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How hard is your network really, comms watchdog asks telcos

TheRegister - Mon, 2023-12-11 13:03
Ofcom opens consultation on resilience requirements... power backup for mobile networks, anyone?

Britain's comms regulator is asking telecoms providers for updated guidance on how resilient their networks are, given modern society’s increasing reliance on digital services.…

Categories: Linux fréttir

With 23% of US Office Space Vacant, Some Landlords Are Defaulting on Mortgages

Slashdot - Mon, 2023-12-11 12:34
The New York Times reports: Office landlords, hit hard by the work-from-home revolution, are resorting to a desperate measure in the real estate world: "handing back the keys." When this happens, the landlord stops paying the mortgage on the office building or declines to refinance it. The bank or investors who made the loan then repossess the building... Since the pandemic began, office employees showed they could get their jobs done from home, and many have been reluctant to come back. And companies realized they could save a lot of money by renting less office space, making many office towers unprofitable for their owners and turning many business districts into ghost towns. About 23% of office space in the United States was vacant or available for sublet at the end of November, according to Avison Young, a real estate services firm, compared with 16% before the pandemic. Defaulters include "some of the biggest names in commercial real estate, like Brookfield and Blackstone," according to the article, which argues that the phenomenon "reveals both the depth of the problems in the office market and the ability of big property companies to push much of the financial pain onto others — in this case, banks and other lenders." By defaulting on their loans, the landlords avoid making any more payments (or incurring any more interest) — while saddling the banks with their depreciating building. "Big property companies can keep doing business after they default and are even considered savvy for jettisoning distressed buildings."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Categories: Linux fréttir

23andMe responds to breach with new suit-limiting user terms

TheRegister - Mon, 2023-12-11 11:46
Also: 'well-known Bay Area tech' firm's laptops stolen and check out some critical vulns

Security in brief The saga of 23andMe's mega data breach has reached something of a conclusion, with the company saying its probe has determined millions of leaked records originated from illicit break-ins into just 14,000 accounts.…

Categories: Linux fréttir

UK mulls next-gen satellite subsidies for Brit companies

TheRegister - Mon, 2023-12-11 11:00
Almost £100M in handouts available for LEO connectivity projects

UK government may subsidize Brit companies working on low Earth orbit satellite connectivity projects - the aim being to support comms for remote parts of the country and boost the domestic satellite industry.…

Categories: Linux fréttir

VictoriaMetrics takes organic growth over investor pressure

TheRegister - Mon, 2023-12-11 10:15
Keeping the lights on with an enterprise product while staying true to your roots

Interview Monitoring biz VictoriaMetrics is relatively unusual in its field. It is yet to accept external investment, preferring instead to try to grow organically rather than being forced to through a private equity meat grinder by committing to grow by X every year until the investor exits.…

Categories: Linux fréttir

How to deorbit the Chromebook... and repurpose it for innovators

TheRegister - Mon, 2023-12-11 09:30
Better than a Pi? It’s an open and shut case

Opinion Space junk grabs headlines. There's a lot of space hardware alive and dead – 9,064 objects at the time of writing according to the Orbiting Now tracker – and cleaning it up at end of life is the focus of a number of bizarrely nautical technology proposals like sails, harpoons and nets, more at home on an 18th century whaling ship than Low Earth Orbit.…

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UK's First Carbon Capture Plant Turns CO2 Into Jet Fuel

Slashdot - Mon, 2023-12-11 08:44
"The machines in the facility waft air towards a water-based solvent," reports the Times of London, "which carbon dioxide in the air dissolves into. An electrical current then separates those compounds from the solvent, creating a pure stream of CO2." More details from Sky News: The UK's first-ever direct air capture plant has been turned on to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and turn it into jet fuel. The machine, developed by Mission Zero Technologies in partnership with the University of Sheffield, will run on solar power to recover 50 tonnes of CO2 from the air per year and turn it into Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF)... Aviation accounts for about 2% of the world's emissions and Ihab Ahmed, research associate from the University of Sheffield, said the fuel has the capacity to massively reduce the impact of aviation on the environment — and is an important step towards the government's ambitious target to increase the use of SAF to at least 10% by 2030. America opened its first carbon-capture facility in November in a warehouse in California. While the carbon isn't converted into sustainable air fuel, it can capture a maximum of 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year/

