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Trio of spacecraft to capture ripples in spacetime

The European Space Agency (ESA) has signed off on the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission to detect gravitational waves from space.…

We've been working on the solution for 70 years. It's there if we want it

Opinion Datacenter power is a shocking business. The latest report from the International Energy Agency makes some hair-raising predictions, such as Irish datacenter electricity usage making up a third of that country's total juice budget by 2026.…

"Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope observed the smallest exoplanet where water vapor has been detected in the atmosphere," writes SciTechDaily. "At only approximately twice Earth's diameter, the planet GJ 9827d could be an example of potential planets with water-rich atmospheres elsewhere in our galaxy." "This would be the first time that we can directly show through an atmospheric detection, that these planets with water-rich atmospheres can actually exist around other stars," said team member Björn Benneke of the Trottier Institute for Research on Exoplanets at Université de Montréal. "This is an important step toward determining the prevalence and diversity of atmospheres on rocky planets." "Water on a planet this small is a landmark discovery," added co-principal investigator Laura Kreidberg of Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. "It pushes closer than ever to characterizing truly Earth-like worlds." However, it remains too early to tell whether Hubble spectroscopically measured a small amount of water vapor in a puffy hydrogen-rich atmosphere, or if the planet's atmosphere is mostly made of water, left behind after a primeval hydrogen/helium atmosphere evaporated under stellar radiation... Because the planet is as hot as Venus, at 800 degrees Fahrenheit, it definitely would be an inhospitable, steamy world if the atmosphere were predominantly water vapor... "Observing water is a gateway to finding other things," said Thomas Greene, astrophysicist at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. "This Hubble discovery opens the door to future study of these types of planets by the James Webb Space Telescope.

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Clever techie thought of everything – except someone else's stupidity

Who, Me? Why hello, dear reader – fancy seeing you here again on a Monday – the slot we The Register reserves for a fresh instalment of Who, Me? in which Register readers share their tales of tech tribulations.…

The plan is to keep the world at bay by never recording it in the DNS root – like may already do with a subdomain for an intranet

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has proposed creating a new top-level domain (TLD) and never allowing it to be delegated in the global domain name system (DNS) root.…

What’s the point of hardware export bans if foreign entities can access what they want on the cloud?

US-based infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) operators could soon be required to strengthen know-your-customer (KYC) procedures in order to prevent foreign actors renting the infrastructure needed to train AI models.…

Around three hours after its moon lander had touched down, Japan's space agency "decided to switch SLIM off with 12% power remaining to allow for a possible resumption when the sun's angle changed," reports Agence France-Presse. Today there was good news: Japan's Moon lander has resumed operations, the country's space agency said on Monday, indicating that power had been restored after it was left upside down during a slightly haphazard landing. The probe, nicknamed the "moon sniper", had tumbled down a crater slope during its landing on 20 January, leaving its solar batteries facing in the wrong direction and unable to generate electricity... The agency posted on X an image shot by Slim of "toy poodle", a rock observed near the lander.

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And it will all come together in one big, happy, hybrid innovation engine

Chinese tech giant Tencent has predicted that high-performance computing (HPC), quantum computing, cloud computing and edge computing will soon merge.…

"Someday in the not too distant future, it might no longer be possible to drive a brand-new car faster than 80 mph in California," writes Car and Driver: That's because state senator Scott Wiener earlier this week proposed a new bill that aims to prevent certain new vehicles from going more than 10 mph over the speed limit. In California, the maximum posted speed limit is 70 mph, meaning anything north of 80 mph would be off limits. The Speeding and Fatality Emergency Reduction on California Streets — or SAFER California Streets, for short — is a package of bills that includes SB 961 that was published Tuesday, which essentially calls for speed governors on new cars and trucks built or sold in California starting with the 2027 model year. These vehicles would be required to have an "intelligent speed limiter system" that electronically prevents the driver from speeding above the aforementioned threshold. The speed-limiter tech wouldn't apply to emergency vehicles. There's also language in the bill that the passive device would have the ability to be temporarily disabled by the driver, however, it's unclear in what situations that might apply. The bill also states that automakers would be able to fully disable the speed-limiter, but presumably only for authorized emergency vehicles. The commissioner of the California Highway Patrol could authorize disabling the speed-limiter too at their discretion... The proposed legislation is said to be an attempt to address rising traffic fatalities, which in California have reportedly increased by 22 perecent from 2019 to 2022.

