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An anonymous reader shares a report: In a landmark ruling advancing efforts to hold major polluters accountable for transnational climate-related harms, on May 28 a German court concluded that a corporation can be held liable under civil law for its proportional contribution to global climate change, Climate Rights International said today. Filed in 2015, the case against German energy giant RWE AG challenged the corporation to pay for its proportional share of adaptation costs needed to protect the Andean city of Huaraz, Peru, from a flood from a glacial lake exacerbated by global warming. RWE AG, one of Europe's largest emitters, is estimated to be responsible for approximately 0.47% of global historical global greenhouse gas emissions. "This groundbreaking ruling confirms that corporate emitters can no longer hide behind borders, politics, or scale to escape responsibility," said Lotte Leicht, Advocacy Director at Climate Rights International. "The court's message is clear: major carbon polluters can be held legally responsible for their role in driving the climate crisis and the resulting human rights and economic harms. If the reasoning of this decision is adopted by other courts, it could lay the foundation for ending the era of impunity for fossil fuel giants and other big greenhouse gas emitters."

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Cash splashed on damages, infrastructure improvements, and fraud monitoring

A Seattle cancer facility has agreed to fork out around $52.5 million as part of a class action settlement linked to a Thanksgiving 2023 cyberattack where criminals directly threatened cancer patients with swat attacks.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Some of the citations that underpin the science in the White House's sweeping "MAHA Report" appear to have been generated using artificial intelligence [non-paywalled source], resulting in numerous garbled scientific references and invented studies, AI experts said Thursday. Of the 522 footnotes to scientific research in an initial version of the report sent to The Washington Post, at least 37 appear multiple times, according to a review of the report by The Post. Other citations include the wrong author, and several studies cited by the extensive health report do not exist at all, a fact first reported by the online news outlet NOTUS on Thursday morning. Some references include "oaicite" attached to URLs -- a definitive sign that the research was collected using artificial intelligence. The presence of "oaicite" is a marker indicating use of OpenAI, a U.S. artificial intelligence company. A common hallmark of AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, is unusually repetitive content that does not sound human or is inaccurate -- as well as the tendency to "hallucinate" studies or answers that appear to make sense but are not real.

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Giving people the power to build community and bring the world closer together so we can shoot them

Meta has partnered with Anduril Industries to build augmented and virtual reality devices for the military, eight years after it fired the defense firm's founder, Palmer Luckey.…

The three largest U.S. airlines are charging solo travelers higher fares than passengers booking for two or more people on select domestic routes, a pricing strategy analysts believe targets business travelers, according to fare analysis by travel publication Thrifty Traveler. American Airlines, United Airlines and Delta Air Lines implement the practice by opening different fare categories based on passenger count. United charges $269 for a solo traveler flying from Chicago O'Hare to Peoria, while two passengers pay $181 each for identical seats. American's Charlotte-to-Fort Myers route costs solo travelers $422 versus $266 per person for pairs. The airlines appear to be "segmenting" customers by charging business travelers paying with corporate cards more while offering better deals to families booking together. Solo travelers are more likely to be business flyers using employer funds and "less likely to care about paying another $80 or more," according to the analysis.

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Almost 40% of glaciers in existence today are already doomed to melt due to climate-heating emissions from fossil fuels, a study has found. The Guardian: The loss will soar to 75% if global heating reaches the 2.7C rise for which the world is currently on track. The massive loss of glaciers would push up sea levels, endangering millions of people and driving mass migration, profoundly affecting the billions reliant on glaciers to regulate the water used to grow food, the researchers said. However, slashing carbon emissions and limiting heating to the internationally agreed 1.5C target would save half of glacier ice. That goal is looking increasingly out of reach as emissions continue to rise, but the scientists said that every tenth-of-a-degree rise that was avoided would save 2.7tn tonnes of ice.

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Liberation Day not freeing consumers or businesses of their hard earned disposable income

World War Fee Trump's tariffs may have been ruled unlawful, but they are still in place and continue to affect the market, with the threat of price hikes on smartphones causing prospective buyers to hold off until the situation becomes less volatile.…

Google has begun automatically generating AI-powered email summaries for Gmail Workspace users, eliminating the need to manually trigger the feature that has been available since last year. The company's Gemini AI will now independently determine when longer email threads or messages with multiple replies would benefit from summarization, displaying these summaries above the email content itself. The automatic summaries currently appear only on mobile devices for English-language emails and may take up to two weeks to roll out to individual accounts, with Google providing no timeline for desktop expansion or availability to non-Workspace Gmail users.

