A U.S. Appeals Court ruled this week that net neutrality couldn't be reinstated by America's Federal Communications Commission. But "Despite the dismantling of the FCC's efforts to regulate broadband internet service, state laws in California, New York and elsewhere remain intact," notes the Los Angeles Times: This week's decision by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, striking down the FCC's open internet rules, has little bearing on state laws enacted during the years-long tug-of-war over the government's power to regulate internet service providers, telecommunications experts said. In fact, some suggested that the Cincinnati-based 6th Circuit's decision — along with other rulings and the U.S. Supreme Court's posture on a separate New York case — has effectively fortified state regulators' efforts to fill the gap. "Absent an act of Congress, the FCC has virtually no role in broadband any more," Ernesto Falcon, a program manager for the California Public Utilities Commission, said in an interview. "The result of this decision is that states like California, New York and others will have to govern and regulate broadband carriers on our own." California has one of the nation's strongest laws on net neutrality, the principle that internet traffic must be treated equally to ensure a free and open network. Former Gov. Jerry Brown signed the measure into law in 2018, months after federal regulators in President elect-Donald Trump's first administration repealed the net neutrality rules put in place under President Obama. Colorado, Oregon and other states also adopted their own standards. The Golden State's law has already survived legal challenges. It also prompted changes in the way internet service providers offered plans and services. "California's net neutrality law, which is seen as the gold standard by consumer advocates, carries national impact," Falcon said.... "The state's authority and role in broadband access has grown dramatically now," Falcon said. California's net neutrality rules prohibit "throttling" data speeds, according to the article.

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It "felt like a Disneyland ride," reports CBS News. A man took a Waymo takes to the airport — only to discover the car "wouldn't stop driving around a parking lot in circles." And because the car was in motion, he also couldn't get out. Still stuck in the car, Michael Johns — a tech-industry worker — then phoned Waymo for help. ("Has this been hacked? What's going on? I feel like I'm in the movies. Is somebody playing a joke on me?") But he also filmed the incident... "Why is this thing going in a circle? I'm getting dizzy," Johns said in a video posted on social media that has since gone viral, garnering more than two million views and interactions.... The Waymo representative was finally able to get the car under control after a few minutes, allowing him to get to the airport just in time to catch his flight back to LA. He says that the lack of empathy from the representative who attempted to help him, on top of the point that he's unsure if he was talking to a human or AI, are major concerns. "Where's the empathy? Where's the human connection to this?" Johns said while speaking with CBS News Los Angeles. "It's just, again, a case of today's digital world. A half-baked product and nobody meeting the customer, the consumers, in the middle." Johns, who ironically works in the tech industry himself, says he would love to see services like Waymo succeed, but he has no plans to hop in for a ride until he's sure that the kinks have been fixed. In the meantime, he's still waiting for someone from Waymo to contact him in regards to his concerns, which hasn't yet happened despite how much attention his video has attracted since last week. "My Monday was fine till i got into one of Waymo 's 'humanless' cars," he posted on LinkedIn . "I get in, buckle up ( safety first) and the saga begins.... [T]he car just went around in circles, eight circles at that..." A Waymo spokesperson admitted they'd added about five minutes to his travel time, but then "said the software glitch had since been resolved," reports the Los Angeles Times, "and that Johns was not charged for the ride." One final irony? According to his LinkedIn profile, Johns is a CES Innovations Awards judge.

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"It's fair to say that by 1995, OS/2 was dead software walking," remembers a new article from the Register (which begins with a 1995 Usenet post from Gordon Letwin, Microsoft's lead architect on the OS/2 project). But the real question is why this Microsoft-IBM collaboration on a DOS-replacing operating system ultimately lost out to Windows...? If OS/2 1.0 had been an 80386 OS, and had been able to multitask DOS apps, we think it would have been a big hit.... OS/2's initial 1980s versions were 16-bit products, at IBM's insistence. That is when the war was lost. That is when OS/2 flopped. Because its initial versions were even more crippled than the Deskpro 386... Because OS/2 1.x flopped, Microsoft launched a product that fixed the key weakness of OS/2 1.x. That product was Windows 3, which worked perfectly acceptably on 286 machines, but if you ran the same installed copy on a 32-bit 386 PC, it worked better. Windows 3.0 could use the more sophisticated hardware of a 386 to give better multitasking of the market-dominating DOS apps... IBM's poor planning shaped the PC industry of the 1990s more than Microsoft's successes. Windows 3.0 wasn't great, but it was good enough. It reversed people's perception of Windows after the failures of Windows 1 and Windows 2. Windows 3 achieved what OS/2 had intended to do. It transformed IBM PC compatibles from single-tasking text-only computers into graphical computers, with poor but just about usable multitasking... Soon after Windows 3.0 turned out to be a hit, OS/2 NT was rebranded as Windows NT. Even the most ardent Linux enthusiast must c\oncede that Windows NT did quite well over three decades. Back in 1995, the Register's author says they'd moved from OS/2 to Windows 95 "while it was still in beta. "The UI was far superior, more hardware worked, and Doom ran much better."