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The 15-inch MacBook Air just nails it

TheRegister - Mon, 2023-12-11 08:29
Vast battery life, zippy performance, and rich speakers make an impressive package

Desktop Tourism When I speak to laptop-makers about their wares, they often admit that the benchmark in their field is the MacBook Air. Ever since its 2008 debut, Apple's minimalist portable has been the standard others aspire to match, despite changing little from the formula of a gently tapering aluminum clamshell with screens of between 11 and 13 inches.…

Categories: Linux fréttir

Enterprising techie took the bumpy road to replacing vintage hardware

TheRegister - Mon, 2023-12-11 07:29
Nice ridiculously redundant drive you've got there – what a pity if something …happened to it

Who, Me? Heavens to Betsy, dear reader, are you back again? It feels like only a week since we last met in the corner of The Register we call Who, Me? to share the schadenfreude of a fellow Regizen's misfortune.…

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Trust us, says EU, our AI Act will make AI trustworthy by banning the nasty ones

TheRegister - Mon, 2023-12-11 06:30
Big Tech plays the 'this might hurt innovation' card for rules that bar predictive policing, workplace emotion assessments

The European Union (EU) on Saturday reached provisional agreement on the AI Act – a broad legal framework limiting how artificial intelligence can be used.…

Categories: Linux fréttir

'Zombie TV': Cable Channels Left Showing Reruns as Their Owners Invest in Streaming Services

Slashdot - Mon, 2023-12-11 05:35
All those original shows on streaming services brought us "peak TV." But the New York Times reports on the flipside: back in the cable universe, they're experiencing "zombie TV": In 2015, the USA cable network was a force in original programming. Dramas like "Suits," "Mr. Robot" and "Royal Pains" either won awards or attracted big audiences. What a difference a few years make. Viewership is way down, and USA's original programming department is gone. The channel has had just one original scripted show this year, and it is not exclusive to the network — it also airs on another channel. During one 46-hour stretch last week, USA showed repeats of NBC's "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" for all but two hours, when it showed reruns of CBS' "NCIS" and "NCIS: Los Angeles." Instead of standing out among its peers, USA is emblematic of cable television's transformation. Many of the most popular channels — TBS, Comedy Central, MTV — have quickly morphed into zombie versions of their former selves. Networks that were once rich with original scripted programming are now vessels for endless marathons of reruns, along with occasional reality shows and live sports... Advertisers have begun to pull money from cable at high rates, analysts say, and leaders at cable providers have started to question what their consumers are paying for. In a dispute with Disney this year, executives who oversee the Spectrum cable service said media companies were letting their cable "programming house burn to the ground...." The media companies that own the channels are in a bind. The so-called cable bundle was enormously profitable for media companies, and more than 100 million households subscribed at the peak. But subscribers are rapidly declining as people migrate toward streaming. Now roughly 70 million households subscribe to cable. As a result, most media companies are pulling resources from their individual cable networks and directing investment toward their streaming services. Peacock, which is owned by NBCUniversal, also the parent of USA, has begun making more and more original scripted shows over the last three years. However, most streaming services are hemorrhaging cash. (An NBCUniversal executive said this week that Peacock would lose $2.8 billion this year.) Cable, although it is getting smaller, remains profitable. Media analyst Michael Nathanson believes last year was saw a "tipping point" when cable advertising decreased — by double-digit percentages — in five consecutive fiscal quarters. "Advertisers are starting to realize that there's really nothing on here and they shouldn't pay for it." One consultant who works with entertainment companies and used to run marketing at the Oxygen cable network tells the newspaper that cable channels "are being stripped for parts." The article calculates that in 2022 there were 39% fewer scripted programs on basic and premium cable than there were in 2015. "Reruns are filling the hole."

