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Hyundai Motor and LG Energy have announced they will build a $4.3 billion electric battery plant as part of Hyundai's new electric vehicle assembly plant in southeast Georgia. From a report: The companies will split the investment, starting production as soon as late 2025. Hyundai Motor CEO Jaehoon Chang said in a statement that the battery plant would "create a strong foundation to lead the global EV transition," explaining the company wants to speed up efforts to produce electrified Hyundai and Kia vehicles in North America. "Hyundai Motor Group is focusing on its electrification efforts to secure a leadership position in the global auto industry," Chang said. The South Korean automaker said in 2022 it would invest $5.5 billion to assemble electric vehicles and batteries in Ellabell, just west of Savannah. The site is supposed to have 8,100 employees and is slated to begin producing vehicles in 2025.

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Firefox users have been complaining about very intrusive full-screen advertisements promoting Mozilla VPN displayed in the web browser when navigating an unrelated page. From a report: The ads popping in Firefox disable the web browser's functionality, denying users access to the interface and graying out everything in the background until they close them. Some users reported on Reddit that the annoying full-screen ads even cause Firefox to become unresponsive for up to 30 seconds, forcing them to terminate the browser's process. [...] BleepingComputer has contacted Mozilla about the matter and received the following statement following the barrage of complaints from Firefox users: "We're continuously working to understand the best ways to communicate with people who use Firefox. Ultimately, we accomplished the exact opposite of what we intended in this experiment and quickly rolled the experience back. We apologize for any confusion or concern."

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Commerce Secretary Raimondo asks WTF is going on with the Micron ban

The US and China appear to be trying to calm fraught relations over semiconductors as Chinese vendors reportedly drop orders for Micron memory components in line with Beijing's ban.…

Ford CEO Jim Farley said Tesla's Superchargers may become the standard for EV charging in the U.S., a day after the Michigan-based company struck a deal allowing Ford owners to gain access to the rival charging stations in North America. From a report: "I think there's a chance you know," Farley said on Friday in response to a question on CNBC on whether Tesla Superchargers will become the standard for EV charging. Farley told CNBC that General Motors and other automakers are going to "have a big choice to make" in selecting between Tesla's EV chargers and the Combined Charging System (CCS). CCS is one of several competing charging plug standards for DC fast charging. "The CCS standard plays a crucial role in establishing an extensive network of fast charging stations across North America," General Motors said. Since 2012, Tesla has developed and deployed its own high-speed vehicle charger, called Supercharger, which can add up to 322 miles (518 km) of range in just 15 minutes. Farley told CNBC on Friday that Ford had about 10,000 fast chargers and the agreement with Tesla will "double that."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon's No. 1 bestselling printer is the HP Deskjet 2755e. It's not hard to see why. For just $85, you get a wireless color printer, scanner, and six months of free ink. It also comes with HP Plus, one of the most dastardly schemes Big Inkjet has ever unleashed. I'm not talking about how printers quietly waste their own ink, or pretend cartridges are empty when they're not, or lock out official cartridges from other regions. Heck, I'm not even talking about "Dynamic Security," the delightful feature where new HP firmware updates secretly contain malware that blocks batches of third-party cartridges while pretending to harden your printhead against hacks. No, the genius of HP's latest scheme is that it's hiding in plain sight, daring you to unwittingly sign away your rights. Take the free ink, and HP controls your printer for life. First introduced in 2020 at the height of the pandemic, HP Plus was built around FOMO right from the start. You get just seven days to claim your free ink, starting the moment you plug a new printer into the wall. Act now, and it'll also extend your warranty a full year, give you an "Advanced HP Smart app," and plant trees on your behalf. Because why wouldn't you want to save the forest? Here's one reason, as detailed in a new complaint by the International Imaging Technology Council (IITC) that might turn into a false advertising fight: HP Plus comes with a firmware update that utterly removes your printer's ability to accept third-party ink. You have to buy "genuine" HP ink as long as you use the printer.

