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Now they just need to get regulatory approval

Despite technological and regulatory hurdles, Amazon remains convinced that small modular reactors (SMRs) are the answer to the cloud titan's power woes.…

Jason Allen has responded to critics who say he is not an artist by filing a new brief and announcing plans to sell oil-print reproductions of his AI-generated image. Allen won the Colorado State Fair Fine Arts Competition in 2022 after submitting Theatre D'opera Spatial, which Midjourney created. He said in a press release that being called an artist does not concern him but his work and expression do. Allen says he asked himself what could make the piece undeniably art and decided to create physical reproductions using technology. The reproductions employ a three-dimensional printing technique from a company called Arius that uses oil paints to simulate brushstrokes. Allen said the physical artifact is singular and real. His legal filing argues that he produced the artwork by providing hundreds of iterative text prompts to Midjourney and experimenting with over six hundred prompts before cropping and upscaling the final image. The U.S. Copyright Office has rejected his copyright applications for three years. The office maintains that Midjourney does not treat text prompts as direct instructions.

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Backblaze has been tracking hard disk drive failures in its datacenter since 2013. The backup and cloud storage company's latest analysis of approximately 317,230 drives shows that peak failure rates have dropped dramatically and shifted much later in a drive's lifespan. Where the company once saw failure rates of 13.73% at around three years in 2013 and 14.24% at seven years and nine months in 2021, the current data shows a peak of just 4.25% at 10 years and three months. This represents the first time the company has observed the highest failure rate occurring at the far end of the drive curve rather than earlier in its operational life, it said. The drives maintained relatively consistent failure rates through most of their use before spiking sharply near the end. The improvement amounts to roughly one-third of the previous peak failure rates.

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Not a good week for Big Red

Envoy Air, an American Airlines subsidiary, has confirmed that it was among the dozens of organizations compromised via Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) security flaws, following claims by Clop extortionists that its parent company was one of its victims.…

Instant coffee beat drip coffee in blind taste tests conducted by researchers at the Drexel Food Lab. Jonathan Deutsch and Rachel Sherman tested 84 participants across two rounds of tastings for The Guardian's Filter US newsletter. They first narrowed 24 instant coffee varieties to the best options. Those finalists then competed against drip coffees in a second test. 77% of participants preferred instant coffee over drip. The top-performing instant coffee was not from premium third-wave brands but a common grocery store variety. Deutsch compared the result to iconic products like Heinz ketchup and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. Upscale interpretations of certain classic items often fail to surpass the originals, he said.

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'AI is a tool', Pope tells attendees

Recently, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff warned investors to avoid the "false prophets" of AI. Now, the Pope has brought real theological weight to the bot debate, hosting a Vatican seminar that called for global AI regulation and fair distribution of the technology's benefits.…

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has signed into law legislation banning the use of price-fixing software by landlords to set rental rates. From a report: New York is the first state to outlaw algorithmic pricing by landlords, following a number of city-wide bans in Jersey City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Seattle. Software companies such as RealPage offer landlords algorithms that can set rental prices. The software can also help determine the ideal number of people to live in a unit or the terms of a lease renewal. RealPage says it can help its clients "optimize rents to achieve the overall highest yield, or combination of rent and occupancy, at each property." But the "private data algorithms" advertised by these software companies, Hochul says, cause the "housing market distortion" that harms renters "during a historic housing supply and affordability crisis." Not only does the law outlaw setting rental terms with the software, it also says that any property owners who use the software will be considered colluding. In other words, two or more rental property owners or managers who set rents with an algorithm are, in practice, choosing to not compete with each other, whether they do so "knowingly or with reckless disregard," the law says. This is a distinct violation from simply using the software itself.

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Most datacenters to ditch 19-inch standard for 21-inch OCP kit by 2030

Datacenters are set to standardize on the larger, 21-inch rack format by 2030, according to Omdia, as hyperscalers and server makers fully embrace it, leaving enterprises to the existing 19-inch standard.…

US biz lobby claims president overstepped his authority with proclamation demanding hefty visa fee

The US Chamber of Commerce (CoC) has filed a suit accusing President Trump of exceeding his authority by seeking to slap a $100,000 fee on H-1B visa applications.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Samsung Electronics will unveil its highly-anticipated trifold smartphone when world leaders and global dignitaries gather at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in South Korea later this month. It will be the company's first device with two hinges -- allowing it to work as either a conventional smartphone or a significantly larger tablet when fully unfurled -- and will be displayed at an exhibition of cutting-edge Korean technology on the sidelines of the multilateral summit, according to a person familiar with the matter. For Samsung, the Gyeongju-hosted APEC event will provide a global spotlight for a product it hopes will burnish its reputation as an engineering pioneer. Alongside Huawei, Samsung has led the move to develop foldable phones, and Huawei introduced the world's first trifold device in China last year. The Korean company now has the opportunity to take the form factor global.