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"In many instances, there's a catch: flexible work but at lower pay..." writes Fortune. "Remote workers are accepting lower salaries in order to achieve remote status. Some are taking as much as 5% to 15% less pay to do so, while other employers are reversing the strategy to entice workers to come to the office at higher salaries..." Today, nearly half of managers anticipate challenges in meeting candidates' compensation expectations. And when the gap between salary expectation and an offer is too great, many employers are negotiating remote and hybrid work to get candidates to sign on the dotted line, according to Robert Half's recently published 2025 U.S. Hiring Outlook. Some candidates accept 5% to 15% less pay in exchange for getting to work from home, Theresa L. Fesinstine, founder of human resources advisory peoplepower.ai, told Fortune. "There's this unspoken exchange rate between flexibility and comp, and for some candidates, it's worth a significant trade-off," said Fesinstine, who has more than two decades of leadership experience in HR. This is especially true "for those who value work-life balance or are saving on commute costs." There are inherent risks in offering job candidates lower salaries, even if it means getting the chance to work from home. Amy Spurling, founder and CEO of employee benefits reimbursement platform Compt, told Fortune she expects to see a second Great Resignation this year after hiring freezes, benefits cuts, and forced RTO policies in 2023 and 2024. "If you're trying to lowball remote workers, you're about to face a harsh reality," Spurling said. "2025 is going to be a 'find out' year for companies that thought they could use remote work or other 'perks' to replace competitive compensation and genuine employee support." To wit, a 2024 report by PwC forecasts another resignation period with a 28% increase in the number of people who plan to change jobs, compared to 19% during the Great Resignation of 2022... What's more, Fesinstine argues, remote work "isn't a perk anymore, but rather a standard operating model." So attempting to describe remote work as a benefit doesn't sit well with job candidates... On the other hand, Michael Steinitz, senior executive director of professional talent solutions at Robert Half, told Fortune their research shows 76% of job candidates are willing to work fully in-office — in exchange for a higher salary. "Among those employees, the average raise they would request is about 23%, he said."

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In a potential U.S.-China conflict, cyberattackers are military weapons. That's the thrust of a new article from the Wall Street Journal: The message from President Biden's national security adviser was startling. Chinese hackers had gained the ability to shut down dozens of U.S. ports, power grids and other infrastructure targets at will, Jake Sullivan told telecommunications and technology executives at a secret meeting at the White House in the fall of 2023, according to people familiar with it. The attack could threaten lives, and the government needed the companies' help to root out the intruders. What no one at the briefing knew, including Sullivan: China's hackers were already working their way deep inside U.S. telecom networks, too. The two massive hacking operations have upended the West's understanding of what Beijing wants, while revealing the astonishing skill level and stealth of its keyboard warriors — once seen as the cyber equivalent of noisy, drunken burglars. China's hackers were once thought to be interested chiefly in business secrets and huge sets of private consumer data. But the latest hacks make clear they are now soldiers on the front lines of potential geopolitical conflict between the U.S. and China, in which cyberwarfare tools are expected to be powerful weapons. U.S. computer networks are a "key battlefield in any future conflict" with China, said Brandon Wales, a former top U.S. cybersecurity official at the Department of Homeland Security, who closely tracked China's hacking operations against American infrastructure. He said prepositioning and intelligence collection by the hackers "are designed to ensure they prevail by keeping the U.S. from projecting power, and inducing chaos at home." As China increasingly threatens Taiwan, working toward what Western intelligence officials see as a target of being ready to invade by 2027, the U.S. could be pulled into the fray as the island's most important backer... Top U.S. officials in both parties have warned that China is the greatest danger to American security. In the infrastructure attacks, which began at least as early as 2019 and are still taking place, hackers connected to China's military embedded themselves in arenas that spies usually ignored, including a water utility in Hawaii, a port in Houston and an oil-and-gas processing facility. Investigators, both at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and in the private sector, found the hackers lurked, sometimes for years, periodically testing access. At a regional airport, investigators found the hackers had secured access, and then returned every six months to make sure they could still get in. Hackers spent at least nine months in the network of a water-treatment system, moving into an adjacent server to study the operations of the plant. At a utility in Los Angeles, the hackers searched for material about how the utility would respond in the event of an emergency or crisis. The precise location and other details of the infrastructure victims are closely guarded secrets, and couldn't be fully determined. American security officials said they believe the infrastructure intrusions — carried out by a group dubbed Volt Typhoon — are at least in part aimed at disrupting Pacific military supply lines and otherwise impeding America's ability to respond to a future conflict with China, including over a potential invasion of Taiwan... The focus on Guam and West Coast targets suggested to many senior national-security officials across several Biden administration agencies that the hackers were focused on Taiwan, and doing everything they could to slow a U.S. response in a potential Chinese invasion, buying Beijing precious days to complete a takeover even before U.S. support could arrive. The telecom breachers "were also able to swipe from Verizon and AT&T a list of individuals the U.S. government was surveilling in recent months under court order, which included suspected Chinese agents. The intruders used known software flaws that had been publicly warned about but hadn't been patched." And ultimately nine U.S. telecoms were breached, according to America's deputy national security adviser for cybersecurity — including what appears to have been a preventable breach at AT&T (according to "one personal familiar with the matter"): [T]hey took control of a high-level network management account that wasn't protected by multifactor authentication, a basic safeguard. That granted them access to more than 100,000 routers from which they could further their attack — a serious lapse that may have allowed the hackers to copy traffic back to China and delete their own digital tracks. The details of the various breaches are stunning: Chinese hackers gained a foothold in the digital underpinnings of one of America's largest ports in just 31 seconds. At the Port of Houston, an intruder acting like an engineer from one of the port's software vendors entered a server designed to let employees reset their passwords from home. The hackers managed to download an encrypted set of passwords from all the port's staff before the port recognized the threat and cut off the password server from its network...

