Toyota sold just 61 BZ models in September, reports Electrek. "Including the Lexus RZ, which managed 86 sales, Toyota sold just 147 all-electric vehicles in the US last month, over 90% less than the 1,847 it sold in September 2024." Toyota's total sales were up 14% with over 185,700 vehicles sold, meaning EVs accounted for less than 0.1%... So, why is Toyota struggling to sell EVs when the market is booming? For one, Toyota recalled over 95,000 electric vehicles last month, including the bZ4X, Lexus RZ, and Subaru Solterra, all of which are built on the same platform. The recall was due to a faulty defroster, but Toyota instructed its dealers to halt sales of the bZ4X, Lexus RZ, and Subaru Solterra. Toyota hopes to turn things around with a new and improved lineup. The 2026 Toyota BZ (formerly the bZ4X) is arriving at US dealerships, promising to fix some of the biggest complaints with the outgoing electric SUV. Powered by a larger 74.7 kWh battery, the 2026 Toyota BZ offers up to 314 miles of driving range, a 25% improvement from the 2025 bZ4X... Toyota's new electric SUV also features a built-in NACS charge port, allowing for recharging at Tesla Superchargers. It also features a new thermal management system and battery preconditioning, which improves charge times from 10% to 80% in about 30 minutes... It's not just the US that Toyota's EV sales crashed last month, either. In its home market of Japan, Toyota (including Lexus) sold just 18 EVs in September. The Japanese auto giant is betting on new models to drive growth.

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"Microsoft buys a lot of GPUs from both Nvidia and AMD," writes the Register. "But moving forward, Redmond's leaders want to shift the majority of its AI workloads from GPUs to its own homegrown accelerators..." Driving the transition is a focus on performance per dollar, which for a hyperscale cloud provider is arguably the only metric that really matters. Speaking during a fireside chat moderated by CNBC on Wednesday, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott said that up to this point, Nvidia has offered the best price-performance, but he's willing to entertain anything in order to meet demand. Going forward, Scott suggested Microsoft hopes to use its homegrown chips for the majority of its datacenter workloads. When asked, "Is the longer term idea to have mainly Microsoft silicon in the data center?" Scott responded, "Yeah, absolutely... Microsoft is reportedly in the process of bringing a second-generation Maia accelerator to market next year that will no doubt offer more competitive compute, memory, and interconnect performance... It should be noted that AI accelerators aren't the only custom chips Microsoft has been working on. Redmond also has its own CPU called Cobalt and a whole host of platform security silicon designed to accelerate cryptography and safeguard key exchanges across its vast datacenter domains.

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The Greater Manchester Police force has 12,677 employees. But they've now suspended work-from-home privileges, reports the BBC, "following an investigation into so-called 'key-jamming', which can allow people to falsely appear to be working. "Twenty-six police officers, staff and contractors are facing misconduct proceedings following the probe, the force said." One constable told a hearing that a police detective working from home had made it look like his computer was in use on 38 different occasions over 12 days, according to an earlier BBC article. The evidence "showed lengthy periods where the only activity is single keystrokes, pressing the 'H' key about 30 times, between 10:28 and 11:56 GMT on 3 December, and then the 'I' key more than 16,000 times." The detective "used key jamming for 45 hours out of a total of 85 he was logged in for and was frequently away from the keyboard for half of his working day." The constable said the detective's motivation was "laziness" — and the detective has already resigned. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the article.