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Once it knows how to stop, anyway

Remember when the European Commission and the UK started investigating Meta on the suspicion it was helping itself to rivals' data and using it to build its own products, including Facebook Marketplace?…

Liam Proven, reporting for The Register: Over 21 years after it first came out, the Microsoft operating system that will not die is receiving another lease of life. It's possible to activate new installations, safely and securely, without a crack, off line. A blog post on tinyapps has revealed the hot news that nobody sane has been waiting for: the algorithm that Microsoft uses to validate Windows XP product keys has been cracked and reimplemented. As a result it's now possible to generate valid activation codes for Windows XP, without an internet connection, even though Microsoft has turned off all the activation servers. This is not a recommendation But first, a word of caution and restraint. Please don't take this article as a recommendation to run Windows XP. It wasn't the most secure of operating systems back in 2001, and you really should not be running it in 2023 -- especially not on anything that is connected to the internet. However, saying that, the problem is that sometimes people need to. There is, for example, hardware out there that only works with Windows XP and won't work with anything newer... and some of it might be very expensive hardware, which is still perfectly functional -- but which requires a long-obsolete version of Windows to operate it. If you are lumbered with such a device, or you have got some single specific and very particular piece of software that you need to run and which doesn't work properly on any newer version of Windows, then you may be forced to use XP. If so, one of the problems is that Microsoft has turned off the activation servers, so even if you install clean fresh copy, you can no longer activate it over the Internet. (Allegedly, the telephone activation service still works, if that's an option for you.)

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Portugal has banned companies from 'high-risk' countries and jurisdictions from supplying equipment for its fifth-generation phone network, becoming the latest western nation to effectively block China's Huawei from its market. From a report: The country will prohibit the use of equipment in its 5G wireless network from suppliers based outside the European Union or from states that don't belong to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, according to a government statement posted online Thursday.

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Take that, Acinetobacter baumannii! You may hide on hospital doorknobs but you can't outrun binary brainboxes

Neural networks have helped scientists to develop an antibiotic capable of fighting a highly resistant superbug commonly found in hospitals.…

Britain's competition watchdog on Friday said social media giant Meta had offered to limit its use of other businesses' advertising data for its Facebook Marketplace service to address the regulator's competition concerns. From a report: The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it was minded to accept the commitments, which include advertisers being able to opt out of allowing their data to be used to improve the Facebook Marketplace classified ads platform. CMA executive director of enforcement Michael Grenfell said: "Reducing the risk of Meta unfairly exploiting the data of businesses who advertise on its platform for its own competitive advantage could help many UK businesses who advertise there. We are now consulting on these commitments which we believe, at this stage, will address our concerns."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Bcrypt turns 25 this year, and Niels Provos, one of its coinventors, says that looking back, the algorithm has always had good energy, thanks to its open source availability and the technical characteristics that have fueled its longevity. Provos spoke to WIRED about a retrospective on the algorithm that he published this week in Usenix ;login:. Like so many digital workhorses, though, there are now more robust and secure alternatives to bcrypt, including the hashing algorithms known as scrypt and Argon2. Provos himself says that the quarter-century milestone is plenty for bcrypt and that he hopes it will lose popularity before celebrating another major birthday. A version of bcrypt first shipped with the open source operating system OpenBSD 2.1 in June 1997. At the time, the United States still imposed stringent export limits on cryptography. But Provos, who grew up in Germany, worked on its development while he was still living and studying there. "One thing I found so surprising was how popular it became," he says. "I think in part it's probably because it was actually solving a problem that was real, but also because it was open source and not encumbered by any export restrictions. And then everybody ended up doing their own implementations in all these other languages. So these days, if you are faced with wanting to do password hashing, bcrypt is going to be available in every language that you could possibly operate in. But the other thing that I find interesting is that it's even still relevant 25 years later. That is just crazy." Provos developed bcrypt with David Mazieres, a systems security professor at Stanford University who was studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he and Provos collaborated on bcrypt. The two met through the open source community and were working on OpenBSD. [...] Password security is always lagging, though, and both Provos and Mazieres expressed disbelief and disappointment that the state of passwords broadly has not evolved in decades. Even new schemes like passkeys are only just beginning to emerge. "Bcrypt should have been superseded already," Provos says. "It's surprising how much reliance we still have on passwords. If you had asked me 25 years ago, I would not have guessed that."

