Longtime Slashdot reader Qbertino writes: Heise, a German IT news publisher, reports (English version via Google Translate) that the German state of Brandenburg is getting the world's tallest wind turbine, with an overall height of 300 meters (approximately 365 meters including rotor blades), designed to capture so-called third-level winds at higher altitudes. The article also includes a short 3D animation illustrating the construction and its size relative to standard modern wind turbines. The wind turbine uses a dual-framework base instead of a traditional closed tower to access stronger high-altitude winds, aiming to match offshore energy output while keeping onshore operating costs. According to Heise, the prototype could lead to the installation of up to 1,000 units across Germany -- fitting seamlessly between existing wind farms without needing extra land.

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Scale AI is laying off 14% of its workforce and 500 contractors as part of a major restructuring just weeks after Meta bought a 49% stake and absorbed its CEO into a new superintelligence lab. The Verge reports: Jason Droege, CEO of Scale AI, sent an email to all Scale employees today, which was viewed by The Verge. Droege said he plans to restructure several parts of Scale's generative AI business and organize it from 16 pods to "the five most impactful": code, languages, experts, experimental, and audio. The company will also reorganize its go-to-market team into a single "demand generation" team that will have four pods, each covering a specific set of customers. "The reasons for these changes are straightforward: we ramped up our GenAI capacity too quickly over the past year," Droege wrote. "While that felt like the right decision at the time, it's clear this approach created inefficiencies and redundancies. We created too many layers, excessive bureaucracy, and unhelpful confusion about the team's mission. Shifts in market demand also required us to re-examine our plans and refine our approach." Droege said that he believes the changes to the company will make it more able to adapt to market shifts, serve existing customers, and win back customers that have "slowed down" work with Scale. He also said that the company would deprioritize generative AI projects with less growth potential. "We remain a well-resourced, well-funded company," he wrote. Scale's generative AI business unit will have an all-hands meeting tomorrow, followed by a company-wide meeting on July 18th. Osborne said that Scale plans to increase investment and hire hundreds of new employees in areas like enterprise, public sector, and international public sector, in the second half of 2025 and that severance has been paid out to impacted roles. "We're streamlining our data business to help us move faster and deliver even better data solutions to our GenAI customers," he said.

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Longtime Slashdot reader bobdevine shares a report from OSTechNix: For the first time, Linux has officially broken the 5% desktop market share barrier in the United States of America! It's a huge milestone for open-source and our fantastic Linux community. While many might think of Linux as a niche choice, this new data shows a significant shift is happening. According to the latest StatCounter Global Stats for June 2025, Linux now holds 5.03% of the desktop operating system market share in the United United States of America. This is fantastic news! [...] One truly satisfying detail for me? Linux has finally surpassed the "Unknown" category in the USA! It shows that our growth is clear and recognized. "It took eight years to go from 1% to 2% (by April 2021), then just 2.2 years to reach 3% (June 2023), and a mere 0.7 years to hit 4% (February 2024)," notes the report. "Now, here we are, at over 5% in the USA! This exponential growth suggests that we're on a promising upward trend."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Security researchers say Chinese authorities are using a new type of malware to extract data from seized phones, allowing them to obtain text messages -- including from chat apps such as Signal -- images, location histories, audio recordings, contacts, and more. In a report shared exclusively with TechCrunch, mobile cybersecurity company Lookout detailed the hacking tool called Massistant, which the company said was developed by Chinese tech giant Xiamen Meiya Pico. Massistant, according to Lookout, is Android software used for the forensic extraction of data from mobile phones, meaning the authorities using it need to have physical access to those devices. While Lookout doesn't know for sure which Chinese police agencies are using the tool, its use is assumed widespread, which means Chinese residents, as well as travelers to China, should be aware of the tool's existence and the risks it poses. [...] The good news ... is that Massistant leaves evidence of its compromise on the seized device, meaning users can potentially identify and delete the malware, either because the hacking tool appears as an app, or can be found and deleted using more sophisticated tools such as the Android Debug Bridge, a command line tool that lets a user connect to a device through their computer. The bad news is that at the time of installing Massistant, the damage is done, and authorities already have the person's data. "It's a big concern. I think anybody who's traveling in the region needs to be aware that the device that they bring into the country could very well be confiscated and anything that's on it could be collected," said Kristina Balaam, a researcher at Lookout who analyzed the malware. "I think it's something everybody should be aware of if they're traveling in the region."