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Doom turns 30, so its creators celebrate seminal first-person shooter’s contribution to IT careers

TheRegister - Mon, 2023-12-11 05:32
And the joy of slaughtering demons as John Romero himself delivers a frag-tastic new level

Seminal first-person shooter Doom marked the thirtieth anniversary of its release on December 10, and co-creator John Romero marked the occasion by releasing new levels for the game and celebrating its role as the genesis of many IT careers.…

Categories: Linux fréttir

Raspberry Pi sizes up HAT+ spec for future hardware add-ons

TheRegister - Mon, 2023-12-11 04:01
First to wear it will be an M.2 connector that draws power from PCIe

The Raspberry Pi project has released the first revision to its Hardware Attached on Top (HAT) spec, along with an update to the RPi 5's PCIE handling tools.…

Categories: Linux fréttir

Hidden Impacts of Ferocious Volcanic Eruption Finally Revealed

Slashdot - Mon, 2023-12-11 03:01
Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared an interesting article from ScienceAlert: Undersea volcanic eruptions account for more than three-quarters of all volcanism on Earth, but rarely do we see the impacts. The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai eruption of 2022 was a dramatic exception. Its furious explosion from shallow waters broke the ocean surface and punched through the stratosphere, generating supercharged lighting and an atmospheric shock wave that circled the globe several times. But there was far more to the fallout than satellite images could possibly capture or observers could report. We know the human toll this explosion took, but now a new study investigating the underwater impacts of the Hunga-Tonga eruption has detailed just how ferociously the explosion tore open the seafloor, ripped up undersea cables, and smothered marine life... The team also compiled a trove of data from ship-based sonar, sediment cores, geochemical analyses, water column samples, and video footage to chart the devastatingly powerful upheaval... Their analyses show at least 6 cubic kilometers (km3) of seafloor was lost from within the caldera — 20 times the eruptive volume of the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption — and an additional 3.5 km3 of material was blasted out of the Hunga volcano's submerged flanks... That leaves roughly four-fifths of the ejected material in the ocean; material that was funneled into fast-moving density flows that scoured out tracks 30 meters deep in the seafloor and accumulated 22 meters (72 feet) thick in some places.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New Internet Standard L4S: the Quiet Plan to Make the Internet Feel Faster

Slashdot - Mon, 2023-12-11 02:01
Slow load times? Choppy videos? The real problem is latency, writes the Verge — but the good news is "there's a plan to almost eliminate latency, and big companies like Apple, Google, Comcast, Charter, Nvidia, Valve, Nokia, Ericsson, T-Mobile parent company Deutsche Telekom, and more have shown an interest." It's a new internet standard called L4S that was finalized and published in January, and it could put a serious dent in the amount of time we spend waiting around for webpages or streams to load and cut down on glitches in video calls. It could also help change the way we think about internet speed and help developers create applications that just aren't possible with the current realities of the internet... L4S stands for Low Latency, Low Loss, Scalable Throughput, and its goal is to make sure your packets spend as little time needlessly waiting in line as possible by reducing the need for queuing. To do this, it works on making the latency feedback loop shorter; when congestion starts happening, L4S means your devices find out about it almost immediately and can start doing something to fix the problem. Usually, that means backing off slightly on how much data they're sending... [L4S] makes it easier to maintain a good amount of data throughput without adding latency that increases the amount of time it takes for data to be transferred... If you really want to get into it (and you know a lot about networking), you can read the specification paper on the Internet Engineering Task Force's website... The L4S standard adds an indicator to packets, which says whether they experienced congestion on their journey from one device to another. If they sail right on through, there's no problem, and nothing happens. But if they have to wait in a queue for more than a specified amount of time, they get marked as having experienced congestion. That way, the devices can start making adjustments immediately to keep the congestion from getting worse and to potentially eliminate it altogether... In terms of reducing latency on the internet, L4S or something like it is "a pretty necessary thing," according to Greg White, a technologist at research and development firm CableLabs who helped work on the standard. "This buffering delay typically has been hundreds of milliseconds to even thousands of milliseconds in some cases. Some of the earlier fixes to buffer bloat brought that down into the tens of milliseconds, but L4S brings that down to single-digit milliseconds...." Here's the bad news: for the most part, L4S isn't in use in the wild yet. However, there are some big names involved with developing it... When we spoke to Greg White from CableLabs, he said there were already around 20 cable modems that support it today and that several ISPs like Comcast, Charter, and Virgin Media have participated in events meant to test how prerelease hardware and software work with L4S. Companies like Nokia, Vodafone, and Google have also attended, so there definitely seems to be some interest. Apple put an even bigger spotlight on L4S at WWDC 2023 after including beta support for it in iOS 16 and macOS Ventura... At around the same time as WWDC, Comcast announced the industry's first L4S field trials in collaboration with Apple, Nvidia, and Valve. That way, content providers can mark their traffic (like Nvidia's GeForce Now game streaming), and customers in the trial markets with compatible hardware like the Xfinity 10G Gateway XB7 / XB8, Arris S33, or Netgear CM1000v2 gateway can experience it right now... The other factor helping L4S is that it's broadly compatible with the congestion control systems in use today...