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Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In an Op-ed for The Huntington News, fourth year Northeastern University CS student Derek Kaplan argues that real pedagogical merit is what should count when deciding which language to use to teach CS fundamentals (aka 'Fundies'). He makes the case for Northeastern to reconsider its decision to move from Racket to Python and Java later this year in an overhaul of its first-year curriculum. "Students will get extensive training in Python, which is currently the most requested language by co-op employers," Northeastern explains (some two decades after a Slashdot commenter made the same Hot Languages = Jobs observation in a spirited 2001 debate on Java as a CS introductory language)... "I have often heard computer science students complain that Fundies 1 teaches Racket instead of a 'useful language' like Python," Kaplan writes. "But the point of Fundies is not to teach Racket — it is to teach program design skills that can be applied using any programming language. Racket is just the tool it uses to do so. A student who does well in Fundies will have no difficulty applying the same skills to Python or any other language. And with how fast the tech industry changes, is it really worth having a course that teaches just Python when tomorrow, some other language might dominate the industry? Our current curriculum focuses on timeless principles rather than fleeting trends." Also expressing concerns about the selection of suitable languages for novice programming is King's College CS Prof Michael Kölling, who explains, "One of the drivers is the perceived usefulness of the language in a real-world context. Students (and their parents) often have opinions which language is 'better' to learn. In forming these opinions, the definition of 'better' can often be vague and driven by limited insight. One strong aspect commonly cited is the perceived usefulness of a language in the 'real world.' If a language is widely used in industry, it is more likely to be seen as a useful language to learn." Kölling's recommendation? "We need a new language for teaching novices at secondary school and introductory university level," Kölling concludes. "This language should be designed explicitly for teaching [...] Maintenance and adaptation of this language should be driven by pedagogical considerations, not by industry needs." While noble in intent, one suspects Kaplan and Kölling may be on a quixotic quest in a money wins world, outgunned by the demands, resources, and influence of tech giants like Amazon — the top employer of Northeastern MSCS program grads — who pushed back against NSF advice to deemphasize Java in high school CS and dropped $15 million to have tech-backed nonprofit Code.org develop and push a new Java-based, powered-by-AWS CS curriculum into high schools with the support of a consortium of politicians, educators, and tech companies. Echoing Northeastern, an Amazon press release argued the new Java-based curriculum "best prepares students for the next step in their education and careers."

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Friday America's surgeon general warned that alcohol is "a well-established, preventable cause of cancer responsible for about 100,000 cases of cancer and 20,000 cancer deaths annually in the United States," and recommended an update to the warning labels on alcohol. So what happens to beer and spirits companies? They've actually been preparing for something like this for years, reports CNN: Major brewers, including Molson Coors and Anheuser-Busch InBev, and spirit giants such as Diageo and Pernod Ricard, have all grown their portfolios with new non-alcoholic drinks to attract an increasing number of consumers, particularly younger ones, who are ditching drinking because of health concerns. A Gallup poll from August found that almost half of Americans say that having one or two drinks a day is bad for a person's health — the highest percentage recorded in the survey's 23 years, and younger adults were most likely to say drinking is bad for health. The poll also showed that just 58% of adults said they drink alcohol, down from 67% in 2022, although Gallup notes it's relatively close to the historical average of 63% going back to 1939. But that doesn't predict a doomsday scenario for Big Alcohol. It actually could be good for their bottom lines: A December report from IWSR, a leading drinks analysis firm, said that the non-alcoholic drinks global market is "experiencing a transformative period of growth, driven by evolving consumer behaviors and the momentum of no-alcohol." The trend, to be led by the United States, is expected to grow by $4 billion by 2028 in the firm's forecast. Non-alcoholic drinks are even "skewing younger than the core buyer demographic across markets, and demonstrate higher frequency and intensity of consumption," signaling that there's a sustained thirst for booze-less beverages. Anheuser-Busch said in its 2023 annual report that its non-alcoholic beers "continued to outperform, delivering high-teens revenue growth." And the staff economist for the Brewers Association told CNN that non-alcoholic beer sales have jumped more than 100% between 2021 and 2024.

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"We're going straight to Mars. The Moon is a distraction," Elon Musk posted Thursday on X.com. Ars Technica's senior space editor points out that "These are definitive statements that directly contradict NASA's plans to send a series of human missions to the lunar south pole later this decade and establish a sustainable base of operations there with the Artemis Program." And "It would be one thing if Musk was just expressing his opinion as a private citizen..." but Musk "has assumed an important advisory role for the incoming administration. He was also partly responsible for the expected nomination of private astronaut [and former SpaceX flight commander] Jared Isaacman to become the next administrator of NASA. Although Musk is not directing US space policy, he certainly has a meaningful say in what happens." So what does this mean for Artemis? The fate of Artemis is an important question not just for NASA but for the US commercial space industry, the European Space Agency, and other international partners who have aligned with the return of humans to the Moon. With Artemis, the United States is in competition with China to establish a meaningful presence on the surface of the Moon. Based upon conversations with people involved in developing space policy for the Trump administration, I can make some educated guesses about how to interpret Musk's comments. None of these people, for example, would disagree with Musk's assertion that "the Artemis architecture is extremely inefficient" and that some changes are warranted. With that said, the Artemis Program is probably not going away. After all, it was the first Trump administration that created the program about five years ago. However, it may be less well-remembered that the first Trump White House pushed for more significant changes, including a "major course correction" at NASA... To a large extent, NASA resisted this change during the remainder of the Trump administration, keeping its core group of major contractors, such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, in place. It had help from key US Senators, including Richard Shelby, the now-retired Republican from Alabama. But this time, the push for change is likely to be more concerted, especially with key elements of NASA's architecture, including the Space Launch System rocket, being bypassed by privately developed rockets such as SpaceX's Starship vehicle and Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket. In all likelihood, NASA will adopt a new "Artemis" plan that involves initiatives to both the Moon and Mars. When Musk said "we're going straight to Mars," he may have meant that this will be the thrust of SpaceX, with support from NASA. That does not preclude a separate initiative, possibly led by Blue Origin with help from NASA, to develop lunar return plans. One month ago in a post on X.com, incoming NASA administrator Isaacman described himself as "passionate about America leading the most incredible adventure in human history..." And he also added that Americans "will walk on the Moon and Mars and in doing so, we will make life better here on Earth."