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P2P lending platform says it could not verify the claims at present

Data breach tracker HaveIBeenPwned claims the victim count of peer-to-peer lender Prosper's September cyberattack stands at 17.6 million.…

Maj. Gen. William Taylor told reporters at the Association of the US Army Conference in Washington this week that he and the Eighth Army he commands out of South Korea are regularly using AI for decision-making. Taylor said he has been asking AI chatbots to help build models for personal decisions that affect his organization and overall readiness. The general referred to his chatbot companion as "Chat" and said the technology has been useful for predictive analysis in logistical planning and operational purposes.

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The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that hosts Wikipedia, says that it's seeing a significant decline in human traffic to the online encyclopedia because more people are getting the information that's on Wikipedia via generative AI chatbots that were trained on its articles and search engines that summarize them without actually clicking through to the site. 404 Media: The Wikimedia Foundation said that this poses a risk to the long term sustainability of Wikipedia. "We welcome new ways for people to gain knowledge. However, AI chatbots, search engines, and social platforms that use Wikipedia content must encourage more visitors to Wikipedia, so that the free knowledge that so many people and platforms depend on can continue to flow Sustainably," the Foundation's Senior Director of Product Marshall Miller said in a blog post. "With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work."

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Operating system's end of life D-day resucitates flatlining computer sector

It transpires that Windows 11 is indeed good for at least one thing – driving PC upgrades, according to the latest figures from Gartner.…

joshuark writes: Not all jobs are created equal, according to the new American Job Quality Study. The nationally representative survey of roughly 18,000 Americans finds that just 40% of U.S. workers hold "quality jobs," "Quality jobs" are defined as roles with fair compensation, safe environments, growth opportunities, agency and manageable schedules. Quality jobs are linked to higher satisfaction and wellbeing, yet most U.S. workers face gaps in pay, advancement, scheduling and fairness. As former obsolete technology COM guru Don Box stated: COM sucks but pays my bucks. Now it sucks and no bucks.

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Sharing views POTUS doesn't like? Say goodbye to that visa, First Amendment be damned

Lawyers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) are helping three US labor unions sue the Trump administration over a social media surveillance program that threatens to punish those who publicly express views that are not harmonious with the government's position.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Heise: The European Commission has revised the Ecodesign requirements for external power supplies (EPS). The new rules aim to increase consumer convenience, resource efficiency, and energy efficiency. Manufacturers have three years to prepare for the changes. The new regulations apply to external power supplies that charge or power devices such as laptops, smartphones, Wi-Fi routers, and computer monitors. Starting in 2028, these products must meet higher energy efficiency standards and become more interoperable. Specifically, USB chargers on the EU market must have at least one USB Type-C port and function with detachable cables. With the regulation, the EU is also establishing minimum requirements for the efficiency of power supplies with an output power of up to 240 watts that charge via USB Power Delivery (USB-PD), among other things, under other things, minimum requirements. Power supplies with an output power exceeding 10 watts will also have to meet minimum energy efficiency values in partial load operation (10 percent of rated power) in the future, which is intended to reduce unnecessary energy losses. The EU Commission says the new requirements are expected to save around 3% of energy consumption over the lifecycle of external chargers by 2035. Additionally, greenhouse gas emissions are expected to decrease by 9% and pollutant emissions by about 13%. "The EU also calculates that consumer spending could decrease by around 100 million euros per year by 2035," reports Heise.

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Beijing blocks exports after Netherlands imposes special measures on Chinese-owned chipmaker

Major car, van, truck and bus manufacturers are warning that the Dutch government placing semiconductor biz Nexperia under special administrative measures could result in a shortage of automotive chips.…

NASA's Earth-watching archives find new home in Redmond's cloud, complete with Copilot hype

Microsoft has made NASA's Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS) dataset available on Azure via the Windows giant's Planetary Computer platform.…

A decade later, ERP giant struggles to convince legacy customers to upgrade

More than a decade after SAP's S/4HANA in-memory ERP system debuted, 95 percent of legacy users say building a positive case to migrate requires a big effort or is genuinely challenging.…