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Networks of pipes and heat exchangers can transfer excess heat from buildings into nearby bodies of water -- but as the world warms, the cooling potential of some water courses is now diminishing, Wired reports. Paris's district cooling network, which pipes Seine river water to cool 800 buildings including the Louvre Museum, faces diminishing returns as climate change warms water temperatures. The system achieves coefficients of performance between 4 and 15 -- significantly higher than conventional air conditioning -- by transferring building heat through heat exchangers to the river. The Seine briefly exceeded 27C this summer, approaching the 30C regulatory limit for returned water. The network currently spans 100 kilometers of pipes and will expand to 245 kilometers by 2042 to serve 3,000 buildings. Similar installations operate in Toronto using lake water from 83-meter depths and at Cornell University drawing 4C water from Lake Cayuga at 76 meters. Rotterdam and other cities are developing comparable systems as cooling demand rises.

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After years of foot-dragging, penalties for blocking access finally kick in

It took four presidential administrations to finally get it done, but US health care actors that block patient and provider access to electronic medical data may finally begin to face actual consequences.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Can AI help "smooth over" discussion on abortion, racism, immigration, or Israel-Palestine? Columbia University sure hopes so. The Verge has learned that the university recently began testing Sway, an AI debate program currently in beta. Developed by two researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, Sway matches up students with opposing views to chat one-on-one about hot-button issues and "facilitates better discussions between them," according to the tool's website. Nicholas DiBella, a postdoctoral scholar at CMU who helped develop Sway, told The Verge that about 3,000 students from more than 30 colleges and universities have used the tool. One of those may soon be Columbia. News of the potential partnership comes after more than two years of escalating tensions at Columbia between students, administrators, and the federal government. The university has spent years at the center of controversy after controversy: expulsions of pro-Palestinian student protesters, a string of police raids, and demands from the federal government. People at Columbia's Teachers College are testing Sway in order to potentially integrate it into the conflict resolution curriculum and "bridge-building initiatives at Columbia," DiBella said. He said there's also been interest from other teams at Columbia in using Sway for the fall 2026 semester and onward. Simon Cullen, an assistant professor at CMU and the other developer behind Sway, told The Verge that the company is also in touch with Columbia University Life.

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9.9-rated flaw on the loose, so patch now

A critical code-injection bug in SAP S/4HANA that allows low-privileged attackers to take over your SAP system is being actively exploited, according to security researchers.…

Anthropic is blocking its services from Chinese-controlled companies, saying it's taking steps to prevent a US adversary from advancing in AI and threatening American national security. From a report: The San Francisco-based startup is widening existing restrictions on "authoritarian" regimes to cover any company that's majority-owned by entities from countries such as China. That includes their overseas operations, it said in a statement. Foreign-based subsidiaries could be used to access its technology and further military applications, the startup added. Anthropic's Dario Amodei has publicly advocated technological sanctions on China, particularly after DeepSeek stunned Silicon Valley with an advanced model this year. While Anthropic didn't name any companies, Chinese big tech firms from Alibaba to ByteDance have joined DeepSeek in an intensifying race to build AI services that can rival the likes of OpenAI in the US. Chinese entities "could use our capabilities to develop applications and services that ultimately serve adversarial military and intelligence services and broader authoritarian objectives," Anthropic said in its Friday post.

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Much of the world favors protecting 30% of the world's land and water for nature by 2030, according to new research that has found overwhelming public support for the goal across eight countries on five continents. The Guardian: Nearly 200 nations agreed in 2022 to set aside 30% of the world's land and 30% of marine areas for nature. But just 17.6% of the world's land and 8.6% of the seas are now under global protection, and more than 100 nations are less than halfway to meeting the target, which was established under the 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Governments will need to implement swift changes if they are to achieve the target within the next five years. But setting aside more space for nature can be a political pitfall. Often it can mean restricting people's access to land, halting resource extraction and relocating human settlements. These issues, along with possible effects on economic growth, are often cited by countries as barriers to expanding protecting areas. Research published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, however, suggests that more than 80% of the public across eight sampled countries support the policy.

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Because handing battlefield ID to an algorithm has never gone wrong before, right?

