Residential utility bills in America "rose 6% on average nationwide in August compared with the same period in the previous year," reports CNBC, citing statistics from the U.S. Energy Information Administration: The reasons for price increases are often complex and vary by region. But in at least three states with high concentrations of data centers, electric bills climbed much faster than the national average during that period. Prices, for example, surged by 13% in Virginia, 16% in Illinois and 12% in Ohio. The tech companies and AI labs are building data centers that consume a gigawatt or more of electricity in some cases, equivalent to more than 800,000 homes, the size of a city essentially... "The techlash is real," said Abraham Silverman, who served as general counsel for New Jersey's public utility board from 2019 until 2023 under outgoing Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy. "Data centers aren't always great neighbors," said Silverman, now a researcher at Johns Hopkins University. "They tend to be loud, they can be dirty and there's a number of communities, particularly in places with really high concentrations of data centers, that just don't want more data centers..." [C]apacity prices get passed down to consumers in their utility bills, Silverman said. The data center load in PJM [America's largest grid, serving 13 states] is also impacting prices in states that are not industry leaders such as New Jersey, where prices jumped about 20% year over year... There are other reasons for rising electricity prices, Silverman said. The aging electric grid needs upgrades at a time of broad inflation and the cost of building new transmission lines has gone up by double digits, he said. The utilities also point to rising demand from the expansion of domestic manufacturing and the broader electrification of the economy, such as electric vehicles and the adoption of electric heat pumps in some regions... In other states, however, the relationship between rising electricity prices and data centers is less clear. Texas, for example, is second only to Virginia with more than 400 data centers. But prices in the Lone Star state increased about 4% year over year in August, lower than the national average. Texas operates its own grid, ERCOT, with a relatively fast process that can connect new electric supply to the grid in around three years, according to a February 2024 report from the Brattle Group. California, meanwhile, has the third most data centers in the nation and the second highest residential electricity prices, nearly 80% above the national average. But prices in the Golden State increased about 1% in August 2024 over the prior year period, far below the average hike nationwide. One of the reasons California's electricity rates are so much higher than most of the country is the costs associated with preventing wildfires.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from The Register: Yet another supply chain attack has hit the npm registry in what Amazon describes as "one of the largest package flooding incidents in open source registry history" — but with a twist. Instead of injecting credential-stealing code or ransomware into the packages, this one is a token farming campaign. Amazon Inspector security researchers, using a new detection rule and AI assistance, originally spotted the suspicious npm packages in late October, and, by November 7, the team had flagged thousands. By November 12, they had uncovered more than 150,000 malicious packages across "multiple" developer accounts. These were all linked to a coordinated tea.xyz token farming campaign, we're told. This is a decentralized protocol designed to reward open-source developers for their contributions using the TEA token, a utility asset used within the tea ecosystem for incentives, staking, and governance. Unlike the spate of package poisoning incidents over recent months, this one didn't inject traditional malware into the open source code. Instead, the miscreants created a self-replicating attack, infecting the packages with code to automatically generate and publish, thus earning cryptocurrency rewards on the backs of legitimate open source developers. The code also included tea.yaml files that linked these packages to attacker-controlled blockchain wallet addresses. At the moment, Tea tokens have no value, points out CSO Online. "But it is suspected that the threat actors are positioning themselves to receive real cryptocurrency tokens when the Tea Protocol launches its Mainnet, where Tea tokens will have actual monetary value and can be traded..." In an interview on Friday, an executive at software supply chain management provider Sonatype, which wrote about the campaign in April 2024, told CSO that number has now grown to 153,000. "It's unfortunate that the worm isn't under control yet," said Sonatype CTO Brian Fox. And while this payload merely steals tokens, other threat actors are paying attention, he predicted. "I'm sure somebody out there in the world is looking at this massively replicating worm and wondering if they can ride that, not just to get the Tea tokens but to put some actual malware in there, because if it's replicating that fast, why wouldn't you?" When Sonatype wrote about the campaign just over a year ago, it found a mere 15,000 packages that appeared to come from a single person. With the swollen numbers reported this week, Amazon researchers wrote that it's "one of the largest package flooding incidents in open source registry history, and represents a defining moment in supply chain security...." For now, says Sonatype's Fox, the scheme wastes the time of npm administrators, who are trying to expel over 100,000 packages. But Fox and Amazon point out the scheme could inspire others to take advantage of other reward-based systems for financial gain, or to deliver malware. After deplooying a new detection rule "paired with AI", Amazon's security researchers' write, "within days, the system began flagging packages linked to the tea.xyz protocol... By November 7, the researchers flagged thousands of packages and began investigating what appeared to be a coordinated campaign. The next day, after validating the evaluation results and analyzing the patterns, they reached out to OpenSSF to share their findings and coordinate a response. Their blog post thanks the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) for rapid collaboration, while calling the incident "a defining moment in supply chain security..."

