Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike shared this investigation by Time magazine's senior economics correspondent which argues that America's residential solar industry "is floundering." In late 2023 alone, more than 100 residential solar dealers and installers in the U.S. declared bankruptcy, according to Roth Capital Partners — six times the number in the previous three years combined. Roth expects at least 100 more to fail. The two largest companies in the industry, SunRun and Sunnova, both posted big losses in their most recent quarterly reports, and their shares are down 86% and 81% respectively from their peaks in January 2021... At the root of these struggles is the complicated financial engineering that helped companies raise money but that some investors and analysts say was built on a framework of lies — or at least exaggerations. Since at least 2016, big solar companies have used Wall Street money to fund their growth. This financialization raised the consumer cost of the panels and led companies to aggressively pursue sales to make the cost of borrowing Wall Street money worth it. National solar companies essentially became finance companies that happened to sell solar, engaging in calculations that may have been overly optimistic about how much money the solar leases and loans actually bring in.

"I've often heard solar finance and sales compared to the Wild West due to the creativity involved," says Jamie Johnson, the founder of Energy Sense Finance, who has been studying the residential solar industry for a decade. "It's the Silicon Valley mantra of 'break things and let the regulators figure it out.'"
Leasing the panels lets the companies claim green-energy tax credits (which they then sell to companies like Google). And meanwhile, bundles of solar-panel leases become asset-backed securities. By 2017, there were over $1 billion such securities... However, these financial innovations also increased the pressure on companies to grow quickly. Solar companies needed lots of new customers in order to package the loans into asset-backed securities and sell them to investors. Public companies especially faced intense scrutiny from investors who expected double-digit quarterly growth. And with upfront costs no longer a barrier for new customers, solar companies began to see almost every homeowner as a target, and they deployed expensive sales teams to go out and sell as aggressively as they could... Even today, about one-third of the upfront cost of a residential solar system goes to intermediaries like sales and financing people, says Pol Lezcano, an analyst with Bloomberg New Energy Finance. In Germany, where installation is done locally and there are fewer intermediaries, the typical residential system costs about 50% less than it costs in the U.S. "The upfront cost of these systems is stupidly high," says Lezcano, making residential solar not "scalable."

After growing 31% in 2021 and 40% in 2022, residential solar will only grow by 13% in 2023 and then contract 12% in 2024, according to predictions from the research firm Wood Mackenzie... Meanwhile, the pressure for fast sales may have led some companies to look the other way when salespeople obscured the terms of the solar panel leases and loans they were selling in order to close a deal.
One customer complains the solar panel company actually took out a lien on his house without his knowledge, according to the article. He's "one of a growing number of consumers now saying in courts and in arbitration that salesmen from solar-panel and solar-panel-finance companies — including some of the biggest in the U.S., like GoodLeap, Mosaic, Sunnova, and SunRun — tricked them into taking out onerous loans they didn't want — or that someone signed them up for a loan without their knowledge." Even some people who voluntarily signed up for financing products say they were misled about the actual cost of the solar panels. That's because loans from companies like GoodLeap and Mosaic often include an unexplained and significant "dealer fee." For example, a customer buying a $30,000 solar panel system with a low interest rate may not know that price includes a $10,000 loan-dealer fee. In other words, the cost of the panels, had they paid cash, would have been just $20,000; the extra 30% is the price they paid for the low-interest loan, though many consumers allege this was not explained to them...

In some ways, the current situation in the residential solar market is analogous to the subprime lending crisis that set off the Great Recession, though on a smaller scale. Like in the subprime lending crisis, some companies issued loans to people who could not — or would not — pay them. Like in the subprime lending crisis, thousands of these loans — and in solar's case, also leases — were packaged and sold to investors as asset-backed securities with promised rates of return. The Great Recession was driven largely by the fact that people stopped paying their loans, and the asset-backed securities didn't deliver the promised rate of return to investors. Similar cracks may be forming in the solar asset-backed securities market. For instance, the rate of delinquencies of loans in one of Sunnova's asset-backed securities was approaching 5% in the fall of last year, according to an October 2023 report issued by KBRA, a bond ratings agency. Historically, delinquencies in solar asset-backed securities had been around 1%.

The firms that grade these asset-backed securities have long said delinquencies would be low because rooftop-solar customers had high credit scores. The problem is that they appear not to have considered that even customers with good credit scores may not want to pay for solar panels that they were told would be free — or that salesmen could be signing people up without their knowledge.
Besides consumer cases in court, there's the possibility that regulators may act against solar companies that used inflated projections to juice their tax credits. "As early as 2016, a researcher at MIT's Energy Initiative estimated that such companies were overstating this value by as much as 50%." The broad problems facing residential solar and financing companies are already causing some pain in the forms of layoffs — California alone lost 17,000 solar jobs in 2023, according to the California Solar and Storage Association. There are ripple effects in the industry; Enphase Energy, which makes microinverters for solar panels, said in December it was laying off 10% of its workforce amidst softening demand.

