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In a year when average air temperatures consistently breached the 1.5C warming threshold, global COâ-equivalent emissions from energy rose by 1%, marking yet another record, the fourth in as many years. From a report: Wind and solar energy alone expanded by an impressive 16% in 2024, nine times faster than total energy demand. Yet this growth did not fully counterbalance rising demand elsewhere, with total fossil fuel use growing by just over 1%, highlighting a transition defined as much by disorder as by progress. Crude oil demand in OECD countries remained flat, following a slight decline in the previous year. In contrast, non-OECD countries, where much of the world's energy demand growth is concentrated and fossil fuels continue to play a dominant role, saw oil demand rise by 1%. Notably, Chinese crude oil demand fell in 2024 by 1.2%, indicating that 2023 may have reached a peak. Elsewhere, global natural gas demand rebounded, rising by 2.5% as gas markets rebalanced after the 2023 slump. India's demand for coal rose 4% in 2024 and now equals that of the CIS, Southern and Central America, North America, and Europe combined.

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When AI is a nesting doll of networks, so why reinvent the wheel when you can license it instead

feature GPUs dominate the conversation when it comes to AI infrastructure. But while they're an essential piece of the puzzle, it's the interconnect fabrics that allow us to harness them to train and run multi-trillion-parameter models at scale.…

Germany's data protection commissioner has urged Apple and Google to remove Chinese AI startup DeepSeek from their app stores due to concerns about data protection. Reuters reports: Commissioner Meike Kamp said in a statement on Friday that she had made the request because DeepSeek illegally transfers users' personal data to China. The two U.S. tech giants must now review the request promptly and decide whether to block the app in Germany, she added, though her office has not set a precise timeframe. According to its own privacy policy, DeepSeek stores numerous pieces of personal data, such as requests to its AI program or uploaded files, on computers in China. "DeepSeek has not been able to provide my agency with convincing evidence that German users' data is protected in China to a level equivalent to that in the European Union," [Commissioner Meike Kamp] said. "Chinese authorities have far-reaching access rights to personal data within the sphere of influence of Chinese companies," she added. The commissioner said she took the decision after asking DeepSeek in May to meet the requirements for non-EU data transfers or else voluntarily withdraw its app. DeepSeek did not comply with this request, she added.

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'Memory vulnerabilities pose serious risks to national security and critical infrastructure,' say CISA and NSA

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) this week published guidance urging software developers to adopt memory-safe programming languages.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Canada is proceeding with its digital services tax on technology companies such as Meta despite a Group of Seven agreement that resulted in removing the Section 899 "revenge tax" proposal from U.S. President Donald Trump's tax bill. The first payment for Canada's digital tax is still due Monday, the country's Finance Department confirmed, and covers revenue retroactively to 2022. The tax is three percent of the digital services revenue a firm makes from Canadian users above $20 million in a calendar year. Keeping the digital tax will not affect the G7 agreement, which focuses on global minimum taxes, the Finance Department said. The Section 899 provision would have targeted companies and investors from countries that the U.S. determines are unfairly taxing American companies. [...] Finance Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne suggested to reporters last week that the digital tax may be negotiated as part of broader, ongoing U.S.-Canada trade discussions. "Obviously all of that is something that we're considering as part of broader discussions that you may have," he said. Business groups in the country have opposed the tax since it was announced, arguing it would increase the cost of digital services and invite retaliation from the U.S. It also raised the ire of U.S. businesses and lawmakers. A group of 21 members of U.S. Congress wrote to Trump earlier this month asking him to push for the tax's removal, estimating the June 30 payment will cost U.S. companies $2 billion. Before scrapping its digital services tax, Canada wants to see an OECD deal on policies that expand a country's authority to tax profits earned within that country even if a company doesn't have a physical location there -- which is different from a global minimum tax. Earlier today, President Trump said the U.S. is immediately ending trade talks with Canada in response to the tax, calling it a "direct and blatant attack on our country." "Based on this egregious Tax, we are hereby terminating ALL discussions on Trade with Canada, effective immediately," Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. "We will let Canada know the Tariff that they will be paying to do business with the United States of America within the next seven day period."

