gaiageek writes: Of note, given the recent Slashdot article about Signal opening up to trying out usernames, is the $6 million annual cost of sending SMS messages for account verification, which certainly suggests that getting rid of phone number verification would be a significant cost-saving solution.

Microsoft has created a Windows App for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, Windows, and web browsers. From a report: The app essentially takes the previous Windows 365 app and turns it into a central hub for streaming a copy of Windows from a remote PC, Azure Virtual Desktop, Windows 365, Microsoft Dev Box, and Microsoft's Remote Desktop Services.

Microsoft supports multiple monitors through its Windows App, custom display resolutions and scaling, and device redirection for peripherals like webcams, storage devices, and printers. The preview version of the Windows App isn't currently available for Android, though. The Windows App is also limited to Microsoft's range of business accounts, but there are signs it will be available to consumers, too. The sign-in prompt on the Windows App on Windows (yes that's a mouthful) suggests you can access the app using a personal Microsoft Account, but this functionality doesn't work right now.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: For decades, scientists have tried to figure out ways to reverse climate change by pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and storing it underground. They've tried using trees, giant machines that suck CO2 out of the sky, complicated ocean methods that involve growing and burying huge quantities of kelp. Companies, researchers and the U.S. government have spent billions of dollars on the research and development of these approaches and yet they remain too expensive to make a substantial dent in carbon emissions. Now, a start-up says it has discovered a deceptively simple way to take CO2 from the atmosphere and store it for thousands of years. It involves making bricks out of smushed pieces of plants. And it could be a game changer for the growing industry working to pull carbon from the air.

Graphyte, a new company incubated by Bill Gates's investment group Breakthrough Energy Ventures, announced Monday that it has created a method for turning bits of wood chips and rice hulls into low-cost, dehydrated chunks of plant matter. Those blocks of carbon-laden plant matter -- which look a bit like shoe-box sized Lego blocks -- can then be buried deep underground for hundreds of years. The approach, the company claims, could store a ton of CO2 for around $100 a ton, a number long considered a milestone for affordably removing carbon dioxide from the air. [...] Graphyte's approach uses the power of plants and trees to photosynthesize and pull carbon dioxide from the air. While trees and plants are excellent at carbon capture, they don't store that carbon for very long -- when a plant burns or decays, its stored carbon comes spilling back out into the air and soil.

Graphyte plans to avoid that decomposition by taking plant waste from timber harvesters and farmers and drying it thoroughly, removing all the microbes that could cause it to decompose and release greenhouse gases. Then, in a process that they call "carbon casting," it will compress the waste and wrap it into Lego-like bricks, for easier storage about 10 feet underground. The company says that with the right monitoring systems, the blocks can stay there for a thousand years. [...] Graphyte is planning to build its first project in Pine Bluff, Ark., and the company hopes to sequester its first carbon for a customer in 2024. It remains to be seen whether Graphyte will be able to scale up its operation to removing millions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. The company will need to secure many sources of plant waste and build many small processing centers around the country to be successful. "The simplicity of the Graphyte approach is so exciting," said Daniel Sanchez, who runs the Carbon Removal Lab at the University of California at Berkeley, and serves as a science adviser for Graphyte. "You don't need very expensive equipment or processes. And it locks up a lot of the carbon in the wood -- nearly all of it."

"People that are academics probably thought about this before and were like, 'That's way too simple,'" Sanchez said, laughing. "'No one's ever going to do that.'"

Anton Shilov reports via Tom's Hardware: A new report from a data recovery company now points the finger at design and manufacturing flaws as the underlying issue with the recent flood of SanDisk Extreme Pro failures that eventually spurred a class action lawsuit. It became clear in May that some of Western Digital's SanDisk Extreme Pro 4TB SSDs suffered from sudden data loss; at this point, the company promised a firmware update to owners of the 4TB models. However, the 2TB and 3TB models also suffer from the same issue, and Western Digital did not promise any firmware updates for these drives.

