An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A federal court yesterday ruled against parents who sued a Massachusetts school district for punishing their son who used an artificial intelligence tool to complete an assignment. Dale and Jennifer Harris sued Hingham High School officials and the School Committee and sought a preliminary injunction requiring the school to change their son's grade and expunge the incident from his disciplinary record before he needs to submit college applications. The parents argued that there was no rule against using AI in the student handbook, but school officials said the student violated multiple policies.

The Harris' motion for an injunction was rejected in an order (PDF) issued yesterday from US District Court for the District of Massachusetts. US Magistrate Judge Paul Levenson found that school officials "have the better of the argument on both the facts and the law."

"On the facts, there is nothing in the preliminary factual record to suggest that HHS officials were hasty in concluding that RNH [the Harris' son, referred to by his initials] had cheated," Levenson wrote. "Nor were the consequences Defendants imposed so heavy-handed as to exceed Defendants' considerable discretion in such matters." "On the evidence currently before the Court, I detect no wrongdoing by Defendants," Levenson also wrote. "The manner in which RNH used Grammarly -- wholesale copying and pasting of language directly into the draft script that he submitted -- powerfully supports Defendants' conclusion that RNH knew that he was using AI in an impermissible fashion," Levenson wrote. While "the emergence of generative AI may present some nuanced challenges for educators, the issue here is not particularly nuanced, as there is no discernible pedagogical purpose in prompting Grammarly (or any other AI tool) to generate a script, regurgitating the output without citation, and claiming it as one's own work," the order said.

Levenson concluded with a quote from a 1988 Supreme Court ruling that said the education of youth "is primarily the responsibility of parents, teachers, and state and local school officials, and not of federal judges." According to Levenson, "This case well illustrates the good sense in that division of labor. The public interest here weighs in favor of Defendants."

In a 23-page document (PDF) filed late Wednesday, U.S. regulators asked a federal judge to break up Google after a court found the tech giant of maintaining an abusive monopoly through its dominant search engine. As punishment, the DOJ calls for a sale of Google's Chrome browser and restrictions to prevent Android from favoring its own search engine. The Associated Press reports: Although regulators stopped short of demanding Google sell Android too, they asserted the judge should make it clear the company could still be required to divest its smartphone operating system if its oversight committee continues to see evidence of misconduct. [...] The Washington, D.C. court hearings on Google's punishment are scheduled to begin in April and Mehta is aiming to issue his final decision before Labor Day. If [U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta] embraces the government's recommendations, Google would be forced to sell its 16-year-old Chrome browser within six months of the final ruling. But the company certainly would appeal any punishment, potentially prolonging a legal tussle that has dragged on for more than four years.

Besides seeking a Chrome spinoff and a corralling of the Android software, the Justice Department wants the judge to ban Google from forging multibillion-dollar deals to lock in its dominant search engine as the default option on Apple's iPhone and other devices. It would also ban Google from favoring its own services, such as YouTube or its recently-launched artificial intelligence platform, Gemini. Regulators also want Google to license the search index data it collects from people's queries to its rivals, giving them a better chance at competing with the tech giant. On the commercial side of its search engine, Google would be required to provide more transparency into how it sets the prices that advertisers pay to be listed near the top of some targeted search results. The measures, if they are ordered, threaten to upend a business expected to generate more than $300 billion in revenue this year. "The playing field is not level because of Google's conduct, and Google's quality reflects the ill-gotten gains of an advantage illegally acquired," the Justice Department asserted in its recommendations. "The remedy must close this gap and deprive Google of these advantages."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Framework CEO Nirav Patel had one of the bravest tech demos that we've seen at a conference yet -- modifying a Framework Laptop from x86 to RISC-V live on stage. In the five-minute duration of one of the Ubuntu Summit's Lightning Talks, he opened up a Framework machine, removed its motherboard, installed a RISC-V-powered replacement, reconnected it, and closed the machine up again. All while presenting the talk live, and pretty much without hesitation, deviation, or repetition. It was an impressive performance, and you can watch it yourself at the 8:56:30 mark in the video recording.