It could get a lot worse before it gets better, with not just lost jobs, but near-total collapse of the current system. Some analysts, like Lezcano of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, think that the big, national players are going to have to fall apart for residential solar to become affordable in the U.S., and that in the future, the solar industry in the U.S. will look more like it does in Germany, where installations are done locally and there's fewer door-to-door sales.
"Over the past few years, a handful of people got rich off of Americans who were told they could simultaneously save money and save the planet. For example, Hayes Barnard, GoodLeap's founder and chairman, was named by Forbes as one of the 400 richest people in the world in 2023..."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechRadar: Thanks to new Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) research, which was part-funded by Lamborghini, we could soon see the end of difficult-to-source and often problematic rare metal materials featuring in the batteries of future electric vehicles. The MIT study's aim was to replace cobalt and nickel, typically used as a cathode in today's lithium-ion battery technology, with organic materials that could be produced at a much lower cost. This would also reduce the impact on the planet and conduct electricity at similar rates as cobalt batteries. [...] The research, which has been running for six years, has culminated in a novel organic material that could be a direct replacement for cobalt and nickel. According to details recently released by MIT, this material consists of many layers of TAQ (bis-tetraaminobenzoquinone), an organic small molecule that contains three fused hexagonal rings.

It's a complicated subject for those not donning lab coats for a living, but these TAQ layers can extend outward in every direction, forming a structure similar to graphite. Within the molecules are chemical groups called quinones, which are the electron reservoirs, and amines, which help the material to form strong hydrogen bonds, which ensure they don't dissolve into the battery electrolyte (something that has previously blighted organic cathode compounds), thus extending the lifetime of the battery. It comes as no surprise that Lamborghini has licensed the patent on this technology, seeing as it funded the research and has a certain Lanzador high performance electric vehicle in the pipeline.

Researchers say that tests of the material revealed that its conductivity and storage capacity were comparable to that of traditional cobalt-containing batteries. Also, batteries with a TAQ cathode can be charged and discharged faster than existing batteries, which could speed up the charging rate for electric vehicles. This speedy rate of charge and discharge could help give something like Lamborghini's Lanzador a performance edge, while super-fast charging capabilities will negate the need for lengthy charging stops -- something the Italian marque's discerning clientele will likely be opposed to. However, Lamborghini is also part of the wider Volkswagen Group and seeing that the primary materials needed to manufacture this type of cathode are already commercially available and produced in large quantities as commodity chemicals, we may see the battery tech filter down to more affordable EVs in the future.

In 2003, Hans Reiser answered questions from Slashdot's readers...

Today Wikipedia describes Hans Reiser as "a computer programmer, entrepreneur, and convicted murderer... Prior to his incarceration, Reiser created the ReiserFS computer file system, which may be used by the Linux kernel but which is now scheduled for removal in 2025, as well as its attempted successor, Reiser4."

This week alanw (Slashdot reader #1,822), spotted a development on the Linux kernel mailing list. "Hans Reiser (imprisoned for the murder of his wife) has written a letter, asking it to be published to Slashdot." Reiser writes: I was asked by a kind Fredrick Brennan for my comments that I might offer on the discussion of removing ReiserFS V3 from the kernel. I don't post directly because I am in prison for killing my wife Nina in 2006.

I am very sorry for my crime — a proper apology would be off topic for this forum, but available to any who ask.

A detailed apology for how I interacted with the Linux kernel community, and some history of V3 and V4, are included, along with descriptions of what the technical issues were. I have been attending prison workshops, and working hard on improving my social skills to aid my becoming less of a danger to society. The man I am now would do things very differently from how I did things then.
Click here for the rest of Reiser's introduction, along with a link to the full text of the letter...

The letter is dated November 26, 2023, and ends with an address where Reiser can be mailed. Ars Technica has a good summary of Reiser's lengthy letter from prison — along with an explanation for how it came to be. With the ReiserFS recently considered obsolete and slated for removal from the Linux kernel entirely, Fredrick R. Brennan, font designer and (now regretful) founder of 8chan, wrote to the filesystem's creator, Hans Reiser, asking if he wanted to reply to the discussion on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML). Reiser, 59, serving a potential life sentence in a California prison for the 2006 murder of his estranged wife, Nina Reiser, wrote back with more than 6,500 words, which Brennan then forwarded to the LKML. It's not often you see somebody apologize for killing their wife, explain their coding decisions around balanced trees versus extensible hashing, and suggest that elementary schools offer the same kinds of emotional intelligence curriculum that they've worked through in prison, in a software mailing list. It's quite a document...

It covers, broadly, why Reiser believes his system failed to gain mindshare among Linux users, beyond the most obvious reason. This leads Reiser to detail the technical possibilities, his interpersonal and leadership failings and development, some lingering regrets about dealings with SUSE and Oracle and the Linux community at large, and other topics, including modern Russian geopolitics... Reiser asks that a number of people who worked on ReiserFS be included in "one last release" of the README, and to "delete anything in there I might have said about why they were not credited." He says prison has changed him in conflict resolution and with his "tendency to see people in extremes...."

