subsidies and the bloc's founding ideals are running up against a new ambition: to adapt to a world where climate change threatens traditional ways of life. Scientists are adamant: To fulfill the bloc's goal of reaching net zero emissions by 2050 and to reverse biodiversity losses, Europe has to transform the way it produces its food.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the New York Times: It is powered into flight by a rocket engine. It can fly a distance equal to the width of China. It has a stealthy design and is capable of carrying missiles that can hit enemy targets far beyond its visual range. But what really distinguishes the Air Force's pilotless XQ-58A Valkyrie experimental aircraft is that it is run by artificial intelligence, putting it at the forefront of efforts by the U.S. military to harness the capacities of an emerging technology whose vast potential benefits are tempered by deep concerns about how much autonomy to grant to a lethal weapon.

Essentially a next-generation drone, the Valkyrie is a prototype for what the Air Force hopes can become a potent supplement to its fleet of traditional fighter jets, giving human pilots a swarm of highly capable robot wingmen to deploy in battle. Its mission is to marry artificial intelligence and its sensors to identify and evaluate enemy threats and then, after getting human sign-off, to move in for the kill... The emergence of artificial intelligence is helping to spawn a new generation of Pentagon contractors who are seeking to undercut, or at least disrupt, the longstanding primacy of the handful of giant firms who supply the armed forces with planes, missiles, tanks and ships. The possibility of building fleets of smart but relatively inexpensive weapons that could be deployed in large numbers is allowing Pentagon officials to think in new ways about taking on enemy forces.

It also is forcing them to confront questions about what role humans should play in conflicts waged with software that is written to kill...
The article adds that the U.S. Air Force plans to build 1,000 to 2,000 AI drones for as little as $3 million apiece. "Some will focus on surveillance or resupply missions, others will fly in attack swarms and still others will serve as a 'loyal wingman' to a human pilot....

"A recently revised Pentagon policy on the use of artificial intelligence in weapons systems allows for the autonomous use of lethal force — but any particular plan to build or deploy such a weapon must first be reviewed and approved by a special military panel."

An anonymous reader shared this report from the New York: In 2017, Michael Moritz, a billionaire venture capitalist, sent a note to a potential investor about what he described as an unusual opportunity: a chance to invest in the creation of a new California city. The site was in a corner of the San Francisco Bay Area where land was cheap. Moritz and others had dreams of transforming tens of thousands of acres into a bustling metropolis that, according to the pitch, could generate thousands of jobs and be as walkable as Paris or the West Village in New York.

He painted a kind of urban blank slate where everything from design to construction methods and new forms of governance could be rethought. And it would all be a short distance from San Francisco and Silicon Valley... Since then, a company called Flannery Associates has been buying large plots of land in a largely agricultural region 60 miles northeast of San Francisco. The company, which has little information public about its operations, has committed more than $800 million to secure thousands of acres of farmland, court documents show. One parcel after another, Flannery made offers to every landowner for miles, paying several times the market rate, whether the land had been listed for sale or not...

Brian Brokaw, a representative for the investor group, said in a statement that the group was made up of "Californians who believe that Solano County's and California's best days are ahead." He said the group planned to start working with Solano County residents and elected officials, as well as with Travis Air Force Base, next week... The land that Flannery has been purchasing is not zoned for residential use, and even in his 2017 pitch, Moritz acknowledged that rezoning could "clearly be challenging" — a nod to California's notoriously difficult and litigious development process. To pull off the project, the company will almost certainly have to use the state's initiative system to get Solano County residents to vote on it. The hope is that voters will be enticed by promises of thousands of local jobs; increased tax revenue; and investments in infrastructure like parks, a performing arts center, shopping, dining and a trade school.
Moritz's 2017 email had argued their project "should relieve some of the Silicon Valley pressures we all feel — rising home prices, homelessness, congestion etc."

SFGate estimates the group now owns 52,000 acres — "an empire that is nearly double the size of the city of San Francisco" — and notes that some details emerged when the group filed a document to repond to a lawsuit. "It claims it told landowners that they could keep 'existing income streams from wind energy and natural gas storage,' could 'continue using these properties rent-free for decades,' and would receive 'significant grants from Flannery for charitable giving, to be used at the [landowners'] discretion to support local schools and other non-profits.'"

"Tech billionaires reportedly backing mysterious Solano County land grab," reads the headline on SFGate's latest article: SFGATE reported earlier this week that a survey had circulated to Solano County residents asking for their opinions on the potential development of "a new city with tens of thousands of new homes, a large solar energy farm, orchards with over a million new trees, and over ten thousand acres of new parks and open space."