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In addition to showing the need for unifying DRM driver-side APIs within the Linux kernel, NVIDIA's Linux graphics driver team at XDC2025 also showcased the shortcomings of screencasting under Wayland...

The Qt toolkit is moving away from directly relying on the CPU's RDRAND and RDSEED instructions for random number generation and to instead rely on the OS-supplied entropy...

An anonymous reader shared this report from Electrek: Solar and wind are growing fast enough to meet all new electricity demand worldwide for the first three quarters of 2025, according to new data from energy think tank Ember. The group now expects fossil power to stay flat for the full year, marking the first time since the pandemic that fossil generation won't increase. Solar and wind aren't just expanding; they're outpacing global electricity demand itself. Solar generation jumped 498 TWh (+31%) compared to the same period last year, already topping all the solar power produced in 2024. Wind added another 137 TWh (+7.6%). Together, they supplied 635 TWh of new clean electricity, beating out the 603 TWh rise in global demand (+2.7%). That lifted solar and wind to 17.6% of global electricity in the first three quarters of the year, up from 15.2% year-over-year. That brought the total share of renewables in global electricity -solar, wind, hydro, bioenergy, and geothermal — to 43%. Fossil fuels slid to 57.1%, down from 58.7%. For the first time in 2025, renewables collectively generated more electricity than coal. And fossil generation as a whole has stalled. Fossil output slipped slightly by 0.1% (-17 TWh) through the end of Q3. Ember expects no fossil-fuel growth for the full year, driven by clean power growth outpacing demand.

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The upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel cycle is set to introduce initial Xe3P_LPD GPU support for Nova Lake as well as beginning to build out support for the Crescent Island graphics card. Now joining DRM-Next with that initial Intel Xe3P_LPD code for Linux 6.19 is being able to drive displays with that Xe3 hardware...

One of the NVIDIA presentations at the recent XDC2025 developer conference was not around the NVIDIA driver itself but the ongoing fragmentation that's happening within the Linux Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem and arguing the need for unifying more driver-side APIs for supporting different Linux DRM clinets...

Following the recent idea floated to consider C++20 as the default C++ language dialect by the GCC compiler rather than C++17, it was discovered that the GNU Compiler Collection itself has problems building in C++20 model...

As part of this week's sound subsystem fixes ahead of today's Linux 6.18-rc6 kernel release is adding some quirks for supporting the PureAudio Lotus DAC5 and other PureAudio audio hardware...

An anonymous reader shared this report from PC World: It won't whip the llama's ass, but Opera has added a Spotify visualizer to its latest iteration of its free Opera One browser. Known as Sonic, the visualizer will be part of Opera's Dynamic Themes, which use the WebGPU standard to employ a dynamic theme that runs in the background of the browser. It's essentially a shader, which uses your PC's graphics engine to generate the moving background. The browser also comes with a music player, which is set to Spotify by default. Users will have an opportunity to upgrade to Spotify Premium as part of the browser upgrade, Opera said. Opera's Sonic theme... takes the Spotify input and transforms it into a dynamic background. "As any old tech head knows, the original visualizer was found in Winamp, which would sync visualizations to the beat and flow of music being played," the article points out. And 27 years later, WinAmp arrived as an app in Apple's App Store and Google Play and in April of 2024. (The latest version was apparently released this May — and you can also download it to your desktop...) Somewhere along the way, Winamp also announced "Winamp for Creators," which they're describing as a dedicated platform for music artists with monetization and promotion tools, music management services, and other essential resources "to help creators take control of their careers" (including "a powerful social media publishing tool that lets users write a single post and push it to all their social media channels simultaneously.")