Reiser writes that he understood the difficulty ahead in getting the Linux world to "shift paradigms" but lacked the understanding of how to "make friends and allies of people" who might initially have felt excluded. This is followed by a heady discussion of "balanced trees instead of extensible hashing," Oracle's history with implementing balanced trees, getting synchronicity just right, I/O schedulers, block size, seeks and rotational delays on magnetic hard drives, and tails. It leads up to a crucial decision in ReiserFS' development, the hard non-compatible shift from V3 to Reiser 4. Format changes, Reiser writes, are "unwanted by many for good reasons." But "I just had to fix all these flaws, fix them and make a filesystem that was done right. It's hard to explain why I had to do it, but I just couldn't rest as long as the design was wrong and I knew it was wrong," he writes. SUSE didn't want a format change, but Reiser, with hindsight, sees his pushback as "utterly inarticulate and unsociable." The push for Reiser 4 in the Linux kernel was similar, "only worse...."

He encourages people to "allow those who worked so hard to build a beautiful filesystem for the users to escape the effects of my reputation." Under a "Conclusion" sub-heading, Reiser is fairly succinct in summarizing a rather wide-ranging letter, minus the minutiae about filesystem architecture.

I wish I had learned the things I have been learning in prison about talking through problems, and believing I can talk through problems and doing it, before I had married or joined the LKML. I hope that day when they teach these things in Elementary School comes.

I thank Richard Stallman for his inspiration, software, and great sacrifices,

It has been an honor to be of even passing value to the users of Linux. I wish all of you well.


It both is and is not a response to Brennan's initial prompt, asking how he felt about ReiserFS being slated for exclusion from the Linux kernel. There is, at the moment, no reply to the thread started by Brennan.

It's "a free and open-source, software-defined storage platform," according to Wikipedia, providing object storage, block storage, and file storage "built on a common distributed cluster foundation". The charter advisory board for Ceph included people from Canonical, CERN, Cisco, Fujitsu, Intel, Red Hat, SanDisk, and SUSE.

And Nite_Hawk (Slashdot reader #1,304) is one of its core engineers — a former Red Hat principal software engineer named Mark Nelson. (He's now leading R&D for a small cloud systems company called Clyso that provides Ceph consulting.) And he's returned to Slashdot to share a blog post describing "a journey to 1 TiB/s". This gnarly tale-from-Production starts while assisting Clyso with "a fairly hip and cutting edge company that wanted to transition their HDD-backed Ceph cluster to a 10 petabyte NVMe deployment" using object-based storage devices [or OSDs]...) I can't believe they figured it out first. That was the thought going through my head back in mid-December after several weeks of 12-hour days debugging why this cluster was slow... Half-forgotten superstitions from the 90s about appeasing SCSI gods flitted through my consciousness...

Ultimately they decided to go with a Dell architecture we designed, which quoted at roughly 13% cheaper than the original configuration despite having several key advantages. The new configuration has less memory per OSD (still comfortably 12GiB each), but faster memory throughput. It also provides more aggregate CPU resources, significantly more aggregate network throughput, a simpler single-socket configuration, and utilizes the newest generation of AMD processors and DDR5 RAM. By employing smaller nodes, we halved the impact of a node failure on cluster recovery....

The initial single-OSD test looked fantastic for large reads and writes and showed nearly the same throughput we saw when running FIO tests directly against the drives. As soon as we ran the 8-OSD test, however, we observed a performance drop. Subsequent single-OSD tests continued to perform poorly until several hours later when they recovered. So long as a multi-OSD test was not introduced, performance remained high. Confusingly, we were unable to invoke the same behavior when running FIO tests directly against the drives. Just as confusing, we saw that during the 8 OSD test, a single OSD would use significantly more CPU than the others. A wallclock profile of the OSD under load showed significant time spent in io_submit, which is what we typically see when the kernel starts blocking because a drive's queue becomes full...

For over a week, we looked at everything from bios settings, NVMe multipath, low-level NVMe debugging, changing kernel/Ubuntu versions, and checking every single kernel, OS, and Ceph setting we could think of. None these things fully resolved the issue. We even performed blktrace and iowatcher analysis during "good" and "bad" single OSD tests, and could directly observe the slow IO completion behavior. At this point, we started getting the hardware vendors involved. Ultimately it turned out to be unnecessary. There was one minor, and two major fixes that got things back on track.
It's a long blog post, but here's where it ends up:

• Fix One: "Ceph is incredibly sensitive to latency introduced by CPU c-state transitions. A quick check of the bios on these nodes showed that they weren't running in maximum performance mode which disables c-states."

• Fix Two: [A very clever engineer working for the customer] "ran a perf profile during a bad run and made a very astute discovery: A huge amount of time is spent in the kernel contending on a spin lock while updating the IOMMU mappings. He disabled IOMMU in the kernel and immediately saw a huge increase in performance during the 8-node tests." In a comment below, Nelson adds that "We've never seen the IOMMU issue before with Ceph... I'm hoping we can work with the vendors to understand better what's going on and get it fixed without having to completely disable IOMMU."