Now DeepComputing is taking orders for the DC-ROMA board, at least to those in its early access program. The new main board is powered by a StarFive JH7110 System-on-Chip. (Note: there are two tabs on the page, for both the JH7110 and JH7100, and we can't link directly to the latter.) CNX Software has more details about the SoC. Although the SoC has six CPU cores, two are dedicated processors, making it a quad-core 64-bit device. The four general-purpose cores are 64-bit and run at up to 1.5 GHz. It supports 8 GB of RAM and eMMC storage. [...]

In our opinion, RISC-V is not yet competitive with Arm in performance. However, this is a real, usable, general-purpose computer, based on an open instruction set. That's no mean feat, and it's got more than enough performance for less demanding work. It's also the first third-party main board for the Framework hardware, which is another welcome achievement. The company has now delivered several new generations of hardware, including a 16-inch model, and continues to upgrade its machines' specs.

More than 120,000 bitcoin were stolen in a 2016 breach of Bitfinex. Seven years later the perpetrator pleaded guilty.

And Thursday he was sentenced to a five-year prison term, reports the Associated Press: Ilya Lichtenstein masterminded one of the largest-ever thefts from a virtual currency exchange before he and his wife, Heather Rhiannon Morgan, carried out an elaborate scheme to liquidate the stolen funds, according to federal prosecutors... "Over half a decade, the defendant engaged in what IRS agents described as the most complicated money laundering techniques they had seen to date," prosecutors wrote... The couple successfully laundered about 21 percent of the funds stolen from Bitfinex. The laundered money was worth at least $14 million at 2016 prices. Its value would have exceeded $1 billion at the time of their 2022 arrest.

Authorities seized the remaining funds, collectively valued at over $6 billion at current prices... An attorney for Bitfinex said the hack "devastated" its finances and its reputation with its customers, with the stolen funds accounting for approximately 36% of the company's assets at the time of theft. "Bitfinex had to take unprecedented and immediate action to ensure that any losses from the Hack would ultimately be borne by Bitfinex and its shareholders alone, not its customers," the lawyer, Barry Berke, wrote in a letter to the judge.

A prosecutor said Lichtenstein immediately began cooperating with federal authorities after his arrest, helping them with other cybercrime investigations. Over 96% of the stolen funds have been recovered, with help from Lichtenstein, according to defense attorney Samson Enzer. The "vast bulk" of the stolen money was never spent, the lawyer said.
Lichtenstein also "pleaded with the judge to spare his wife from prison, blaming himself for her involvement," according to the article. His wife — a rap artist who records under the name Razzlekhan — will be sentenced Monday, but has pleaded guilty to the same charge, and prosecutors are recommending an 18-month sentence.

Phoronix's Michael Larabel reports: The OpenMP Architecture Review Board announced from SC24 that OpenMP 6.0 is now available as a major upgrade to the OpenMP specification for multi-process programming within C / C++ / Fortran. A big emphasis on OpenMP 6.0 is making it easier for developers to embrace. OpenMP 6.0 aims to make it easier to support parallel programming in new applications, easier to adapt to new use-cases, and more fine-grained developer control.

OpenMP 6.0 simplifies task programming with support for task execution by free-agent threads, allowing for recording of task graphs for efficient replay, and other improvements. OpenMP 6.0 also brings support for array syntax applications, better control over memory allocations and accessibility, easier writing of asynchronous data transfers, and other improvements for enhanced device support / offloading. There is also easier programming of loop transformations, support for induction, support for C23 / Fortran 2023 / C++23, grater user control of storage resources and memory spaces, and other improvements.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: U.K. consumer rights group 'Which?' is filing a legal claim against Apple under competition law on behalf of some 40 million users of iCloud, its cloud storage service. The collective proceeding lawsuit, which is seeking 3 billion pounds in compensation damages (around $3.8 billion at current exchange rates), alleges that Apple has broken competition rules by giving its own cloud storage service preferential treatment and effectively locking people into paying for iCloud at "rip-off" prices. "iOS has a monopoly and is in control of Apple's operating systems and it is incumbent on Apple not to use that dominance to gain an unfair advantage in related markets, like the cloud storage market. But that is exactly what has happened," Which wrote in a press release announcing filing the claim with the U.K.'s Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT).

