"A Texas truck theft ended in gun fire after the suspected thief was tracked down by thevehicle's owner's AirTag," reports AppleInsider: San Antonio police received a stolen vehicle report at around 1 pm from a Braesview home. However, before police could recover the stolen truck, the owners of the vehicle decided to perform their own investigation, using an AirTag left in the truck to do so. The unnamed owners tracked the truck to a shopping center in Southeast Military Drive, reports KSAT. However, rather than wait for police to arrive, the truck owners decided to approach the vehicle and confront the suspect. While it is unknown exactly what happened, Police say it seems the suspected thief may have pulled out their own firearm. The vehicle owner responded by shooting and killing the suspect while they were inside the truck. It is unclear whether the vehicle owner will face charges over the matter, and an investigation is ongoing into whether the suspect actually had a weapon in the first place. The San Antonio police department's public information officer offered these remarks (in a video from KSAT): "Most importantly is, to the public, SAPD is urging you if you are to get your vehicle stolen: I know that it's frustrating, but please do not take matters into your own hands like this. Our police department has plenty of resources that could go into finding your vehicle, i.e. our drone system, trackers ourselves, very good patrolmen that look for these kind of things. It's never safe to take matters into your own hands, as you can see today by this incident.... That's why I urge the public, wait for police in this matter. Let us go with you. We have the training. We know exactly how to determine what's going to happen, these kind of factors and situations, and we know how to handle them."

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Around 4 in the morning one Tuesday night in San Francisco, an autonomously-driven Cruise vehicle stopped at a red light — and was rear-ended by a Honda. But then "the Honda driver reversed backward several feet, stopped and drove forward again, making contact with the Cruise vehicle a second time," reports NBC News. After damaging the car and injuring its two test drivers, according to a collision report the Honda then "left the scene without exchanging information." It's just part of "a pattern bedeviling tech companies that are trying to make driverless cars a reality," reports NBC News, after reviewing collision reports from the California Department of Motor Vehicles: The reports, which were written by employees of the tech companies, describe 36 instances in 2022 in which a person driving a car or truck left the scene of a crash involving their vehicle and an autonomous vehicle. The problem has continued at a similar pace this year, with seven examples as of early March.... "My best guess is that the drivers think they can't be held liable," said Anderson Franco, a personal injury attorney in the city. "If you are operating your own vehicle and you crash into an autonomous vehicle, the correct thing to do is take photographs, call the police and have it documented," he said. But it's not always clear from the outside of a Cruise or other autonomous vehicle what to do if there's a problem. Cruise said in a statement to NBC News that it was in the process of making its phone number more prominently displayed on the outside of vehicles, so drivers in a crash know who to call.... The human drivers who have hit autonomous vehicles appear to be getting away with little accountability. Autonomous vehicles are usually equipped with a variety of external cameras that could record the license plate numbers of hit-and-run drivers but it's not clear how often the companies have gone down that road.... Cruise said in a statement that the hit-and-runs are usually minor. It said it works with San Francisco police "when necessary" and searches its videos for the license plate numbers of other cars "if needed." Cruise declined to comment on specific cases. Waymo said it has kept its options open about how to respond to hit-and-runs. California's Department of Motor Vehicles pointed out that because of the limited data available, "it's unclear if the rate of hit-and-run incidents involving autonomous vehicles is higher or lower than the rate involving conventional vehicles."

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Replacing their main machine, long-time Slashdot reader shanen had a sobering thought. "Considering how many years it's lasted and adding that number to my own age, I wouldn't want to bet on who will outlast which." And this prompted a look back at all the computers used over a lifetime: I've purchased at least 15 personal computers over the decades. Might be more like 20 and couldn't even count how many company computers I've used for various classes and work. Then there were the computer labs filled with my students. But this ultimately led them to two questions for Slashdot's readers: (1) What was the brand of your longest-lived PC? (2) What is the brand of your latest PC and how long do you expect it to last? Some answers have already been posted on the original submission. I think the longest-lasting computer that I used on a daily basis as my main device was a Lenovo ThinkPad R500. I bought it in 2010 and used it until 2019. It still worked when I retired it, but it was getting a bit slow. The longest lived was a PDP11/34A. Made in the late 70s or early 80s, it was still running when I sold it in 2005. Did a couple of component-level repairs, and I reckon there's every chance that it still runs today. Not sure if it counts as "personal" though. I have a polycarbonate Macbook from 2007 still going strong, so I guess that makes the answer "Apple". There's also an interesting story about a long-running server from days gone. But what's your own answer to the question? Share your own stories in the comments. What was the brand of your longest-lived PC — and how long do you expect your current PC to last?