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It's been trying to measure the popularity of programming languages since 2000 using metrics like the number of engineers, courses, and third-party vendors. And "The November 2025 TIOBE Index brings another twist below Python's familiar lead," writes TechRepublic. "C solidifies its position as runner-up, C++ and Java lose some ground, and C# moves sharply upward, narrowing the gap with Java to less than a percentage point..." TIO CEO Paul Jansen said this month that "Instead of Python, programming language C# is now the fastest rising language," How did C# achieve this? Java and C# are battling for a long time in the same areas. Right now it seems like C# has removed every reason why not to use C# instead of Java: it is cross platform nowadays, it is open source and it contains all new language features a developer wants. While the financial world is still dominated by Java, all other terrains show equal shares between Java and C#. Besides this, Microsoft is going strong and C# is still their most backed programming language. Interesting note: C# has never been higher than Java in the TIOBE index. Currently the difference between the two rivals is less than 1%. There are exciting times ahead of us. Is C# going to surpass Java for the first time in the TIOBE index history? "The fact that C# has been in the news for the successive betas and pre-release candidates prior to the release of C# 14 may have bumped up its percentage share in the last few months," notes a post on the site i-Programmer. But they also point out that by TIOBE's reckoning, Java — having been overtaken by Python in 2021 — "has been in decline ever since." TechRepublic summarizes the rest of the Top Ten: JavaScript stays in sixth place at 3.42%, and Visual Basic edges up to seventh with 3.31%. Delphi/Object Pascal nudges upward to eighth at 2.06%, while Perl returns to the top 10 in ninth at 1.84% after a sharp year-over-year climb. SQL rounds out the list at tenth with 1.80%, maintaining a foothold that shows the enduring centrality of relational databases. Go, which held eighth place in October, slips out of the top 10 entirely. Here's how TIOBE's methodology ranks programming language popularity in November: Python C C++ Java C# JavaScript Visual Basic Delphi/Object Pascal Perl SQL

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Slashdot reader spatwei writes: It is now more common for data to leave companies through copying and pasting than through file transfers and uploads, LayerX revealed in its Browser Security Report 2025. This shift is largely due to generative AI (genAI), with 77% of employees pasting data into AI prompts, and 32% of all copy-pastes from corporate accounts to non-corporate accounts occurring within genAI tools. 'Traditional governance built for email, file-sharing, and sanctioned SaaS didn't anticipate that copy/paste into a browser prompt would become the dominant leak vector,' LayerX CEO Or Eshed wrote in a blog post summarizing the report. "GenAI now accounts for 11% of enterprise application usage," notes this article from SC World, "with adoption rising faster than many data loss protection (DLP) controls can keep up. Overall, 45% of employees actively use AI tools, with 67% of these tools being accessed via personal accounts and ChatGPT making up 92% of all use..." "With the rise of AI-driven browsers such as OpenAI's Atlas and Perplexity's Comet, governance of AI tools' access to corporate data becomes even more urgent, the LayerX report notes."

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"Google is going to court to help put an end to, or at least limit, the prevalence of phishing scams over text message," reports BGR: Google said it's bringing suit against Lighthouse, an impressively large operation that allegedly provides tools customers can buy to set up their own specialized phishing scams. All told, Google estimates that Lighthouse-affiliated scams in the U.S. have stolen anywhere between 12.7 million and 115 million credit cards. "Bad actors built Lighthouse as a phishing-as-a-service kit to generate and deploy massive SMS phishing attacks," Google notes. "These attacks exploit established brands like E-Z Pass to steal people's financial information." Google's legal action is comprehensive and is intent on completely dismantling Lighthouse's operations. The search giant is bringing claims under RICO, the Lanham Act, and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). RICO, which often comes up in movies and television shows, allows authorities to treat Lighthouse's phishing operation as a broad criminal enterprise as opposed to isolated scams. By using RICO, Google also expands the list of individuals who can be found liable, whether it be the people who started Lighthouse, the people who run it, or even unaffiliated customers who used the company's services. The Lanham Act, for those unaware, targets malicious actors who misappropriate well-known company trademarks in order to confuse consumers. This Lanham Act comes into play because many phishing scams masquerade as legitimate messages from companies like Amazon and FedEx. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, meanwhile, is relevant because scammers typically use stolen credentials to gain unauthorized access to financial systems, something the CFAA is designed to target... The fact that Google is invoking all three of the acts above underscores how serious the company is about putting a stop to SMS-based scams. By using all three, Google's legal attack is more potent and also expands the range of available remedies to include civil damages and criminal penalties. In short, Google isn't merely trying to win a legal case; it's aiming to emphatically and permanently stop Lighthouse in its tracks. Getting even more aggressive, Google says it's also working with the U.S. Congress to pass new anti-scammer legislation, and endorsed these three new bipartisan bills: The Scam Compound Accountability and Mobilization (SCAM) Act "would develop a national strategy to counter scam compounds, enhance sanctions and support survivors of human trafficking within these compounds." The Foreign Robocall Elimination Act "would establish a taskforce focused on how to best block foreign-originated illegal robocalls before they ever reach American consumers." The Guarding Unprotected Aging Retirees from Deception (GUARD) Act "would empower state and local law enforcement by enabling them to utilize federal grant funding to investigate financial fraud and scams specifically targeting retirees. " Thanks to Slashdot reader anderzole for sharing the article.