The lawsuit accuses Apple of encouraging users of its devices to sign up to iCloud for photo storage and other data storage needs, while simultaneously making it difficult for consumers to use alternative storage providers -- including by not allowing them to store or back-up all of their phone's data with a third-party provider. "iOS users then have to pay for the service once photos, notes, messages and other data go over the free 5GB limit," Which noted. The suit also accuses Apple of overcharging U.K. consumers for iCloud subscriptions owing to the lack of competition. "Apple raised the price of iCloud for UK consumers by between 20% and 29% across its storage tiers in 2023," it wrote, saying it's seeking damages for all affected Apple customers -- and estimating that individual consumers could be owed an average of 70 pounds (around $90), depending on how long they've been paying Apple for iCloud services. "Anyone who has 'obtained' iCloud services, including non-paying users, over the nine-year timeframe since the Consumer Rights Act came into force on October 1st, 2015," will be included in the claim. U.K.-based consumers will have to opt-out if they do not want to be included. "Consumers who live outside the U.K. and believe they are eligible to be included must actively opt-in to join the action," adds TechCrunch.

If you have Spotify's soon-to-be-bricked Car Thing, there are a few ways you can give it a new lease on life. YouTuber Dammit Jeff has showcased modifications to Car Thing that makes the device useful as a desktop music controller, customizable shortcut tool, or a simple digital clock. Ars Technica's Kevin Purdy reports: Spotify had previously posted the code for its uboot and kernel to GitHub, under the very unassuming name "spsgsb" and with no announcement (as discovered by Josh Hendrickson). Jeff has one idea why the streaming giant might not have made much noise about it: "The truth is, this thing isn't really great at running anything." It has half a gigabyte of memory, 4GB of internal storage, and a "really crappy processor" (Amlogic S905D2 SoC) and is mostly good for controlling music.

How do you get in? The SoC has a built-in USB "burning mode," allowing for a connected computer, running the right toolkit, to open up root access and overwrite its firmware. Jeff has quite a few issues getting connected (check his video description for some guidance), but it's "drag and drop" once you're in. Jeff runs through a few of the most popular options for a repurposed Car Thing:

- DeskThing, which largely makes Spotify desk-friendly, but adds a tiny app store for weather (including Jeff's own WeatherWave), clocks, and alternate music controls
- GlanceThing, which keeps the music controls but also provides some Stream-Deck-like app-launching shortcuts for your main computer.
- Nocturne, currently invite-only, is a wholly redesigned Spotify interface that restores all its Spotify functionality.

D-Link confirmed no fix will be issued for the over 60,000 D-Link NAS devices that are vulnerable to a critical command injection flaw (CVE-2024-10914), allowing unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary commands through unsanitized HTTP requests. The networking company advises users to retire or isolate the affected devices from public internet access. BleepingComputer reports: The flaw impacts multiple models of D-Link network-attached storage (NAS) devices that are commonly used by small businesses: DNS-320 Version 1.00; DNS-320LW Version 1.01.0914.2012; DNS-325 Version 1.01, Version 1.02; and DNS-340L Version 1.08. [...] A search that Netsecfish conducted on the FOFA platform returned 61,147 results at 41,097 unique IP addresses for D-Link devices vulnerable to CVE-2024-10914.

In a security bulletin today, D-Link has confirmed that a fix for CVE-2024-10914 is not coming and the vendor recommends that users retire vulnerable products. If that is not possible at the moment, users should at least isolate them from the public internet or place them under stricter access conditions. The same researcher discovered in April this year an arbitrary command injection and hardcoded backdoor flaw, tracked as CVE-2024-3273, impacting mostly the same D-Link NAS models as the latest flaw.