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Steam has begun banning games that violate the payment rules of banks and card networks, targeting adult content in particular -- especially titles with extreme or controversial themes. Engadget reports: The new clause states that "content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam's payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet network providers" is not allowed and could result in removal from the platform. In other words, if credit card companies get mad about something, they could actually have the power to ban a game. The clause goes on to say that this will affect "certain kinds of adult-only content." This has likely already resulted in many games being pulled off the platform. SteamDB doesn't give a reason for these removals, but the timing does match up.

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OpenAI has added Google Cloud as a provider for ChatGPT and its API, expanding beyond Microsoft to address growing demand for computing power. CNBC reports: OpenAI has added Google to a list of suppliers, specifying that ChatGPT and its application programming interface will use the Google Cloud Platform, as well as Microsoft, CoreWeave and Oracle. The announcement amounts to a win for Google, whose cloud unit is younger and smaller than Amazon's and Microsoft's. Google also has cloud business with Anthropic, which was established by former OpenAI executives. The Google infrastructure will run in the U.S., Japan, the Netherlands, Norway and the United Kingdom.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Android Authority: Italian YouTuber Once Were Nerd covers a variety of retro gaming topics, but his reviews of ANBERNIC devices appear to be the straw that broke the camel's back. According to the video [here], customs enforcement officers from the Guardia di Finanza showed up at his home and office on April 15 with a search warrant to investigate promotion of pirated copyrighted materials. They seized a variety of ANBERNIC, Powkiddy, and TrimUI gaming handhelds from his collection. In total, more than 30 consoles were taken. The creator, assuming he didn't do anything wrong, complied with demands, providing full transcripts of his conversations and chats with gaming handheld manufacturers. The officers also took his phone, promising to return it in a few days. It was returned two months later, on June 15. According to the video, officials are not required to disclose what exactly the charges are or who has brought them until the initial investigation is complete under Italian law. At that point, the case is either dismissed or goes to trial. The complaint specifically mentions reproduction of copyrighted material from Nintendo and Sony, but the case may originate from the agency itself. However, in the meantime officials have the option to shut down his channel, even before proving any wrongdoing. This is a scary prospect for any creator who has spent years building a channel, and unlike YouTube copyright strikes, there's likely no remedy. Currently, officials contest that his reviews of ANBERNIC devices like the RG Slide, which often, but not always, ship with microSD cards filled with copyrighted ROMs, are punishable under Article 171 ter of the Italian Copyright Law. This law, which was originally written in 1941, allows for a maximum punishment of 15,000 euros (or 30 million Italian Lira, since the law pre-dates the Euro) and three years of jail time.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Chinese firms have begun rushing to order Nvidia's H20 AI chips as the company plans to resume sales to mainland China, Reuters reports. The chip giant expects to receive US government licenses soon so that it can restart shipments of the restricted processors just days after CEO Jensen Huang met with President Donald Trump, potentially generating $15 billion to $20 billion in additional revenue this year. Nvidia said in a statement that it is filing applications with the US government to resume H20 sales and that "the US government has assured Nvidia that licenses will be granted, and Nvidia hopes to start deliveries soon." [...] The H20 chips represent Nvidia's most capable AI processors legally available in China, though they contain less computing power than versions sold elsewhere due to export restrictions imposed in 2022. Nvidia is currently banned from selling its most powerful GPUs in China. Despite these limitations, Chinese tech giants, including ByteDance and Tencent, are reportedly scrambling to place orders for the lesser chip through what sources describe as an approved list managed by Nvidia. "The Chinese market is massive, dynamic, and highly innovative, and it's also home to many AI researchers," Reuters reports Huang telling Chinese state broadcaster CCTV during his visit to Beijing, where he is scheduled to speak at a supply chain expo on Wednesday. "Therefore, it is indeed crucial for American companies to establish roots in the Chinese market." The resumption of H20 sales marks a shift in US-China technology relations after the chips were effectively banned in April with an onerous export license requirement, forcing Nvidia to take a $4.5 billion write-off for excess inventory and purchase obligations. According to Reuters, Chinese sales generated $17 billion in revenue for Nvidia in the fiscal year ending January 26, representing 13 percent of total sales. Nvidia also announced it will introduce a new "RTX Pro" chip model specifically tailored to meet regulatory rules in the Chinese market, though the company provided no details about its specifications or capabilities.