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From 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. today (EDT), the Free Software Foundation celebrates its 40th anniversary with an online and in-person event. "We will broadcast the talks and workshops via a fully free software livestream on fsf.org/live," according to the FSF's official "FSF40 Celebration" page. "Everyone will be able to join the discussion via the #fsf40 IRC channel on Libera.Chat." "4 decades, 4 freedoms, 4 all users" is the event's slogan. And during the ceremony, a 40th-anniversary cake was sliced by newly-elected FSF president Ian Kelling (who was unanimously confirmed by FSF board members): Kelling, age 43, has held the role of a board member and a voting member since March 2021. The board said of Kelling's confirmation: "His hands-on technical experience resulting from his position as the organization's senior systems administrator proved invaluable for his work on the board of directors... He has the technical knowledge to speak with authority on most free software issues, and he has a strong connection with the community as an active speaker and blogger." Kelling earned a bachelor's degree in computer science and is a continuous user, developer, and advocate for free software. His personal commitment to complete software freedom has been shaped by his past experiences working as a software developer for proprietary software companies while using, learning, and contributing to GNU/Linux on his own time. "Ian has shown good judgment on the board, and a firm commitment to the free software movement," FSF founder and Chief GNUisance Richard Stallman said. Outgoing FSF President and long-time board member Geoff Knauth added: "Since joining the board in 2021, Ian has shown a clear understanding of the free software philosophy in today's technology, and a strong vision. He recognizes threats in upcoming technologies, promotes transparency, has played a significant role in designing and implementing the new board recruitment processes, and has always adhered to ethical principles. He has also given me valuable advice at critical moments, for which I am very grateful..." Kelling will continue to fill the role of senior systems administrator for the FSF, which he has held since 2017, where he leads the FSF's tech team under the direction of Zoë Kooyman, executive director of the FSF. True to the FSF's tradition for this role, he takes on the governance role as a volunteer. Upcoming on the livestream: Free Software Foundation triviaLibreLocal group lightning talksA panel with the FSF, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) , F-Droid, and Sugar Labs

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An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post: Women tend to live longer than men. There are traditional explanations: Men smoke more. They drink more. They tend to engage in riskier behavior. But the fact that this lifespan gap holds true regardless of country or century indicates something deeper is also at play. A growing body of evidence suggests that women's relative longevity may derive, in part, from having double X chromosomes, a redundancy that protects them against harmful mutations. That theory was further bolstered Wednesday with the publication of the most sweeping analysis to date of the lifespan differences between males and females in more than 1,000 mammal and bird species... If a baby has a pair of X chromosomes, she's a girl. If the baby inherits an X chromosome and a Y chromosome, he's a boy. In birds, however, the situation is reversed. Female birds have a pair of unlike sex chromosomes while males have the like pair... For their study, Colchero, Staerk and their colleagues collected data on the lifespans of 528 mammal species and 648 bird species kept in zoos. The team found that most other mammals are like humans, with the females of nearly three-fourths of mammal species outliving their male counterparts. But in birds, 68 percent of species studied showed a bias toward male longevity, as expected from their chromosomal makeup.

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Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: CBS News has a TL;DR video report, but Jeremy Stern's earlier epic Class Dismissed [at Collosus.com] offers a deep dive into Alpha School, "the teacherless, homeworkless, K-12 private school in Austin, Texas, where students have been testing in the top 0.1% nationally by self-directing coursework with AI tutoring apps for two hours a day. Alpha students are incentivized to complete coursework to "mastery-level" (i.e., scoring over 90%) in only two hours via a mix of various material and immaterial rewards, including the right to spend the other four hours of the school day in 'workshops,' learning things like how to run an Airbnb or food truck, manage a brokerage account or Broadway production, or build a business or drone." Founder MacKenzie Larson's dream that "kids must love school so much they don't want to go on vacation" drew the attention of — and investments of money and time from — mysterious tech billionaire Joe Liemandt, who sent his own kids to Larson's school and now aims to bring the experience to rest of the world. "When GenAI hit in 2022," Liemandt said, "I took a billion dollars out of my software company. I said, 'Okay, we're going to be able to take MacKenzie's 2x in 2 hours groundwork and get it out to a billion kids.' It's going to cost more than that, but I could start to figure it out. It's going to happen. There's going to be a tablet that costs less than $1,000 that is going to teach every kid on this planet everything they need to know in two hours a day and they're going to love it. "I really do think we can transform education for everybody in the world. So that's my next 20 years. I literally wake up now and I'm like, I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I will work 7 by 24 for the next 20 years to fricking do this. The greatest 20 years of my life are right ahead of me. I don't think I'm going to lose. We're going to win." Of course, Stern writes at Collosus.com, there will be questions about this model of schooling, but asks: "Suppose that from kindergarten through 12th grade, your child's teachers were, in essence, stacks of machines. Suppose those machines unlocked more of your child's academic potential than you knew was possible, and made them love school. Suppose the schooling they loved involved vision monitoring and personal data capture. Suppose that surveillance architecture enabled them to outperform your wildest expectations on standardized tests, and in turn gave them self-confidence and self-esteem, and made their own innate potential seem limitless.... Suppose poor kids had a reason to believe and a way to show they're just as academically capable as rich kids, and that every student on Earth could test in what we now consider the top 10%. Suppose it allowed them to spend two-thirds of their school day on their own interests and passions. Suppose your child's deep love of school minted a new class of education billionaires. "If you shrink from such a future, by which principle would you justify stifling it?"