The US Army is preparing to deploy a new AI product that promises to automatically identify and track potential targets on the battlefield. However, humans will continue to make life and death decisions.…

Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton has warned that AI will concentrate wealth among a small elite while impoverishing most workers. The computer scientist, who pioneered neural network research in the 1980s, told Financial Times that rich people will use AI to replace workers, creating massive unemployment and profit increases. Hinton, who left Google in 2023 after selling his AI startup for $44 million a decade earlier, dismissed universal basic income as insufficient to address human dignity concerns from job losses. The 77-year-old physicist predicts superintelligent AI will arrive within five to twenty years. He blamed capitalism rather than AI technology itself for the coming economic disruption, stating the system ensures AI will primarily benefit the wealthy rather than solve grand problems like hunger or poverty.

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It won't be fully functional for a while, though

video Europe's first exascale supercomputer has finally lived up to expectations, despite not being fully complete, as its general-purpose compute cluster is not set to be ready before next year at the earliest.…

Firefox 145 is dumping 32-bit Linux, though

Mozilla, the maker of Firefox, had some good news this week for users still clinging to Windows 7 – Firefox ESR 115 support is being extended until March 2026.…

Alphabet's Google was hit with a $3.45 billion EU antitrust fine on Friday for anti-competitive practices in its lucrative adtech business, marking its fourth penalty in its decade long fight with EU competition regulators. From a report: The move by the European Commission was triggered by a complaint from the European Publishers Council and comes amid a threat by U.S. President Donald Trump to retaliate against the European Union for any push against Big Tech. The EU competition enforcer had originally planned to hand out the fine on Monday but opposition from EU trade chief Maros Sefcovic on concerns about the impact on U.S. tariffs on European cars derailed EU antitrust chief Teresa Ribera's plan. The Commission said Google favored its own online display technology services to the detriment of rivals and online publishers and that it abused its market power since 2014 until today.

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Panasonic's market value has remained flat at approximately $25 billion over the past decade while rivals Hitachi, Sony and NEC have increased their valuations sixfold during the same period. The Osaka-based conglomerate announced a restructuring plan in May 2025 to eliminate 10,000 positions and streamline operations across its six operating companies and hundreds of product lines. The company generates $57 billion in annual revenue and maintains dominant positions in several markets. Financial Times reports: Within Panasonic's six operating companies and hundreds of product lines are industrial technology gems. The company supplies 70 per cent of the world's in-flight entertainment systems, its facial recognition technology is being used to measure brain health, and its EV battery plants are among the world's most efficient, according to auto industry insiders. Panasonic chief said in January that AI-driven hardware and software solutions would constitute 30% of revenues by 2035, compared to approximately 10% currently. But Goldman Sachs analyst Ryo Harada wrote recently that investors are seeking a growth strategy beyond the announced reforms.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Google's CEO Sundar Pichai stood smiling in a leafy-green California garden in September 2020 and declared that the tech behemoth was entering the "most ambitious decade yet" in its climate action. "Today, I'm proud to announce that we intend to be the first major company to operate carbon free -- 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year," he said, in a video announcement at the time. Pichai added that he knew the "road ahead would not be easy," but Google "aimed to prove that a carbon-free future is both possible and achievable fast enough to prevent the most dangerous impacts of climate change." Five years on, just how hard Google's "energy journey" would become is clear. In June, Google's Sustainability website proudly boasted a headline pledge to achieve net-zero emissions by 2030. By July, that had all changed. An investigation by Canada's National Observer has found that Google's net-zero pledge has quietly been scrubbed, demoted from having its own section on the site to an entry in the appendices of the company's sustainability report.