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Kernel 6.8-rc2 debuts after very robust discussion about 'inodes'

Linus Torvalds has dished up one of his most strongly worded Linux kernel mailing list posts in years, lashing a contributor from Google for his suggestions regarding filesystems.…

ALSO: SEC admits to X account negligence; New macOS malware family appears; and some critical vulns

Infosec in brief Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) held its first-ever automotive-focused Pwn2Own event in Tokyo last week, and awarded over $1.3 million to the discoverers of 49 vehicle-related zero day vulnerabilities.…

Halo — the TV series — launches its second season on February 8th. But today a trailer premiered during halftime of the pre-Super Bowl football playoff. Gizmodo reports: Even though the Covenant are the other side of Halo's ongoing conflict, the first season of Paramount+'s TV series largely represented them through a human proxy named Makee. With the upcoming second season, the coalition of alien races is set to become a more prominent threat, and that means they'll be getting more proper screentime. IGN had written that Season 1 "isn't a perfect adaptation of the games, but it ultimately succeeds in expanding the series' mythology and taking a more character-driven approach to Master Chief's adventures." This week Paramount+ also released a 28-minute compilation of "Epic Battle Scenes from Season 1, a season which reportedly cost $200 million to film. And now the entertainment site Collider reports on what comes next: While on the set for Halo Season 2, Collider's Steve Weintraub and some other reporters got the chance to sit down with stars Schreiber and Kate Kennedy to discuss how the show will further flesh out the Covenant in the upcoming episodes. Part of that involves expanding their arsenal with new vehicles like the corvette, a class of ships used in the Halo canon by the Covenant for reconnaissance, stealth, and much more. Kennedy placed it among her favorite Season 2 set designs, saying... "It's huge, and what the set guys did for it, and the art department, is really, really impressive. They turned it around so quickly, and it's, like, awe-inspiring, it's huge." Aside from making the Covenant more formidable, Season 2 will also focus on making them more understandable. Part of that involves diving into the thought process of key players within the alien faction, including two that Schreiber could tease. "Yeah, we definitely go into the Covenant mind-state, mentality," he said... In future seasons, Schreiber believes Halo will only continue to develop the Covenant, their motives, and the relationships and allegiances within the coalition as the story of intergalactic war unfolds.

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ALSO: Samsung turns to Baidu for Galaxy AI in China; Terraform Labs files for bankruptcy; India's supercomputing ambitions

Asia In Brief Indian infosec firm CloudSEK last week claimed it found records describing 750 million Indian mobile network subscribers on the dark web, with two crime gangs offering the trove of data for just $3,000.…

The tech site IT Brew looks at an open-source tool that "uses AI to offer efficiency-minded suggestions to Python coders." Known as "Scalene," the profiler — a kind of debugger for performance issues — has been downloaded more than 900,000 times on GitHub. "It's awesome in general, and amazing for an academic project," UMass professor Emery Berger, who worked with PhD students Sam Stern and Juan Altmayer Pizzorno on the open-source tool, told IT Brew... Scalene measures how much time and memory is spent on each line of code — both on average and at peak, [and] how much time is spent in efficient libraries and how much is spent in Python... By selecting a lightning-bolt icon, a user can "leverage the engine that powers ChatGPT to get an optimization" suggestion, Berger said. In one demo he showed IT Brew, an output recommended a less-memory-intensive move to reduce a very large array created by the code... "If your Python code already runs fast enough, then you don't need a profiler. But if it's running slow, I think it's a very convenient profiler to reach for," Berger said. Link via Dev News .