A new article at Reason.com argues that U.S. courts "are coming for digital libraries." In September, a federal appeals court dealt a major blow to the Internet Archive — one of the largest online repositories of free books, media, and software — in a copyright case with significant implications for publishers, libraries, and readers. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit upheld a lower court ruling that found the Internet Archive's huge, digitized lending library of copyrighted books was not covered by the "fair use" doctrine and infringed on the rights of publishers. Agreeing with the Archive's interpretation of fair use "would significantly narrow — if not entirely eviscerate — copyright owners' exclusive right to prepare derivative works," the 2nd Circuit ruled. "Were we to approve [Internet Archive's] use of the works, there would be little reason for consumers or libraries to pay publishers for content they could access for free."
Others disagree, according to some links shared in a recent email from the Internet Archive. Public Knowledge CEO Chris Lewis argues the court's logic renders the fair use doctrine "almost unusuable". And that's just the beginning... This decision harms libraries. It locks them into an e-book ecosystem designed to extract as much money as possible while harvesting (and reselling) reader data en masse. It leaves local communities' reading habits at the mercy of curatorial decisions made by four dominant publishing companies thousands of miles away. It steers Americans away from one of the few remaining bastions of privacy protection and funnels them into a surveillance ecosystem that, like Big Tech, becomes more dangerous with each passing data breach.
But lawyer/librarian Kyle K. Courtney writes that the case "is specific only to the parties, and does not impact the other existing versions of controlled digital lending." Additionally, this decision is limited to the 2nd Circuit and is not binding anywhere else — in other words, it does not apply to the 47 states outside the 2nd Circuit's jurisdiction. In talking with colleagues in the U.S. this week and last, many are continuing their programs because they believe their digital loaning programs fall outside the scope of this ruling... Moreover, the court's opinion focuses on digital books that the court said "are commercially available for sale or license in any electronic text format." Therefore, there remains a significant number of materials in library collections that have not made the jump to digital, nor are likely to, meaning that there is no ebook market to harm — nor is one likely to emerge for certain works, such as those that are no longer commercially viable...

This case represents just one instance in an ongoing conversation about library lending in the digital age, and the possibility of appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court means the final outcome is far from settled.
Some more quotes from links shared by Internet Archive:

• "It was clear that the only reason all the big publishers sued the Internet Archive was to put another nail in the coffin of libraries and push to keep this ebook licensing scheme grift going. Now the courts have helped." — TechDirt

• "The case against the Internet Archive is not just a story about the ruination of an online library, but a grander narrative of our times: how money facilitates the transference of knowledge away from the public, back towards the few." — blogger Hannah Williams

Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the news.

Sodium-ion batteries are cheaper than lithium-ion batteries — and they're also more environmentally friendly. And "In the past few years, sodium-ion battery production has increased in the United States," reports the Washington Post, with a new factory planned to manufacture them "in the same way as lithium-ion batteries, just with different ingredients. Instead of using expensive materials like lithium, nickel and cobalt, these will be made of sodium, iron and manganese..." Last month, sodium-ion battery manufacturer Natron Energy announced it would open a "gigafactory" in North Carolina that would produce 24 gigawatt hours of batteries annually, enough energy to charge 24,000 electric vehicles. But sodium-ion batteries are still early in their development compared with lithium-ion, and they have yet to hit the market on a massive scale.

"It's unlikely sodium-ion could displace lithium-ion anytime soon," said Keith Beers, polymer science and materials chemistry principal engineer at technical consultancy firm Exponent... The biggest limitation of sodium-ion batteries is their weight. Sodium weighs nearly three times as much as lithium, and it cannot store the same amount of energy. As a result, sodium-ion batteries tend to be larger. Jens Peters, an economics professor at the University of Alcalá in Madrid, said the energy density could be improved over time in sodium-ion batteries. But, he added, "what we found out so far in our assessments is that it is not a game changer."