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Daniel Stenberg, creator of the curl utility, is considering ending its bug bounty program due to a surge in low-quality, AI-generated reports that are overwhelming the small volunteer team. Despite attempts to discourage AI-assisted submissions, these reports now make up about 20% of all entries in 2025, while genuine vulnerabilities have dropped to just 5%. The Register reports: "The general trend so far in 2025 has been way more AI slop than ever before (about 20 percent of all submissions) as we have averaged about two security report submissions per week," he wrote in a blog post on Monday. "In early July, about 5 percent of the submissions in 2025 had turned out to be genuine vulnerabilities. The valid-rate has decreased significantly compared to previous years." The situation has prompted Stenberg to reevaluate whether to continue curl's bug bounty program, which he says has paid out more than $90,000 for 81 awards since its inception in 2019. He said he expects to spend the rest of the year mulling possible responses to the rising tide of AI refuse. Presently, the curl bug bounty program -- outsourced to HackerOne - requires the bug reporter to disclose the use of generative AI. It does not entirely ban AI-assisted submissions, but does discourage them. "You should check and double-check all facts and claims any AI told you before you pass on such reports to us," the program's policy explains. "You are normally much better off avoiding AI." Two bug submissions per week on average may not seem like a lot, but the curl security team consists of only seven members. As Stenberg explains, three or four reviewers review each submission, a process that takes anywhere from 30 minutes to three hours. "I personally spend an insane amount of time on curl already, wasting three hours still leaves time for other things," Stenberg lamented. "My fellows however are not full time on curl. They might only have three hours per week for curl. Not to mention the emotional toll it takes to deal with these mind-numbing stupidities." [...] Stenberg says it's not clear what HackerOne should do to reduce reckless use of AI, but insists something needs to be done. His post ponders charging a fee to submit a report or dropping the bug bounty award, while also expressing reservations about both potential remedies. "As a lot of these reporters seem to genuinely think they help out, apparently blatantly tricked by the marketing of the AI hype-machines, it is not certain that removing the money from the table is going to completely stop the flood," he concludes.

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Bruce66423 shares a report from The Guardian: They went viral, amassing more than 1m streams on Spotify in a matter of weeks, but it later emerged that hot new band the Velvet Sundown were AI-generated -- right down to their music, promotional images and backstory. The episode has triggered a debate about authenticity, with music industry insiders saying streaming sites should be legally obliged to tag music created by AI-generated acts so consumers can make informed decisions about what they are listening to. [...] Several figures told the Guardian that the present situation, where streaming sites, including Spotify, are under no legal obligation to identify AI-generated music, left consumers unaware of the origins of the songs they're listening to. Roberto Neri, the chief executive of the Ivors Academy, said: "AI-generated bands like Velvet Sundown that are reaching big audiences without involving human creators raise serious concerns around transparency, authorship and consent." Neri added that if "used ethically," AI has the potential to enhance songwriting, but said at present his organization was concerned with what he called "deeply troubling issues" with the use of AI in music. Sophie Jones, the chief strategy officer at the music trade body the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), backed calls for clear labelling. "We believe that AI should be used to serve human creativity, not supplant it," said Jones. "That's why we're calling on the UK government to protect copyright and introduce new transparency obligations for AI companies so that music rights can be licensed and enforced, as well as calling for the clear labelling of content solely generated by AI." Liz Pelly, the author of Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, said independent artists could be exploited by people behind AI bands who might create tracks that are trained using their music. She referred to the 2023 case of a song that was uploaded to TikTok, Spotify and YouTube, which used AI-generated vocals claiming to be the Weeknd and Drake. Universal Music Group said the song was "infringing content created with generative AI" and it was removed shortly after it was uploaded. Aurelien Herault, the chief innovation officer at the music streaming service Deezer, said the company uses detection software that identifies AI-generated tracks and tags them. He said: "For the moment, I think platforms need to be transparent and try to inform users. For a period of time, what I call the "naturalization of AI', we need to inform users when it's used or not." Herault did not rule out removing tagging in future if AI-generated music becomes more popular and musicians begin to use it like an "instrument." At present, Spotify does not label music as AI-generated and has previously been criticized for populating some playlists with music by "ghost artists" -- fake acts that create stock music. Bruce66423 comments: "Artists demand 'a warning' on such material. Why? If it is what the people want..."