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Phoronix reports on Valve's "Steam Survey" results for December 2024, saying the new numbers "reflect a nice upward trend for the Linux gaming statistics and a high point in recent times." In November the Steam Survey reflected a 2.03% marketshare for Linux... Roughly inline with what we have been seeing for Linux right at around the 2% threshold. With the just-published December survey numbers, there is a 0.29% increase to 2.29%...! When looking at the Linux numbers, SteamOS Holo accounts for around 36% of all Linux gamers... SteamOS Holo being the operating system of the Steam Deck and beginning to appear on other devices as well... Driven in large part by the Steam Deck relying on a custom AMD SoC/APU and AMD being popular with Linux gamers/enthusiasts for their open-source driver support, AMD CPU use on Linux commands a 73.6% marketshare. In fact, December "saw AMD reach another record-high share among participants of Valve's survey," according to TechSpot — "up 3.02% last month, taking its total to 38.7% as Intel fell slightly to 63.4%..." Elsewhere, Windows 11 is now comfortably the most popular OS in the survey. It pulled ahead another 2% to an almost 55% share in December as Windows 10 dropped to 42.3%... However, it's a different story when looking at global users: Windows 10's share has increased two months in a row to 62.7% while Windows 11 has declined to 34.1%. Rounding up the rest of the survey, 16GB of RAM remains the most popular amount of system RAM but it's lead is declining as second-place 32GB grows; a trend that is mirrored in the VRAM category... Phoronix adds that the Windows percent "pulled back by 0.51% to 96.1% while Apple macOS also gained 0.22% going up to a 1.61% marketshare."

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Developer/data journalist Josh Renaud is also long-time Slashdot reader Kirkman14 — and he's got a story to tell: How do you get people interested in an obscure Atari ST graphics format used on BBSes in the late 1980s and early 1990s? Recruit some folks to help you make an artpack full of images and animations showing it off! That's the idea behind IGNITE, a new artpack from Mistigris computer arts and Break Into Chat, featuring 18 images and animations created in "Instant Graphics and Sound" format. I love telling unknown underdog computer stories, and IGS sucked me in. This fall, I published a six-part, 14,000-word history, introducing readers to a cast of characters that included Mears, the self-described "working man without a degree" who often downplayed his own coding ability; Kevin Moody and Anthony Rau, two Navy guys in Florida who bonded over their love of Atari and BBSing; Steve Turnbull, an artist and scenic designer working in Hollywood; and many others. But IGS isn't just a thing of the past. Two years ago, on New Years Eve 2022, Mears made a surprise announcement — he was releasing a new version of IGS, thirty years after he had stopped working on the project. Because I (inadvertently) had spurred Larry to action, I felt an obligation to make some art using his new tools. I completed my first piece — a drawing of a ship from the sci-fi game FTL — in early 2023. Over the subsequent months, I kept at it, and ended up creating a number of fun animations. I'm particularly proud of the [Star Trek-themed] animated Guardian of Forever login sequence, and a brand-new Calvin and Hobbes-themed animation I created just for this pack. I had long wanted to release an all-IGS artpack as a way to honor Mears, highlight IGS, and maybe stir other people's interest in trying this format. To lower the barrier to entry, I created my own web-based drawing tool, JoshDraw, which supports a small subset of IGS's features. To my surprise, I successfully recruited seven other people to submit nine static images to include in the pack.