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Point release brings Cinnamon tweaks, shiny apps, and Ubuntu's Hardware Enablement stack

The latest point release to the current version of Linux Mint brings a newer Cinnamon (if that's your thing) and updates for all.…

Uber's Indian arm has started using its app to offer rideshare and delivery drivers the chance to make money by classifying data used by AI systems. From a report: Megha Yethadka, global head of Uber AI Solutions, revealed the new gigs in a Thursday LinkedIn post in which she said drivers sometimes have downtime during the day or might want to make some extra cash after hours. Yethadka said the work can involve reviewing photos, counting objects, classifying text, recording audio, or digitizing receipts. She said the gigs are "Powering our enterprise customers worldwide for their gen AI models or consumer applications." "Until now, these tasks were completed by independent contractors outside the app," Yethadka wrote. "The early results are very promising, and we're eager to scale this further." In an accompanying video, she mentioned "worldwide" expansion for the offering. Prabhjeet Singh, Uber's president for India and South Asia, said the gigs are available in 12 cities and that "tens of thousands of drivers" are already performing what Uber calls "digital tasks."

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White House hosts back-slapping dinner for Tim Apple and co, datacenter grid connection relief promised by US Prez

President Donald Trump has pledged to sort out the power and grid connection nightmares plaguing the US datacenter industry.…

Good for solving finance and clinical problems... and AI

Microsoft researchers in Cambridge have unveiled its latest iteration of an Analog Optical Computer (AOC) and have inevitably incorporated AI into the technology's capabilities.…

Move over LinkedIn, Altman's crew wants a piece of the action

For those worried that AI is going to disrupt their jobs, OpenAI has the solution – take its certification and use a newly announced jobs board to find a new role.…

Millions continued to flow after Japanese supplier said it would step back

The coordinator of a parliamentary campaign to end Fujitsu's grip on UK government contracting in the wake of the Post Office Horizon scandal has slammed the Japanese vendor's lack of transparency over its promise not to bid for new government work.…

A UK government trial of Microsoft's M365 Copilot found no clear productivity gains despite user satisfaction with tasks like summarizing meetings and writing emails. While the tool sped up some routine work, it actually slowed down more complex tasks like Excel analysis and PowerPoint creation, often producing lower-quality results. The Register reports: The Department for Business and Trade received 1,000 licenses for use between October and December 2024, with the majority of these allocated to volunteers and 30 percent to randomly selected participants. Some 300 of these people consented to their data being analyzed. An evaluation of time savings, quality assurance, and productivity was then calculated in the assessment (PDF). Overall, 72 percent of users were satisfied or very satisfied with their digital assistant and voiced disappointment when the test ended. However, the reality of productivity gains was more nuanced than Microsoft's marketing materials might suggest. Around two-thirds of the employees in the trial used M365 at least once a week, and 30 percent used it at least once a day -- which doesn't sound like great value for money. [...] According to the M365 Copilot monitoring dashboard made available in the trial, an average of 72 M365 Copilot actions were taken per user. "Based on there being 63 working days during the pilot, this is an average of 1.14 M365 Copilot actions taken per user per day," the study says. Word, Teams, and Outlook were the most used, and Loop and OneNote usage rates were described as "very low," less than 1 percent and 3 percent per day, respectively. "PowerPoint and Excel were slightly more popular; both experienced peak activity of 7 percent of license holders using M365 Copilot in a single day within those applications," the study states. The three most popular tasks involved transcribing or summarizing a meeting, writing an email, and summarizing written comms. These also had the highest satisfaction levels, we're told. Participants were asked to record the time taken for each task with M365 Copilot compared to colleagues not involved in the trial. The assessment report adds: "Observed task sessions showed that M365 Copilot users produced summaries of reports and wrote emails faster and to a higher quality and accuracy than non-users. Time savings observed for writing emails were extremely small. "However, M365 Copilot users completed Excel data analysis more slowly and to a worse quality and accuracy than non-users, conflicting time savings reported in the diary study for data analysis. PowerPoint slides [were] over 7 minutes faster on average, but to a worse quality and accuracy than non-users." This means corrective action was required. A cross-section of participants was asked questions in an interview -- qualitative findings -- and they claimed routine admin tasks could be carried out with greater efficiency with M365 Copilot, letting them "redirect time towards tasks seen as more strategic or of higher value, while others reported using these time savings to attend training sessions or take a lunchtime walk." Nevertheless, M365 Copilot did not necessarily make them more productive, the assessment found. This is something Microsoft has worked on with customers to quantify the benefits and justify the greater expense of a license for M365 Copilot.

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