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Categories: Linux fréttir

Don't be fooled: Google faked its Gemini AI voice demo

TheRegister - Mon, 2023-12-11 01:58
PLUS: The AI companies that will use AMD's latest GPUs, and more

AI In brief Google wowed the internet with a demo video showing the multimodal capabilities of its latest large language model Gemini – but some of the the demo was faked.…

Categories: Linux fréttir

Is There a Mass Exodus of Former Silicon Valley Tech Companies From Austin, Texas?

Slashdot - Mon, 2023-12-11 00:46
"Over the years, Austin has seen a huge migration of tech companies moving to the city, from billionaire owners of Twitter (X) to the largest search engine in the world," according to a local news site in Texas. "But many startups are now choosing to leave the capital city they once flocked to because of the rising cost of living, low funding, and lack of diversity, according to TechCrunch. " On Thursday, December 7, the cloud computing company VMWare announced it was laying off 577 employees in Austin as part of a nationwide job reduction to cut costs, according to the Austin American-Statesman. TechCrunch is reporting that startup founders, like Techstars Managing Director Amos Schwartzfarb, are announcing their decisions to leave Austin's "lackluster" startup scene... In 2022, Meta abandoned plans to move into the biggest skyscraper in Austin, and Google froze plans to move into 35 floors of a different downtown building, despite paying rent to the developer, according to the Washington Post... In January, CEO Don Ward of Laundris, a B2B enterprise industrial software platform, announced he would be relocating his company to Tulsa because it reminded him "of where Austin was 10 years ago in terms of the tech ecosystem being built," according to Tulsa World. Last month, startup unicorn Cart, an e-commerce business, announced it was moving its headquarters back to Houston after relocating to Austin in late 2021, according to TechCrunch.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft hikes prices across Asia

TheRegister - Mon, 2023-12-11 00:01
PLUS: Japan Moon landing scheduled; Mastercard's APAC pay-by-face trial; Scammers feast on restaurant QR code

Microsoft last week announced price hikes for its software and services, with the biggest rises to be felt across Asia.…