Sodium-ion batteries are touted to be the environmentally friendly alternative to their lithium-ion counterparts, thanks to their raw materials. Sodium, iron and manganese are all abundant elements on the planet, so they require less energy to extract and cost less... Sodium-ion batteries also last longer than lithium-ion ones because they can withstand more charge cycles, said Wendell Brooks, co-CEO of Natron Energy. "Our product can have millions of cycles," said Brooks, "where lithium-ion would have three to five thousand cycles and wear out a lot faster...." Sodium-ion batteries aren't the best fit for smartphones or electric vehicles, which need to store lots of energy. However, one advantage is their low cost. And they could be a good candidate in situations where the size of the battery isn't a concern, like energy storage. "When something is built out to support grid or backup storage, it doesn't need to be very dense. It's staying put," Beers said.
Natron will invest nearly $1.4 billion in the factory "to meet the rapidly expanding demand for critical power, industrial and grid energy storage solutions," according to their announcement.

"Natron's high-performance sodium-ion batteries outperform lithium-ion batteries in power density and recharging speed, do not require lithium, cobalt, copper, or nickel, and are non-flammable... Natron's batteries are the only UL-listed sodium-ion batteries on the market today, and will be delivered to a wide range of customer end markets in the industrial power space, including data centers, mobility, EV fast charging, microgrids, and telecom, among others."

According to a partial teardown video of Apple's new Mac mini, the new machine features modular storage that can be removed. "As we saw with the Mac Studio, however, replacing the modular storage is complicated," notes MacRumors. The teardown also reveals two 128GB storage chips in the 256GB model, enabling faster SSD speeds comparable to higher-capacity versions. From the report: The criticism surrounding Apple's decision to use a single 256GB chip in some base-model Macs a few years ago primarily came from a vocal contingent of tech enthusiasts, and the average customer is unlikely to even notice the slower speeds in common day-to-day tasks. Nevertheless, it appears that customers who do want the fastest SSD speeds do not need to worry about which storage capacity they choose when ordering the new Mac mini.

IBM is facing a new lawsuit alleging that its Weather Channel website shared users' personal data with third-party ad partners without consent, violating the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA). The Register reports: In the absence of a comprehensive federal privacy law, the complaint [PDF] claims Big Blue violated America's Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), enacted in 1988 in response to the disclosure of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork's videotape rental records. IBM was sued in 2019 (PDF) by then Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer over similar allegations: That its Weather Channel mobile app collected and shared location data without disclosure. The IT titan settled that claim in 2020. A separate civil action against IBM's Weather Channel was filed in 2020 and settled in 2023 (PDF).

This latest legal salvo against alleged Weather Channel-enabled data collection takes issue with the sensitive information made available through the company's website to third-party ad partners mParticle and AppNexus/Xandr (acquired by Microsoft in 2022). The former provides customer analytics, and the latter is an advertising and marketing platform. The complaint, filed on behalf of California plaintiff Ed Penning, contends that by watching videos on the Weather Channel website, those two marketing firms received Penning's full name, gender, email address, precise geolocation, the name, and the URLs of videos he watched, without his permission or knowledge.

It explains that the plaintiff's counsel retained a private research firm last year to analyze browser network traffic during video sessions on the Weather Channel website. The research firm is said to have confirmed that the website provided the third-party ad firms with information that could be used to identify people and the videos that they watched. The VPPA prohibits video providers from sharing "personally identifiable information" about clients without their consent. [...] The lawsuit aspires to be certified as a class action. Under the VPPA, a successful claim allows for actual damages (if any) and statutory damages of $2,500 for each violation of the law, as well as attorney's fees.

Intel faces a class-action lawsuit alleging its 13th and 14th generation desktop processors from 2022 and 2023 are defective, causing system instability and frequent crashes. The suit claims that Intel knew of the issue but continued marketing the processors anyway. The Register reports: The plaintiff, Mark Vanvalkenburgh of Orchard Park, New York, purchased an Intel Core i7-13700K from Best Buy in January 2023, according to the complaint [PDF]. "After purchasing the product, Plaintiff learned that the processor was defective, unstable, and crashing at high rates," the complaint claims. "The processor caused issues in his computer, including random screen blackouts and random computer restarts. These issues were not resolved even after he attempted to install a patch issued by Intel for its 13th Generation processors."