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The food delivery robots that arrived in Atlanta in June "are not our friends," argues a headline at CNN. The four-wheeled Serve Robotics machines "get confused at crosswalks. They move with the speed and caution of a first-time driver, stilted and shy, until they suddenly speed up without warning. Their four wheels look like they were made for off-roading, but they still get stuck in the cracks of craggy sidewalks. Most times I see the bots, they aren't moving at all... " Cyclists swerve to avoid them like any other obstacle in the road. Patrons of Shake Shack (a national partner of Serve) weave around the mess of robots parked in front of the restaurant to make their way inside and place orders on iPads... The dawn of everyday, "friendly" robots may be here, but they haven't proven themselves useful — or trustworthy — yet. "People think they are your friends, but they're actually cameras and microphones of corporations," said Joanna Bryson, a longtime AI scholar and professor of ethics and technology at the Hertie School in Berlin. "You're right to be nervous..." When robots show up in a city, it's often not because the residents of said city actively wanted them there or had a say in their arrival said Edward Ongweso Jr. [a researcher at the Security in Context initiative, a tech journalist and self-proclaimed "decelerationist" urging a slower rollout for Silicon Valley tech pioneers and civic leaders embracing untested and unregulated technology]... "They're being rolled out without any sort of input from people, and as a result, in ways that are annoying and inconvenient," Ongweso Jr. said. "I suspect that people would feel a lot differently if they had a choice ... 'what kind of robots are we interested in rolling out in our homes, in our workplaces, on our college campuses or in our communities?'" Delivery robots aren't unique to Atlanta. AI-driven companies including Avride and Coco Robotics have sent fleets of delivery robots to big cities like Chicago, Dallas and Jersey City, as well as sleepy college towns... "They're popping up everywhere," Ongweso Jr. continued, "because there's sort of a realization that you have to convince people to view them as inevitable. The way to do that is to just push it into as many places as possible, and have these spectacle demonstrations, get some friendly coverage, try to figure out the ways in which you're selling this as the only alternative.... If you humanize it, you're more willing to entertain it and rationalize it being in your area — 'That's just Jeffrey,' or whatever they name it — instead of seeing it for what it is, which is a bunch of investors privately encroaching on a community or workplace," Ongweso Jr. said. "It's not the future. It's a business model." Serve Robotics CEO Ali Kashani told CNN their goal in Atlanta was reducing traffic — and that the robots' average delivery distance there was under a mile, taking about 18 minutes per delivery. Serve Robotics has also launched their robots in Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Dallas-Fort Worth and Atlanta, according to the site Robotics 247, as part of an ongoing collaboration with Uber Eats. (Although after the robots launched in Los Angeles, a man in a mobility scooter complained the slow-moving robot swerved in front of him.) And "residents of other cities have had to rescue them when they've been felled by weather," reports CNN. CNN also spoke to Dylan Losey, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech who studies human-robot interaction, who notes that the robots' AI algorithms are "completely unregulated... We don't know if a third party has checked the hardware and software and deemed the system 'safe' — in part because what it means for these systems to be 'safe' is not fully understood or standardized." (CNN's reporter adds that "the last time I got close to a bot, to peer down at a flier someone left on top of it, it revved at me loudly. Perhaps they can sense a hater.") But Serve's CEO says there's one crucial way robot delivery will be cheaper than humans. "You don't have to tip the robots."

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"A small number of researchers are making real progress trying to create computers out of living cells," reports the BBC: Among those leading the way are a group of scientists in Switzerland, who I went to meet. One day, they hope we could see data centres full of "living" servers which replicate aspects of how artificial intelligence (AI) learns — and could use a fraction of the energy of current methods. That is the vision of Dr Fred Jordan, co-founder of the FinalSpark lab I visited. We are all used to the ideas of hardware and software in the computers we currently use. The somewhat eyebrow-raising term Dr Jordan and others in the field use to refer to what they are creating is "wetware". In simple terms, it involves creating neurons which are developed into clusters called organoids, which in turn can be attached to electrodes — at which point the process of trying to use them like mini-computers can begin... For FinalSpark, the process begins with stem cells derived from human skin cells, which they buy from a clinic in Japan. The actual donors are anonymous... In the lab, FinalSpark's cellular biologist Dr Flora Brozzi handed me a dish containing several small white orbs. Each little sphere is essentially a tiny, lab-grown mini-brain, made out of living stem cells which have been cultured to become clusters of neurons and supporting cells — these are the "organoids"... After undergoing a process which can last several months, the organoids are ready to be attached to an electrode and then prompted to respond to simple keyboard commands... Electrical stimulations are important first steps towards the team's bigger goal of triggering learning in the biocomputer's neurons so they can eventually adapt to perform tasks... FinalSpark are not the only scientists working in the biocomputing space. Australian firm Cortical Labs announced in 2022 that it had managed to get artificial neurons to play the early computer game Pong. In the US, researchers at Johns Hopkins University are also building "mini-brains" to study how they process information — but in the context of drug development for neurological conditions like Alzheimer's and autism. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the news.