• Fix Three: "We were not, in fact, building RocksDB with the correct compile flags... It turns out that Canonical fixed this for their own builds as did Gentoo after seeing the note I wrote in do_cmake.sh over 6 years ago... With the issue understood, we built custom 17.2.7 packages with a fix in place. Compaction time dropped by around 3X and 4K random write performance doubled."

The story has a happy ending, with performance testing eventually showing data being read at 635 GiB/s — and a colleague daring them to attempt 1 TiB/s. They built a new testing configuration targeting 63 nodes — achieving 950GiB/s — then tried some more performance optimizations...

U.S. lawmakers have banned the Defense Department from buying batteries produced by China's biggest manufacturers. "The rule implemented as part of the latest National Defense Authorization Act that passed on Dec. 22 will prevent procuring batteries from Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd., BYD Co. and four other Chinese companies beginning in October 2027," reports Bloomberg. From the report: The measure doesn't extend to commercial purchases by companies such as Ford, which is licensing technology from CATL to build electric-vehicle batteries in Michigan. Tesla also sources some of its battery cells from BYD, which became the new top-selling EV maker globally in the fourth quarter. The four other manufacturers whose batteries will be banned are Envision Energy Ltd., EVE Energy Co., Gotion High Tech Co. and Hithium Energy Storage Technology Co.

The decision still requires Pentagon officials to more clearly define the reach of the new rule. It adds to previous provisions outlined by the NDAA that decoupled the Defense Department's supply chain from China, including restrictions on use of Chinese semiconductors. While the Defense Department bans apply strictly to defense procurement, industries and lawmakers closely follow the rules as a guide for what materials, products and companies to trust in their own course of business.

Seagate this week unveiled the industry's first hard disk drive platform that uses heat-assisted media recording (HAMR). Tom's Hardware: The new Mozaic 3+ platform relies on several all-new technologies, including new media, new write and read heads, and a brand-new controller. The platform will be used for Seagate's upcoming Exos hard drives for cloud datacenters with a 30TB capacity and higher. Heat-assisted magnetic recording is meant to radically increase areal recording density of magnetic media by making writes while the recording region is briefly heated to a point where its magnetic coercivity drops significantly.

Seagate's Mozaic 3+ uses 10 glass disks with a magnetic layer consisting of an iron-platinum superlattice structure that ensures both longevity and smaller media grain size compared to typical HDD platters. To record the media, the platform uses a plasmonic writer sub-system with a vertically integrated nanophotonic laser that heats the media before writing. Because individual grains are so small with the new media, their individual magnetic signatures are lower, whereas magnetic inter-track interference (ITI) effect is somewhat higher. As a result, Seagate had to introduce its new Gen 7 Spintronic Reader, which features the "world's smallest and most sensitive magnetic field reading sensors," according to the company. Because Seagate's new Mozaic 3+ platform deals with new media with a very small grain size, an all-new writer, and a reader that features multiple tiny magnetic field readers, it also requires a lot of compute horsepower to orchestrate the drive's work. Therefore, Seagate has equipped with Mozaic 3+ platform with an all-new controller made on a 12nm fabrication process.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman on Tuesday said an energy breakthrough is necessary for future artificial intelligence, which will consume vastly more power than people have expected. Speaking at a Bloomberg event on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Altman said the silver lining is that more climate-friendly sources of energy, particularly nuclear fusion or cheaper solar power and storage, are the way forward for AI. "There's no way to get there without a breakthrough," he said. "It motivates us to go invest more in fusion."

In 2021, Altman personally provided $375 million to private U.S. nuclear fusion company Helion Energy, which since has signed a deal to provide energy to Microsoft in future years. Microsoft is OpenAI's biggest financial backer and provides it computing resources for AI. Altman said he wished the world would embrace nuclear fission as an energy source as well. Further reading: Microsoft Needs So Much Power to Train AI That It's Considering Small Nuclear Reactors

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Have I Been Pwned has added almost 71 million email addresses associated with stolen accounts in the Naz.API dataset to its data breach notification service. The Naz.API dataset is a massive collection of 1 billion credentials compiled using credential stuffing lists and data stolen by information-stealing malware. Credential stuffing lists are collections of login name and password pairs stolen from previous data breaches that are used to breach accounts on other sites.

Information-stealing malware attempts to steal a wide variety of data from an infected computer, including credentials saved in browsers, VPN clients, and FTP clients. This type of malware also attempts to steal SSH keys, credit cards, cookies, browsing history, and cryptocurrency wallets. The stolen data is collected in text files and images, which are stored in archives called "logs." These logs are then uploaded to a remote server to be collected later by the attacker. Regardless of how the credentials are stolen, they are then used to breach accounts owned by the victim, sold to other threat actors on cybercrime marketplaces, or released for free on hacker forums to gain reputation amongst the hacking community.