The potential class-action lawsuit cites various media reports and social media posts dating back to December 2022 that describe problems with Intel's 13th and 14th generation processors, known as Raptor Lake. These reports document unexplained failures and system instability, as well as a higher-than-expected rate of product returns. "By late 2022 or early 2023, Intel knew of the defect," the complaint says. "Intel's Products undergo pre-release and post-release testing. Through these tests, Intel became aware of the defect in the processors." And because Intel continued making marketing claims touting the speed and performance of its products, with no mention of any defect, the complaint alleges that Intel committed fraud by omission, breached implied warranty, and violated New York General Business Law.

Surging AI demand could push major oil companies to reinvest in renewable energy [non-paywalled link], Abu Dhabi National Oil Company CEO Sultan al-Jaber said this week. Al-Jaber's comments came as oil executives from Shell, BP and TotalEnergies met with Microsoft and other tech leaders in Abu Dhabi to discuss AI's growing energy needs and its applications across the sector.

ADNOC announced plans to deploy autonomous AI agents across its operations through EnergyAI, developed with Microsoft and UAE's G42. The system will analyze seismic data and model underground carbon storage potential. The state oil giant committed $23 billion to low-carbon technology development using AI. Tech companies have pledged to power their AI data centers with renewable energy to meet climate targets. "We need a model that integrates all forms of energy," said al-Jaber, citing needs for renewable power, battery storage, natural gas, and nuclear energy in some locations.

This week's Ubuntu Summit 2024 was attended by Lproven (Slashdot reader #6,030). He's also a FOSS correspondent for the Register, where he's filed this report: One of the first full-length sessions was presented by David Morin, executive director of the Academy Software Foundation, introducing his organization in a talk about Open Source Software for Motion Pictures. Morin linked to the Visual Effects Society's VFX/Animation Studio Workstation Linux Report, highlighting the market share pie-chart, showing Rocky Linux 9 with at some 58 percent and the RHELatives in general at 90 percent of the market. Ubuntu 22 and 24 — the report's nomenclature, not this vulture's — got just 10.5 percent. We certainly didn't expect to see that at an Ubuntu event, with the latest two versions of Rocky Linux taking 80 percent of the studio workstation market...

What also struck us over the next three quarters of an hour is that Linux and open source in general seem to be huge components of the movie special effects industry — to an extent that we had not previously realized.
There's a "sizzle reel" showing examples of how major motion pictures used OpenColorIO, an open-source production tool for syncing color representations originally developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks. That tool is hosted by a collaboration between the Linux Foundation with the Science and Technology Council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the "Academy" of the Academy Awards). The collaboration — which goes by the name of the Academy Software Foundation — hosts 14 different projects The ASWF hasn't been around all that long — it was only founded in 2018. Despite the impact of the COVID pandemic, by 2022 it had achieved enough to fill a 45-page history called Open Source in Entertainment [PDF]. Morin told the crowd that it runs events, provides project marketing and infrastructure, as well as funding, training and education, and legal assistance. It tries to facilitate industry standards and does open source evangelism in the industry. An impressive list of members — with 17 Premier companies, 16 General ones, and another half a dozen Associate members — shows where some of the money comes from. It's a big list of big names. [Adobe, AMD, AWS, Autodesk...]
The presentation started with OpenVBD, a C++ library developed and donated by Dreamworks for working with three-dimensional voxel-based shapes. (In 2020 they created this sizzle reel, but this year they've unveiled a theme song.) Also featured was OpenEXR, originally developed at Industrial Light and Magic and sourced in 1999. (The article calls it "a specification and reference implementation of the EXR file format — a losslessly compressed image storage format for moving images at the highest possible dynamic range.")