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Amazon will be adding facial recognition to its camera-equipped Ring doorbells for the first time in December, according to the Washington Post. "While the feature will be optional for Ring device owners, privacy advocates say it's unfair that wherever the technology is in use, anyone within sight will have their faces scanned to determine who's a friend or stranger." The Ring feature is "invasive for anyone who walks within range of your Ring doorbell," said Calli Schroeder, senior counsel at the consumer advocacy and policy group Electronic Privacy Information Center. "They are not consenting to this." Ring spokeswoman Emma Daniels said that Ring's features empower device owners to be responsible users of facial recognition and to comply with relevant laws that "may require obtaining consent prior to identifying people..." Other companies, including Google, already offer facial recognition for connected doorbells and cameras. You might use similar technology to unlock your iPhone or tag relatives in digital photo albums. But privacy watchdogs said that Ring's use of facial recognition poses added risks, because the company's products are embedded in our neighborhoods and have a history of raising social, privacy and legal questions... It's typically legal to film in public places, including your doorway. And in most of the United States, your permission is not legally required to collect or use your faceprint. Privacy experts said that Ring's use of the technology risks crossing ethical boundaries because of its potential for widespread use in residential areas without people's knowledge or consent. You choose to unlock your iPhone by scanning your face. A food delivery courier, a child selling candy or someone walking by on the sidewalk is not consenting to have their face captured, stored and compared against Ring's database, said Adam Schwartz, privacy litigation director for the consumer advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation. "It's troubling that companies are making a product that by design is taking biometric information from people who are doing the innocent act of walking onto a porch," he said. Ring's spokesperson said facial recognition won't be available some locations, according to the article, including Texas and Illinois, which passed laws fining companies for collecting face information without permission. But the Washington Post heard another possible worst-case scenario from Calli Schroeder, senior counsel at the consumer advocacy and policy group Electronic Privacy Information Center: databases of identified faces being stolen by cyberthieves, misused by Ring employees, or shared with outsiders such as law enforcement. Amazon says they're "reuniting lost dogs through the power of AI," in their announcement this week, thanks to "an AI-powered community feature that enables your outdoor Ring cameras to help reunite lost dogs with their families... When a neighbor reports a lost dog in the Ring app, nearby outdoor Ring cameras automatically begin scanning for potential matches." Amazon calls it an example of their vision for "tools that make it easier for neighbors to look out for each other, and create safer, more connected communities." They're also 10x zoom, enhanced low-light performance, 2K and 4K resolutions, and "advanced AI tuning" for video...

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BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: Signal has introduced the Sparse Post Quantum Ratchet (SPQR), a new upgrade to its encryption protocol that mixes quantum safe cryptography into its existing Double Ratchet. The result, which Signal calls the Triple Ratchet, makes it much harder for even future quantum computers to break private chats. The change happens silently in the background, meaning users do not need to do anything, but once fully rolled out it will make harvested messages useless even to adversaries with quantum power. The company worked with researchers and used formal verification tools to prove the new protocol's security. Signal says the upgrade preserves its guarantees of forward secrecy and post compromise security while adding protection against harvest now, decrypt later attacks. The move raises a bigger question: will this be enough when large scale quantum computers arrive, or will secure messaging need to evolve yet again?

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Indonesia has suspended TikTok's registration to provide electronic systems after it failed to hand over all data relating to the use of its live stream feature, a government official said on Friday. The suspension could in theory prevent access to TikTok, which has more than 100 million accounts based in Indonesia. Alexander Sabar, an official at Indonesia's communications and digital ministry, said in a statement some accounts with ties to online gambling activities used TikTok's live stream feature during national protests. [...] Sabar said the government had asked the company for its traffic, streaming and monetization data. The company, owned by China's ByteDance, did not provide complete data, citing its internal procedures, Sabar said without giving further detail.

