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The European Space Agency has launched the Biomass satellite to study the world's forests using the first space-based P-band synthetic aperture radar, aiming to accurately measure carbon storage and improve understanding of the global carbon cycle. CBS News reports: Forests on Earth collectively absorb and store about 8 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually, the ESA said. That regulates the planet's temperature. Deforestation and degradation, especially in tropical regions, means that stored carbon is being released back into the atmosphere, the ESA said, which can contribute to climate change. There's a lack of accurate data on how much carbon the planet's estimated 1.5 trillion trees store and how much human activity can impact that storage, the ESA said. To "weigh" the planet's trees and determine their carbon dioxide capacity, Biomass will use a P-band synthetic aperture radar. It's the first such piece of technology in space. The radar can penetrate forest canopies and measure woody biomass, including trunks, branches and stems, the ESA said. Most forest carbon is stored in these parts of the trees. Those measurements will act as a proxy for carbon storage, the ESA said. [...] Once the radar takes the measurements, the data will be received by the large mesh reflector. It will then be sent to the ESA's mission control center.

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Apple violated a court order requiring it to open up the App Store to third-party payment options and must stop charging commissions on purchases outside its software marketplace, a federal judge said in a blistering ruling that referred the company to prosecutors for a possible criminal probe. From a report: U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers sided Wednesday with "Fortnite" maker Epic Games over its allegation that the iPhone maker failed to comply with an order she issued in 2021 after finding the company engaged in anticompetitive conduct in violation of California law. Gonzalez Rogers also referred the case to federal prosecutors to investigate whether Apple committed criminal contempt of court for flouting her 2021 ruling. The U.S. attorney's office in San Francisco declined to comment. The changes the company must now make could put a sizable dent in the double-digit billions of dollars in revenue the App Store generates each year. The judge's order [PDF]: Apple willfully chose not to comply with this Court's Injunction. It did so with the express intent to create new anticompetitive barriers which would, by design and in effect, maintain a valued revenue stream; a revenue stream previously found to be anticompetitive. That it thought this Court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation. As always, the cover-up made it worse. For this Court, there is no second bite at the apple. It Is So Ordered.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCWorld: Windows 7 came onto the market in 2009 and put Microsoft back on the road to success after Windows Vista's annoying failures. But Windows 7 was not without its faults, as this curious story proves. Some users apparently encountered a vexing problem at the time: if they set a single-color image as the background, their Windows 7 PC always took 30 seconds to start the operating system and switch from the welcome screen to the desktop. In a recent blog post, Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen explains the exact reason for this. According to him, a simple programming error meant that users had to wait longer for the system to boot. After logging in, Windows 7 first set up the desktop piece by piece, i.e. the taskbar, the desktop window, icons for applications, and even the background image. The system waited patiently for all components to finish loading and received feedback from each individual component. Or, it switched from the welcome screen to the desktop after 30 seconds if it didn't receive any feedback. The problem here: The code for the message that the background image is ready was located within the background image bitmap code, which means that the message never appeared if you did not have a real background image bitmap. And a single color is not such a bitmap. The result: the logon system waited in vain for the message that the background has finished loading, so Windows 7 never started until the 30 second fallback activated and sent users to the desktop. The problem could also occur if users had activated the "Hide desktop icons" group policy. This was due to the fact that such policies were only added after the main code had been written and called by an If statement. However, Windows 7 was also unable to recognize this at first and therefore took longer to load.

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Investigative journalist and cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs reports: A 23-year-old Scottish man thought to be a member of the prolific Scattered Spider cybercrime group was extradited last week from Spain to the United States, where he is facing charges of wire fraud, conspiracy and identity theft. U.S. prosecutors allege Tyler Robert Buchanan and co-conspirators hacked into dozens of companies in the United States and abroad, and that he personally controlled more than $26 million stolen from victims. Scattered Spider is a loosely affiliated criminal hacking group whose members have broken into and stolen data from some of the world's largest technology companies. Buchanan was arrested in Spain last year on a warrant from the FBI, which wanted him in connection with a series of SMS-based phishing attacks in the summer of 2022 that led to intrusions at Twilio, LastPass, DoorDash, Mailchimp, and many other tech firms. The complain against Buchanan is available here (PDF).

