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Electricity demand is set to increase sharply in the coming years as people around the world use more power to run air conditioners, industry and a growing fleet of data centers. From a report: Over the next three years, global electricity consumption is set to rise by an "unprecedented" 3,500 terawatt hours, according to a report by the International Energy Agency. That's an addition each year of more than Japan's annual electricity consumption. The roughly 4% annual growth in that period is the fastest such rate in years, underscoring the growing importance of electricity to the world's overall energy needs. "The acceleration of global electricity demand highlights the significant changes taking place in energy systems around the world and the approach of a new Age of Electricity," Keisuke Sadamori, IEA's director of energy markets and security, said in a statement. "But it also presents evolving challenges for governments in ensuring secure, affordable and sustainable electricity supply."

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Western Digital plans to introduce its first heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) drives in late 2026, with 36TB conventional magnetic recording (CMR) and 44TB shingled UltraSMR variants. Volume production won't begin until the first half of 2027, following qualification by cloud data center providers in late 2026. The company projects that HAMR technology, combined with OptiNAND, increased platter count, and mechanical improvements, will enable drives reaching 80TB CMR and 100TB UltraSMR capacities around 2030 -- a departure from Western Digital's previous commitment to microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) in 2017, which evolved into the energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR) technology used in current drives.

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And it's not just datacenters driving the need for 3,500 TWh of new energy generation by 2027

The world is going to need a lot of new electricity generation in the next three years to keep up with an "unprecedented" spike in demand, says the International Energy Agency (IEA) – and it's going to be a tough goal to meet. …

A hedge fund startup that uses AI to do work typically handled by analysts has outperformed the global stock market in its first six months while slashing research costs. From a report: The Sydney-based firm, Minotaur Capital, was founded by Armina Rosenberg and Thomas Rice. Rosenberg previously managed a global equities portfolio for tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes and ran Australian small-company research for JPMorgan Chase & Co. when she was 25. Rice is a former portfolio manager at Perpetual. The duo's bets on global stocks returned 13.7% in the six months ending January, versus 6.7% for the MSCI All-Country World Index. Minotaur has no analysts on staff, with Rosenberg saying AI models are far quicker and cheaper. "We're looking at about half the price" in terms of cost of AI versus a junior analyst salary, Rosenberg, 37, said of the firm's program. Minotaur is among a growing number of hedge funds experimenting with ways to improve returns and cut expenses with AI as the technology becomes increasingly sophisticated. Still, the jury is still out on the ability of AI-driven models to deliver superior returns over the long run.

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Hector Martin has resigned as the project lead of Asahi Linux, weeks after stepping down from his role as a Linux kernel maintainer for Apple ARM support. His departure from Asahi follows a contentious exchange with Linus Torvalds over development processes and social media advocacy. After quitting kernel maintenance earlier this month, the conflict escalated when Martin suggested that "shaming on social media" might be necessary to effect change. Torvalds sharply rejected this approach, stating that "social media brigading just makes me not want to have anything at all to do with your approach" and suggested that Martin himself might be the problem. In his final resignation announcement from Asahi, Martin wrote: "I no longer have any faith left in the kernel development process or community management approach." The dispute reflects deeper tensions in the Linux kernel community, particularly around the integration of Rust code. It follows the August departure of another key Rust for Linux maintainer, Wedson Almeida Filho from Microsoft. According to Sonatype's research, more than 300,000 open source projects have slowed or halted updates since 2020.

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China issued guidelines on Friday to promote biotech cultivation, focusing on gene-editing tools and developing new wheat, corn, and soybean varieties, as part of efforts to ensure food security and boost agriculture technology. From a report: The 2024-2028 plan aims to achieve "independent and controllable" seed sources for key crops, with a focus to cultivate high-yield, multi-resistant wheat, corn and high-oil, high-yield soybean and rapeseed varieties. The move comes as China intensifies efforts to boost domestic yields of key crops like soybeans to reduce reliance on imports from countries such as the United States amid a looming trade war.