Markus Hafele, Managing Director of Attingo, a data recovery company, told FutureZone that the problem lies in hardware, not firmware, which could explain the lack of corrective firmware updates for those models and SanDisk's continued silence about the source of the issues. Attingo, which has been in the data recovery business for over 25 years, normally sees these failed SanDisk Extreme Pro SSDs at least once a week. The problem appears to be rather complex. According to HÃfele, the components used in these SSDs are too big for the circuit board, causing weak connections (i.e., high impendence and high temperatures) and making them prone to breaking. He also says that the soldering material used to attach these components is prone to forming bubbles and breaking easily.

It remains unknown whether the cause is cheap solder, the componentry, or both contribute to the issues observed. However, newer revisions of these SanDisk Extreme Pro SSDs seem to have been modified with extra epoxy resin to secure the oversized components. This suggests that Western Digital might know about the hardware problems. Nevertheless, these newer models are still failing, thus sending data recovery service customers to firms like Attingo. According to the head of Attingo, the issue seems to be affecting multiple product lineups, including both SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD as well as the SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable SSD.

"In an open-air warehouse in California's Central Valley, 40-foot-tall racks hold hundreds of trays filled with a white powder that turns crusty as it absorbs carbon dioxide from the sky," reports the New York Times.

"The start-up that built the facility, Heirloom Carbon Technologies, calls it the first commercial plant in the United States to use direct air capture, which involves vacuuming greenhouse gases from the atmosphere." Another plant is operating in Iceland, and some scientists say the technique could be crucial for fighting climate change. Heirloom will take the carbon dioxide it pulls from the air and have the gas sealed permanently in concrete, where it can't heat the planet. To earn revenue, the company is selling carbon removal credits to companies paying a premium to offset their own emissions. Microsoft has already signed a deal with Heirloom to remove 315,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The company's first facility in Tracy, California, which opens Thursday, is fairly small. The plant can absorb a maximum of 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year, equal to the exhaust from about 200 cars. But Heirloom hopes to expand quickly. "We want to get to millions of tons per year," said Shashank Samala, the company's chief executive. "That means copying and pasting this basic design over and over."

Heirloom's technology hinges on a simple bit of chemistry: Limestone, one of the most abundant rocks on the planet, forms when calcium oxide binds with carbon dioxide. In nature, that process takes years. Heirloom speeds it up. At the California plant, workers heat limestone to 1,650 degrees Fahrenheit in a kiln powered by renewable electricity. Carbon dioxide is released from the limestone and pumped into a storage tank. The leftover calcium oxide, which looks like flour, is then doused with water and spread onto large trays, which are carried by robots onto tower-high racks and exposed to open air. Over three days, the white powder absorbs carbon dioxide and turns into limestone again. Then it's back to the kiln and the cycle repeats. "That's the beauty of this, it's just rocks on trays," Mr. Samala, who co-founded Heirloom in 2020, said.

The hard part, he added, was years of tweaking variables like particle size, tray spacing and moisture to speed up absorption... In future projects, Heirloom also plans to pump carbon dioxide into underground storage wells, burying it.
The company received funding from Microsoft's Climate Innovation Fund and Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures, according to Bloomberg, which adds that Heirloom's technology will later "be deployed at a major hub in Louisiana the government expects will remove 1 million tons of CO2 a year by the end of the decade."

The New York Times notes there was also federal funding, something that's been fueling the ambitions of hundreds of carbon-capture startups. "The science is clear," says America's Energy Secretary. "Cutting back carbon emissions through renewable energy alone won't stop the damage from climate change. Direct air capture technology is a game-changing tool that gives us a shot at removing the carbon pollution that has been building in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution."

Smartphones and electric cars are both powered by lithium-ion batteries, notes the Economist. These "Li-ion" batteries "form the guts of a growing number of grid-storage systems that smooth the flow of electricity from wind and solar power stations. Without them, the electrification needed to avoid the worst effects of global warming would be unimaginable." But unfortunately, building them requires scarce metals.