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In Denver, Colorado, a pastor had a message for his congregation, reports CNN. "After months of prayers and cues from God, he was going to start selling cryptocurrency, he announced in a YouTube video last April." The Signature and Silvergate banks had collapsed weeks earlier, signaling the need to look into other investment options beyond financial institutions, he said. With divine wisdom, he said, he was "setting the rails for God's wealth transfer." Shortly afterward, Regalado and his wife, Kaitlyn Regalado, launched a cryptocurrency, INDXcoin, and began selling it to members of his Victorious Grace Church and other Christian communities in the Denver area. They sold it through the Kingdom Wealth Exchange, an online cryptocurrency marketplace he created, controlled and operated. The Regalados raised more than $3.2 million from over 300 investors, Tung Chang, Securities Commissioner for Colorado, said in a civil complaint. The couple's sales pitches were filled with "prayer and quotes from the Bible, encouraging investors to have faith that their investment ... would lead to 'abundance' and 'blessings,'" the complaint said. But Colorado state regulators say that INDXcoin was "essentially worthless." Instead of helping investors acquire wealth, the Regalados used around $1.3 million of the investment funds to bankroll lavish expenditures, including a Range Rover, jewelry, cosmetic dentistry and extravagant vacations, the complaint said. The money also paid for renovations to the Regalados' Denver home, the complaint said. In a stunning video statement posted online on January 19 — several days after the civil charges were filed — Eli Regalado did not dispute that he and his wife profited from the crypto venture. "The charges are that Kaitlyn and I pocketed 1.3 million dollars, and I just want to come out and say that those charges are true," he said, adding, "A few hundred thousand dollars went to a home remodel that the Lord told us to do...." Regalado also said that he and his wife used about half a million dollars of their investors' funds to pay taxes to the IRS. CNN reports that in videos Regalado explains how God "convinced him that it was a safe and profitable investment venture." ("You read it correctly. God's hand is on INDXcoin and we are launching!" explains the launch video's description.) "The Regalados used technical terms to confuse investors and misled them into believing that the coins were valued at between $10-$12 even though they were purchased for $1.50 or, at times, given away, the complaint said."

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The Wall Street Journal reports that "a motley crew of AM radio advocates," including conservative talk show hosts and federal emergency officials, are lobbying Congress to stop carmakers from dropping AM radio from new vehicles: Lawmakers say most car companies are noncommittal about the future of AM tuners in vehicles, so they want to require them by law to keep making cars with free AM radio. Supporters argue it is a critical piece of the emergency communication network, while the automakers say Americans have plenty of other ways, including their phones, to receive alerts and information. The legislation has united lawmakers who ordinarily want nothing to do with one another. Sens. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and Ed Markey (D., Mass.) are leading the Senate effort, and on the House side, Speaker Mike Johnson — himself a former conservative talk radio host in Louisiana — and progressive "squad" member Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan are among about 200 co-sponsors... A spring 2023 Nielsen survey, the most recent one available, showed that AM radio reaches about 78 million Americans every month. That is down from nearly 107 million in the spring of 2016, one of the earliest periods for which Nielsen has data... Automakers say the rise of electric vehicles is driving the shift away from AM, because onboard electronics create interference with AM radio signals — a phenomenon that "makes the already fuzzy analog AM radio frequency basically unlistenable," according to the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a car-industry trade group. Shielding cables and components to reduce interference would cost carmakers $3.8 billion over seven years, the group estimates. Markey and other lawmakers say they want to preserve AM radio because of its role in emergency communications. The Federal Emergency Management Agency says that more than 75 radio stations, most of which operate on the AM band and cover at least 90% of the U.S. population, are equipped with backup communications equipment and generators that allow them to continue broadcasting information to the public during and after an emergency. Seven former FEMA administrators urged Congress in a letter last year to seek assurances from automakers that they would keep broadcast radio available. The companies' noncommittal response spurred legislation, lawmakers said. Automakers increasingly want to put radio and other car features "behind a paywall," Markey said in an interview. "They see this as another profit center for them when the American driving public has seen it as a safety resource for them and their families...." He compared the auto industry's resistance to the bill to previous opposition to government mandates like seat belts and air bags. "Leaving safety decisions to the auto industry is very dangerous," Markey said. Lawmakers have heard from over 400,000 AM radio supporters, according to the president of the National Association of Broadcasters. But the article also cites an executive at the Consumer Technology Association, who says automakers and tech advocacy groups have told lawmakers that requiring AM radio "would be "inconsistent with the principles of a free market.... It's strange that Congress is focused on a 100-year-old technology."