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The dream of quantum computers has been hampered by the challenge of error correction, writes the Harvard Gazette, since qubits "are inherently susceptible to slipping out of their quantum states and losing their encoded information." But in a newly-published paper, a research team "combined various methods to create complex circuits with dozens of error correction layers" that "suppresses errors below a critical threshold — the point where adding qubits further reduces errors rather than increasing them." "For the first time, we combined all essential elements for a scalable, error-corrected quantum computation in an integrated architecture," said Mikhail Lukin, co-director of the Quantum Science and Engineering Initiative, Joshua and Beth Friedman University Professor, and senior author of the new paper. "These experiments — by several measures the most advanced that have been done on any quantum platform to date — create the scientific foundation for practical large-scale quantum computation..." "There are still a lot of technical challenges remaining to get to very large-scale computer with millions of qubits, but this is the first time we have an architecture that is conceptually scalable," said lead author Dolev Bluvstein, Ph.D. '25, who did the research during his graduate studies at Harvard and is now an assistant professor at Caltech. "It's going to take a lot of effort and technical development, but it's becoming clear that we can build fault-tolerant quantum computers...." Hartmut Neven, vice president of engineering at the Google Quantum AI team, said the new paper came amid an "incredibly exciting" race between qubit platforms. "This work represents a significant advance toward our shared goal of building a large-scale, useful quantum computer," he said... With recent advances, Lukin believes the core elements for building quantum computers are falling into place. "This big dream that many of us had for several decades, for the first time, is really in direct sight," he said. "In theory, a system of 300 quantum bits can store more information than the number of particles in the known universe..." the article points out. "The new paper represents an important advance in a three-decade pursuit of quantum error correction." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

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A new "cold war" between America and China is "pushing leaders to sideline concerns about the dangers of powerful AI models," reports the Wall Street Journal, "including the spread of disinformation and other harmful content, and the development of superintelligent AI systems misaligned with human values..." "Both countries are driven as much by fear as by hope of progress. " In Washington and Silicon Valley, warnings abound that China's "authoritarian AI," left unchecked, will erode American tech supremacy. Beijing is gripped by the conviction that a failure to keep pace in AI will make it easier for the U.S. to cut short China's resurgence as a global power. Both countries believe market share for their companies across the world is up for grabs — and with it, the potential to influence large swaths of the global population. The U.S. still has a clear lead, producing the most powerful AI models. China can't match it in advanced chips and has no answer for the financial firepower of private American investors, who funded AI startups to the tune of $104 billion in the first half of 2025, and are gearing up for more. But it has a massive population of capable engineers, lower costs and a state-led development model that often moves faster than the U.S., all of which Beijing is working to harness to tip the contest in its direction. A new "whole of society" campaign looks to accelerate the construction of computing clusters in areas like Inner Mongolia, where vast solar and wind farms provide plentiful cheap energy, and connect hundreds of data centers to create a shared compute pool — some describe it as a "national cloud" — by 2028. China is also funneling hundreds of billions of dollars into its power grid to support AI training and adoption... "Our lead is probably in the 'months but not years' realm," said Chris McGuire, who helped design U.S. export controls on AI chips while serving on the National Security Council under the Biden administration. Chinese AI models currently rank at or near the top in every task from coding to video generation, with the exception of search, according to Chatbot Arena, a popular crowdsourced ranking platform. China's manufacturing sector, meanwhile, is rocketing past the U.S. in bringing AI into the physical world through robotaxis, autonomous drones and humanoid robots. Given China's progress, McGuire said, the U.S. is "very lucky" to have its advantage in chips... If AI surpasses human intelligence and acquires the ability to improve itself, it could confer unshakable scientific, economic and military superiority on the country that controls it. Short of that, AI's ability to automate tedious tasks and process vast amounts of data quickly promises to supercharge everything from cancer diagnoses to missile defense. With so much at stake, hacking and cyber espionage are likely to get worse, as AI gives hackers more powerful tools, while increasing incentives for state-backed groups to try to steal AI-related intellectual property. As distrust grows, Washington and Beijing will also find it hard, if not impossible, to cooperate in areas like preventing extremist groups from using AI in destructive ways, such as building bioweapons. "The costs of the AI Cold War are already high and will go much higher," said Paul Triolo, a former U.S. government analyst and current technology policy lead at business consulting firm DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group. "A U.S.-China AI arms race becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, with neither side able to trust that the other would observe any restrictions on advanced AI capability development...." The article includes an interesting observation from Helen Toner, director of strategy for Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology and a former OpenAI board member. Toner points out "We don't actually know" if boosting computing power with better chips will continue producing more-powerful AI models. So "If performance plateaus," the Journal writes, "despite all the spending by OpenAI and others — a growing concern in Silicon Valley — China has a chance to compete."