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Cloud-based revival should come with 'a corresponding discount scale,' customers say

SAP users have asked for transparent discounting and commercial arrangements following the business app giant's relaunch of Business Suite and extended alliance with Databricks.…

The owners of the multibillion-pound James Bond franchise are embroiled in a fight to keep control of the super spy's name, after a Dubai-based property developer filed claims in the UK and Europe that they are not using the trademark across a range of goods and services. From a report: The Austrian businessman Josef Kleindienst, who is building a $5 billion luxury resort complex called the Heart of Europe on six human-made islands just off the coast of Dubai, has filed a slew of what are known officially as "cancellation actions based on non-use" targeting the James Bond name. Under UK and EU law, if a name is trademarked against certain goods and services but the owner does not commercially exploit it in these areas for a period of at least five years then a challenge to revoke ownership of the name can be made. "He is challenging a number of UK and European Union trademark registrations for James Bond," said Mark Caddle, a partner and patent attorney at European intellectual property firm Withers & Rogers. "The basis of the European Union filings is that James Bond has not been used for the goods and services it protects, and that is likely to be the same basis of the filings in the UK."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Reddit is planning to introduce a paywall this year, CEO Steve Huffman said during a videotaped Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on Thursday. Huffman previously showed interest in potentially introducing a new type of subreddit with "exclusive content or private areas" that Reddit users would pay to access. When asked this week about plans for some Redditors to create "content that only paid members can see," Huffman said: "It's a work in progress right now, so that one's coming... We're working on it as we speak." When asked about "new, key features that you plan to roll out for Reddit in 2025," Huffman responded, in part: "Paid subreddits, yes."

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Dominion Energy already eyeing another 26 GW worth of datacenter demand

Demand for electricity from datacenters in Virginia nearly doubled in the second half of 2024, power supplier Dominion Energy said of the region, which is home to "Datacenter Alley".…

More than $1 trillion in value remains locked in venture-backed startups with dwindling prospects as the Silicon Valley unicorn bubble deflates, according to a new Bloomberg Businessweek report. Of the 354 companies that reached billion-dollar valuations in 2021, only six have completed initial public offerings, Stanford Business School professor Ilya Strebulaev said. Four others went public via SPACs and 10 were acquired, some below their unicorn status. Several prominent startups have already collapsed, including indoor farming firm Bowery Farming and AI healthcare company Forward Health. Freight business Convoy, valued at $3.8 billion in 2022, shut down last year with rival Flexport buying its assets at a steep discount.

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The hurdles are higher than you might imagine

FOSDEM 2025 Getting involved with open source projects is a great way to build experience in development, documentation, internationalization, and more – but it's not as easy as it should be.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: How many YouTube videos are there? What are they about? What languages do YouTubers speak? As of 14 February 2025, the platform's will have been running for 20 years. That is a lot of video. Yet we have no idea just how many there really are. Google knows the answers. It just won't tell you. Experts say that's a problem. For all practical purposes, one of the most powerful communication systems ever created -- a tool that provides a third of the world's population with information and ideas -- is operating in the dark. In part that's because there's no easy way to get a random sampling of videos, according to Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in the US. You can pick your videos manually or go with the algorithm's recommendations, but an unbiased selection that's worthy of real study is hard to come by. A few years ago, however, Zuckerman and his team of researchers came up with a solution: they designed a computer program that pulls up YouTube videos at random, trying billions of URLs at a time. You might call the tool a bot, but that's probably over selling it, Zuckerman says. "A more technically accurate term would be 'scraper'," he says. The scraper's findings are giving us a first-time perspective on what's actually happening on YouTube. [...] The first question was simple. How many videos have people uploaded to YouTube? [...] Zuckerman and his colleagues compared the number of videos they found to the number of guesses it took, and arrived an estimate: in 2022, they calculated that YouTube housed more than nine billion videos. By mid 2024, that number had grown to 14.8 billion videos, a 60% jump.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: As always, the most important Nvidia graphics card is the one you can actually buy, and Nvidia's talked a big game for its RTX 5070, making the dubious but nuanced claim it can deliver RTX 4090 performance for just $549. On February 28th, AMD will get its chance to intercept with the Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT, in a streaming event it just announced today. But Nvidia has now made its own wiggle room, delaying the launch of the RTX 5070 from February to March 5th, its product page reveals today. Nvidia will ship its $749 RTX 5070 Ti ahead of AMD's event, though, on February 20th, a week from today.