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Remember that cheery corporate video Internet Brands tried announcing their new (non-negotiable) hybrid return-to-office policy (with the festive song "Iko Iko" playing in the background)? They've now pulled the video from Vimeo. Could that signal a larger shift in attitudes about working from home? The Washington Post reports: Now, new research from the Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh suggests that office mandates may not help companies' financial performances, but they can make workers less satisfied with their jobs and work-life balance... "We will not get back to the time when as many people will be happy working from the office the way they were before the pandemic," said Mark Ma, co-author of the study and associate professor at the Katz Graduate School of Business. Additionally, mandates make workers less happy, therefore less productive and more likely to look for a new job, he said. The study analyzed a sample of Standard & Poor's 500 firms to explore the effects of office mandates, including average change in quarterly results and company stock price. Those results were compared with changes at companies without office mandates. The outcome showed the mandates made no difference. Firms with mandates did not experience financial boosts compared with those without. The sample covered 457 firms and 4,455 quarterly observations between June 2019 and January 2023... "There are compliance issues universally," said Prithwiraj Choudhury, a Harvard Business School professor who studies remote work. "Some companies are issuing veiled threats about promotions and salary increases ... which is unfortunate because this is your talent pool, your most valuable resource...." Rather than grappling with mandates as a means of boosting productivity, companies should instead focus on structuring their policies on a team basis, said Choudhury of Harvard. That means not only understanding the frequency and venue in which teams would be most productive in-person, but also ensuring that in-person days are structured for more collaboration. Requiring employees to work in-office to boost productivity in general has yet to prove itself out, he added. "Return-to-office is just a knee-jerk reaction trying to make the world go back to where it was instead of recognizing this as a point for fundamental transformation," he said. "I call them return-to-the-past mandates." The article cites US Bureau of Labor Statics showing movement in the other directionRoughly 78% of workers ages 16 and older "worked entirely on-site in December 2023, down from 81% a year earlier" — and for tech workers only 34% worked entirely on-site last month compared with 38% last year. "Still, some companies are going all in on mandates, reminding workers and sometimes threatening promotions and job security for noncompliance. Leaders are unlikely to backtrack on mandates once they have been implemented because that could be viewed as admitting they made a mistake, said Ma."

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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..."

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The Guardian reports that "Hundreds of thousands of EU citizens were wrongly fined for driving in London's Ulez clean air zone, according to European governments..." The Guardian can reveal Transport for London (TfL) has been accused by five EU countries of illegally obtaining the names and addresses of their citizens in order to issue the fines, with more than 320,000 penalties, some totalling thousands of euros, sent out since 2021... Since Brexit, the UK has been banned from automatic access to personal details of EU residents. Transport authorities in Belgium, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands have confirmed to the Guardian that driver data cannot be shared with the UK for enforcement of London's ultra-low emission zone (Ulez), and claim registered keeper details were obtained illegally by agents acting for TfL's contractor Euro Parking Collection. In France, more than 100 drivers have launched a lawsuit claiming their details were obtained fraudulently, while Dutch lorry drivers are taking legal action against TfL over £6.5m of fines they claim were issued unlawfully. According to the Belgian MP Michael Freilich, who has investigated the issue on behalf of his constituents, TfL is treating European drivers as a "cash cow" by using data obtained illegitimately to issue unjustifiable fines. Freilich describes the situation as "possibly one of the largest privacy and data breaches in EU history," according to the article. Some drivers have even received penalties of up to five-figure sums — for compliant vehicles which had simply not yet been registered. And "some low-emission cars have been misclassed as heavy goods diesel vehicles and fined under the separate low-emission zone scheme, which incurs penalties of up to £2,000 a day." Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the article.

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Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: IBM mainframes were the original onsite private cloud," begins retired software engineer Billy Newport in Is Cloud the New Mainframe? And while there were many things to like about the mainframe (including "crazy high availability numbers which today's cloud vendors can only dream of"), cost was not one of them. "As the application usage grows," Newport explains, "the bill grows and the control of the bill is largely in IBM's hands. You use more, you pay more [...] Unfortunately, while compute is elastic, budgets are not [...] Inevitably, customers try to migrate workloads from the mainframe to 'cheaper' platforms but these projects can be very expensive to do and they do fail more often than people realize." "Today's Cloud kind of looks exactly the same as the mainframe scenario," Newport warns. "Companies have rushed to get on the cloud with the cool kids. I predict many companies will try to rush to reduce cloud expenditure and will find migrating onsite to be an expensive proposition if it's even possible.

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