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High-profile logo win for AI? Weeks ahead of year-end and with investors twitchy about returns? Impeccable timing

Microsoft yesterday used a town hall meeting to leak details tell staff about a 100,000 license contract signed with Barclays to use Copilot.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Negotiations are under way between the UAE and OpenAI that may make the company's ChatGPT Plus artificial intelligence chatbot available to all residents free of charge, though a final deal has not been reached. An agreement involving ChatGPT Plus would be part of the recently announced Stargate UAE infrastructure plan to create an AI hub in Abu Dhabi, according to a source familiar with the country's AI strategy. Abu Dhabi's AI company G42 has partnered with OpenAI, Oracle and Nvidia to set up Stargate UAE, a 1-gigawatt computing cluster that will operate in the newly established 5GW UAE -- US AI Campus.

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Can't build a datacenter overnight, argues tech giant

Dell has confirmed an order backlog of $14.4 billion for AI optimized servers, yet it is tempering investors' expectations for future sales by talking about demand being lumpy and dependencies in the pipeline.…

Latest project gets the green light although Brexit-era brainchild faces spending review

The UK's version of Darpa — a US government blue-sky research body — has invested £23.3 million (c $32 million) into nine teams working to transform "robotic dexterity."…

Take care when downloading AI freebies, researcher tells The Register

Criminals are using installers for fake AI software to distribute ransomware and other destructive malware.…

sinij shares a report from the BBC: France's National Assembly has voted to abolish low-emission zones, a key measure introduced during President Emmanuel Macron's first term to reduce city pollution. So-called ZFEs (zones a faibles emissions) have been criticized for hitting those who cannot afford less-polluting vehicles the hardest. A handful of MPs from Macron's party joined opposition parties from the right and far right in voting 98-51 to scrap the zones, which have gradually been extended across French cities since 2019. [...] The low-emission zones began with 15 of France's most polluted cities in 2019 and by the start of this year had been extended to every urban area with a population of more than 150,000, with a ban on cars registered before 1997. Those produced after 1997 need a round "Crit'Air" sticker to drive in low-emission zones, and there are six categories that correspond to various types of vehicle. The biggest restrictions have been applied in the most polluted cities, Paris and Lyon, as well as Montpellier and Grenoble. The BBC notes that while the abolition is expected to pass France's Senate, it must still be included in a broader bill approved by the lower house in June and cleared by the Constitutional Council, which isn't guaranteed.

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Greater Manchester Police reprimanded over hours of video that went AWOL

The UK’s data watchdog has reprimanded Greater Manchester Police (GMP) force for losing CCTV footage the cop shop was later requested to retain.…

War in Ukraine causes major rethink in policy and spending

The UK is spending more than £1 billion ($1.35 billion) setting up a new Cyber and Electromagnetic Command and is recruiting a few good men and women to join up and staff it.…

After three service calls, user reflected on their utter stupidity

On Call As the door closes on another working week, The Register brings you another edition of On Call, our reader-contributed column that recounts your amazing stories from the frontlines of tech support.…

For the first time, scientists have directly observed atmospheric sputtering in action on Mars -- an erosion process driven by solar wind ions that may have played a major role in the planet's atmospheric and water loss. ScienceAlert reports: The only spacecraft with the equipment and orbital configuration to make these observations is NASA's MAVEN. The researchers carefully pored over the data collected by the spacecraft since it arrived in Mars orbit in September 2014, looking to find simultaneous observations of the solar electric field and an upper atmosphere abundance of argon -- one of the sputtered particles, used as a tracer for the phenomenon. They found that, above an altitude of 350 kilometers (217 miles), argon densities vary depending on the orientation of the solar wind electric field, compared to argon densities at lower altitudes that remain consistent. The results showed that lighter isotopes of argon vary, leaving behind an excess of heavy argon -- a discrepancy that is best explained by active sputtering. This is supported by observations of a solar storm, the outflows of which arrived at Mars in January 2016. During this time, the evidence of sputtering became significantly more pronounced. Not only does this support the team's finding that argon density variations at high Martian altitudes are the result of sputtering, it demonstrates what conditions may have been like billions of years ago, when the Sun was younger and rowdier, undergoing more frequent storm activity. The findings have been published in the journal Science Advances.

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Light is faster than copper, which is important with rack scale architecture

Analysis AMD officially entered the co-packaged optics race with the acquisition of photonic chip startup Enosemi, announced this week.…

Thank whoever decided to make the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey public for this discovery

A trio of scientists have published a paper that explains how they found a dwarf planet in a database.…