"For an organization that is not one of the better-known ones in the FOSS space, we came away with the impression that the ASWF is busy," the article concludes. (Besides running Open Source Days and ASWF Dev Days, it also hosts several working groups like the Language Interop Project works on Rust bindings and the Continuous Integration Working Group on CI tools, There's generally very little of the old razzle-dazzle in the Linux world, but with the demise of SGI as the primary maker of graphics workstations — its brand now absorbed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise — the visual effects industry moved to Linux and it's doing amazing things with it. And Kubernetes wasn't even mentioned once.

In 1896 the Dow Jones Industrial Average (or DJIA) was created as a kind of proxy indicator for the wider stock market. "A stock is typically added only if the company has an excellent reputation, demonstrates sustained growth and is of interest to a large number of investors," according to a source cited by Yahoo Finance. Its mix of stocks might be informally considered a sign of the times, since it's made up of 30 stocks that according to Wikipedia have been changed only 57 times over the last 128 years.

Wait — make that 58.... CNBC reports that NVIDIA is replacing Intel in the DJIA, "a shakeup to the blue-chip index that reflects the boom in AI and a major shift in the semiconductor industry." Companies including Microsoft, Meta, Google and Amazon are purchasing Nvidia's GPUs, such as the H100, in massive quantities to build clusters of computers for their AI work. Nvidia's revenue has more than doubled in each of the past five quarters, and has at least tripled in three of them. The company has sginaled that demand for its next-generation AI GPU called Blackwell is "insane...."

While Nvidia has been soaring, Intel has been slumping. Long the dominant maker of PC chips, Intel has lost market share to Advanced Micro Devices and has made very little headway in AI. Intel shares have fallen by more than half this year as the company struggles with manufacturing challenges and new competition for its central processors. Intel said in a filing this week that the board's audit and finance committee approved cost and capital reduction activities, including lowering head count by 16,500 employees and reducing its real estate footprint. The job cuts were originally announced in August."
The DJIA will now include four of six tech companies worth $1 trillion — Apple, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Amazon (which joined in February, replacing the owners of the Walgreens pharmacy chain). The other two trillion-dollar tech companies (not included in the DJIA) are Meta and Alphabet.

Adding NVIDIA to the DJIA will ensure "more representative exposure to the semiconductors industry" within the average, the index's curators told the Washington Post.

And also leaving the DJIA is power-generation company AES (which according to CNBC had a power mix of 54% renewables, 27% natural gas, 17% coal). It will be replaced by Vistra, defined by Wikipedia as America's largest competitive power generator, "with a capacity of approximately 39GW powered by a diverse portfolio including natural gas, nuclear, solar, and battery energy storage facilities." In the 2020 Forbes Global 2000, Vistra Energy was ranked as the 756th-largest public company in the world. The company owns the Moss Landing Power Plant in California which currently (2021) contains the largest battery energy storage system in the world (400-MW/1,600-MWh). As of 2020, the company was ranked as the highest CO2 emitter in the U.S.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the European Space Agency: White dots arranged in five clusters against a black background (PNG). This is the simulated extraterrestrial signal transmitted from Mars and deciphered by a father and a daughter on Earth after a year-long decoding effort. On June 7, 2024, media artist Daniela de Paulis received this simple, retro-looking image depicting five amino acids in her inbox. It was the solution to a cosmic puzzle beamed from ESA's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) in May 2023, when the European spacecraft played alien as part of the multidisciplinary art project 'A Sign in Space.' After three radio astronomy observatories on Earth intercepted the signal, the challenge was first to extract the message from the raw data of the radio signal, and secondly to decode it. In just 10 days, a community of 5000 citizen scientists gathered online and managed to extract the signal. The second task took longer and required some visionary minds.

US citizens Ken and Keli Chaffin cracked the code following their intuition and running simulations for hours and days on end. The father and daughter team discovered that the message contained movement, suggesting some sort of cellular formation and life forms. Amino acids and proteins are the building blocks of life. Now that the cryptic signal has been deciphered, the quest for meaning begins. The interpretation of the message, like any art piece, remains open. Daniela crafted the message with a small group of astronomers and computer scientists, with support from ESA, the SETI Institute and the Green Bank Observatory. The artist and collaborators behind the project are now taking a step back and witnessing how citizen scientists are shaping the challenge on their own.