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Today a warning was published from the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle. "Experts say post-pandemic woes stemming from office workers staying home instead of commuting into the city could send San Francisco into a 'doom loop' that would gut its tax base, decimate fare-reliant regional transit systems like BART and trap it in an economic death spiral...." Despite our housing crisis, it was years into the COVID pandemic before our leaders meaningfully questioned the logic of reserving some of the most prized real estate on Earth for fickle suburbanites and their cars. Downtown, after all, was San Francisco's golden goose. Companies in downtown offices accounted for 70% of San Francisco's pre-pandemic jobs and generated nearly 80% of its economic output, according to city economist Ted Egan. And so we wasted generous federal COVID emergency funds trying to bludgeon, cajole and pray for office workers to return downtown instead of planning for change. We're now staring down the consequences for that lack of vision. The San Francisco metropolitan area's economic recovery from the pandemic ranked 24th out of the 25 largest regions in the U.S., besting only Baltimore, according to a report from the Bay Area Council Economic Institute. In the first quarter of 2023, San Francisco's office vacancy rate shot up to a record-high 29.4% — the biggest three-year increase of any U.S. city. The trend isn't likely to end anytime soon: In January, nearly 30% of San Francisco job openings were for hybrid or fully remote work, the highest share of the nation's 50 largest cities. Amid lower property, business and real estate transfer taxes, the city is projecting a $728 million deficit over the next two fiscal years. Transit ridership remains far below pre-pandemic levels. In January, downtown San Francisco BART stations had just 30% of the rider exits they did in 2019, according to a report from Egan's office. Many Bay Area transit agencies, including Muni, are rapidly approaching a fiscal cliff. San Francisco isn't dead; as of March, it was home to an estimated 173 of the country's 655 companies valued at more than $1 billion. Tourism is beginning to rebound. And new census data shows that San Francisco's population loss is slowing, a sign its pandemic exodus may be coming to an end. But the city can't afford to wait idly for things to reach equilibrium again. It needs to evolve — quickly. Especially downtown. That means rebuilding the neighborhood's fabric, which won't be cheap or easy. Office-to-housing conversions are notoriously tricky and expensive. Demolishing non-historic commercial buildings that no longer serve a purpose in the post-pandemic world is all but banned. And, unlike New York after 9/11, San Francisco is a city that can't seem to stop getting in its own way. So what's the solution? The CEO of the Bay Area Council suggests public-private partnerships that "could help shift downtown San Francisco's focus from tech — with employees now accustomed to working from home — to research and development, biotech, medical research and manufacturing, which all require in-person workers." And last week San Francisco's mayor proposed more than 100 changes to streamline the permitting process for small businesses, and on Monday helped introduce legislation making it easier to convert office buildings to housing, expand pop-up business opportunities, and fill some empty storefronts. This follows a February executive order to speed housing construction. The editorial points out that "About 40% of office buildings in downtown San Francisco evaluated in a study would be good candidates for housing due to their physical characteristics and location and could be converted into approximately 11,200 units, according to research from SPUR and the Urban Land Institute San Francisco." But without some action, the editorial's headline argues that "Downtown San Francisco is at risk of collapsing — and taking much of the Bay Area with it."

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An anonymous reader shares this report from the Washington Post: Steve Jobs never lived to be an old wise man. But running Apple and Pixar, tumbling and thriving, earned him a lot of wisdom in his 56 years. Now, a small group of his family, friends and former colleagues have collected it into "Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words," available free to the public online starting on April 11. Somewhere between a posthumous memoir and a scrapbook album, it is told through notes and drafts Jobs emailed to himself, excerpts of letters and speeches, oral histories and interviews, photos and mementos. (Some physical copies are being produced for Apple and Disney employees, but that format won't be for sale to the general public.) "Imagine yourself as an old person looking back on your life," Jobs wrote in a June 2005 email to himself as he was preparing to give the Stanford commencement speech. "Your life will be a story. It will be your story, with its highs and lows, its heros and villains, its forks in the road that mean everything." The book, published by the Steve Jobs Archive, will be released on Apple Books and the Steve Jobs Archive website. The fact that it aesthetically resembles an Apple product — mostly gray and white, minimalist — is no coincidence: It was designed by LoveFrom, the firm founded by Jony Ive, Apple's former chief design officer.