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High-complexity bug unearthed by infoseccers, as Rapid7 probes exploit further

A high-severity SQL injection bug in the PostgreSQL interactive tool was exploited alongside the zero-day used to break into the US Treasury in December, researchers say.…

AI startups are poised to disrupt the $300 billion business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, as advances in language models and voice technology enable automation of tasks traditionally handled by human workers. The BPO market, which reached $300 billion in 2024 and is projected to hit $525 billion by 2030, faces mounting pressure from AI companies offering faster, more scalable alternatives to manual processing of customer support, IT services and financial claims, venture capital firm a16z wrote in a thesis post. Early AI implementations have shown promising results, with customer service startup Decagon reporting 80% resolution rates and improved satisfaction scores. In healthcare, AI company Juniper said its clients saw 80% fewer insurance claim denials and 50% faster processing times. Major BPO providers are responding to the threat, with Wipro reporting a 140% increase in AI adoption across projects and Infosys deploying over 100 AI agents. However, industry analysts say BPOs face structural challenges in transitioning from their labor-based business model to AI-first operations. The shift threatens traditional BPO companies like Cognizant, Infosys and Wipro, which reported revenues between $10-20 billion in their latest fiscal years.

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The Cupola continues to offer the best views in the universe

It has been 15 years since the ultimate selfie booth, the Cupola, was attached to the International Space Station (ISS).…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The U.K. government wants to make a hard pivot into boosting its economy and industry with AI, and as part of that, it's pivoting an institution that it founded a little over a year ago for a very different purpose. Today the Department of Science, Industry and Technology announced that it would be renaming the AI Safety Institute to the "AI Security Institute." (Same first letters: same URL.) With that, the body will shift from primarily exploring areas like existential risk and bias in large language models, to a focus on cybersecurity, specifically "strengthening protections against the risks AI poses to national security and crime." Alongside this, the government also announced a new partnership with Anthropic. No firm services were announced but the MOU indicates the two will "explore" using Anthropic's AI assistant Claude in public services; and Anthropic will aim to contribute to work in scientific research and economic modeling. And at the AI Security Institute, it will provide tools to evaluate AI capabilities in the context of identifying security risks. [...] Anthropic is the only company being announced today -- coinciding with a week of AI activities in Munich and Paris -- but it's not the only one that is working with the government. A series of new tools that were unveiled in January were all powered by OpenAI. (At the time, Peter Kyle, the secretary of state for Technology, said that the government planned to work with various foundational AI companies, and that is what the Anthropic deal is proving out.) "The changes I'm announcing today represent the logical next step in how we approach responsible AI development -- helping us to unleash AI and grow the economy as part of our Plan for Change," Kyle said in a statement. "The work of the AI Security Institute won't change, but this renewed focus will ensure our citizens -- and those of our allies -- are protected from those who would look to use AI against our institutions, democratic values, and way of life." "The Institute's focus from the start has been on security and we've built a team of scientists focused on evaluating serious risks to the public," added Ian Hogarth, who remains the chair of the institute. "Our new criminal misuse team and deepening partnership with the national security community mark the next stage of tackling those risks."

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... weeks after US titan was outvoted by other members to let Microsoft join the Euro cloud trade association

Amazon's Web Services wing has exited the board of CISPE (cloud infrastructure service providers in Europe), following a recent update to the Articles of Association that means only corporations based in the region can serve.…

Officer says mistakenly published police details were shared 'a considerable amount of times'

Two suspected New IRA members were arrested on Tuesday and charged under the Terrorism Act 2000 after they were found in possession of spreadsheets containing details of staff that the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) mistakenly published online.…