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"Media headlines suggesting some slowdown in EV sales are simply incorrect," writes the site Electrek, "and leave out the bigger picture that gas car sales actually are dropping..." Over the course of the last two years or so, sales of battery electric vehicles, while continuing to grow, have posted lower year-over-year percentage growth rates than they had in years prior. EV sales used to grow at 50%+ per year, but for the last couple years, they have grown closer to ~25% per year. This alone is not particularly remarkable — it is inevitable that any growing product or category will show slower percentage growth rates as sales rise, particularly one that has been growing at such a fast rate for so long. In some recent years, we had even seen year-over-year doublings in EV market share (though one of those was 2020->2021, which was anomalous). To expect improvement at that level perpetually would be close to impossible — after 3 years of doubling market share from 2023's 18% number, EVs would account for more than 100% of the global automotive market, which cannot happen... We have seen a global EV sales growth rate of 23% in the first 10 months of this year, according to a report just released by Rho Motion (recently acquired by Benchmark Mineral Intelligence). That includes a +32% bump in Europe, +22% bump in China, +4% in North America, and a big +48% bump in the "rest of the world." Notably, this 23% global growth rate is higher than last year's YTD growth rate, which was 22% at this time... In covering these trends, some journalists have attempted to use the less-wrong phrase "slower growth," showing that EV sales are still growing, but at a lower percentage change than previously seen. But for the first ten months of this year, that isn't true — EV sales are up more in 2025 than in 2024 by a percentage basis. They are also up in raw sales numbers — in 2024, EV sales grew by a larger number than in 2023. And the same is true so far in 2025. Going back to 2023, 10.7 million EVs were sold globally in the first 10 months. Then in 2024, 13.3 million were sold, a difference of 2.6 million. And so far in 2025, 16.5 million EVs have sold, a difference of 3.2 million. Not only are the numbers getting bigger, but the growth in unit sales is getting bigger as well. Even in America, the EV market "has increased so far this year, with 11.7% US EV sales growth YTD." In terms of US hybrid sales, much has been made of customers "shifting from EVs to hybrids," which is also not the case. Conventional gas-hybrid sales are indeed up and plug-in hybrids, which have grown more slowly than gas-hybrids/BEVs, have also shown some growth lately. But gas-hybrid sales have not come at the cost of EV sales, rather at the cost of gas-only car sales. Because that's just the thing: the number of gas-only vehicles being sold worldwide is a number that actually is falling. That number continues to go down year over year. Sales of new gas-powered cars are down by about a quarter from their peak in 2017, and show no signs of recovering... And yet, somehow, virtually every headline you read is about the "EV sales slump," rather than the "gas-car sales slump." The one you keep hearing about isn't happening, but the one you rarely hear about is happening... No matter what region of the world you're in, EV sales were up in the first 10 months of this year.

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From the personal blog of interface expert Bruce Ediger: Early in March 2025, I noticed that a web crawler with a user agent string of meta-externalagent/1.1 (+https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/crawler) was hitting my blog's machine at an unreasonable rate. I followed the URL and discovered this is what Meta uses to gather premium, human-generated content to train its LLMs. I found the rate of requests to be annoying. I already have a PHP program that creates the illusion of an infinite website. I decided to answer any HTTP request that had "meta-externalagent" in its user agent string with the contents of a bork.php generated file... This worked brilliantly. Meta ramped up to requesting 270,000 URLs on May 30 and 31, 2025... After about 3 months, I got scared that Meta's insatiable consumption of Super Great Pages about condiments, underwear and circa 2010 C-List celebs would start costing me money. So I switched to giving "meta-externalagent" a 404 status code. I decided to see how long it would take one of the highest valued companies in the world to decide to go away. The answer is 5 months.

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Released minutes ago was the Servo 0.0.2 web browser engine update. Along with this new Rust-based web engine release is also the "servoshell" in tow for the example implementation built around this open-source codebase...