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IEEE Spectrum reports on Codon, a Python compiler specifically developed to, as they put it, "turbocharge Python's Notoriously slow compiler." "We do type checking during the compilation process, which lets us avoid all of that expensive type manipulation at runtime," says Ariya Shajii, an MIT CSAIL graduate student and lead author on a recent paper about Codon. Without any unnecessary data or type checking during runtime, Codon results in zero overhead, according to Shajii. And when it comes to performance, "Codon is typically on par with C++. Versus Python, what we usually see is 10 to 100x improvement," he says. But Codon's approach comes with its trade-offs. "We do this static type checking, and we disallow some of the dynamic features of Python, like changing types at runtime dynamically," says Shajii. "There are also some Python libraries we haven't implemented yet...." Codon was initially designed for use in genomics and bioinformatics. "Data sets are getting really big in these fields, and high-level languages like Python and R are too slow to handle terabytes per set of sequencing data," says Shajii. "That was the gap we wanted to fill — to give domain experts who are not necessarily computer scientists or programmers by training a way to tackle large data without having to write C or C++ code." Aside from genomics, Codon could also be applied to similar applications that process massive data sets, as well as areas such as GPU programming and parallel programming, which the Python-based compiler supports. In fact, Codon is now being used commercially in the bioinformatics, deep learning, and quantitative finance sectors through the startup Exaloop, which Shajii founded to shift Codon from an academic project to an industry application. To enable Codon to work with these different domains, the team developed a plug-in system. "It's like an extensible compiler," Shajii says. "You can write a plug-in for genomics or another domain, and those plug-ins can have new libraries and new compiler optimizations...." In terms of what's next for Codon, Shajii and his team are currently working on native implementations of widely used Python libraries, as well as library-specific optimizations to get much better performance out of these libraries. They also plan to create a widely requested feature: a WebAssembly back end for Codon to enable running code on a Web browser.

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It was 10 times brighter than any previously detected, reports the BBC, noting it illuminated much of the galaxy. RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) writes: A recent paper on ArXiv describes a Gamma Ray Burst (GRB) whose light arrived late last year as one of the strongest ever observed. GRB 221009A was detected on October 9 last year (yes, that number is a date), so 5 and a bit months from event to papers published is remarkably quick, and I anticipate that there will be a lot more papers on it in the future. Stand-out points are : - it lasted for more than ten hours after detection (a space x-ray telescope had time to orbit out of the Earth's shadow and observe it) - it could (briefly) be observed by amateur astronomers. - it is also one of the closest gamma-ray bursts seen and is among the most energetic and luminous bursts. It's redshift is given as z= 0.151, which Wikipedia translates as occurring 1.9 billion years ago, at a distance of 2.4 billion light-years from Earth. Observations have been made of the burst in radio telescopes (many sites, continuing), optical (1 site ; analysis of HST imaging is still in work), ultraviolet (1 space telescope), x-ray (2 space telescopes) and gamma ray (1 sapce telescope) — over a range of 1,000,000,000,000,000-fold (10^15) in wavelength. It's brightness is such that radio observatories are expected to continue to detect it for "years to come". The model of the source is of several (3~10) Earth-masses of material ejected from (whatever, probably a compact body (neutron star or black dwarf) merger) and impacting the interstellar medium at relativistic speeds (Lorentz factor 9, velocity >99.2% of c). The absolute brightness of the burst is high (about 10^43 J) and it is made to seem brighter by being close, and also by the energy being emitted in a narrow jet ("beamed"), which we happen to be near the axis of. General news sites are starting to notice the reports, including the hilarious acronym of "BOAT — Brightest Of All Time". Obviously, with observations having only occurred for about 50 years. we're likely to see something else as bright within the next 50 years. The brightness of the x-rays from this GRB is such that the x-rays scattered from dust in our galaxy creates halos around the source — which are bright enough to see, and to tell us things about the dust in our galaxy (which is generally very hard to see). Those images are more photogenic than the normal imagery for GRBs — which is nothing — so you'll see them a lot.

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ProPublica looks at "a booming underground community of Instagram scammers and hackers who shut down profiles on the social network and then demand payment to reactivate them." While they also target TikTok and other platforms, takedown-for-hire scammers like OBN are proliferating on Instagram, exploiting the app's slow and often ineffective customer support services and its easily manipulated account reporting systems. These Instascammers often target people whose accounts are vulnerable because their content verges on nudity and pornography, which Instagram and its parent company, Meta, prohibit.... In an article he wrote for factz.com last year, OBN dubbed himself the "log-out king" because "I have deleted multiple celebrities + influencers on Meta & Instagram... I made about $300k just off banning and unbanning pages," he wrote. OBN exploits weaknesses in Meta's customer service. By allowing anyone to report an account for violating the company's standards, Meta gives enormous leverage to people who are able to trick it into banning someone who relies on Instagram for income. Meta uses a mix of automated systems and human review to evaluate reports. Banners like OBN test and trade tips on how to trigger the system to falsely suspend accounts. In some cases OBN hacks into accounts to post offensive content. In others, he creates duplicate accounts in his targets' names, then reports the original accounts as imposters so they'll be barred for violating Meta's ban on account impersonation. In addition, OBN has posed as a Meta employee to persuade at least one target to pay him to restore her account. Models, businesspeople, marketers and adult performers across the United States told ProPublica that OBN had ruined their businesses and lives with spurious complaints, even causing one woman to consider suicide. More than half a dozen people with over 45 million total followers on Instagram told ProPublica they lost their accounts temporarily or permanently shortly after OBN threatened to report them. They say Meta failed to help them and to take OBN and other account manipulators seriously. One person who said she was victimized by OBN has an ongoing civil suit against Meta for lost income, while others sent the company legal letters demanding payment.... A Meta spokesperson acknowledged that OBN has had short-term success in getting accounts removed by abusing systems intended to help enforce community standards. But the company has addressed those situations and taken down dozens of accounts linked to OBN, the spokesperson said. Most often, the spokesperson said, OBN scammed people by falsely claiming to be able to ban and restore accounts.... After banning an account, OBN frequently offers to reactivate it for a fee as high as $5,000, kicking off a cycle of bans and reactivations that continues until the victim runs out of money or stops paying. A Meta spokesperson told the site they're currently "updating our support systems," including a tool to help affected users and letting more speak to a live support agent rather than an automated one. But the Meta spokesperson added that "This remains a highly adversarial space, with scammers constantly trying to evade detection by social media platforms." ProPublica ultimately traced the money to a 20-year-old who lives with his mother (who claimed he was only "funnelling" the money for someone else). After that conversation OBN "announced he would no longer offer account banning as a service" — but would still sell his services in getting your account verified.