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Quango tax blunder follows similar payments from Defra and MoJ

UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) has been hit with a £36 million ($44.5 million) bill after miscalculating tax it owed on the country's controversial off-payroll working setup, IR35.…

Says it'll keep track of what it hoovers up at post-layoff summit

Opinion In Red Hat land, some things remain the same – Fedora will still be supported, we're told – while others, AI-driven applications, are starting to surface.…

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), investment in clean energy is set to surpass spending on fossil fuels in 2023, with solar projects expected to outpace oil production for the first time. Reuters reports: Annual investment in renewable energy is up by nearly a quarter since 2021 compared to a 15% rise for fossil fuels, the Paris-based energy watchdog said in its World Energy Investment report. Around 90% of that clean energy spending comes from advanced economies and China, however, highlighting the global divide between rich and poor countries as fossil fuel investment is still double the levels needed to reach net-zero emissions by mid-century. Around $2.8 trillion is set to be invested in energy worldwide in 2023, of which more than $1.7 trillion is expected to go to renewables, nuclear power, electric vehicles, and efficiency improvements. The rest, or around $1 trillion, will go to oil, gas and coal, demand for the last of which will reach an all-time high or six times the level needed in 2030 to reach net zero by 2050. Current fossil fuel spending is significantly higher than what it should be to reach the goal of net zero by mid-century, the agency said. In 2023, solar power spending is due to hit more than $1 billion a day or $382 billion for the year, while investment in oil production will stand at $371 billion. Investment in new fossil fuel supply will rise by 6% in 2023 to $950 billion, the IEA added.

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The unkillable OS rises from the grave… Again

Over 21 years after it first came out, the Microsoft operating system that will not die is receiving another lease of life. It's possible to activate new installations, safely and securely, without a crack, off line.…

When all seemed lost, here comes the Sun … workstation

On Call Reg readers in the US and UK are about to enjoy long weekends – perfect occasions, and timing, for a spot of spring cleaning. But as we discover in this week's edition of On-Call, our weekly reader-contributed tale of tech support traumas, that might be one chore it's wisest to set aside.…

"Researchers have induced hibernation in a non-hibernating species (rats) with ultrasound, indicating the potential to do the same in humans with applications for medical trauma and spaceflight," writes longtime Slashdot reader Baron_Yam. The research has been published in the journal Nature Metabolism. From a report: "Ultrasound is the only available energy form that can noninvasively focus on any location within the brain with high precision and without ionizing radiation," Hong Chen, a medical ultrasound researcher at Washington University in St. Louis and co-author of the paper, told The Daily Beast in an email. "We were curious whether ultrasound could noninvasively turn on the switch to induce the torpor-like state" Torpor is a state in which mammals reduce their metabolism and body temperature, and essentially slows down their entire system in order to conserve as much energy as possible. The authors write that the state is controlled by the central nervous system. So the idea goes that targeting the hypothalamus, which controls the nervous system, could potentially induce hibernation. It should be noted that while mice enter such a state during periods of extreme cold, rats do not. The team developed an ultrasound emitter and mounted them on the heads of mice. They then triggered 10-second pulses of ultrasound on the hypothalamus, which caused an immediate drop in the creatures' body temperature by an average of 6 degrees Fahrenheit, heart rate, and oxygen consumption. The team was also able to automate their device so it would blast the mices' brains with ultrasound whenever their body temperature rose, allowing them to safely maintain the torpor-like state for up to 24 hours. Within two hours after the experiment, the animals were able to fully recover. The study's authors were also able to replicate the experiment in rats -- another creature that doesn't hibernate -- for up to 12 hours and found similar results. However, the rats' body temperature dropped by an average 2 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit instead of 6, which is partly due to the fact that they don't naturally hibernate. However, it does show that they can entire a torpor-like state with the right technique. Of course, further research is needed to determine whether it's effective on humans. Chen added that the team hopes to eventually move the technique to human trials. They might be able to prove that blasting ultrasound on the brain is a great way to get us to rest like the bears do.

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Pioneering research effectively reconnects patient's motor cortex with his spinal cord

Comment A paper in Nature reveals how a brain implant and computer-controlled prosthetic helped a paraplegic man in his recovery from a partially severed spinal cord.…

0°C×9/5+32 = how much money to thaw frozen crypto accounts?

New Jersey-based cryptocurrency lender Celsius Network has announced it will be bought by a consortium called Fahrenheit.…

Big semiconductor R&D strategy in the works, too

India's IT minister has started teasing the content of the nation’s long-awaited law covering all things digital.…