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AI will make 'significant changes' to economy, labor market

It may not happen today or even tomorrow, but US Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell is confident that someday soon AI is going to seriously change the US economy and labor market. …

The AI boom needs power, and startup The Nuclear Company aims to help build

Palantir has become the latest tech company to jump on the nuclear power bandwagon - not by making a datacenter deal like Microsoft or Amazon, mind you, but by providing its data analytics software to a startup aiming to help build nuclear plants faster and cheaper.…

Now play dead, like a lot of NASA science programs if the White House gets its way

The team behind NASA's 19-year-old Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been busy teaching an old spacecraft new tricks, persuading the vehicle to perform a 120-degree roll to peer more clearly into the red planet.…

Android 16 will include a new security feature that warns users when their phones connect to fake cell towers designed for surveillance. The "network notification" setting alerts users when devices connect to unencrypted networks or when networks request phone identifiers, helping protect against "stingray" devices that mimic legitimate cell towers to collect data and force phones onto insecure communication protocols.

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Getting it in might mean re-racking the entire datacenter and rebuilding the network, though

Cisco is talking up the integration of security into network infrastructure such as its latest Catalyst switches, claiming this is vital to AI applications, and in particular the current vogue for "agentic AI."…

The Supreme Court ruled Friday that the FCC's Universal Service Fund can continue operating, rejecting claims that the program's funding mechanism violates the Constitution. In a 6-3 decision written by Justice Elena Kagan, the court found that Congress did not exceed its authority when it enacted the 1996 law establishing the fund and that the FCC could delegate administration to a private corporation. The Universal Service Fund subsidizes telecommunications services for low-income consumers, rural health care providers, schools and libraries through fees generally passed on to customers that raise billions of dollars annually. The program is administered by the Universal Service Administrative Company, a nonprofit the FCC designated to run the fund. Conservative advocacy group Consumers' Research challenged the structure, arguing that "a private company is taxing Americans in amounts that total billions of dollars every year, under penalty of law, without true governmental accountability." The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Consumers' Research, prompting the FCC to petition the Supreme Court for review. Kagan wrote that Congress "sufficiently guided and constrained the discretion that it lodged with the FCC to implement the universal-service contribution scheme," adding that the FCC "retained all decision-making authority within that sphere." She concluded that "nothing in those arrangements, either separately or together, violates the Constitution." The challengers argued the program violates the "nondelegation doctrine," a conservative legal theory that says Congress has limited powers to delegate its lawmaking authority to the executive branch.

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'No impact on safety,' FAA tells The Reg

Hawaiian Airlines said a "cybersecurity incident" affected some of its IT systems, but noted that flights are operating as scheduled.…

Brazil's supreme court has ruled that social media platforms can be held legally responsible for their users' posts. From a report: Companies such as Facebook, TikTok and X will have to act immediately to remove material such as hate speech, incitement to violence or "anti-democratic acts," even without a prior judicial takedown order, as a result of the decision in Latin America's largest nation late on Thursday.

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No replacement in the wings for info streamed from past their prime rigs, 'termination will be permanent'

Satellite data used for hurricane forecasting is to be abruptly cut off from the end of June due to "recent service changes."…