The Naz.API is a dataset allegedly containing over 1 billion lines of stolen credentials compiled from credential stuffing lists and from information-stealing malware logs. It should be noted that while the Naz.API dataset name includes the word "Naz," it is not related to network attached storage (NAS) devices. This dataset has been floating around the data breach community for quite a while but rose to notoriety after it was used to fuel an open-source intelligence (OSINT) platform called illicit.services. This service allows visitors to search a database of stolen information, including names, phone numbers, email addresses, and other personal data. The service shut down in July 2023 out of concerns it was being used for Doxxing and SIM-swapping attacks. However, the operator enabled the service again in September. Illicit.services use data from various sources, but one of its largest sources of data came from the Naz.API dataset, which was shared privately among a small number of people. Each line in the Naz.API data consists of a login URL, its login name, and an associated password stolen from a person's device, as shown [here]. "Here's the back story: this week I was contacted by a well-known tech company that had received a bug bounty submission based on a credential stuffing list posted to a popular hacking forum," explained Troy Hunt, the creator of Have I Been Pwned, in blog post. "Whilst this post dates back almost 4 months, it hadn't come across my radar until now and inevitably, also hadn't been sent to the aforementioned tech company."

"They took it seriously enough to take appropriate action against their (very sizeable) user base which gave me enough cause to investigate it further than your average cred stuffing list."

To check if your credentials are in the Naz.API dataset, you can visit Have I Been Pwned.

America's Environmental Protection Agency "has signed off on a California oil company's plans to permanently store carbon emissions deep underground to combat global warming," reports the Los Angeles Times: California Resources Corp., the state's largest oil and gas company, applied for permission to send 1.46 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year into the Elk Hills oil field, a depleted oil reservoir about 25 miles outside of downtown Bakersfield. The emissions would be collected from several industrial sources nearby, compressed into a liquid-like state and injected into porous rock more than one mile underground.

Although this technique has never been performed on a large scale in California, the state's climate plan calls for these operations to be widely deployed across the Central Valley to reduce carbon emissions from industrial facilities. The EPA issued a draft permit for the California Resources Corp. project, which is poised to be finalized in March following public comments. As California transitions away from oil production, a new business model for fossil fuel companies has emerged: carbon management. Oil companies have heavily invested in transforming their vast network of exhausted oil reservoirs into a long-term storage sites for planet-warming gases, including California Resources Corp., the largest nongovernmental owner of mineral rights in California...

[Environmentalists] say that the transportation and injection of CO2 — an asphyxiating gas that displaces oxygen — could lead to dangerous leaks. Nationwide, there have been at least 25 carbon dioxide pipeline leaks between 2002 and 2021, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. Perhaps the most notable incident occurred in Satartia, Miss., in 2020 when a CO2 pipeline ruptured following heavy rains. The leak led to the hospitalization of 45 people and the evacuation of 200 residents... Under the EPA draft permit, California Resources Corp. must take a number of steps to mitigate these risks. The company must plug 157 wells to ensure the CO2 remains underground, monitor the injection site for leaks and obtain a $33-million insurance policy.
Canadian-based Brookfield Corporation also invested $500 million, according to the article, with California Resources Corp. seeking permits for five projects — more than any company in the nation. "It's kind of reversing the role, if you will," says their chief sustainability officer. "Instead of taking oil and gas out, we're putting carbon in."

Meanwhile, there's applications for "about a dozen" more projects in California's Central Valley that could store millions of tons of carbon emissions in old oil and gas fields — and California Resources Corp says greater Los Angeles is also "being evaluated" as a potential storage site.

"For months, bits of an asteroid collected by a U.S. probe during a billion-mile trek were out of reach to scientists," reports Space.com, "locked inside a return capsule in a NASA facility with two stuck fasteners preventing access to the rocky space treasure.

"This week, NASA won its battle against those fasteners."

More details from CNN: The space agency already harvested about 2.5 ounces (70 grams) of rocks and dust from its OSIRIS-REx mission, which traveled nearly 4 billion miles to collect the unprecedented sample from the near-Earth asteroid called Bennu. But NASA revealed in October that some material remained out of reach in a capsule hidden inside an instrument called the Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism — a robotic arm with a storage container at one end that collected the sample from Bennu. The sampler head is held shut by 35 fasteners, according to NASA, but two of them proved too difficult to open.

Prying the mechanism loose is no simple task. The space agency must use preapproved materials and tools around the capsule to minimize the risk of damaging or contaminating the samples. These "new tools also needed to function within the tightly-confined space of the glovebox, limiting their height, weight, and potential arc movement," said Dr. Nicole Lunning, OSIRIS-REx curation lead at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, in a statement. "The curation team showed impressive resilience and did incredible work to get these stubborn fasteners off the TAGSAM head so we can continue disassembly. We are overjoyed with the success."
To address the issue, NASA said they designed and fabricated two new, multi-part tools out of surgical steel. NASA says that a "few additional disassembly steps" still remain, but there's a video on their web site showing the operation (along with some pictures).

NASA adds that "Later this spring, the curation team will release a catalog of the OSIRIS-REx samples, which will be available to the global scientific community." But CNN notes that an analysis of material from last fall "already revealed the samples from the asteroid contained abundant water in the form of hydrated clay minerals as well as carbon," CNN reports. And they add that scientists believe this bolsters the theory that water arrived on Earth billions of years ago on an asteroid...