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Brazil ended daylight saving time in 2019, reports the Washington Post, adding that some Brazilians loved the change, "particularly those who commute long distances and are no longer forced to leave their houses in pitch blackness." But "In the heavily populated southeast, the sky begins to brighten at the unconscionable hour of 4:30 a.m. during the summer, and by 8 a.m., it feels like high noon... Polls showed it ultimately lost majority support..." And then "After several energy emergencies, and with the prospect of more to come as the effects of climate change intensify, the vanquished daylight saving time is suddenly looking a whole lot better than it once did to some in the Brazilian government." Authorities almost mandated the return of daylight saving — a portion of the calendar when clocks are turned forward to maximize seasonal daylight — late last year to conserve energy amid a historic drought that had threatened hydroelectric power generation and drove up light bills. The government is already laying the political groundwork to restore it as soon as this year... Latin America's largest country is a global leader in green energy. An astounding 93 percent of its electricity comes from renewable sources, according to Brazil's Electric Energy Commercialization Chamber, the majority of which is hydropower. This strength, however, has also left it vulnerable to global warming. As temperatures have warmed and punishing droughts have grown more frequent, the country's water reserves have dropped precariously low at times, jeopardizing its primary source of energy. In 2021, an extended drought depleted the country's water stores, driving up light bills by an estimated 20 percent, according to the National Chamber of Electric Energy. Then came last year's drought, the worst in 70 years, and government officials started to look more seriously at daylight saving. Alexandre Silveira [Brazil's mining and energy minister] said that month that the decision to eliminate daylight saving had been extravagance Brazil could scarcely afford. "It was massively irresponsible, without any basis in science," the energy official said. "We're living in a period of denial in Brazil in all aspects." José Sidnei Colombo Martini, an electrical engineer at the University of São Paulo, told The Washington Post that decision to end daylight saving amounted to a "national bet on whether it is going to rain." And the bet is expected to become increasingly risky as the years pass. "Brazil has always had a massive amount of available water compared to other countries — storing 12 percent of the planet's surface — but this is being altered," said Suely Araújo, public policy coordinator at the Climate Observatory. Estimates show "we could have a 40 percent reduction in our water availability in Brazil's principal hydro regions by 2040. Brazil has entered a new reality... " Should other countries end Daylight Saving Time? "People and governments all over the world are having the same debate," the article points out, "often coming to conflicting conclusions." Countries including Azerbaijan, Mexico and Samoa have done away with daylight saving time. Meanwhile, Jordan, Namibia and Turkey have gone the opposite direction, opting for permanent daylight saving time. And Russia, discovering there's no way to tell time that pleases everyone, first tried permanent daylight saving time, then scuttled it.

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TPM is a dedicated chip or firmware enabling hardware-level security, housing encryption keys, certificates, passwords, and sensitive data, "and shielding them from unauthorized access," Microsoft senior product manager Steven Hosking wrote last month, declaring TPM 2.0 to be "a non-negotiable standard for the future of Windows." Or, as BleepingComputer put it, Microsoft "made it abundantly clear... that Windows 10 users won't be able to upgrade to Windows 11 unless their systems come with TPM 2.0 support." (This despite the fact that Statcounter Global data "shows that more than 61% of all Windows systems worldwide still run Windows 10.") They add that Microsoft "announced on October 31 that Windows 10 home users will be able to delay the switch to Windows 11 for one more year if they're willing to pay $30 for Extended Security Updates." But last week the Free Software Foundation's campaigns manager delivered a message on the FSF's official blog: "Keep putting pressure on Microsoft." Grassroots organization against a corporation as large as Microsoft is never easy. They have the advertising budget to claim that they "love Linux" (sic), not to mention the money and political willpower to corral free software developers from around the world on their nonfree platform Microsoft GitHub. This year's International Day Against DRM took aim at one specific injustice: their requiring a hardware TPM module for users being forced to "upgrade" to Windows 11. As Windows 10 will soon stop receiving security updates, this is a (Microsoft-manufactured) problem for users still on this operating system. Normally, offloading cryptography to a different hardware module could be seen as a good thing — but with nonfree software, it can only spell trouble for the user... What's crucial now is to keep putting pressure on Microsoft, whether that's through switching to GNU/Linux, avoiding new releases of their software, or actions as simple as moving your projects off of Microsoft GitHub. If you're concerned about e-waste or have friends who work to combat climate change, getting them together to tell them about free software is the perfect way to help our movement grow, and free a few more users from Microsoft's digital restrictions. If you're concerned about e-waste or have friends who work to combat climate change, getting them together to tell them about free software is the perfect way to help our movement grow, and free a few more users from Microsoft's digital restrictions.

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"Private space stations have been raising billions of dollars in an effort to build future hubs — and even one day cities — in orbit," according to a recent report from the U.K. newspaper, the Telegraph: Axiom Space, a US business aiming to build its own station, has raised more than $500m (£400m). Vast, a space business backed by crypto billionaire Jed McCaleb, is plotting two stations before the end of the decade. Gravitics, meanwhile, has raised tens of millions of dollars for its modular space "real estate". Nasa itself, along with other space agencies, is planning a further station, Lunar Gateway, which will orbit the Moon. Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin has also announced plans to build a space station by 2027, called Orbital Reef, which it has described as an orbital "mixed-use business park". Working with US aerospace business Sierra Space, Orbital Reef will be made up of inflatable pods, which can be launched on a regular rocket before being "blown up" in space. Sierra Space says these modules could house in-space manufacturing or pharmaceutical technology... Since 2021, Nasa has also offered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to private companies to develop commercial space stations that could succeed the ISS. So far, it has handed $400m to companies including Axiom, Blue Origin (which is working with Sierra Space), and Northrop Grumman... Vast hopes to launch its first space station, Haven-1, as soon as 2025. This simple module will be the first privately-run space station and will be occupied by a crew of four over four two week expeditions... While Vast was not one of the businesses to secure funding from Nasa, it hopes by launching the first proof-of-concept space station as soon as next year it can leapfrog rival efforts and claim the agency as an anchor customer. From there, it can target other space agencies or companies looking to conduct research. Some interesting perspectives from the article: Chris Quilty, an analyst at Quilty Space: "If China were not building its own space station it is arguable whether Nasa would have felt enjoined to maintain a human presence in low Earth orbit." Tim Farrar, founder of TMF Associates, which advises some of the world's top space companies: "Unless they either secure government funding or focus on space tourism, they will inevitably have to rely on the largess of either billionaires or gullible investors who are space enthusiasts." Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the news.