Apple launched a dramatically smaller Mac Mini desktop computer on Tuesday, powered by its new M4 processor and featuring ray tracing capabilities for the first time. The redesigned Mini measures just 5 inches square, roughly half the size of its predecessor, while delivering up to 1.8 times faster CPU performance compared to the M1 model.

The base version starts at $599, while the more powerful M4 Pro variant begins at $1,399. The M4 Pro model sports 14 CPU cores and 20 GPU cores, with support for up to 64GB of RAM and 8TB storage. It introduces Thunderbolt 5 connectivity, offering data transfer speeds up to 120 Gb/s. Apple has revamped the port configuration, adding front-facing USB-C ports and a headphone jack. The rear features Ethernet, HDMI, and three Thunderbolt ports, though USB-A ports have been eliminated. The new Mini supports up to three 6K displays with the M4 Pro chip.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the blog OMG Ubuntu: Having recently announced is own range of Raspberry Pi-branded SD cards (with support for command queuing on the Pi 5 and reliable read/write speeds) the company is now offering its own range of branded Raspberry Pi SSDs... And for those who don't have an M.2 expansion board? Well, that's where the new Raspberry Pi SSD Kit comes in. It bundles the official M.2 HAT+ with an SSD for an all-in-one, ready-to-roll solution.
Eben Upton expects it to be a popular feature: When we launched Raspberry Pi 5, almost exactly a year ago, I thought the thing people would get most excited about was the three-fold increase in performance over 2019's Raspberry Pi 4. But very quickly it became clear that it was the other new features — the power button (!), and the PCI Express port — that had captured people's imagination. We've seen everything from Ethernet adapters, to AI accelerators, to regular PC graphics cards attached to the PCI Express port... We've also released an AI Kit, which bundles the M.2 HAT+ with an AI inference accelerator from our friends at Hailo. But the most popular use case for the PCI Express port on Raspberry Pi 5 is to attach an NVMe solid-state disk (SSD).

SSDs are fast; faster even than our branded A2-class SD cards. If no-compromises performance is your goal, you'll want to run Raspberry Pi OS from an SSD, and Raspberry Pi SSDs are the perfect choice. The entry-level 256GB drive is priced at $30 on its own, or $40 as a kit; its 512GB big brother is priced at $45 on its own, or $55 as a kit... The 256GB SSD and SSD Kit are available to buy today, while the 512GB variants are available to pre-order now for shipping by the end of November.

So, there you have it: a cost-effective way to squeeze even more performance out of your Raspberry Pi 5. Enjoy!

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Verge: Ever wondered why some of your Instagram videos tend to look blurry, while others are crisp and sharp? It's because, on Instagram, the quality of your video apparently depends on how many views it's getting.

Here's part of Mosseri's explanation, from the video, which was reposted by a Threads user today. "In general, we want to show the highest-quality video we can ... But if something isn't watched for a long time — because the vast majority of views are in the beginning — we will move to a lower quality video. And then if it's watched again a lot then we'll re-render the higher quality video...."

The shift in quality "isn't huge," Mosseri said in response to another Threads user, who'd asked if that approach disadvantaged smaller creators. That's "the right concern," he told them, but said people interact with videos based on its content, not its quality. That's consistent with how Meta has described its approach before... Meta wrote in a blog [post] that in order to conserve computing resources for the relatively few, most watched videos, it gives fresh uploads the fastest, most basic encoding. After a video "gets sufficiently high watch time," it receives a more robust encoding pass.
"It works at an aggregate level, not an individual viewer level," Mosseri wrote later on Threads. "We bias to higher quality (more CPU intensive encoding and more expensive storage for bigger files) for creators who drive more views. It's not a binary theshhold, but rather a sliding scale."