Categories: Linux fréttir

Saudi-Led Fight Against COP28 Deal 'Outrageous', Shows 'Panic' Officials Say

Slashdot - Sun, 2023-12-10 22:15
"U.S. lawmakers and ministers from around the world blasted a letter that emerged Friday night, warning OPEC member states to resist calls at the COP28 climate summit for a fossil fuel phase-out," reports Axios: The letter has shaken up the climate talks in a critical phase, as nations spar over whether to include historic language in an emerging climate agreement that calls for a phase-out of fossil fuels... "OPEC's letter is outrageous. OPEC wants to talk about emissions, but not the source of the emissions," said Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), who is visiting COP28 as part of a congressional delegation. "It would be like the tobacco industry saying you can talk about lung cancer, but you can't talk about cigarettes. It's outrageous, it's preposterous," he told Axios. "The extent to which they had the nerve to write such a preposterous letter, just shows you how much in denial they still are." The letter, reportedly sent by the OPEC secretary general to all 13 member nations and 10 members of the larger OPEC+ coalition on Dec. 6, warned of the possibility of a tipping point toward a COP28 outcome containing language calling for a phase-out of fossil fuels. Reuters reports that "It was the first time OPEC's Secretariat has intervened in the U.N. climate talks with such a letter, according to Alden Meyer of the E3G climate change think tank. 'It indicates a whiff of panic,' he said." More from Politico: The full-scale resistance that oil-exporting countries are mounting against a COP28 deal to end fossil fuel use is a sign of "panic," said Germany's climate envoy... [T]o Jennifer Morgan, Germany's special envoy for international climate action, the letter was also a rare admission from the oil industry that these climate talks pose an existential threat to its business model... As the talks speed toward a close, officials are working to craft language that can get support from the nearly 200 countries participating in the process. It will be up to the UAE presidency of COP28 to attempt to find consensus. Draft text over the weekend offered several options for a pledge to "phase out" fossil fuels, all with various caveats. But several people close to the talks said that Saudi Arabia and the Arab group of negotiators have resisted such language, including storming out of one meeting room, according to one observer of the process granted anonymity to discuss the closed-door talks. "We have raised our consistent concerns with attempts to attack energy sources instead of emissions," Saudi Arabia's Albara Tawfiq said during Sunday's public session. The Guardian adds that "there is some optimism coming from the discussions." Catherine Abreu, the executive director of Destination Zero, said: "In eight years of attending climate talks, I have never felt more that we were talking about what really matters. Hearing ministers from all around the world talk straight about the realities of phasing out fossil fuels is something I could not have imagined happening in this process even two years ago. "What's clear after this Majlis dialogue at Cop28 is that there is overwhelming consensus that phasing out fossil fuels and scaling up renewable energy is absolutely necessary to hold to the promise of the Paris Agreement and keep the hope of 1.5 alive.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mystery of the Missing ISS Tomato Finally Solved

Slashdot - Sun, 2023-12-10 21:15
"A tomato lost for eight months on the orbiting lab has been located, " reports Gizmodo, "absolving astronaut Frank Rubio of playful allegations that he ate it." NASA's Veg-05 experiment, a project focusing on growing fruits and vegetables in space, experienced an unusual turn of events when a Red Robin dwarf tomato vanished shortly after being harvested in March. This tomato, part of a study to explore the feasibility of continuous fresh-food production in space, was finally found, NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli revealed during a livestream on December 6... The Veg-05 project expanded the scope of in-space farming to include dwarf tomatoes, exploring how lighting and fertilizer variations influence fruit growth, safety, and nutritional value (and yes, tomatoes are fruits, not vegetables)... Following the harvest in March, each astronaut received a tomato sample stored in a Ziploc bag. However, concerns about potential fungal contamination led NASA to instruct the astronauts not to consume the fruit, as Space.com reported. News of the missing tomato first emerged on September 13, during an event commemorating Rubio's one-year stay in orbit. Rubio, who had an extended mission on the ISS due to a malfunctioning Russian Soyuz spacecraft, lamented the loss of his tomato share, which had floated away before he could take a bite. Rubio, who spent a record 371 days in space, mused about the missing tomato, saying: "I spent so many hours looking for that thing. I'm sure the desiccated tomato will show up at some point and vindicate me, years in the future." In the livestream Moghbeli "did not specify where on the 356-foot space station the one-inch-wide red dwarf tomato was located," notes the Guardian, "or in what condition." The Rubio tomato turned out to be one of only 12 red dwarves successfully germinated and grown to ripeness in space during the Veg-05 project, compared with more than 100 in a parallel experiment conducted on Earth, according to NASA. Thanks to Slashdot reader christoban for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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