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Today 34-year-old chess champion Magnus Carlsen married 26-year-old Ella Victoria Malone, "in a ceremony packed with guests on a sunny winter day in Oslo," reports Chess.com. According to Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet, a film crew from Netflix was also present. The streaming giant is shooting a chess-related TV show rumored to air in 2025... Ella Victoria is now expected to have a more central role in her husband's career. According to VG, she played a crucial role in securing Magnus a deal with fashion brand G-Star Raw... Their wedding was surely a fairy tale, but the Carlsens aren't heading for their honeymoon just yet. Magnus is set to make his debut for St. Pauli in the German Bundesliga on January 10, when he'll face Dusseldorf led by none other than GM Gukesh Dommaraju. The article adds that "For Carlsen, this caps off a whirlwind week that began in New York, highlighted by his eighth World Blitz Championship title," a victory that they say was "controversially" shared with Russian grandmaster Ian Nepomniachtchi. CNN reports: [Carlsen] had taken a 2-0 lead in the four-game contest before Nepomniachtchi launched a stunning comeback to level the scores, sending the match to a sudden death tie-break. The pair then drew the next three games, and it was later determined that they would share the title after the proposal was accepted by Arkady Dvorkovich, the president of chess governing body FIDE. "I thought, at that point, we had already played for a very long time and I was, first of all, very happy to end it, and I thought, at that point, it would have been very, very cruel on both of us if one gets first and the other gets second," Carlsen later told reporters.... [T]he decision to share the Blitz title with long-time rival Nepomniachtchi has sparked outcry from some of the world's top players — the first time in history that a world championship title has been shared. "This is a situation where I cannot stand with what Magnus has done," prominent player Hikaru Nakamura said on his YouTube channel. "I do not think that there is any precedent for this, when you put out rules about the game itself and then suddenly you decide, 'It's okay, we're going to go home' ... It's unconscionable to me...." "FIDE goes from forfeiting Carlsen (over the jeans debacle) to creating an entirely new rule," Hans Niemann, whom Carlsen had defeated in the quarterfinals, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. "Seems like the the regulatory body of chess has no intention of being unbiased. They seem to only care about what one player thinks...." Former world champion Garry Kasparov made a pointed reference to the jeans controversy, writing on X: "I thought the first FIDE tiebreak was pants." Magnus apparently tells his opponent "If they like refuse, we can just play short draws until they give up," according to a behind-the-scenes video clip posted to X.com. The CEO of FIDE, Emil Sutovsky, re-posted it on X.com, complaining that FIDE president Dvorkovich's decision to accept the players' proposed draw was made "under the spur of a moment, and of course, the video appeared much later. I do think it is VERY BAD though..." FIDE later told CNN that "This situation has already prompted valuable discussions within FIDE management to improve our regulations." (And their article adds that some — including grandmaster Ivan Sokolov — suggested ties be settled with a new chess format known as Armageddon.) "In Armageddon, White has more time but a draw on the board counts as a win for Black," explains the Guardian — adding that back in 1983, "Fide determined the winner of a Candidates match by a roulette wheel." The Guardian adds that Russian-born FIDE president Arkady Dvorkovich "probably felt he had little choice but to rubber stamp the agreement by the players." He would have been pilloried in Moscow as preventing a Russian world champion had he ruled otherwise, and a negative could also have provoked a series of the notorious Berlin draws, the standard method for a quick mutually agreed half point. However, that course of action would have brought the players into disrepute, and it is more likely that an inspired game or a blunder would have settled the final. The audience on Wall Street applauded the decision, but the considerable online reaction from professional players and fans has been mostly critical. It was the first ever shared over-the-board individual world title in chess history.

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"My feet are already in the crosswalk," says Geoffrey A. Fowler, a San Francisco-based tech columnist for the Washington Post. In a video he takes one step from the curb, then stops to see if Waymo robotaxis will stop for him. And they often didn't. Waymo's position? Their cars consider "signals of pedestrian intent" including forward motion when deciding whether to stop — as well as other vehicles' speed and proximity. ("Do they seem like they're about to cross or are they just sort of milling around waiting for someone?") And Waymo "also said its car might decide not to stop if adjacent cars don't yield." Fowler counters that California law says cars must always stop for pedestrians in a crosswalk. ("It's classic Silicon Valley hubris to assume Waymo's ability to predict my behavior supersedes a law designed to protect me.") And Phil Koopman, a Carnegie Mellon University professor who conducts research on autonomous-vehicle safety, agrees that the Waymos should be stopping. "Instead of arguing that they shouldn't stop if human drivers are not going to stop, they could conspicuously stop for pedestrians who are standing on road pavement on a marked crosswalk. That might improve things for everyone by encouraging other drivers to do the same." From Fowler's video: I tried crossing in front of Waymos here more than 20 times. About three in ten times the Waymo would stop for me, but I couldn't figure out what made it change its mind. Heavy traffic vs light, crossing with two people, sticking one foot out — all would cause it to stop only sometimes. I could make it stop by darting out into the street — but that's not how my mama taught me to use a crosswalk... Look, I know many human drivers don't stop for pedestrians either. But isn't the whole point of having artificial intelligence robot drivers that they're safer because they actually follow the laws? Waymo would not admit breaking any laws, but acknowledged "opportunity for continued improvement in how it interacts with pedestrians." In an article accompanying the video, Fowler calls it "a cautionary tale about how AI, intended to make us more safe, also needs to learn how to coexist with us." Waymo cars don't behave this way at all intersections. Some friends report that the cars are too careful on quiet streets, while others say the vehicles are too aggressive around schools... No Waymo car has hit me, or any other person walking in a San Francisco crosswalk — at least so far. (It did strike a cyclist earlier this year.) The company touts that, as of October, its cars have 57 percent fewer police-reported crashes compared with a human driving the same distance in the cities where it operates. Other interesting details from the article: Fowler suggests a way his crosswalk could be made safer: "a flashing light beacon there could let me flag my intent to both humans and robots." The article points out that Waymo is also under investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration "for driving in an unexpected and disruptive manner, including around traffic control devices (which includes road markings)." At the same time, Fowler also acknowledges that "I generally find riding in a Waymo to be smooth and relaxing, and I have long assumed its self-driving technology is a net benefit for the city." His conclusion? "The experience has taught my family that the safest place around an autonomous vehicle is inside it, not walking around it." And he says living in San Francisco lately puts him "in a game of chicken with cars driven by nothing but artificial intelligence."