"A clutch of companies, though, think they have an alternative: making batteries with sodium instead..." And the idea of building "Na-ion" batteries at scale is "gaining traction." Engineers are tweaking designs. Factories, particularly in China, are springing up. For the first time since the Li-ion revolution began, lithium's place on the electrochemical pedestal is being challenged... [A]ccording to Rory McNulty, a research analyst at Benchmark, Chinese firms have 34 Na-ion-battery factories built, being built or announced inside the country, and one planned in Malaysia. Established battery-makers in other places, by contrast, are not yet showing much interest. Even without a five-year plan to guide them, though, some non-Chinese startups are seeking to steal a march by developing alternatives to layered oxides, in the hope of improving the technology, reducing its cost, or both.

One of the most intriguing of these neophytes is Natron Energy, of Santa Clara, California... Natron claims that its cells can endure 50,000 cycles of charging and discharging — between ten and 100 times more than commercial Li-ion batteries can manage. The firm has built a factory in Michigan, which it says will begin production later this year. Other non-Chinese firms are less far advanced, but full of hope. Altris, in Sweden, which is also building a factory, employs a material called Prussian white that substitutes some of the iron in Prussian blue with sodium. Tiamat, in France, uses a polyanionic design involving vanadium. And Faradion, in Britain (now owned by Reliance, an Indian firm), intends to stick with a layered-metal-oxide system.
Thanks to Slashdot reader echo123 for sharing the article.

Google says it'll issue a system update to fix a major storage bug in Android 14 that has caused some users to be locked out of their devices. Ars Technica reports: Apparently one more round of news reports was enough to get the gears moving at Google. Over the weekend the Issue tracker bug has been kicked up from a mid-level "P2" priority to "P0," the highest priority on the issue tracker. The bug has been assigned to someone now, and Googlers have jumped into the thread to make official statements that Google is looking into the matter. Here's the big post from Google on the bug tracker [...]. The highlights here are that Google says the bug affects devices with multiple Android users, not multiple Google accounts or (something we thought originally) users with work profiles. Setting up multiple users means going to the system settings, then "Multiple users," then "Allow multiple users," and you can add a user other than the default one. If you do this, you'll have a user switcher at the bottom of the quick settings. Multiple users all have separate data, separate apps, and separate Google accounts. Child users are probably the most popular reason to use this feature since you can lock kids out of things, like purchasing apps.

Shipping a Google Play system update as a quick Band-Aid is an interesting solution, but as Google's post suggests, this doesn't mean the problem is fixed. Play system updates (these are alternatively called Project Mainline or APEX modules) allow Google to update core system components via the Play Store, but they are really not meant for critical fixes. The big problem is that the Play system updates don't aggressively apply themselves or even let you know they have been downloaded. They just passively, silently wait for a reboot to happen so they can apply. For Pixel users, it feels like the horse has already left the barn anyway -- like most Pixel phones have automatically applied the nearly 13-day-old update by now. Users can force Play system updates to happen themselves by going to the system settings, then "Security & Privacy," then "System & updates," then "Google Play system update." If you have an update, you'll be prompted to reboot the phone. Also note that this differs from the usual OS update checker location, which is in system settings, then "System," then "System update." The system update screen will happily tell you "Your system is up to date" even if you have a pending Google Play system update. It would be great to have a single location for OS updates, Google Play System/Mainline updates, and app updates, but they are scattered everywhere and give conflicting "up to date" messages.

Western Digital said on Monday it would spin off its flash memory business that has been grappling with a supply glut after talks of merging the unit with Japan's Kioxia stalled. From a report: The split will leave the data storage products maker with its traditional hard-disk drive business and create two publicly traded firms, giving into demands from activist investor Elliott. The move clears years of uncertainty over Western Digital's flash memory unit that was built through its $19 billion purchase of SanDisk in 2016 and caters to the smartphone and computer industries. Demand for flash chips has slumped after the pandemic, leaving the market awash in supply and increasing the pressure on chipmakers to consolidate. Since 2021, Western Digital and its manufacturing partner Kioxia have been in talks for a merger that would create a company that controls a third of the global NAND flash market.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from OPP.Today: Android 14, the latest operating system from Google, is facing a major storage bug that is causing users to be locked out of their devices. This issue is particularly affecting users who utilize the "multiple profiles" feature. Reports suggest that the bug is comparable to being hit with "ransomware," as users are unable to access their device storage. Initially, it was believed that this bug was limited to the Pixel 6, but it has since been discovered that it impacts a wider range of devices upgrading to Android 14. This includes the Pixel 6, 6a, 7, 7a, Pixel Fold, and Pixel Tablet. The Google issue tracker for this bug has garnered over 350 replies, but there has been no response from Google so far. The bug has been assigned the medium priority level of "P2" and remains unassigned, indicating that no one is actively investigating it.