Julian Spector reports via Canary Media: Hawaii shut down its last coal plant on September 1, 2022, eliminating 180 megawatts of fossil-fueled baseload power from the grid on Oahu -- a crucial step in the state's first-in-the-nation commitment to cease burning fossil fuels for electricity by 2045. But the move posed a question that's becoming increasingly urgent as clean energy surges across the United States: How do you maintain a reliable grid while switching from familiar fossil plants to a portfolio of small and large renewables that run off the vagaries of the weather? Now Hawaii has an answer: It's a gigantic battery, unlike the gigantic batteries that have been built before.

The Kapolei Energy Storage system actually began commercial operations before Christmas on the industrial west side of Oahu, according to Plus Power, the Houston-based firm that developed and owns the project. Now, Kapolei's 158 Tesla Megapacks are charging and discharging based on signals from utility Hawaiian Electric. The plant's 185 megawatts of instantaneous discharge capacity match what the old coal plant could inject into the grid, though the batteries react far more quickly, with a 250-millisecond response time. Instead of generating power, they absorb it from the grid, ideally when it's flush with renewable generation, and deliver that cheap, clean power back in the evening hours when it's desperately needed.

The construction process had its setbacks, as did the broader effort to replace the coal plant with a roster of large-scale clean energy projects. The Kapolei battery was initially intended to come online before the coal plant retired. Covid disrupted deliveries for the grid battery industry across the board, and Kapolei's remote location in the middle of the Pacific Ocean didn't make things easier. By summer 2021, Plus Power was hoping to complete Kapolei by the end of 2022, but it ended up taking another year. Even then, it has joined the grid before several of the other large solar and battery projects slated to replace the coal plant's production with clean power.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Variety: SAG-AFTRA signed a deal on Tuesday with an AI voiceover studio that sets terms for the use of artificial intelligence in video games. The union announced the deal with Replica Studios on Tuesday at CES in Las Vegas. Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the union's executive director, said that the terms include informed consent for the use of AI to create digital voice replicas, as well as requirements for the safe storage of digital assets. At a press conference, Crabtree-Ireland said the union wants to channel emerging technology to benefit performers -- rather than trying to stand in the way. "These are the kind of terms that producers can agree to without disrupting their ability to make content," Crabtree-Ireland said. "This is an evolutionary step forward. AI technology is not something we can block. It's not something we can stop. That's not a tactic or a strategy that's ever worked for labor in the past."

AI was a major issue in the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. The union ultimately reached a deal with the major studios -- represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers -- that established consent and compensation requirements for the use of AI to replicate actors' likenesses. The deal did not block studios from training AI systems to create "synthetic" actors that bear no resemblance to real performers. SAG-AFTRA is now engaged in a similar negotiation with a coalition of major video game studios. The union has obtained a strike authorization vote, though talks continue. Crabtree-Ireland said that agreement with Replica Studios could help spur those discussions.

Replica Studios launched its AI platform in 2019. The company sells AI voices to video game developers from its library of "ethically licensed" voices. Last year, the company announced a new iteration of "Smart NPCs" -- non-playable characters -- that could use OpenAI or other language models to interact with video game players. Crabtree-Ireland said the agreement will open up new employment opportunities for voiceover performers who want to license their voices for use in video games. The deal pertains only to "digital replicas" -- using AI to re-create the voice of a real performer, living or dead. It does not apply to AI training to create synthetic performances.

Asus is back with another Zenbook Duo, the latest $2,161 device in its range of dual-screened laptops. But rather than including a small secondary display above this laptop's keyboard like previous Duos, the revamped version for 2024 has two equally sized 14-inch screens. The Verge has more: They're both OLED, with resolutions of up to 2880 x 1800, aspect ratios of 16:10, and a maximum refresh rate of 120Hz. Between them, they offer a total of 19.8 inches of usable screen real estate. It's a similar approach to the one Lenovo took with last year's dual-screen Yoga Book 9i, albeit with a couple of tweaks. Like Lenovo, Asus gives you a choice of typing on the lower touchscreen via a virtual keyboard or by using a detachable physical Bluetooth keyboard. But what's different here is that Asus' keyboard has a trackpad built in, so you don't have to use it in combination with an on-screen trackpad.

Asus envisages you using the new Zenbook Duo in a few different configurations. There's a standard laptop mode, where the bottom screen is entirely covered by a traditional keyboard and trackpad. Or you can rest the keyboard on your desk and have the two screens arranged vertically for "Dual Screen" mode or horizontally for "Desktop" mode. Finally, there's "Sharing" mode, which has you ditch the keyboard entirely and lay the laptop down on a flat surface with both its screens facing up and away from each other, presumably so you can share your work with a colleague sitting across the desk from you. Naturally, having launched a year later than its competitor, the Asus Zenbook Duo is also packed with more modern hardware. It can be specced with up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 185H processor and 32GB of RAM, up to 2TB of storage, and a 75Wh battery. Connectivity includes two Thunderbolt 4 ports, a USB-A port, HDMI out, and a 3.5mm jack, and the laptop can be used with Asus' stylus.