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New submitter LDA6502 writes: The Republican chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee is proposing a new annual federal vehicle registration fee of $200 for full EVs, $100 for hybrid EVs, and $20 for combustion vehicles. The tax would be tied to inflation, would be collected by the states, and would expire in 2035. Critics of the proposal note that it could result in low mileage EVs paying a far higher tax rate than heavy ICE trucks and SUVs. Ars Technica notes that the bill "exempts commercial vehicles, which should see a rush from tax avoiders to register their vehicles under their businesses [...]." Farm vehicles will also be exempt from the tax. "The Eno Center for Transportation calculates that this new tax will contribute an extra $110 billion to the highway Trust Fund by 2035 but that cuts to other taxes and more spending mean that the fund will still be $222 billion short of its commitments -- assuming that this added fee doesn't further dampen EV adoption in the U.S., that is."

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After 10 consecutive quarters of rising AI-related investment, Microsoft has put on the brakes, spending over $1 billion less than the previous quarter (source paywalled; alternative source). Despite the slight slowdown, Microsoft posted stronger-than-expected results with $70 billion in revenue and $25.8 billion in profit. The New York Times reports: In the first three months of 2025, Microsoft spent $21.4 billion on capital expenses, down more than $1 billion from the previous quarter. The company is still on track to spend more than $80 billion on capital expenses in the current fiscal year, which ends in June. But the pullback, though slight, is an indication that the tech industry's appetite for spending on A.I. is not limitless. Overall, Microsoft's results showed unexpected strength in its business. Sales surpassed $70 billion, up 13 percent from the same period a year earlier. Profit rose to $25.8 billion, up 18 percent. The results far surpassed Wall Street's expectations. "Cloud and A.I. are the essential inputs for every business to expand output, reduce costs, and accelerate growth," Satya Nadella, Microsoft's chief executive, said in a statement.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Apple sent notifications this week to several people who the company believes were targeted with government spyware, according to two of the alleged targets. In the past, Apple has sent similar notifications to targets and victims of spyware, and directed them to contact a nonprofit that specializes in investigating such cyberattacks. Other tech companies, like Google and WhatsApp, have in recent years also periodically sent such notifications to their users. As of Wednesday, only two people appear to have come forward to reveal they were among those who received the notifications from Apple this week. One is Ciro Pellegrino, an Italian journalist who works for online news outlet Fanpage. Pellegrino wrote in an article that he received an email and a text message from Apple on Tuesday notifying him that he was targeted with spyware. The message, according to Pellegrino, also said he wasn't the only person targeted. "Today's notification is being sent to affected users in 100 countries," the message read, according to Pellegrino's article. "Did this really happen? Yes, it is not a joke," Pellegrino wrote. The second person to receive an Apple notification is Eva Vlaardingerbroek, a Dutch right-wing activist, who posted on X on Wednesday. "Apple detected a targeted mercenary spyware attack against your iPhone," the Apple alert said, according to a screenshot shown in a video that Vlaardingerbroek posted on X. "This attack is likely targeting you specifically because of who you are or what you do. Although it's never possible to achieve absolute certainty when detecting such attacks, Apple has high confidence in this warning -- please take it seriously." Reacting to the notification, Vlaardingerbroek said that this was an "attempt to intimidate me, an attempt to silence me, obviously."

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A newly revealed set of vulnerabilities dubbed AirBorne in Apple's AirPlay SDK could allow attackers on the same Wi-Fi network to hijack tens of millions of third-party devices like smart TVs and speakers. While Apple has patched its own products, many third-party devices remain at risk, with the most severe (though unproven) threat being potential microphone access. 9to5Mac reports: Wired reports that a vulnerability in Apple's software development kit (SDK) means that tens of millions of those devices could be compromised by an attacker: "On Tuesday, researchers from the cybersecurity firm Oligo revealed what they're calling AirBorne, a collection of vulnerabilities affecting AirPlay, Apple's proprietary radio-based protocol for local wireless communication. Bugs in Apple's AirPlay software development kit (SDK) for third-party devices would allow hackers to hijack gadgets like speakers, receivers, set-top boxes, or smart TVs if they're on the same Wi-Fi network as the hacker's machine [...] Oligo's chief technology officer and cofounder, Gal Elbaz, estimates that potentially vulnerable third-party AirPlay-enabled devices number in the tens of millions. 'Because AirPlay is supported in such a wide variety of devices, there are a lot that will take years to patch -- or they will never be patched,' Elbaz says. 'And it's all because of vulnerabilities in one piece of software that affects everything.'" For consumers, an attacker would first need to gain access to your home Wi-Fi network. The risk of this depends on the security of your router: millions of wireless routers also have serious security flaws, but access would be limited to the range of your Wi-Fi. AirPlay devices on public networks, like those used everywhere from coffee shops to airports, would allow direct access. The researchers say the worst-case scenario would be an attacker gaining access to the microphones in an AirPlay device, such as those in smart speakers. However, they have not demonstrated this capability, meaning it remains theoretical for now.