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The UK secretly relocated thousands of Afghans to the UK after their personal details were disclosed in one of the country's worst ever data breaches, putting them at risk of Taliban retaliation. The operation cost around $2.7 billion and remained under a court-imposed superinjunction until recently lifted. Reuters reports: The leak by the Ministry of Defence in early 2022, which led to data being published on Facebook the following year, and the secret relocation program, were subject to a so-called superinjunction preventing the media reporting what happened, which was lifted on Tuesday by a court. British defence minister John Healey apologised for the leak, which included details about members of parliament and senior military officers who supported applications to help Afghan soldiers who worked with the British military and their families relocate to the UK. "This serious data incident should never have happened," Healey told lawmakers in the House of Commons. It may have occurred three years ago under the previous government, but to all whose data was compromised I offer a sincere apology." The incident ranks among the worst security breaches in modern British history because of the cost and risk posed to the lives of thousands of Afghans, some of whom fought alongside British forces until their chaotic withdrawal in 2021. Healey said about 4,500 Afghans and their family members have been relocated or were on their way to Britain under the previously secret scheme. But he added that no-one else from Afghanistan would be offered asylum because of the data leak, citing a government review which found little evidence of intent from the Taliban to seek retribution against former officials.

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Anthropic has launched a specialized version of its Claude AI tools for the financial services sector, designed to assist professionals with investment decisions, market analysis, and research. The Financial Analysis Solution "includes Claude 4 models, Claude Code and Claude for Enterprise with expanded usage limits, implementation support and other features," reports CNBC. From the report: As part of its new Financial Analysis Solution, Claude will get real-time access to financial information through data providers like Box, PitchBook, Databricks, S&P Global and Snowflake. Anthropic said many of these integrations are available on Tuesday, with more to come. Anthropic's Financial Analysis Solution and Claude for Enterprise are available on AWS Marketplace. The company said Google Cloud Marketplace availability is coming soon. "What this is is a tailored version of Claude for Enterprise," Kate Jensen, Anthropic's head of revenue said at an event in New York City on Tuesday. "It's specifically built for financial analysts, and it's equipped for the nuance, accuracy and reasoning that you need to handle the complexity of your work."

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Reddit has begun verifying users' ages in the UK to restrict access to "certain mature content" for minors, complying with the UK's Online Safety Act. The BBC reports: Reddit, known for its online communities and discussions, said that while it does not want to know who its audience is: "It would be helpful for our safety efforts to be able to confirm whether you are a child or an adult." Ofcom, the UK regulator, said: "We expect other companies to follow suit, or face enforcement if they fail to act." Reddit said that from 14 July, an outside firm called Persona will perform age verification for the social media platform either through an uploaded selfie or "a photo of your government ID," such as a passport. It said Reddit will not have access to the photo and will only retain a user's verification status and date of birth so people do not have to re-enter it each time they try to access restricted content. Reddit added that Persona "promises not to retain the picture for longer than seven days" and will not have access to a user's data on the site. The new rules in the UK come into force on 25 July. [...] Companies that fail to meet the rules face fines of up to 18 million pounds or 10% of worldwide revenue, "whichever is greater." [Ofcom] added that in the most serious cases, it can seek a court order for "business disruption measures," such as requiring payment providers or advertisers to withdraw their services from a platform, or requiring Internet Service Providers to block access to a site in the UK."

