Tech

Surging AI demand could push major oil companies to reinvest in renewable energy [non-paywalled link], Abu Dhabi National Oil Company CEO Sultan al-Jaber said this week. Al-Jaber's comments came as oil executives from Shell, BP and TotalEnergies met with Microsoft and other tech leaders in Abu Dhabi to discuss AI's growing energy needs and its applications across the sector. ADNOC announced plans to deploy autonomous AI agents across its operations through EnergyAI, developed with Microsoft and UAE's G42. The system will analyze seismic data and model underground carbon storage potential. The state oil giant committed $23 billion to low-carbon technology development using AI. Tech companies have pledged to power their AI data centers with renewable energy to meet climate targets. "We need a model that integrates all forms of energy," said al-Jaber, citing needs for renewable power, battery storage, natural gas, and nuclear energy in some locations. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ars Technica's Eric Berger reports: When Chinese space officials unveiled the design for the country's first super heavy lift rocket nearly a decade ago, it looked like a fairly conventional booster. The rocket was fully expendable, with three stages and solid motors strapped onto its sides. Since then, the Asian country has been revising the design of this rocket, named Long March 9, in response to the development of reusable rockets by SpaceX. As of two years ago, China had recalibrated the design to have a reusable first stage. Now, based on information released at a major airshow in Zhuhai, China, the design has morphed again. And this time, the plan for the Long March 9 rocket looks almost exactly like a clone of SpaceX's Starship rocket. Based on its latest specifications, the Long March 9 rocket will have a fully reusable first stage powered by 30 YF-215 engines, which are full-flow staged combustion engines fueled by methane and liquid oxygen, each with a thrust of approximately 200 tons. By way of comparison, Starship's first stage is powered by 33 Raptor engines, also fueled with methane and liquid oxygen, each with a thrust of about 280 tons. The new specifications also include a fully reusable configuration of the rocket, with an upper stage that looks eerily similar to Starship's second stage, complete with flaps in a similar location. According to a presentation at the airshow, China intends to fly this vehicle for the first time in 2033, nearly a decade from now. Last week, Chinese space startup Cosmoleap announced plans to develop a fully reusable "Leap" rocket with the next few years. "An animated video that accompanied the funding announcement indicated that the company seeks to emulate the tower catch-with-chopsticks methodology that SpaceX successfully employed during Starship's fifth flight test last month," reports Ars. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Major media outlets are beginning to declare former President Trump the winner of the 2024 presidential election, having secured 270 electoral votes. "He becomes the first president in more than 120 years to lose the White House, and then to come back and win it again, after President Grover Cleveland in 1892," notes The Hill. As with previous election announcements on Slashdot, this is your chance to talk about it and what it means for the future of our nation. Developing... Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: Google CEO Sundar Pichai has weighed in on the debate over the relative values of political expression and workplace coexistence by ordering employees to leave their political opinions at home. A day after firing 28 workers for participating in a sit-in protest of the tech giant's cloud contract with Israel, Pichai warned staff that the office is not a place "to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics" in a company blog post. Although Pichai didn't specifically mention the protests or the Israel-Hamas war, he concluded that the $1.92 trillion company "is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform." "We have a duty to be an objective and trusted provider of information that serves all of our users globally," Pichai continued. "When we come to work, our goal is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. That supersedes everything else and I expect us to act with a focus that reflects that." The sit-in protest was staged against Google's involvement in Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud contract with the Israeli government. During the nearly 10-hour protest, employees wore "Googler against genocide" T-shirts and occupied the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian. The report notes how tech companies, "previously famed for their progressive culture where nap pods and abortion benefits were welcome," are increasingly restricting political discussions to avoid internal conflict. Pichai notes in his memo that Google has previously enjoyed "a culture of vibrant, open discussion that enables us to create amazing products and turn great ideas into action." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bitcoin surged over 9.2% to an all-time high of over $74,200 on Tuesday evening as early results showed favorable outcome for Republican candidate Donald Trump, who has promised crypto-friendly policies if he wins. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: When Parasite became the first non-English language film in Oscars history to win best picture in 2019, it marked a breakthrough moment for Korean cinema. But the surge of interest that followed the director Bong Joon-ho's international success has not translated into a thriving local film industry, according to another of its leading lights. The director Jang Joon-hwan said K-cinema was struggling after the arrival of Netflix and other streaming platforms, with movies often rushed on to streaming platforms, and box office ticket sales suffering as a consequence. Jang, whose 2004 cult sci-fi comedy Save the Green Planet is being remade by the Poor Things director, Yorgos Lanthimos, said Korean cinema was going through a "very precarious period" because Korean viewers would increasingly prefer to wait for films to come out on streaming platforms than pay more to go to the cinema. "I hope that such a day comes that Korean films are being introduced to wider audiences and we can all enjoy them together, however as a Korean film director in Korea, [it's] a very difficult and challenging time with the advent of Netflix and the [streaming] platforms. In this post-pandemic period cinemagoers have dropped dramatically, so investment has dropped. There are less Korean films being made," he said. But he acknowledged that platforms such as Netflix had "introduced a lot of new international fans to Korean content," through hit shows such as Squid Game. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Rightsholders have asked Google to remove more than 10 billion 'copyright infringing' URLs from its search results. The search engine doesn't celebrate the milestone in any way, but the takedown notices document intriguing shifts in volume over time, as well as shifting takedown interests. [...] The path to 10 billion was turbulent. When Google first made DMCA details public it was processing a few million DMCA takedown requests in a year. That number swiftly increased to hundreds of millions and eventually reached a billion DMCA requests in 2016. The exponential growth curve eventually flattened out and around 2017, the takedown volume started to decline. The decrease was in part due to various anti-piracy algorithms making pirated content less visible in search results. By downranking pirate sites, infringing content became harder to find. As a result, Google processed fewer takedown notices, a welcome change for both rightsholders and the search engine. Today, Google continues to make pirate sites less visible in search, but the reduction in takedown notices didn't last. On the contrary, over the past several months, Google search processed a record number of DMCA notices. Last summer, the search giant recorded the 7 billionth takedown request and after that the numbers shot up, adding billions more in the year that followed. The company is now handling removal requests at a rate of roughly 2.5 billion per year; a new record. This represents more than 50 million takedown requests per week and roughly 5,000 every minute. [...] While the 10 billionth reported URL is undoubtedly a milestone, this number is largely driven by a few rightsholders, reporting outfits, and domain names. The aforementioned takedown outfit Link-Busters, for example, accounts for roughly 15% of all reported links, nearly 1.5 billion. Similarly, the ten most prolific rightsholders, including the BPI, HarperCollins, and VIZ Media, are responsible for 40% of all reported links. These ten companies are only a tiny fraction of the 600,000 rightsholders that reported pirated links, however. A small group of domains also receives a disproportionate amount of attention. In total, 5,400,061 domains have been reported, with the top domains having dozens of millions of flagged URLs each. However, most domains have only a few flagged links, some of which are erroneous. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Schneider Electric confirmed that it is investigating a breach as a ransomware group Hellcat claims to have stolen more than 40 GB of compressed data -- and demanded the French multinational energy management company pay $125,000 in baguettes or else see its sensitive customer and operational information leaked. The Register: And yes, you read that right: payment in baguettes. As in bread. Schneider Electric declined to answer The Register's specific questions about the intrusion, including if the attackers really want $125,000 in baguettes or if they would settle for cryptocurrency. A spokesperson, however, emailed us the following statement: "Schneider Electric is investigating a cybersecurity incident involving unauthorized access to one of our internal project execution tracking platforms which is hosted within an isolated environment. Our Global Incident Response team has been immediately mobilized to respond to the incident.âSchneider Electric's products and services remain unaffected." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said at an all-hands meeting on Tuesday that the plan to require employees to be in-office five days per week is not meant to force attrition or satisfy city leaders, as many employees have suggested. Reuters: The controversial plan mandating workers come to Amazon offices every day starting next year, up from three days now, has caused consternation among employees who say it is stricter than other tech companies and will hinder efficiency because of commuting times. Workers who are consistently not in compliance have been told they will be "voluntarily resigning" and locked out of company computers. "A number of people I've seen theorized that the reason we were doing this is, it's a backdoor layoff, or we made some sort of deal with city or cities," said Jassy, according to a transcript of the meeting reviewed by Reuters. "I can tell you both of those are not true. You know, this was not a cost play for us. This is very much about our culture and strengthening our culture," he said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last December, Hyperloop One, the futuristic transportation company pursuing Elon Musk's dream of tube-based, airplane-speed travel, announced its shutdown. However, the concept itself has found a new lease on life in a scaled-down version overseas. According to The Verge's Andrew J. Hawkins, "The hyperloop, in fact, lives on -- as a 1/12th scale model in Switzerland." From the report: Sure, this isn't exactly the full realization of Musk's 2013 white paper, in which he theorized that aerodynamic aluminum capsules filled with passengers or cargo could be propelled through a nearly airless tube at speeds of up to 760mph. These tubes, either raised on pylons or sunk beneath the earth, could be built either within or between cities. Musk called it a "fifth mode of transportation" and argued it could help change the way we live, work, trade, and travel. The idea is being put to the test in Lausanne, Switzerland, where a 120-meter circular test track is being operated by a team that includes the Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), the School of Business and Engineering Vaud (HEIG-VD), and Swisspod Technologies. This week, the group announced that it had conducted "the longest" hyperloop test of its kind: traveling 11.8 km (7.3 miles) at a speed of 40.7km/h (25.3mph). The circular test track has a circumference of 125.6 meters (412 feet) and a diameter of 40 centimeters (15.7 inches). It sounds modest, but the group claims that in a full-scale system, their test "directly translates" to a journey of 141.6 km (88 miles), which is about the distance between Geneva and Bern, or San Francisco to Sacramento, and speeds of up to 488.2 km/h (303.4mph). The project is called LIMITLESS, which stands for Linear Induction Motor Drive for Traction and Levitation in Sustainable Hyperloop Systems. During the test, the team "monitored the performance of vital subsystems," including propulsion, communication infrastructure, power electronics, and thermal management. They assessed "energy consumption, thrust variations, [linear induction motor] response, and control during acceleration, cruising, coasting, and braking scenarios." Of course, a 1/12th-scale circular test track is hardly a sign that the hyperloop is alive and well. Most of the startups and companies pursuing a full-scale hyperloop have shut down, victims of financial mismanagement, as well as infrastructure and regulatory hurdles. Critics said that while the hyperloop may be technically feasible, it still only amounts to vaporware. It's been called a "utopian vision" that would be financially impossible to achieve. But the Swiss team is undeterred, promising to conduct a battery of future tests to further validate the system. Swisspod CEO Denis Tudor said the group plans to test its first freight product soon, and is currently building a larger test track in the US. "This is a key step toward making hyperloop for passengers a reality and changing how we connect, work, and live," he said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.