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The Fresno Bee newspaper reports that flooding in parts of California "have also ground work to a halt at several key construction sites for California's high-speed rail project." But while standing water at some locations has prevented work crews from reaching their job sites, the Central Valley director for the Cailfornia High-Speed Rail Authority said it's the prospects for a lengthy summer run of water in local irrigation canals that present a greater potential disruption to construction later this year.... At the Tule River viaduct near Highway 43 and Avenue 144 south of Corcoran, drone video posted to social media on March 22 by the Tulare County Sheriff's Office shows vehicles stranded in floodwaters and support columns for the structure sticking out of the water. "There's a lot of work we can't get to," Garth Fernandez, who heads up the rail agency's Central Valley region, told The Fresno Bee in a telephone interview this week. "So at Tule River and Deer Creek, right now we are not working. ... We don't even have access to that (Deer Creek) site right now because it's all under water." Fernandez added that in the meantime, the rail agency and its contractor have turned their attention to providing what help they can to nearby communities that are being affected by flooding.... While some construction locations are facing delays because of standing flood water, crews have been able to continue working at other sites in Madera, Fresno, Kings and Kern counties — a 119-mile stretch covered by three separate construction contracts.... So far, no significant damage has been reported on any of the high-speed rail structures that have been completed or are in various stages of construction. "From north to south, water is flowing underneath all of our completed structures," Fernandez said. "All of our structures are on piles and deep foundations, so I don't believe we'll have an issue with damage to our structures... We may have some areas of erosion, some embankments washed out in a couple of places, but that minor damage can be resolved rather easily," he added. "But for all of our major structures, the current reporting is that we are holding good." The rail line has been designed to cope with major floods; viaducts and a railbed that will elevated above the level of the surrounding land are expected to minimize the risk of damage from future floods, Fernandez said. "Our facilities are designed for a 100-year flood, so (the current events are) showing that our design is actually working," he said. "It's designed in a way that even though it's a large system north to south, it's able to convey all the flood water past our embankments and our alignment."

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"Every day is April Fool's Day now, requiring a low but constant effort," argues Motherboard's senior editor, in a post shared by Slashdot reader samleecole. "As AI-generated shitposting becomes easier, it's inevitable that one of these will catch you with your guard down, or appeal to some basic emotion you are too eager to believe..." Even if you're trained in recognizing fake imagery and can immediately spot the difference between copy written by a language model and a human (content that's increasingly sneaking into online articles), doing endless fact-checking and performing countless micro-decisions about reality and fraud is mentally draining. Every year, our brains are tasked with processing five percent more information per day than the last. Add to this cognitive load a constant, background-level effort to decide whether that data is a lie. The disinformation apocalypse is already here, but not in the form of the Russian "dezinformatsiya" we feared. Wading through what's real and fake online has never been harder, not because each individual deepfake is impossible to distinguish from reality, but because the volume of low effort gags is outpacing our ability to process them.... Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who's been studying manipulated media since long before deepfakes, told me that while he's used to getting a few calls every week from reporters asking him to take a look at images or videos that seem manipulated, over the past few weeks, he's gotten dozens of requests a day. "I don't even know how to put words to it. It really feels like it's unraveling," Farid told me in a phone call. When AI generated fakes started cropping up online years ago, he recalled, he warned that this would change the future, and some of his colleagues told him that he was overreacting. "The one thing that has surprised me is that it has gone much, much faster than I expected," he said. "I always thought, I agree that it is not the biggest problem today. But what's that Wayne Gretzky line? Don't skate to where the puck is, skate to where the puck is going. You've got to follow the puck. In this case, I don't think this was hard to predict." Buzzfeed noted that a viral image of the Pope in a white "puffer" coat" was created by a 31-year-old construction worker who created it while tripping on mushrooms, then posted it to Facebook. But Motherboard's article concludes with a quote from Peter Eckersley, the chief computer scientist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation who died in 2022. "There's a large and growing fraction of machine learning and AI researchers who are worried about the societal implications of their work on many fronts, but are also excited for the enormous potential for good that this technology processes." Eckersley said in a 2018 phone call. "So I think a lot of people are starting to ask, 'How do we do this the right way?' "It turns out that that's a very hard question to answer. Or maybe a hard question to answer correctly... How do we put our thumbs on the scale to ensure machine learning is producing a saner and more stable world, rather than one where more systems can be broken into more quickly?"