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Plasma Bigscreen, KDE's TV-focused interface, is being revived after years of inactivity thanks to contributor Devin, who overhauled the UI, redesigned the Settings app, improved app launching, and updated key modules. While still in progress -- with features like HDMI-CEC remote support and a virtual keyboard pending -- the project aims to rejoin KDE's official Plasma release schedule, potentially in version 6.5. Neowin reports: If you have not heard of it, Plasma Bigscreen is a Plasma shell for televisions, with original support for the now-defunct Mycroft AI assistant. It used to provide a simple launcher for apps and custom "Mycroft Skills" before development stalled, causing most distributions to drop it. The project was left behind during the big transition to Plasma 6 last year because no one had ported it in time for the megarelease. After a friend of his started poking at the code, Devin stepped in to tackle the much-needed work. [...] For anyone who wants to test this out, you can do as Devin did by installing Plasma Bigscreen on a Raspberry Pi using postmarketOS, though you would have to compile it yourself or pull from the nightly repos to get the latest changes. Applications like Kodi and VacuumTube (smart TV version of YouTube) work well with remote navigation, and some games like SuperTuxKart are playable. Controller support exists, but getting TV remotes to work over HDMI CEC is still untested. The project is far from finished; it still needs an arrow-navigable virtual keyboard and a clearer long-term direction now that Mycroft is gone. Still, the goal is to get it back into the official Plasma release schedule, possibly for version 6.5.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phoronix: Merged yesterday to the latest development code for the LibreOffice open-source office suite is now recognizing Bitcoin "BTC" as a supported currency for use within the Calc spreadsheet program and elsewhere within this cross-platform free software office suite. Stemming from a recent bug report requesting Bitcoin as an official currency option within LibreOffice Calc, the necessary additions are now in place so it's a built-in preset like USD and EUR. Thus easier managing of Bitcoin transactions and the like from within LibreOffice Calc.

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U.S. prosecutors and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) have officially closed their investigations into Polymarket, the decentralized, blockchain-powered prediction market platform where users bet with real cryptocurrency on the outcomes of future events. "The DOJ was investigating Polymarket last year, reportedly for allowing U.S. users to place bets on the site despite Polymarket being required to block U.S. traders," reports CoinDesk. The FBI raided Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan's Manhattan apartment last November, seizing his phone and electronic devices. A source close to the matter told The New York Post it was politically motivated due to Polymarket's successful prediction of Trump's election win. It's "grand political theater at its worst," the source said. "They could have asked his lawyer for any of these things. Instead, they staged a so-called raid so they can leak it to the media and use it for obvious political reasons."

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BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: Blender 4.5 has arrived and it's a long-term support release. That means users get two full years of updates and bug fixes, making it a smart choice for anyone looking for stability in serious projects. Whether you're a solo artist or part of a studio pipeline, this version is built to last. Here's a list of key features and changes in this release: - Vulkan backend replaces OpenGL (faster, smoother UI) - Adaptive subdivision up to 14x faster with multithreading - New Geometry Nodes: Camera Info, Instance Bounds - GPU-accelerated compositor nodes with standardized inputs - New Boolean solver: Manifold (cleaner, faster mesh operations) - UV maps visible in Object Mode + improved selection behavior - Grease Pencil render pass and Geometry Nodes integration - Improved file import support: PLY, OBJ, STL, CSV, VDB - Deprecations: Collada, Big Endian, legacy .blend, Intel Mac support - Cycles OptiX now requires NVIDIA driver v535+ - New shader variants for add-on developers (POLYLINES_*, POINT_*) ~500 bug fixes across all major systems