Users who have encountered this storage bug have shared log files containing concerning messages such as "Failed to open directory /data/media/0: Structure needs cleaning." This issue leads to various problematic situations, with some users experiencing boot loops, others stuck on a "Pixel is starting..." message, and some unable to take screenshots or access their camera app due to the lack of storage. Users are also unable to view files on their devices from a PC over USB, and the System UI and Settings repeatedly crash. Essentially, without storage, the device becomes practically unusable.

Android's user-profile system, designed to accommodate multiple users and separate work and personal profiles, appears to be the cause of this rarely encountered bug. Users have reported that the primary profile, which is typically the most important one, becomes locked out.

The UK's oil and gas regulator is coming under fire from environmental groups for using lawyers to try to prevent the publication of five key documents relating to the environmental impact of Shell's activities in the North Sea. From a report: At a hearing in December, a legal representative for the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA) is expected to argue against the publication of documents that contain details about the risk of pollution as a result of decommissioning the Brent oilfield, which was operated by Shell for more than 40 years. It says it opposes publication "on a matter of process basis." Shell has applied for an exemption from international rules that require all infrastructure to be removed from the field and the UK government is deciding whether it will allow the oil company to leave the 170-metre-high oil platform legs in place for the three platforms known as Bravo, Charlie and Delta.

A total of 64 concrete storage cells are contained in the leg structures, 42 of which have previously been used for oil storage and separation. Most of the cells are the size of seven Olympic swimming pools, and collectively still contain an estimated 72,000 tonnes of contaminated sediment and 638,000 cubic metres of oily water. Environmental groups believe the documents held by the NSTA would reveal new information about long-term environmental dangers that is relevant to other North Sea oil developments, including Equinor's plans to develop Rosebank, the UK's largest untapped field.

"A company backed by BlackRock has abandoned plans to build a 1,300-mile pipeline across the US Midwest to collect and store carbon emissions from the corn ethanol industry," reports Ars Technica.

The move comes "following opposition from landowners and some environmental campaigners." Navigator CO2 on Friday said developing its carbon capture and storage (CCS) project called Heartland Greenway had been "challenging" because of the unpredictable nature of regulatory and government processes in South Dakota and Iowa. Navigator's decision to scrap its flagship $3.1 billion project — one of the biggest of its kind in the US — is a blow for a fledgling industry... It also represents a setback for the carbon-intensive corn ethanol refining industry, a pillar of the rural Midwestern economy which is targeting industry-scale CCS as a way to reduce emissions...

The project faced opposition from local landowners, who expressed concerns about safety and property seizures, and some environmentalists who describe CO2 pipelines as dangerous and a way to prop up the fossil fuels industry, which already has a network of such infrastructure. Addressing the decision by Navigator, the Coalition To Stop CO2 Pipelines said it "celebrates this victory," but added: "we also know that the tax incentives made available by the federal government for carbon capture, transport and storage likely mean another entity will pick up Navigator's project, or find a different route through Illinois."
The article cites one analyst at energy research firm Wood Mackenzie who believes this cancellation could benefit rival carbon-capture companies like Summit Carbon Solutions, which is planning an even larger network of CO2 pipelines throughout the Midwest, and could try to sign deals with Navigator's former customers.

Karen K. Ho reports via ARTnews: British Museum has announced plans to digitize its entire collection in order to increase security and public access, as well as ward off calls for the repatriation of items. The project will require 2.4 million records to upload or upgrade and is estimated to take five years to complete. The museum's announcement on October 18 came after the news 2,000 items had been stolen from the institution by a former staff member, identified in news reports as former curator Peter Higgs. About 350 have been recovered so far, and last month the museum launched a public appeal for assistance. [...]