Shortly after the premium email service Hey announced a standalone Hey Calendar app, co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson said it was rejected by Apple for violating App Store rules.

"Apple just called to let us know they're rejecting the HEY Calendar app from the App Store (in current form)," wrote DHH on X. "Same bullying tactics as last time: Push delicate rejections to a call with a first-name-only person who'll softly inform you it's your wallet or your kneecaps. Since it's clear we're never going to pay them the extortionate 30% ransom, they're back to the bullshit about 'the app doesn't do anything when you download it.' Despite the fact that after last time, they specifically carved out HEY in App Store Review Guidelines 3.1.3 (f)!" The Verge's Amrita Khalid reports: New users can't sign up for Hey Calendar directly on the app -- Basecamp, which makes Hey, makes users first sign up through a browser. Apple's App Store rules require most paid services to offer users the ability to pay and sign up through the app, ensuring the company gets up to a 30 percent cut. The controversial rule has a ton of gray areas and carve-outs (i.e. reader apps like Spotify and Kindle get an exception) and is the subject of antitrust fights in multiple countries. But as Hansson detailed on X and in a subsequent blog post, he found Apple's rejection insulting for another reason. Close to four years ago, the company rejected Hey's original iOS app for its email service for the exact same reason.

The outcome of the 2020 fight actually worked out in Hey's favor. After days of back and forth between Apple's App Store Review Board and Basecamp, the Hey team agreed to a rather creative solution suggested by Apple exec Phil Schiller. Hey would offer a free option for the iOS app, allowing new users to sign up directly. But the company had a slight twist -- users who signed up via the iOS app got a free, temporary randomized email address that worked for 14 days -- after which they had to pay to upgrade. Currently, Hey email users can only pay for an account through the browser. Following the saga with Hey, Apple made a carve-out to its App Store rules that stated that free companion apps to certain types of paid web services were not required to have an in-app payment mechanism. But, as Hansson mentions on X, a calendar app wasn't mentioned in the list of services that Apple now makes an exception for, which includes VOIP, cloud storage, web hosting -- and of course -- email. Hansson plans to fight Apple's decision without elaborating on exactly how he intends to do so.

As spotted by X user bedros_p, Google appears to be preparing to introduce a paid upgrade for Bard Advanced, a "new, cutting-edge AI experience" announced in December that gives users access to Google's best models and capabilities. Android Police reports: According to the strings, you will be able to "Try Bard Advanced for 3 months, on us." After that test period, you will likely have to pay up for the service. A defunct link within the code suggests that it may be part of Google One, but it's not clear if Bard Advanced will be added to all tiers or only more expensive ones with more Google Drive storage. It's also possible that it will be an extra new tier in Google One.

As a refresher, Google launched its most capable AI model yet in December 2023, called Gemini. The LLM is available in three tiers, including a Nano version capable of running on devices like phones and a Pro version currently powering Bard in the US. There is also a Gemini Ultra which isn't public just yet, but supposedly outperforms other LLMs in almost all metrics. Google says that this is the one that will power Bard Advanced.

Several prominent museums have been unable to display their collections online since a cyberattack hit a prominent technological service provider that helps hundreds of cultural organizations show their works digitally and manage internal documents. From a report: The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Rubin Museum of Art in New York and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas were among the institutions confirming that their systems have experienced outages in recent days. The service provider, Gallery Systems, said in a recent message to clients, which was obtained by The New York Times, that it had noticed a problem on Dec. 28, when computers running its software became encrypted and could no longer operate.

"We immediately took steps to isolate those systems and implemented measures to prevent additional systems from being affected, including taking systems offline as a precaution," the company said in the message. "We also launched an investigation and third-party cybersecurity experts were engaged to assist. In addition, we notified law enforcement." Signs of disruption were evident on several museum websites because eMuseum, a tool that usually lets visitors search online collections, was down. There was also disruption behind the scenes: Some curators said that they had returned from their winter vacations to find themselves unable to access sensitive information from another Gallery Systems program called TMS. That system can include the names of donors, loan agreements, provenance records, shipping information and storage locations of priceless artworks.

smooth wombat writes: The advent of streaming services heralded a new era of movie watching. No longer tied to an inconvenient time at a theater, movies could now be watched at your convenience any time of the day or night in your own home. However, with that convenience comes a sinister side: those same movies disappearing from streaming services. Once the movie is removed from the streaming service you can't watch it again. As a result, more people, particularly younger people, are buying DVDs, and even records, to preserve their ability to watch and listen to what they want when they want. Before his release of Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan encouraged fans to embrace "a version you can buy and own at home and put on a shelf so no evil streaming service can come steal it from you". From the BBC article:

Other directors have chimed in to sing the praises of physical media. James Cameron told Variety:"The streamers are denying us any access whatsoever to certain films. And I think people are responding with their natural reaction, which is 'I'm going to buy it, and I'm going to watch it any time I want.'" Guillermo del Toro posted on X that "If you own a great 4K HD, Blu-ray, DVD etc etc of a film or films you love... you are the custodian of those films for generations to come." His tweet prompted people to reply, sharing evidence of their vast DVD collections. [...]