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"SpaceX has its first commercial cargo contract to the lunar surface," says Jaret Matthews, the founder of the tiny startup Astrolab which makes a moon rover the size of a Jeep Wrangler. The New York Times reports: On Friday, Astrolab announced that it had signed an agreement with SpaceX for its Flexible Logistics and Exploration Rover, or FLEX, to be a payload on an uncrewed Starship cargo mission that is to take off as early as mid-2026...." SpaceX, which did not respond to requests for comment, has yet to announce that it is planning this commercial Starship mission to the moon's surface, headed to the south polar region. Astrolab would be just one of the customers sharing the voluminous cargo compartment of the Starship flight, Mr. Matthews said. Mr. Matthews, an engineer who previously worked at SpaceX and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, founded Astrolab less than four years ago. Located a stone's throw from SpaceX's headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif., it has about 20 full-time employees, he said.... Mr. Matthews declined to say how much it would cost to get FLEX to the moon or how much money Astrolab has raised. He said Astrolab would make money by lifting and deploying cargo for customers on the lunar surface. That could include scientific instruments. In the future, the rover could help build lunar infrastructure. "Essentially providing what I like to call last-mile mobility on the moon," Mr. Matthews said. "You can kind of think of it like being U.P.S. for the moon. And in this analogy, Starship is the container ship crossing the ocean, and we're the local distribution solution...." Mr. Matthews said Astrolab already had several signed agreements for payloads. That appears to be part of the expanding potential market for [SpaceX's] Starship.... For NASA, Starship is how its astronauts will land on the moon during the Artemis III mission, currently scheduled for 2025. Before that, SpaceX is to conduct an uncrewed flight to demonstrate the capability of spacecraft to get to the moon and set down there in one piece. If those schedules hold, the commercial cargo mission with the Astrolab rover could take place the next year.... Farther into the future, the company has even grander visions. "Ultimately our goal is to have a fleet of rovers both on the moon and Mars," Mr. Matthews said. "And I really think I see these vehicles as the catalysts ultimately for the off-Earth economy."

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Wired pays a visit to a half-finished Microsoft data center that rises out of the flat North Holland farmland — where the security guard tells a local councillor he's not allowed to visit the site, and "Within minutes, the argument has escalated, and the guard has his hand around Ruiter's throat." The security guard lets go of Ruiter within a few seconds, and the councillor escapes with a red mark across his neck. Back in his car, Ruiter insists he's fine. But his hands shake when he tries to change gears. He says the altercation — which he will later report to the police — shows the fog of secrecy that surrounds the Netherlands' expanding data center business. "We regret an interaction that took place outside our data center campus, apparently involving one of Microsoft's subcontractors," says Craig Cincotta, general manager at Microsoft, adding that the company would cooperate with the authorities. The heated exchange between Ruiter and Microsoft's security guard shows how contentious Big Tech's data centers have become in rural parts of the Netherlands. As the Dutch government sets strict environmental targets to cut emissions, industries are being forced to compete for space on Dutch farmland — pitting big tech against the increasingly political population of Dutch farmers. There are around 200 data centers in the Netherlands, most of them renting out server space to several different companies. But since 2015, the country has also witnessed the arrival of enormous "hyperscalers," buildings that generally span at least 10,000 square feet and are set up to service a single (usually American) tech giant. Lured here by the convergence of European internet cables, temperate climates, and an abundance of green energy, Microsoft and Google have built hyperscalers; Meta has tried and failed. Against the backdrop of an intensifying Dutch nitrogen crisis, building these hyperscalers is becoming more controversial. Nitrogen, produced by cars, agriculture, and heavy machinery used in construction, can be a dangerous pollutant, damaging ecosystems and endangering people's health. The Netherlands produces four times more nitrogen than the average across the EU. The Dutch government has pledged to halve emissions by 2030, partly by persuading farmers to reduce their livestock herds or leave the industry altogether. Farmers have responded with protests, blockading roads with tractors and manure and dumping slurry outside the nature minister's home. Farmers object that Microsoft is building its data center before it's even received government permits certifying that it won't worsen the nitrogen problem, according to the article. In response the Farmer Citizen Movement has sprung up, and last month it became the joint-largest party in the Dutch Senate. One party leader tells Wired, "It is a waste of fertile soil to put the data centers boxes here." And Wired adds that opposition to datacenter development is also growing elsewhere in Europe.