theodp writes: FWD.us, the immigration and criminal justice-focused nonprofit of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg -- the world's third richest person, according to Forbes with an estimated $250B net worth -- has released a new research report warning that announced immigration policies will hurt American families, who can't afford it with their meager savings. The report begins: "Inflation remains a top concern for the majority of Americans. But new immigration policies announced by President Trump, and already underway, such as revoking immigrant work permits, deporting millions of people, and limiting legal immigration, would directly undermine the goal to level out, or even lower, the costs of everyday and essential goods and services. In fact, all Americans, particularly working-class families, are about to unnecessarily see prices for goods and services like food and housing increase substantially again, above and beyond other economic policies like global tariffs that could also raise prices. Announced immigration policies will result in American families paying an additional $2,150 for goods and services each year by the end of 2028, or the equivalent of the average American family's grocery bill for 3 months or their combined electricity and gas bills for the entire year. Such an annual increase would represent a tax that would erase many American families' annual savings, and amount to one of their bi-weekly paychecks each year. Unlike past periods of inflation, Americans have not been saving at the same rate as earlier years, and can't as easily absorb these price increases, squeezing American budgets even further." In 2021, Zuckerberg's FWD.us teamed with the nation's tech giants to file a brief with the Supreme Court case to help crush WashTech (a tiny programmers' union), who challenged the lawfulness of hiring international students under the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program. "Striking down OPT and STEM OPT," FWD.us and its tech giant partners argued in their filing, [PDF] "would create a sudden labor shortage in the United States for many companies' most important technical jobs" and "hurt U.S. workers." The brief also dismissed WashTech's contention that the programs coupled with a talent surplus would shut U.S. workers out of the labor market, citing Microsoft's President Brad Smith's claim of an acute talent shortage and a 2.4% unemployment rate for computer occupations (that was then, this is now).

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Pen Test Partners hijack data from Renault Clio to steer, brake, and accelerate in SuperTuxKart

Cybersecurity nerds figured out a way to make those at-home racing simulators even more realistic by turning an actual car into a game controller.…

A new study challenges previous research about which sleep stages help people achieve breakthrough moments in problem-solving. Researchers found that N2 sleep, a deeper stage of non-REM sleep, significantly increased participants' likelihood of experiencing sudden insights during a perceptual task. The preregistered study involved 90 participants who performed a visual pattern recognition task before and after a 20-minute daytime nap while researchers monitored their brain activity with EEG. Participants who reached N2 sleep showed an 85.7% rate of achieving insights about a hidden strategy in the task, compared to 63.6% for those who only reached N1 sleep (the first stage of non-rapid eye movement sleep) and 55.5% for participants who remained awake. The findings contradict earlier work by Lacaux and colleagues, which suggested that lighter N1 sleep promoted insight while deeper sleep hindered it. News coverage: Stuck on a problem? Take a nap!

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Eight nations have surpassed 50% IPv6 deployment since June 2024, bringing the total number of countries in the majority IPv6 club to 21, according to the Internet Society. Brazil, Guatemala, Hungary, Japan, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Sri Lanka, and Tuvalu all crossed the threshold over the past year. Tuvalu's adoption coincided with the arrival of Elon Musk's Starlink satellite broadband service, which operates as IPv6-only. The Internet Society's Pulse platform found no IPv6 deployment in the Pacific nation in June 2024, but Starlink now holds 88% market share there and 59% of Tuvalu's internet connections use IPv6. France moved from third place to tie with India for the global lead at 73% IPv6 deployment. Japan rebounded from 49% to 55%, returning to the 50% club after dropping below the mark in mid-2024. Puerto Rico climbed from 49% to 53%. Thailand appears positioned to join next at 49% deployment, followed by Estonia at 46% and the United Kingdom at 45%.

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When it was all about the baud rate

The world of datacenter networking is crammed with exotic technology and capabilities beyond the imaginings of administrators charged with running big iron decades ago. However, while it might have been a slower and more proprietary time, it was also perhaps a little simpler.…

36% of all Chinese undergraduate entrants -- about 1.6 million people -- selected engineering degrees in 2022 (the latest year for which data are available), up from 32% in 2010, according to data from China's Ministry of Education. In Britain and America, which have far fewer students to start with, the proportion hovers around 5%. The surge comes as China's government directs universities to focus on strategic industries and technological bottlenecks. Over 600 Chinese universities now offer undergraduate programs in artificial intelligence, a field the Communist Party vows to dominate by 2030. In 2023, officials started telling universities to overhaul their degree programs, and the education ministry announced an "emergency mechanism" to create degrees more quickly to meet "national priorities." Over half of China's young people now complete some form of higher education through 3,000-odd institutions. Youth unemployment reached 14.9% in May, driving students toward technical fields they believe offer better job prospects.

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