On the same day the British Museum announced its digitization initiative, Jones and board chairman George Osborne gave oral evidence to the UK Parliament's Culture, Media and Sport Committee. Their comments included an explanation of how the thefts occurred, policy changes made as a result, and how the museum will handle whistleblower complaints going forward. They also gave more details about the British Museum's strategy for digitizing its collection, estimated at a cost of $12.1 million. "We are not asking the taxpayer or the Government for the money; we hope to raise it privately," Osborne said.

The increased digital access to the collection would also be part of the museum's response to requests for items to be returned or repatriated. "Part of our response can be: "They are available to you. Even if you cannot visit the museum, you are able to access them digitally." That is already available -- we have a pretty good website -- but we can use this as a moment to make that a lot better and a lot more accessible," Osborne said.

Redis, the go-to in-memory database used as a cache and system broker, is looking to include disk as part of a tiered storage architecture to reduce costs and broaden the system's appeal. From a report: Speaking to The Register, CEO Rowan Trollope said he hoped the move would help customers lower costs and simplify their architecture. Redis counts Twitter X, Snapchat, and Craigslist among its customers, and it's popular among developers of modern internet-scale applications owing to its ability to create a cache to prevent the main database from overloading. Trollope said the sub-millisecond distributed system gives devs the performance they need, but admitted other systems built for internet scale, such as MongoDB, might offer price advantages. To address this, the company has already created a tiered approach to memory by offering flash support behind its in-memory system.

"We have a half-step between disk and memory. For some specific use cases, in gaming for example, a company might use us for leaderboards and other in-game stats, which they need in real time," he said. However, after an initial flush of the game launch, a large chunk of users would finish the game and their accounts would go dormant until the release of a new episode or some new content, when they might return. Trollope said using flash allowed users to dynamically tier memory. "We can take the lesser-used data that hasn't been touched in a while and shuttle it off to flash where it can sit for a while. When the user comes back eventually, it's very easy for us to seamlessly move it from flash back into memory. And that allows the company to save costs," he said.

Chinese multinational Zotac has announced a mini-PC built around two solid-state active cooling chips called the AirJet Pro and AirJet Mini. They're designed by a company called Frore Systems. New Atlas reports: The AirJet tech is described as a self-contained active heat sink featuring membranes inside that vibrate at ultrasonic frequency, generating "a powerful flow of air" that's pushed through vents at the top of the unit. These "high-velocity pulsating jets" remove heat from the processor and push it out through an integrated spout. Back at Computex 2023 in May, Zotac's new Zbox mini-PC was announced as the first recipient of Frore's cooling technology, in the shape of two near-silent AirJet Minis. Now The Zbox PI430AJ has launched to "select regions." Zotac reckons that the active cooling modules can only be heard if the user places an ear against the Zbox's housing.

The processor of choice for this "world's first" device is an Intel Core i3-N300 octacore chip that can clock up to 3.8 GHz. This features integrated UHD graphics, and is supported by 8 GB of LPDDR5 RAM. The Windows flavor comes with 512 GB of SSD storage, while users who opt for the barebones version will need to install their own. The 114.8 x 76 x 23.8-mm (4.52 x 2.99 x 0.95-in) mini-PC sports two USB 3.2 Type-A ports plus one USB-C, HDMI and DisplayPort, Ethernet LAN and a combo headphone/microphone jack. Bluetooth 5.2 and Wi-Fi 6 are cooked in for wireless needs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Patent owner StreamScale won a $240 million jury verdict in Waco, Texas, federal court on Friday in a patent case against data-management software company Cloudera. The jury said (PDF) after a four-day trial that Cloudera infringed three StreamScale patents related to cloud-based data storage technology. Cloudera said in a statement that it intends to challenge the decision and that it would not impact the company's customers.

StreamScale attorney Jason Sheasby called the verdict a "referendum on the importance of small inventors and small businesses." StreamScale owns patents for inventor Michael Anderson's "accelerated erasure coding" technology, which the company's complaint called a "cornerstone" of modern data storage. It sued Santa Clara, California-based Cloudera in 2021 for allegedly infringing several of its patents.