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Wired pays a visit to a half-finished Microsoft data center that rises out of the flat North Holland farmland — where the security guard tells a local councillor he's not allowed to visit the site, and "Within minutes, the argument has escalated, and the guard has his hand around Ruiter's throat." The security guard lets go of Ruiter within a few seconds, and the councillor escapes with a red mark across his neck. Back in his car, Ruiter insists he's fine. But his hands shake when he tries to change gears. He says the altercation — which he will later report to the police — shows the fog of secrecy that surrounds the Netherlands' expanding data center business. "We regret an interaction that took place outside our data center campus, apparently involving one of Microsoft's subcontractors," says Craig Cincotta, general manager at Microsoft, adding that the company would cooperate with the authorities. The heated exchange between Ruiter and Microsoft's security guard shows how contentious Big Tech's data centers have become in rural parts of the Netherlands. As the Dutch government sets strict environmental targets to cut emissions, industries are being forced to compete for space on Dutch farmland — pitting big tech against the increasingly political population of Dutch farmers. There are around 200 data centers in the Netherlands, most of them renting out server space to several different companies. But since 2015, the country has also witnessed the arrival of enormous "hyperscalers," buildings that generally span at least 10,000 square feet and are set up to service a single (usually American) tech giant. Lured here by the convergence of European internet cables, temperate climates, and an abundance of green energy, Microsoft and Google have built hyperscalers; Meta has tried and failed. Against the backdrop of an intensifying Dutch nitrogen crisis, building these hyperscalers is becoming more controversial. Nitrogen, produced by cars, agriculture, and heavy machinery used in construction, can be a dangerous pollutant, damaging ecosystems and endangering people's health. The Netherlands produces four times more nitrogen than the average across the EU. The Dutch government has pledged to halve emissions by 2030, partly by persuading farmers to reduce their livestock herds or leave the industry altogether. Farmers have responded with protests, blockading roads with tractors and manure and dumping slurry outside the nature minister's home. Farmers object that Microsoft is building its data center before it's even received government permits certifying that it won't worsen the nitrogen problem, according to the article. In response the Farmer Citizen Movement has sprung up, and last month it became the joint-largest party in the Dutch Senate. One party leader tells Wired, "It is a waste of fertile soil to put the data centers boxes here." And Wired adds that opposition to datacenter development is also growing elsewhere in Europe.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Drinking moderate amounts of alcohol every day does not — as once thought — protect against death from heart disease," writes the Washington Post, "nor does it contribute to a longer life, according to a sweeping new analysis of alcohol research." The review, which examined existing research on the health and drinking habits of nearly 5 million people, is one of the largest studies to debunk the widely held belief that moderate drinking of wine or other alcoholic beverages is good for you. Last year, researchers in Britain examined genetic and medical data of nearly 400,000 people and concluded that even low alcohol intake was associated with increased risk of disease. The new study, which appears Friday in Jama Network Open, also found that drinking relatively low levels of alcohol — 25 grams a day for women (less than 1 ounce) and 45 grams (about 1.5 ounces) or more per day for men — actually increased the risk of death. A standard wine pour is about 5 ounces. The standard serving size for beer is 12 ounces, and for distilled spirits, 1.5 ounces. "This study punctures the hope of many that moderate alcohol use is healthy," said Robert DuPont, a psychiatrist and substance abuse expert who served as the first director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.... Much of the research into the health effects of alcohol has been funded by the alcohol industry. One recent report found that 13,500 studies have been directly or indirectly paid for by the industry.... The new review, called a "meta-analysis," looked at 107 observational studies that involved more than 4.8 million people. The study stressed that previous estimates of the benefits of moderate alcohol consumption on the risk of death by "all causes" — meaning anything, including heart disease, cancer, infections and automobile accidents — were "significantly" biased by flaws in study design. Earlier research did not adjust for numerous factors that could influence the outcome, for example, age, sex, economic status and lifestyle behaviors such as exercise, smoking and diet, they said. Using statistical software, the researchers essentially removed the bias, adjusting for various factors that could skew the research. After doing so, they found no significant declines in the risk of death by any causes among the moderate drinkers.