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Google is investing in training over 100,000 new U.S. electricians through a $10 million grant, aiming to address a critical labor shortage driven by AI-fueled data center growth and rising electricity demands. Reuters reports: A lack of access to power supplies has become the biggest problem for giant technology companies racing to develop artificial intelligence in energy-intensive data centers, which are driving up U.S. electricity demand after nearly 20 years of stagnation. The situation has led President Donald Trump to declare a national energy emergency aimed at speeding up permitting for generation and transmission projects. Google's funding, which includes a $10 million grant for electrical worker nonprofits, is the latest in a series of recent moves by giant technology companies to alleviate power project backlogs and electricity shortfalls across the United States. [...] The Google grant will be used for electrician apprenticeship programs and the training of existing workforce through organizations, including the Electrical Training Alliance, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the National Electrical Contractors Association. It could increase the pipeline of electrical workers by 70% by the end of the decade, the company said. "This initiative with Google and our partners at NECA and the Electrical Training Alliance will bring more than 100,000 sorely needed electricians into the trade to meet the demands of an AI-driven surge in data centers and power generation," said Kenneth Cooper, international president of the IBEW labor union.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Raspberry Pi boards have a combination of surface-mount devices (SMDs) and through-hole bits. SMDs allow for far more tiny chips, resistors, and other bits to be attached to boards by their tiny pins, flat contacts, solder balls, or other connections. For those things that are bigger, or subject to rough forces like clumsy human hands, through-hole soldering is still required, with leads poked through a connective hole and solder applied to connect and join them securely. The Raspberry Pi board has a 40-pin GPIO header on it that needs through-hole soldering, along with bits like the Ethernet and USB ports. These require robust solder joints, which can't be done the same way as with SMT (surface-mount technology) tools. "In the early days of Raspberry Pi, these parts were inserted by hand, and later by robotic placement," writes Roger Thornton, director of applications for Raspberry Pi, in a blog post. The boards then had to go through a follow-up wave soldering step. Now Pi boards have their tiny bits and bigger pieces soldered at the same time through an intrusive reflow soldering process undertaken with Raspberry Pi's UK manufacturing partner, Sony. After adjusting component placement, the solder stencil, and the connectors, the board makers could then place and secure all their components in the same stage. Intrusive reflow soldering this way involves putting solder paste on both the pads for SMD bits and into the through-hole pins. The through-hole parts are pushed onto the paste, and the whole board then goes into a reflow oven, where the solder paste melts, the connectors fall in more fully, and joints are formed for all the SMD and through-hole parts at once. You can watch the process up close in this mesmerizing video from Surface Mount Process. Intrusive reflow soldering is not a brand-new process, but what it did for the Raspberry Pi is notable, according to Thornton. The company saw "a massive 50% reduction in product returns," and it sped up production by 15 percent by eliminating the break between the two soldering stages. By removing the distinct soldering bath from its production line, the company also reduced its carbon dioxide output by 43 tonnes per year (or 47.4 US tons).

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NIST: Clocks on Earth are ticking a bit more regularly thanks to NIST-F4, a new atomic clock at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) campus in Boulder, Colorado. This month, NIST researchers published a journal article establishing NIST-F4 as one of the world's most accurate timekeepers. NIST has also submitted the clock for acceptance as a primary frequency standard by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM), the body that oversees the world's time. NIST-F4 measures an unchanging frequency in the heart of cesium atoms, the internationally agreed-upon basis for defining the second since 1967. The clock is based on a "fountain" design that represents the gold standard of accuracy in timekeeping. NIST-F4 ticks at such a steady rate that if it had started running 100 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed, it would be off by less than a second today. By joining a small group of similarly elite time pieces run by just 10 countries around the world, NIST-F4 makes the foundation of global time more stable and secure. At the same time, it is helping to steer the clocks NIST uses to keep official U.S. time. Distributed via radio and the internet, official U.S. time is critical for telecommunications and transportation systems, financial trading platforms, data center operations and more.

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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that 20%-30% of code inside the company's repositories was "written by software" -- meaning AI -- during a fireside chat with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at Meta's LlamaCon conference on Tuesday. From a report: Nadella gave the figure after Zuckerberg asked roughly how much of Microsoft's code is AI-generated today. The Microsoft CEO said the company was seeing mixed results in AI-generated code across different languages, with more progress in Python and less in C++.