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Google will discontinue Gmailify and POP email support in January 2026, forcing users who rely on these features to switch to IMAP. PCWorld reports: These changes only affect future emails. Emails that have already been synchronized in the Gmail account will remain the same. External accounts can still be used in the Gmail app, but only via IMAP. Google also recommends that users with work or education accounts contact their administrators if a Google Workspace migration is needed. For many Gmail users, these changes will likely mean getting used to the new system. Anyone who previously upgraded their external email accounts with Gmailify or integrated them via POP will have to switch to IMAP by January 2026 at the latest and do without some convenient functions, like spam filters and automatic sorting.

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The University of San Francisco issued a campuswide alert after reports of a man using Meta Ray-Ban AI glasses to film students while making "unwanted comments and inappropriate dating questions." Although no violence has been reported, officials said he may be uploading footage to TikTok and Instagram. SFGate reports: University officials said "no threats or acts of violence" have been reported, but they have been unable to identify all students who appear in the videos. They urged any school members affected to alert the app platform and the USF Department of Public Safety. "As a community, we share the responsibility of caring for ourselves, each other, and this place," school officials said in the alert. "By looking out for one another and promptly reporting concerns, we help ensure a safe and supportive environment for all." The glasses feature a small camera that can be used for recording by pressing a button or using voice controls. Meta advises users to act "responsibly" when using the glasses. "Not everyone loves being photographed. Stop recording if anyone expresses that they would rather opt out, and be particularly mindful of others before going live," the company said.

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The SEC has approved the Texas Stock Exchange (TXSE), the first new fully integrated U.S. stock exchange in decades and the only one based in Texas. TXSE is set to launch trading services, as well as exchange-traded products, known as ETPs, and corporate listings, in 2026. CBS News reports: Exchange-traded products are financial instruments that follow the performance of underlying assets such as stocks, indexes or other financial benchmarks. Like stocks, ETPs are traded on public exchanges, allowing investors to buy and sell them throughout the trading day at market prices that fluctuate in real time. TXSE was backed by wealth management giant BlackRock and market maker Citadel Securities, among other firms. The Texas company said in June 2024 that it raised a total of $120 million from more than two dozen investors. TXSE's headquarters in Dallas opened this spring, the group said.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google is bringing its AI coding agent Jules deeper into developer workflows with a new command-line interface and public API, allowing it to plug into terminals, CI/CD systems, and tools like Slack -- as competition intensifies among tech companies to own the future of software development and make coding more of an AI-assisted task. Until now, Jules -- Google's asynchronous coding agent -- was only accessible via its website and GitHub. On Thursday, the company introduced Jules Tools, a command-line interface that brings Jules directly into the developer's terminal. The CLI lets developers interact with the agent using commands, streamlining workflows by eliminating the need to switch between the web interface and GitHub. It allows them to stay within their environment while delegating coding tasks and validating results. "We want to reduce context switching for developers as much as possible," Kathy Korevec, director of product at Google Labs, told TechCrunch. Jules differs from Gemini CLI in that it focuses on "scoped," independent tasks rather than requiring iterative collaboration. Once a user approves a plan, Jules executes it autonomously, while the CLI needs more step-by-step guidance. Jules also has a public API for workflow and IDE integration, plus features like memory, a stacked diff viewer, PR comment handling, and image uploads -- capabilities not present in the CLI. Gemini CLI is limited to terminals and CI/CD pipelines and is better suited for exploratory, highly interactive use.

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Last month, federal investigators said they dismantled a China-linked plot that aimed to cripple New York City's telecommunications system by overloading cell towers, jamming 911 calls, and disrupting communications. According to law enforcement sources, the plot was even bigger than first thought. "Agents from Homeland Security Investigations found an additional 200,000 SIM cards at a location in New Jersey," according to ABC News. "That's double the 100,000 SIM cards, along with hundreds of servers, that were recently seized at five other vacant offices and apartments in and around the city." From the report: Investigators secured each of those locations, seized the electronics, and are now trying to track down who rented the spaces and filled them with shelves full of gear capable of sending 30 million anonymous text messages every minute, overloading communications and blacking out cellular service in a city that relies on it for emergency response and counterterrorism. According to sources, the investigation began after several high-level people, including at least one with direct access to President Donald Trump, were targeted not only by swatters but also with actual threats received on their private phones. "The potential threat these data centers pose to the public could include shutting down critical resources that the public needs, like the 911 system, or potentially impacting the public's ability to communicate everything, including business transactions," said Don Mihalek, an ABC News contributor who was formerly with the Secret Service.