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"Chinese officials have released an updated analysis of more than 1,300 samples taken from the Wuhan wet market at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic," reports the Telegraph: In a preprint published on Wednesday, researchers from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention said there was "convincing evidence" that Sars-Cov-2 was spreading widely at Wuhan's Huanan seafood market in January 2020. Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the WHO, tells them "This data could and should have been shared three years ago." China's paper then called for "more work involving international coordination" to investigate the potential origins of SARS-CoV-2. "Surveillance of wild animals using a viromic approach should be enhanced to explore the potential natural and intermediate hosts for SARS-CoV-2, if any, which would help to prevent future pandemics caused by animal-origin coronaviruses or alike, with a spillover event." But the Telegraph notes that China also "claimed it's not clear how Covid got there, as no virus was found in the 457 animal swabs taken from 18 species at the market. The data behind the latest Chinese research has proved controversial, after a team of international experts downloaded the genetic sequences that had been discreetly shared on a database called GISAID. Their analysis was the first conducted on the data outside China, which has been accused by the World Health Organization of withholding critical clues. In samples taken from the Wuhan market that tested positive for Covid, the international team found genetic material from wildlife known to be susceptible to Sars-Cov-2 — including racoon dogs, palm civets and Himalayan marmots. This does not prove these animals were infected, but does confirm they were being illegally sold at Huanan market in early 2020. "What we are seeing is the genomic ghost of that animal in the stalls," said Dr Florence Débarre, an evolutionary biologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, who first spotted the data when trawling GISAID. "It's close to the best [evidence] we can get, because the animals were gone when they came to sample the markets," she told the Telegraph earlier this month.... The latest paper from China CDC — published on ChinaXiv on Wednesday — reveals that although researchers sampled 18 species including bamboo rats, wild boars and hedgehogs, they did not take specimens from animals including raccoon dogs now known to be susceptible to the virus. It is likely that this is because they had already been removed. Some researchers said this undermines the China CDC's suggestion that animals did not bring the virus into the market — a route that China has consistently discredited, much like the potential for a laboratory leak, as it does not want the origin to be within its own borders. "This claim that no live animals with the virus were found at the market is one of the most pernicious and misleading talking points proffered," said Dr Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona who led the international analysis. "If no live raccoon dogs... or other plausible intermediate hosts species were tested (because they had all disappeared by the time this testing took place), then saying that the lack of Sars-CoV-2 live animals at the market is evidence against a zoonotic origin is at best misinformed. At worst, it is deliberate disinformation," he told the Telegraph.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: Authorities in Germany this week seized Internet servers that powered FlyHosting, a dark web offering that catered to cybercriminals operating DDoS-for-hire services, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. FlyHosting first advertised on cybercrime forums in November 2022, saying it was a Germany-based hosting firm that was open for business to anyone looking for a reliable place to host malware, botnet controllers, or DDoS-for-hire infrastructure. A statement released today by the German Federal Criminal Police Office says they served eight search warrants on March 30, and identified five individuals aged 16-24 suspected of operating "an internet service" since mid-2021. The German authorities did not name the suspects or the Internet service in question. "Previously unknown perpetrators used the Internet service provided by the suspects in particular for so-called 'DDoS attacks', i.e. the simultaneous sending of a large number of data packets via the Internet for the purpose of disrupting other data processing systems," the statement reads. The German authorities said that as a result of the DDoS attacks facilitated by the defendants, the websites of various companies as well as those of the Hesse police have been overloaded in several cases since mid-2021, "so that they could only be operated to a limited extent or no longer at times." The statement says police seized mobile phones, laptops, tablets, storage media and handwritten notes from the unnamed defendants, and confiscated servers operated by the suspects in Germany, Finland and the Netherlands.

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In the US, heat pump purchases exceeded those of gas furnaces in 2022 -- part of a bigger trend that saw global heat pump sales grow by 11%. Electrek reports: According to analysis released today by the International Energy Agency (IEA), heat pump sales in Europe saw a record year, with sales growing by nearly 40%. And specifically, sales of air-to-water models in Europe that are compatible with typical radiators and underfloor heating systems jumped by almost 50%. In China, the world's largest heat pump market, sales remained stable amid a general slowdown of the economy. Currently, heat pumps function as a main heating device in around 10% of buildings globally. That's the equivalent of over 100 million households, or 1 in 10 homes. But in order to meet climate goals, heat pumps will have to meet nearly 20% of global heating needs in buildings by 2030. If installations continue at the rate of the last two years, then the world may almost be on track to reach the 2030 goal. The IEA says that global heat pump sales will need to expand by well over 15% per year this decade if the world is to achieve net zero by 2050, and that multistory apartment buildings and commercial spaces in particular should be prioritized.