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Finland has passed legislation to restrict the use of phones and other mobile devices during the school day amid fears over their impact on student wellbeing and learning. From a report: Under the changes, which were approved by the Finnish parliament on Tuesday and will come into effect on 1 August, mobile devices will be heavily restricted during lesson times. Pupils will be allowed to use them only with the teacher's permission for healthcare or learning purposes. Finland is the latest European country to impose legal restrictions on the use of phones and other mobile devices in schools amid growing evidence of their impact on children and young people, including attention and self-esteem. Earlier this year, Denmark said it would ban mobile phones from all schools. The chair of the country's wellbeing commission, Rasmus Meyer, told the Guardian the measure was necessary to stop schools from being "colonised by digital platforms" and urged the rest of Europe to follow suit.

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Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai told a judge who found that Google illegally monopolizes online search that a Justice Department proposal to share search data with rivals would be a "de facto" divestiture of the company's search engine. From a report: If Google were required to share both its search data and the information on how it ranks results, rivals could reverse engineer "every aspect of our technology," Pichai testified on Wednesday. "The proposal on data sharing is so far reaching, so extraordinary," Pichai said. It "feels like de facto divestiture of search" and its entire intellectual property and technology over 25 years of research, he said. During testimony in federal court in Washington, Pichai asserted that a package of antitrust remedies proposed by the government is too extreme and will undermine Google's ability to compete in the market.

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Wikipedia will employ AI to enhance the work of its editors and volunteers, it said Wednesday, also asserting that it has no plans to replace those human roles. The Wikimedia Foundation plans to implement AI specifically for automating tedious tasks, improving information discovery, facilitating translations, and supporting new volunteer onboarding, it said.

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Electronic Arts is laying off hundreds of workers and canceling a Titanfall game that was in development at its Respawn Entertainment subsidiary. From a report: Between 300 and 400 positions were eliminated, including around 100 at Respawn, according to a person familiar with the cuts. The company had about 13,700 employees at the end of March 2024. "As part of our continued focus on our long-term strategic priorities, we've made select changes within our organization that more effectively aligns teams and allocates resources in service of driving future growth," Justin Higgs, a spokesman for the Redwood City, California-based company, said in a statement. The canceled project, code-named R7, was an extraction shooter set in the Titanfall universe, according to people familiar with its development. It was not close to being released.

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Microsoft has pledged to take the US government to court if necessary [alternative source] to protect European customers' access to its cloud services, as concerns mount over potential technology disruptions under President Donald Trump. Brad Smith, Microsoft's president and vice-chair, announced five "digital commitments" to Europe on Wednesday, responding to regional anxieties following Trump's temporary suspension of military support to Ukraine. "We as a company need to be a source of digital stability during a period of geopolitical volatility," Smith said. The commitments include contesting any government order to cease European cloud services through legal channels and establishing European oversight of its continental operations. Microsoft will increase its European data center capacity by 40% over the next two years, expanding in 16 countries with investments of "tens of billions of dollars" annually. The Seattle-based company, which derives more than a quarter of its business from Europe, becomes the first major American tech firm to proactively address European concerns amid escalating trade tensions.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Instead of depressing wages or taking jobs, generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini have had almost no wage or labor impact so far -- a finding that calls into question the huge capital expenditures required to create and run AI models. In a working paper released earlier this month, economists Anders Humlum and Emilie Vestergaard looked at the labor market impact of AI chatbots on 11 occupations, covering 25,000 workers and 7,000 workplaces in Denmark in 2023 and 2024. Many of these occupations have been described as being vulnerable to AI: accountants, customer support specialists, financial advisors, HR professionals, IT support specialists, journalists, legal professionals, marketing professionals, office clerks, software developers, and teachers. Yet after Humlum, assistant professor of economics at the Booth School of Business, University of Chicago, and Vestergaard, a PhD student at the University of Copenhagen, analyzed the data, they found the labor and wage impact of chatbots to be minimal. "AI chatbots have had no significant impact on earnings or recorded hours in any occupation," the authors state in their paper. The report should concern the tech industry, which has hyped AI's economic potential while plowing billions into infrastructure meant to support it. Early this year, OpenAI admitted that it loses money per query even on its most expensive enterprise SKU, while companies like Microsoft and Amazon are starting to pull back on their AI infrastructure spending in light of low business adoption past a few pilots. The problem isn't that workers are avoiding generative AI chatbots -- quite the contrary. But they simply aren't yet equating to actual economic benefits. "The adoption of these chatbots has been remarkably fast," Humlum told The Register. "Most workers in the exposed occupations have now adopted these chatbots. Employers are also shifting gears and actively encouraging it. But then when we look at the economic outcomes, it really has not moved the needle." Humlum said while there are gains and time savings to be had, "there's definitely a question of who they really accrue to. And some of it could be the firms -- we cannot directly look at firm profitability. Some of it could also just be that you save some time on existing tasks, but you're not really able to expand your output and therefore earn more. So it's like it saves you time writing emails. But if you cannot really take on more work or do something else that is really valuable, then that will put a damper on how much we should actually expect those time savings to affect your earning ability, your total hours, your wages." "In terms of economic outcomes, when we're looking at hard metrics -- in the administrative labor market data on earnings, wages -- these tools have really not made a difference so far," said Humlum. "So I think that that puts in some sense an upper bound on what return we should expect from these tools, at least in the short run. My general conclusion is that any story that you want to tell about these tools being very transformative, needs to contend with the fact that at least two years after [the introduction of AI chatbots], they've not made a difference for economic outcomes."