The lawsuit accused Cloudera's CDH open source data-management platform of violating StreamScale's patent rights. Cloudera argued its software worked in a different way than StreamScale's inventions and said that the patents were invalid. StreamScale also accused other companies, including Intel, of infringing its patents in the 2021 lawsuit. Intel filed a separate lawsuit later that year arguing that StreamScale's allegations violated a non-disclosure agreement.

The U.S. government is one of the world's biggest holders of bitcoin, but unlike other crypto whales, it doesn't care if the digital currency goes up or down in value. From a report: That is because Uncle Sam's stash of some 200,000 bitcoin was seized from cybercriminals and darknet markets. It is primarily offline in encrypted, password-protected storage devices known as hardware wallets that are controlled by the Justice Department, the Internal Revenue Service or another agency. What the federal government does with its bitcoin has long been a topic of interest among crypto traders because any sale could potentially swing prices or cause other ripple effects in the $1 trillion digital-asset market.

The U.S. has been notoriously slow to convert its stash of bitcoin into dollars. It isn't HODLing, crypto parlance for "holding on for dear life" and never intending to sell. Nor is it waiting for bitcoin to go "to the moon" so it can sell its holdings for a hefty profit. Rather, that big pile of bitcoin is more a byproduct of a lengthy legal process than strategic planning. "We don't play the market. We basically are set by the timing in our process," said Jarod Koopman, executive director of the IRS's cyber and forensics services section, which oversees all activities focused on cybercrimes.

"If we carry on the way we're going, we're going to have to concrete the whole planet just to store the data that we're generating," explains a deputy lab director at Microsoft Research Cambridge in a new video.

Fortunately, "A small sheet of glass can now hold several terabytes of data, enough to store approximately 1.75 million songs or 13 years' worth of music," explains a Microsoft Research web page about "Project Silica". (Data is retrieved by a high-speed, computer-controlled microscope from a library of glass disks storing data in three-dimensional pixels called voxels): Magnetic storage, although prevalent, is problematic. Its limited lifespan necessitates frequent re-copying, increasing energy consumption and operational costs over time. "Magnetic technology has a finite lifetime," says Ant Rowstron, Distinguished Engineer, Project Silica. "You must keep copying it over to new generations of media. A hard disk drive might last five years. A tape, well, if you're brave, it might last ten years. But once that lifetime is up, you've got to copy it over. And that, frankly, is both difficult and tremendously unsustainable if you think of all that energy and resource we're using."

Project Silica aims to break this cycle. Developed under the aegis of Microsoft Research, it can store massive amounts of data in glass plates roughly the size of a drink coaster and preserve the data for thousands of years. Richard Black, Research Director, Project Silica, adds, "This technology allows us to write data knowing it will remain unchanged and secure, which is a significant step forward in sustainable data storage." Project Silica's goal is to write data in a piece of glass and store it on a shelf until it is needed. Once written, the data inside the glass is impossible to change.

Project Silica is focused on pioneering data storage in quartz glass in partnership with the Microsoft Azure team, seeking more sustainable ways to archive data. This relationship is symbiotic, as Project Silica uses Azure AI to decode data stored in glass, making reading and writing faster and allowing more data storage... The library is passive, with no electricity in any of the storage units. The complexity is within the robots that charge as they idle inside the lab, awakening when data is needed... Initially, the laser writing process was inefficient, but after years of refinement, the team can now store several TB in a single glass plate that could last 10,000 years. For a sense of scale, each plate could store around 3,500 movies. Or enough non-stop movies to play for over half a year without repeating. A glass plate could hold the entire text of War and Peace — one of the longest novels ever written — about 875,000 times.
And most importantly, it can store data in a fraction of the space of a datacenter...

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Kirschey for sharing the article.