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The scientific community is reeling after NASA gutted funding for a key Venus mission that was "poised to answer some of the biggest questions about the planet and its volcanic activity," reports The Verge. From the report: This month saw the announcement of one of the most exciting findings about Venus in decades: the first direct evidence of an active volcano there. [...] This finding is "mind-blowing," Venus scientist Darby Dyar told The Verge, opening up possibilities to learn about Venus' geology and atmosphere as well as whether the planet was once habitable. But in the space science community, the excitement about this finding is being overshadowed by the "soft cancellation" of a key NASA Venus mission, which Dyar is also deputy principal investigator for and which had been set to launch in 2028. The Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy (VERITAS) mission was one of three missions set to explore Venus in the next few years, kicking off NASA's "decade of Venus" and seeing a return to the study of our planetary neighbor, which scientists have been calling for for years. But at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference held recently in Houston, Texas, VERITAS principal investigator Sue Smrekar announced that the mission's funding had been completely gutted, leaving the mission in a state of precarious limbo. This came as a surprise to many of the conference attendees, who were soon tweeting their support for the mission using the hashtag #SaveVERITAS. The Planetary Society also put out a statement describing the delay of the mission's launch by at least three years as "uncalled-for" and calling on NASA to commit to launching by 2029. NASA has cited problems with another mission, Psyche, as the reason for delaying VERITAS by at least three years. Both Psyche and VERITAS are managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the NASA / Caltech research center that is responsible for building robotic spacecraft such as the Mars rovers. JPL had problems meeting its requirements for the Psyche mission, which aims to visit a metal asteroid, and missed its launch date last year. An independent review into the missed launch found it was due to, among other problems, workforce issues at JPL. Budget cuts and cancellations aren't uncommon, but the situation with VERITAS is different because it "had already been selected by NASA to be part of its Discovery Program," adds the Verge. "Historically, once a mission has been selected by NASA, those working on it can be confident that funding will be available. If a delay happens -- as is not uncommon in large, complex missions -- then a lower level of funding is typically made available to keep the basic essentials in place, called bridge funding, until full funding can be restored." Although the team asked NASA for bridge funding to maintain mission essentials, "virtually all of their funding has been cut, leaving them with a tiny $1.5 million per year," says the report. "This is a highly unusual situation for a selected mission because delaying and restarting missions is so expensive."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Like electronics or photonics, magnonics is an engineering subfield that aims to advance information technologies when it comes to speed, device architecture, and energy consumption. A magnon corresponds to the specific amount of energy required to change the magnetization of a material via a collective excitation called a spin wave. Because they interact with magnetic fields, magnons can be used to encode and transport data without electron flows, which involve energy loss through heating (known as Joule heating) of the conductor used. As Dirk Grundler, head of the Lab of Nanoscale Magnetic Materials and Magnonics (LMGN) in the School of Engineering explains, energy losses are an increasingly serious barrier to electronics as data speeds and storage demands soar. "With the advent of AI, the use of computing technology has increased so much that energy consumption threatens its development," Grundler says. "A major issue is traditional computing architecture, which separates processors and memory. The signal conversions involved in moving data between different components slow down computation and waste energy." This inefficiency, known as the memory wall or Von Neumann bottleneck, has had researchers searching for new computing architectures that can better support the demands of big data. And now, Grundler believes his lab might have stumbled on such a "holy grail". While doing other experiments on a commercial wafer of the ferrimagnetic insulator yttrium iron garnet (YIG) with nanomagnetic strips on its surface, LMGN Ph.D. student Korbinian Baumgaertl was inspired to develop precisely engineered YIG-nanomagnet devices. With the Center of MicroNanoTechnology's support, Baumgaertl was able to excite spin waves in the YIG at specific gigahertz frequencies using radiofrequency signals, and -- crucially -- to reverse the magnetization of the surface nanomagnets. "The two possible orientations of these nanomagnets represent magnetic states 0 and 1, which allows digital information to be encoded and stored," Grundler explains. The scientists made their discovery using a conventional vector network analyzer, which sent a spin wave through the YIG-nanomagnet device. Nanomagnet reversal happened only when the spin wave hit a certain amplitude, and could then be used to write and read data. "We can now show that the same waves we use for data processing can be used to switch the magnetic nanostructures so that we also have nonvolatile magnetic storage within the very same system," Grundler explains, adding that "nonvolatile" refers to the stable storage of data over long time periods without additional energy consumption. It's this ability to process and store data in the same place that gives the technique its potential to change the current computing architecture paradigm by putting an end to the energy-inefficient separation of processors and memory storage, and achieving what is known as in-memory computation. The research has been published in the journal Nature Communications.

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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Friday said it was approving California's plans to require a rising number of zero-emission heavy-duty trucks as the state pushes to cut pollution. Reuters reports: California Governor Gavin Newsom said as a result of the plan, "half of all heavy duty trucks sold in CA will be electric by 2035." "Time to stop playing small ball," he added. Under an executive order Newsom signed in 2020, California plans to mandate by 2045 that all operations of medium- and heavy-duty vehicles be zero emission where feasible, shifting away from diesel-powered trucks. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) had sought waivers from the Clean Air Act to set heavy-duty vehicle and engine emission standards. California has been joined by Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Washington and Vermont in adopting the rules. CARB has noted heavy-duty vehicles greater than 14,000 pounds comprised 3% of vehicles on California roads, but account for more than 50% of nitrogen oxides and fine particle diesel pollution. The EPA said it is not yet approving California's request to set new regulations on pollutant exhaust emission standards for nitrogen oxide (NOx) and particulate matter for 2024 and future medium- and heavy-duty engines and vehicles. Separately, California in August moved to require all new light-duty cars and trucks sold in the state by 2035 to be either electric or plug-in electric hybrids. California needs an EPA waiver for that regulation.

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