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Firefly Aerospace's sixth Alpha rocket launch failed on April 29, 2025, after an upper-stage anomaly prevented a Lockheed Martin satellite demo from reaching orbit. Both the stage and payload fell into the Pacific Ocean near Antarctica. Space.com reports: The two-stage, 96.7-foot-tall (29.6 meters) Alpha lifted off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base this morning (April 29), carrying a technology demonstration for aerospace giant Lockheed Martin toward low Earth orbit (LEO). But the payload never got there. Alpha suffered an anomaly shortly after its two stages separated, which led to the loss of the nozzle extension for the upper stage's single Lightning engine. This significantly reduced the engine's thrust, dooming the mission, Firefly said in an update several hours after launch. Today's mission, which Firefly called "Message in a Booster," was the first of up to 25 that the company will conduct for Lockheed Martin over the next five years. The flight aimed to send a satellite technology demonstrator to LEO. This demo payload "was specifically built to showcase the company's pathfinding efforts for its LM 400 mid-sized, multi-mission satellite bus, and to demonstrate the space vehicle's operational capabilities on orbit for potential customers," Firefly wrote in a prelaunch mission description. "Initial indications showed Alpha's upper stage reached 320 km [199 miles] in altitude. However, upon further assessment, the team learned the upper stage did not reach orbital velocity, and the stage and payload have now safely impacted the Pacific Ocean in a cleared zone north of Antarctica," an update reads. "Firefly recognizes the hard work that went into payload development and would like to thank our mission partners at Lockheed Martin for their continued support," it continues. "The team is working closely with our customers and the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] to conduct an investigation and determine root cause of the anomaly. We will provide more information on our mission page after the investigation is completed."

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Kosmos 482, a failed Soviet Venus probe, is expected to make an uncontrolled reentry in mid-May after orbiting Earth for 53 years. Gizmodo reports: The lander module from an old Soviet spacecraft is expected to reenter Earth's atmosphere during the second week of May, according to Marco Langbroek, a satellite tracker based in Leiden, the Netherlands. "As this is a lander that was designed to survive passage through the Venus atmosphere, it is possible that it will survive reentry through the Earth atmosphere intact, and impact intact," Langbroek wrote in a blog update. "The risks involved are not particularly high, but not zero." Kosmos 482 launched on March 31, 1972 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome spaceport in Kazakhstan. The mission was an attempt by the Soviet space program to reach Venus, but it failed to gain enough velocity to enter a transfer trajectory toward the scorching-hot planet. A malfunction resulted in an engine burn that wasn't sufficient to reach Venus' orbit and left the spacecraft in an elliptical Earth orbit, according to NASA. The spacecraft broke apart into four different pieces, with two of the smaller fragments reentering over Ashburton, New Zealand, two days after launch. Meanwhile, two remaining pieces, believed to be the payload and the detached upper-stage engine unit, entered a higher orbit measuring 130 by 6,089 miles (210 by 9,800 kilometers). The failed mission consisted of a carrier bus and a lander probe, which together form a spherical pressure vessel weighing more than 1,000 pounds (495 kilograms). Considering its mass, "risks are similar to that of a meteorite impact," Langbroek wrote. As of now, it's hard to determine exactly when the spacecraft will reenter. Langbroek estimates that the reentry will take place on May 10, but a more precise date will get clearer as the reentry date nears.

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