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OpenAI's valuation has surged to $500 billion after a $6.6 billion secondary stock sale, briefly making it the world's most valuable startup ahead of SpaceX and ByteDance. The Associated Press reports: Current and former OpenAI employees sold $6.6 billion in shares to a group of investors, pushing the privately held artificial intelligence company's valuation to $500 billion, according to a source with knowledge of the deal who was not authorized to discuss it publicly. The investors buying the shares included Thrive Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group and T. Rowe Price, along with Japanese tech giant SoftBank and the United Arab Emirates' MGX, the source said Thursday. The valuation reflects high expectations for the future of AI technology and continues OpenAI's remarkable trajectory from its start as a nonprofit research lab in 2015. But with the San Francisco-based company not yet turning a profit, it could also amplify concerns about an AI bubble if the generative AI products made by OpenAI and its competitors don't meet the expectations of investors pouring billions of dollars into research and development.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: As we careen toward a future in which Google has final say over what apps you can run, the company has sought to assuage the community's fears with a blog post and a casual "backstage" video. Google has said again and again since announcing the change that sideloading isn't going anywhere, but it's definitely not going to be as easy. The new information confirms app installs will be more reliant on the cloud, and devs can expect new fees, but there will be an escape hatch for hobbyists. Confirming app verification status will be the job of a new system component called the Android Developer Verifier, which will be rolled out to devices in the next major release of Android 16. Google explains that phones must ensure each app has a package name and signing keys that have been registered with Google at the time of installation. This process may break the popular FOSS storefront F-Droid. It would be impossible for your phone to carry a database of all verified apps, so this process may require Internet access. Google plans to have a local cache of the most common sideloaded apps on devices, but for anything else, an Internet connection is required. Google suggests alternative app stores will be able to use a pre-auth token to bypass network calls, but it's still deciding how that will work. The financial arrangement has been murky since the initial announcement, but it's getting clearer. Even though Google's largely automated verification process has been described as simple, it's still going to cost developers money. The verification process will mirror the current Google Play registration fee of $25, which Google claims will go to cover administrative costs. So anyone wishing to distribute an app on Android outside of Google's ecosystem has to pay Google to do so. What if you don't need to distribute apps widely? This is the one piece of good news as developer verification takes shape. Google will let hobbyists and students sign up with only an email for a lesser tier of verification. This won't cost anything, but there will be an unclear limit on how many times these apps can be installed. The team in the video strongly encourages everyone to go through the full verification process (and pay Google for the privilege). We've asked Google for more specifics here.

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Dozens of countries have yet to secure accommodation at next month's COP30 climate summit in Brazil and some delegates are considering staying away as a shortage of hotels has driven prices to hundreds of dollars per night. Reuters: Small island states on the frontline of rising sea levels are confronted with having to consider reducing the size of delegations they send to Belem, while two European nations said they were considering not attending at all. COP30 organisers are racing to convert love motels, cruise ships and churches into lodgings for an anticipated 45,000 delegates. Brazil chose to hold the climate talks at Belem, which typically has 18,000 hotel beds available, in the hope its location on the edge of the Amazon rainforest would focus attention on the threat climate change poses to this ecosystem, and its role in absorbing climate-warming emissions.

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An anonymous reader shares a report from The Verge: Microsoft is getting ready to announce an ad-supported version of Xbox Cloud Gaming. Sources familiar with Microsoft's plans tell The Verge that the software maker has started testing ad-supported games streaming internally, allowing employees to play select titles free without a Game Pass subscription. I understand that the free ad-supported version of Xbox Cloud Gaming will include the ability to stream some games you own, as well as eligible Free Play Days titles, which let Xbox players try games over a weekend. You'll also be able to stream Xbox Retro Classics games. Sources tell me the internal testing includes around two minutes of preroll ads before a game is available to stream for free through Xbox Cloud Gaming. [...] The ad-supported Xbox Cloud Gaming version will be available on PC, Xbox consoles, handheld devices, and via the web.

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