After Microsoft recently imposed storage limits for photos in a user's OneDrive account, Microsoft has now reversed course after receiving a barrage of backlash. From a report: In August, Microsoft announced that photos in a user's OneDrive Gallery and in each of their saved photo albums would count separately toward the company's cloud-based limit of five gigabytes, according to Neowin. The update was expected to roll out on October 16, which would force some users to encounter storage ceilings as the extra data was added to their OneDrive, preventing additional files from syncing. Customers were surprised by the abrupt policy change, so surprised in fact that the company caved to user backlash and recently announced that the change was no longer on the table.

"On August 31, 2023, we began to communicate an upcoming update to our cloud storage infrastructure that would result in a change in how OneDrive photos and photo albums data is counted against your overall cloud storage quota," Microsoft said in an email to customers, which has also been posted to the company's Support page. "This change was scheduled to start rolling out on October 16, 2023. Based on the feedback we received, we have adjusted our approach, we will no longer roll out this update."

An anonymous reader shares a report: StorageReview went through the remarkable journey of testing a $3 SSD from AliExpress. The Goldenfir-brand SSD was reportedly given to the storage site by one of its Discord users for testing. The good news is that Goldenfir is actually using an SSD controller for its NAND drive. The controller is a Yeestor YS9083XT, which the Chinese company announced as a SATA3.2 controller in 2019. [...] StorageReview tested the drive by putting it into a Lenovo SR635 1U server with an AMD Epyc 7742 processor and 512GB of DDR4-3200 RAM. StorageReview also decided to, admittedly "unfairly," put it up against Kingston's DC600M entry-level enterprise SATA drive. You can guess what happens next. With a 64GB file and the CrystalDiskMark benchmark, StorageReview reported that the "Kingston drive finished the entire test before this piece of turd [the $3 drive] could even build its test." With the VDBench workload benchmark filling up the entire drive, the $3 drive hit a wall at around 15,500 IOPS when running the 4K random read test, compared to the Kingston drive's approximately 80,000. The cheap SSD ultimately finished the test at 13,000 IOPS and 10,225 ms, compared to the Kingston's 78,000 IOPS and 1,630 ms.

A physicist from the University of Portsmouth has explored whether a new law of physics could support the theory that we're living in a computer simulation. Phys.Org reports: Dr. Melvin Vopson has previously published research suggesting that information has mass and that all elementary particles -- the smallest known building blocks of the universe -- store information about themselves, similar to the way humans have DNA. In 2022, he discovered a new law of physics that could predict genetic mutations in organisms, including viruses, and help judge their potential consequences. It is based on the second law of thermodynamics, which establishes that entropy -- a measure of disorder in an isolated system -- can only increase or stay the same. Dr. Vopson had expected that the entropy in information systems would also increase over time, but on examining the evolution of these systems he realized it remains constant or decreases. That's when he established the second law of information dynamics, or infodynamics, which could significantly impact genetics research and evolution theory.

A new paper, published in AIP Advances, examines the scientific implications of the new law on a number of other physical systems and environments, including biological, atomic physics, and cosmology. Key findings include:

- Biological systems: The second law of infodynamics challenges the conventional understanding of genetic mutations, suggesting that they follow a pattern governed by information entropy. This discovery has profound implications for fields such as genetic research, evolutionary biology, genetic therapies, pharmacology, virology, and pandemic monitoring.
- Atomic physics: The paper explains the behavior of electrons in multi-electron atoms, providing insights into phenomena like Hund's rule; which states that the term with maximum multiplicity lies lowest in energy. Electrons arrange themselves in a way that minimizes their information entropy, shedding light on atomic physics and stability of chemicals.
- Cosmology: The second law of infodynamics is shown to be a cosmological necessity, with thermodynamic considerations applied to an adiabatically expanding universe supporting its validity. "The paper also provides an explanation for the prevalence of symmetry in the universe," added Dr. Vopson. "Symmetry principles play an important role with respect to the laws of nature, but until now there has been little explanation as to why that could be. My findings demonstrate that high symmetry corresponds to the lowest information entropy state, potentially explaining nature's inclination towards it."

"This approach, where excess information is removed, resembles the process of a computer deleting or compressing waste code to save storage space and optimize power consumption. And as a result supports the idea that we're living in a simulation."