Security researchers say info-stealing malware can still access victims' compromised Google accounts even after passwords have been changed. From a report: A zero-day exploit of Google account security was first teased by a cybercriminal known as "PRISMA" in October 2023, boasting that the technique could be used to log back into a victim's account even after the password is changed. It can also be used to generate new session tokens to regain access to victims' emails, cloud storage, and more as necessary. Since then, developers of infostealer malware -- primarily targeting Windows, it seems -- have steadily implemented the exploit in their code. The total number of known malware families that abuse the vulnerability stands at six, including Lumma and Rhadamanthys, while Eternity Stealer is also working on an update to release in the near future.

Eggheads at CloudSEK say they found the root of the exploit to be in the undocumented Google OAuth endpoint "MultiLogin." The exploit revolves around stealing victims' session tokens. That is to say, malware first infects a person's PC -- typically via a malicious spam or a dodgy download, etc -- and then scours the machine for, among other things, web browser session cookies that can be used to log into accounts.

"Predating even Toy Story, ReBoot was the first 3D animated television show," writes longtime Slashdot reader sandbagger, sharing a new report from Global News. "The master tapes have been located in storage but the hardware needed to play the 1990s-era media has yet to be located." From the report: Produced in Vancouver by Mainframe Entertainment, it aired on YTV between 1994 and 2001, and decades later still has a committed fan base. Among those super fans are Jacob Weldon and Raquel Lin, a B.C. duo now crafting a documentary about the creation of the show and its impact in the film and TV world. Weldon said he wants to see ReBoot recognized for its place in the evolution of computer animation -- recognition he said it rarely gets.

When ReBoot was finally cancelled -- cut short in its fourth and final season -- its protagonists were left in peril and the show ended on a cliffhanger. It's another factor that Lin and Weldon say has helped immortalize the show and has helped fans hoping for a revival that might finally explain the characters' fate. Earlier this month, the documentary also got a potential major boost. Mainframe allowed Lin and Weldon to come to the studio to look for the show's original master tapes, recordings some believed might have been permanently lost. They struck gold. "They had boxes upon boxes upon boxes, hundreds of tapes," Lin said. "It's original resolution, original frame rate, uncompressed. If we could get a deck to play these, they would look beautiful," Weldon said.

Finding that deck, however, is the pair's next major challenge. The recordings are on a rare digital tape format called D1, a technology that Weldon said was cutting edge and rare when Mainframe was using it. It's even harder to find today, and even Mainframe doesn't have the equipment to play the tapes back. Weldon and Lin have since put out a call on social media for a working Bosch BTS D1 deck that would allow them to play the tapes, and incorporate them into their documentary. "I can't tell you how many people have called us, DM'd us, emailed us -- people from all over the world," Lin said. While the pair still haven't secured the deck, they're aiming to release their documentary by next summer. They're hoping it will help renew interest in the show, introduce it to new generations and perhaps see it get new life on a streaming platform.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: In recent years, tools such as Figma, TLDraw, Apple's Freeform and Arc browser's Easel functionality have tried to sell the idea of using an "infinite canvas" for capturing and sharing ideas. French startup Kosmik is building on that general concept with a knowledge-capturing tool that doesn't require the user to switch between different windows or apps to capture information. Kosmik was founded in 2018 by Paul Rony and Christophe Van Deputte. Prior to that, Rony worked at a video production company as a junior director, and he wanted a single whiteboard-type canvas instead of file and folders where he could put videos, PDFs, websites, notes and drawings. And that's when he started to build Kosmic, Rony told TechCrunch, drawing on a prior background in computing history and philosophy.

"It took us almost three years to make a working product to include baseline features like data encryption, offline-first mode and build a spatial canvas-based UI," Rony explained. "We have built all of this on IPFS, so when two people collaborate everything is peer-to-peer rather than relying on a server-based architecture." Kosmik offers an infinite canvas interface where you can insert text, images, videos, PDFs and links, which can be opened and previewed in a side panel. It also features a built-in browser, saving users from having to switch windows when they need to find a relevant website link. Additionally, the platform sports a PDF reader, which lets the user extract elements such as images and text.

The tool is useful for designers, architects, consultants, and students to build boards of information for different projects. The tool is useful for them as they don't need to open up a bunch of Chrome tabs and put details into a document, which is not a very visual medium for various media types. Some retail investors are using the app to monitor stock prices and consultants are using them for their project boards. Available via the web, Mac, and Windows, Kosmik ships with a basic free tier, though this has a limit of 50MB of files and 5GB of storage with 500 canvas "elements." For more storage and unlimited elements, the company offers a $5.99 monthly subscription, with plans in place to eventually offer a "pay-once" model for those who only want to use the software on a single device.