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Internet service providers BT, Virgin Media, Sky, TalkTalk, EE, and Plusnet account for the majority of the UK's residential internet market and as a result, blocking injunctions previously obtained at the High Court often list these companies as respondents. These so-called "no fault' injunctions stopped being adversarial a long time ago; ISPs indicate in advance they won't contest a blocking order against various pirate sites, and typically that's good enough for the Court to issue an order with which they subsequently comply. For more than 15 years, this has led to blocking being carried out as close to users as possible, with ISPs' individual blocking measures doing the heavy lifting. A new wave of blocking targeting around 200 pirate site domains came into force yesterday but with the unexpected involvement of a significant new player. In the latest wave of blocking that seems to have come into force yesterday, close to 200 pirate domains requested by the Motion Picture Association were added to one of the longest pirate site blocking lists in the world. The big change is the unexpected involvement of Cloudflare, which for some users attempting to access the domains added yesterday, displays the [Error 451 -- Unavailable for Legal Reasons] notice ... As stated in the notice, Error 451 is returned when a domain is blocked for legal reasons, in this case reasons specific to the UK. [...] In this case there's no indication of who requested the blocking order, or the authority that issued it. However, from experience we know that the request was made by the studios of the Motion Picture Association and for the same reason the High Court in London was the issuing authority. [...] The issue lies with dynamic injunctions; while a list of domains will appear in the original order (which may or may not be made available), when the MPA concludes that other domains that appear subsequently are linked to the same order, those can be blocked too, but the details are only rarely made public. From information obtained independently, one candidate is an original order obtained in December 2022 which requested blocking of domains with well known pirate brands including 123movies, fmovies, soap2day, hurawatch, sflix, and onionplay. This leads directly to another unusual issue. The notice linked from Cloudflare doesn't directly concern Cloudflare. The studios sent the notice to Google after Google agreed to voluntarily remove those domains from its search indexes, if it was provided with a copy of relevant court orders. Notices like these were supplied and the domains were deindexed, and the practice has continued ever since. That raises questions about the nature of Cloudflare's involvement here and why it links to the order sent to Google; notices sent to Cloudflare are usually submitted to Lumen by Cloudflare itself. That doesn't appear to be the case here. "Domains blocked by Sky, BPI and others, don't appear to be affected," notes TorrentFreak. "All relate to sites targeted by the MPA, and the majority if not all trigger malware warnings of a very serious kind, either immediately upon visiting the sites, or shortly after." "At least in the short term, if Cloudflare is blocking a domain in the UK, moving on is strongly advised."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: CoreWeave is expanding a data center that is projected to double the electricity needs of a city near Dallas, another example of the strains that artificial intelligence workloads are placing on the US power supply. Local officials have grappled with how to handle the increased stress on the electricity grid from the project, according to a late 2024 presentation and emails seen by Bloomberg. The site is being developed by Core Scientific and will be used by OpenAI in Denton, Texas. Last week, CoreWeave announced it would acquire Core Scientific for about $9 billion, in part, to gain direct control of its data centers aimed at supplying AI work. Denton, about 50 miles northwest of Dallas, has almost doubled its population in the last 25 years to about 166,000 residents. To meet the spike in AI-related power demand, the city is passing on any extra costs to the data center operator and constructing additional grid infrastructure, Antonio Puente, general manager of local utility Denton Municipal Electric, said in an interview. "To serve the entire load from Core Scientific, we do have some transmission challenges," Puente said. "We will have to make some additional transmission investments." [...] Like some other large AI data center projects, the site in Denton was focused on cryptocurrency mining before pivoting to AI workloads in December. This transition means unrelenting power consumption -- the site will no longer curtail operations when power prices are high -- which will increase grid strain. "Now you're talking about a facility that has to have energy 24 hours a day, 365 days a year," Puente said. That challenge will be mitigated by the addition of backup generators and batteries, he added. Unlike many large projects, the Denton data center didn't receive local tax exemptions. Officials expect more than $600 million in property and sales tax from the data center expansion, more than double the costs it plans to incur, according to an analysis document seen by Bloomberg. It also anticipates that 135 new jobs will be created, according to the document. The Denton site, which is already being rented by CoreWeave, is Core Scientific's largest planned project at about 390 megawatts of power. It's "utilizing the majority of extra system capacity" in the city, wrote a utility executive in a January email seen by Bloomberg. Any additional large power users will exacerbate overloads on the grid, the executive added. "When fully built out, it will host one of the largest GPU clusters in North America," Core Scientific Chief Executive Officer Adam Sullivan said of the site during a May call. "Denton is a flagship facility." The report notes that Texas could face electricity shortages as soon as 2026 due to surging power demand from data centers, oil and gas operations, and crypto mining.

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A team of Japanese researchers has set a new world record for internet speed, transmitting data at 125,000 gigabytes per second over 1,120 miles using a new type of 19-core optical fiber. "That's about 4 million times the average internet speed in the U.S. and would allow you to download the entire Internet Archive in less than four minutes," notes Live Science. It's also "more than twice the previous world record of 50,250 Gbps, previously set by a different team of scientists in 2024." From the report: To achieve this new speed -- which has not been independently verified -- the team developed a new form of optical fiber to send information at groundbreaking speeds over roughly the distance between New York and Florida. Details about this achievement were presented April 3 at the 48th Optical Fiber Communication Conference in San Francisco, according to a statement from Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology. The new type of optical fiber is equivalent to 19 standard optical fibers in its data transmission capacity. The new optical fiber is better suited to long-haul transmission than existing cables because the centers of all 19 fibers interact with light in the same way, so they encounter less light fluctuation, which results in less data loss. The new cable squeezes 19 separate fibers into a diameter of five-thousandths of an inch (0.127 millimeters), which is the same thickness as most existing single-fiber cables already in use. This effort means the new cable can transmit more data using existing infrastructure. [...] For this demonstration, the data ran through a transmission system 21 times, finally reaching a data receiver after traveling the equivalent of 1,120 miles.

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