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"Electric vehicles are expected to outsell cars with internal combustion engines in China for the first time next year," reports the Financial Times, calling it "a historic inflection point that puts the world's biggest car market years ahead of western rivals." China is set to smash international forecasts and Beijing's official targets with domestic EV sales — including pure battery and plug-in hybrids — growing about 20 per cent year on year to more than 12mn cars in 2025, according to the latest estimates supplied to the Financial Times by four investment banks and research groups. The figure would be more than double the 5.9mn sold in 2022. At the same time, sales of traditionally powered cars are expected to fall by more than 10 per cent next year to less than 11 million, reflecting a near 30 per cent plunge from 14.8 million in 2022... Robert Liew, director of Asia-Pacific renewables research at Wood Mackenzie, said China's EV milestone signalled its success in domestic technology development and securing global supply chains for critical resources needed for EVs and their batteries. The industry's scale meant steep manufacturing cost reductions and lower prices for consumers. "They want to electrify everything," said Liew. "No other country comes close to China." While the pace of Chinese EV sales growth has eased from a post-pandemic frenzy, the forecasts suggest Beijing's official target, set in 2020, for EVs to account for 50 per cent of car sales by 2035, will be achieved 10 years in advance of schedule... As China's EV market tracked towards year-on-year growth of near 40 per cent in 2024, the market share of foreign-branded cars fell to a record low of 37 per cent — a sharp decline from 64 per cent in 2020, according to data from Automobility, a Shanghai-based consultancy. In this month alone, GM wrote down more than $5 billion (€4.8 billion) of its business value in China; the holding company behind Porsche warned of a writedown in its Volkswagen stake of up to €20 billion; and arch rivals Nissan and Honda said they were responding to a "drastically changing business environment" with a merger. "Meanwhile, EV sales growth has slowed in Europe and the US, reflecting the legacy car industry's slow embrace of new technology, uncertainty over government subsidies and rising protectionism against imports from China..." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.

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It's "what some experts consider the most advanced military AI initiative ever to be deployed," reports the Washington Post. But the Israeli military's AI-powered intelligence practices are also "under scrutiny. Genocide charges against Israel brought to The Hague by South Africa question whether crucial decisions about bombing targets in Gaza were made by software, an investigation that could hasten a global debate about the role of AI technology in warfare." After the brutal Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas, the Israel Defense Forces deluged Gaza with bombs, drawing on a database painstakingly compiled through the years that detailed home addresses, tunnels and other infrastructure critical to the militant group. But then the target bank ran low. To maintain the war's breakneck pace, the IDF turned to an elaborate artificial intelligence tool called Habsora — or "the Gospel" — which could quickly generate hundreds of additional targets. The use of AI to rapidly refill IDF's target bank allowed the military to continue its campaign uninterrupted, according to two people familiar with the operation. It is an example of how the decade-long program to place advanced AI tools at the center of IDF's intelligence operations has contributed to the violence of Israel's 14-month war in Gaza... People familiar with the IDF's practices, including soldiers who have served in the war, say Israel's military has significantly expanded the number of acceptable civilian casualties from historic norms. Some argue this shift is enabled by automation, which has made it easier to speedily generate large quantities of targets, including of low-level militants who participated in the Oct. 7 attacks. In a statement to The Post, the IDF argued that "If anything, these tools have minimized collateral damage and raised the accuracy of the human-led process." The IDF requires an officer to sign off on any recommendations from its "big data processing" systems, according to an intelligence official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because Israel does not release division leaders' names. The Gospel and other AI tools do not make decisions autonomously, the person added...Recommendations that survive vetting by an intelligence analyst are placed in the target bank by a senior officer... Another machine learning tool, called Lavender, uses a percentage score to predict how likely a Palestinian is to be a member of a militant group, allowing the IDF to quickly generate a large volume of potential human targets... The rule mandating two pieces of human-derived intelligence to validate a prediction from Lavender was dropped to one at the outset of the war, according to two people familiar with the efforts. In some cases in the Gaza division, soldiers who were poorly trained in using the technology attacked human targets without corroborating Lavender's predictions at all, the soldier said. The article includes an ominous quote from Steven Feldstein, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment who researches the use of AI in war. Feldstein acknowledges questions of accuracy, but also notes the accelerated speed of the systems, and the ultimate higher death count. His conclusion? "What's happening in Gaza is a forerunner of a broader shift in how war is being fought."

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"Robots and AI models share one crucial characteristic," writes the Washington Post. "Whether to move around, conduct conversations or solve problems, they function by constantly taking in and computing increasingly vast quantities of data. It's a brute-force approach to automation. Processing all that data makes them such energy guzzlers that their planet-warming pollution could outweigh any benefits they offer." But then the article visits the robot soccer team of René van de Molengraft (chair of robotics at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands). "One solution, Molengraft thinks, might lie in 'lazy robotics,' a cheeky term to describe machines doing less and taking shortcuts..." There may be ceilings for laziness: limits to how much superfluous energy use can be stripped away before robots stop functioning as they should. Still, Molengraft said, "The truth is: Robots are still doing a lot of things that they shouldn't be doing." To waste less energy, robots need to do less of everything: move less, and think less, and sense less. They need to focus only on what's important at any particular moment. Which, after all, is what humans do, even if we don't always realize it.... Lazy robotics is already percolating out of university labs and into the R&D wings of corporations.... On the outskirts of Eindhoven, engineers at health technology firm Philips have encoded lazy robotics into two porcelain-white machines. These robots, named FlexArm and Biplane, move around an operating theater with smooth hums, taking X-ray images to help surgeons install cardiac stents or work on the brain with greater precision.... The robots use proximity sensors, which use far less energy. Lazy robotics can also cut down on the number of X-rays during a procedure. Frequently, surgeons take multiple X-rays to make their work as precise as possible. But with the robots' help, they can track the exact coordinates on a patient's body they are operating on in real time... The theories behind lazy robotics make robots smart in a more practical way: by coding in an awareness of what they don't need to know. It may be a while before these solutions are deployed at scale out in the world, but their potential applications are already evident... Molengraft sees an extension of lazy robotics into the realm of generative AI, in which machines don't learn how to move but learn how to learn by processing veritable oceans of data... It's wiser to build versions that contain only the necessary information. A language model used by software engineers, for instance, shouldn't need to run through its training data about world history, sporting records or children's literature. "Not every AI model has to be able to tell us about the first Harry Potter book," Molengraft said. The less data an AI model crunches, the less energy it uses — a vital efficiency fillip given that ChatGPT now uses 500,000 kilowatt-hours of energy a day, responding to 200 million queries. A U.S. household would need more than 17,000 days on average to rack up the same electricity bill... Molengraft sees this work as indispensable if the forthcoming age of machines is to be a cleaner time as well.

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It's weighs less than 15 pounds. It's 17 inches wide. And in June Elon Musk said it was "easily carried in a backpack. This product will change the world." And now, CNET reports: Calling all digital nomads and van-lifers: SpaceX's Starlink Mini is now available everywhere in the US. The small antenna costs $599 and requires a monthly subscription of either $50 or $165, depending on which plan you choose. Thanks to thousands of low Earth orbit satellites, Starlink has the unique ability to send high-speed internet just about anywhere. Standard service is great for home internet in rural areas, while the provider's Roam service and new portable dish are ideal for staying connected on the go... The Mini is a satellite dish and Wi-Fi router all in one that's about the size of a laptop. According to Starlink's website, it uses approximately half the power of Starlink's standard dish. It can be powered with a portable USB battery and can "melt snow and withstand sleet, heavy rain and harsh winds." The article adds that users "can connect up to 128 devices, and it promises low latency... According to Starlink's broadband labels, your download speeds typically range from 30 to 100Mbps and 5 to 25Mbps in upload."

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Politico asked an "array of thinkers — futurists, scientists, foreign policy analysts and others — to lay out some of the possible 'Black Swan' events that could await us in the new year: What are the unpredictable, unlikely episodes that aren't yet on the radar but would completely upend American life as we know it?" Here's one from Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist and author of the book Taming Silicon Valley: How We Can Ensure That AI Works For Us: 2025 could easily see the largest cyberattack in history, taking down, at least for a little while, some sizeable piece of the world's infrastructure, whether for deliberate ransom or to manipulate people to make money off a short on global markets. Cybercrime is already a huge, multi-trillion dollar problem, and one that most victims don't like to talk about. It is said to be bigger than the entire global drug trade. Four things could make it much worse in 2025. First, generative AI, rising in popularity and declining in price, is a perfect tool for cyberattackers. Although it is unreliable and prone to hallucinations, it is terrific at making plausible sounding text (e.g., phishing attacks to trick people into revealing credentials) and deepfaked videos at virtually zero cost, allowing attackers to broaden their attacks. Already, a cybercrew bilked a Hong Kong bank out of $25 million. Second, large language models are notoriously susceptible to jailbreaking and things like "prompt-injection attacks," for which no known solution exists. Third, generative AI tools are increasingly being used to create code; in some cases those coders don't fully understand the code written, and the autogenerated code has already been shown in some cases to introduce new security holes. And finally 2025 may see a U.S. government "determined to deregulate as much as possible, slashing costs," Marus speculates, a scenario where "enforcement and investigations will almost certainly decline in both quality and quantity, leaving the world quite vulnerable to ever more audacious attacks." Elsewhere in Politico's article there's other even less-cheery predictions for 2025. The executive director of an advocacy group for public health professionals describes the possibility of an epidemic "that we had the tools to control" which "winds up killing thousands" (while also "sending the economy back into a Covid-like downward spiral.") And a law professor predicts 2025 will see a decisive breakthrough in quantum computing. "Those little padlocks you see beside URLs? They would, overnight, become a fiction."

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