The thinktank InfluenceMap produces "data-driven analysis on how business and finance are impacting the climate crisis." Their web site says their newest report documents "How automaker lobbying threatens the global transition to electric vehicles." This report analyses the climate policy engagement strategies of fifteen of the largest global automakers in seven key regions (Australia, EU, Japan, India, South Korea, UK, US). It shows how even in countries where major climate legislation has recently passed, such as the US and Australia, the ambition of these policies has been weakened due to industry pressure. All fifteen automakers, except Tesla, have actively advocated against at least one policy promoting electric vehicles. Ten of the fifteen showed a particularly high intensity of negative engagement and scored a final grade of D or D+ by InfluenceMap's methodology. Toyota is the lowest-scoring company in this analysis, driving opposition to climate regulations promoting battery electric vehicles in multiple regions, including the US, Australia and UK. Of all automakers analyzed, only Tesla (scoring B) is found to have positive climate advocacy aligned with science-based policy. CleanTechnica writes that Toyota "led on hybrid vehicles (and still does), so it's actually not surprising that it has been opposed to the next stage of climate-cutting auto evolution — it's clinging on to its lead rather than continuing to innovate for a new era." More from InfluenceMap: Only three of fifteen companies — Tesla, Mercedes Benz and BMW — are forecast to produce enough electric vehicles by 2030 to meet the International Energy Agency's updated 1.5 degreesC pathway of 66% electric vehicle (battery electric, fuel cell and plug-in hybrids) sales according to InfluenceMap's independent analysis of industry-standard data from February 2024. Current industry forecasts analyzed for this report show automaker production will reach only 53% electric vehicles in 2030. Transport is the third-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions globally, and road transport is failing to decarbonize at anywhere near the rate of many other industries. InfluenceMap's report also finds that Japanese automakers are the least prepared for an electric vehicle transition and are engaging the hardest against it. "InfluenceMap highlights that these anti-EV efforts in the industry are often coming from industry associations rather than coming directly from automakers, shielding them a bit from inevitable public backlash," writes CleanTechnica. "Every automaker included in the study except Tesla remains a member of at least two of these groups," InfluenceMap reports, "with most automakers a member of at least five." Thanks to Slashdot reader Baron_Yam for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Released over a year ago was Golang 1.20 with support for Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) and has since been improved with Go 1.21 for 2~7% faster Go binaries thanks to this optimization approach also found with other compilers. The engineers at Cloudflare have put out a blog post this week praising Go's PGO support and the CPU savings they are seeing as a result...

While EROFS is seeing Zstd support and Bcachefs is seeing performance optimizations with the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel, over on the mature EXT4 file-system side the changes are mostly small. There are some minor changes, more folio conversion work, and also adding support for the FS_IOC_GETFSSYSFSPATH ioctl that has been seeing some standardization and adoption by the common Linux file-systems...

A Linux patch has been posted for delivering a quirk so that the Bigscreen Beyond VR Headset can properly behave under Linux and in turn also jives with the likes of SteamVR...

Alongside all of the other pull requests by Ingo Molnar submitted at the start of the week during the opening of the Linux 6.10 merge window were the scheduler updates. As usual, the kernel scheduler work continues to see various tweaks and refinements to enhance its behavior...

Vous avez un petit budget mais rêvez d'un écran gaming d'une diagonale de 27 pouces, avec une définition QHD (2560 x 1440 pixels), réactif bien entendu et doté d'une dalle IPS ? On arrive généralement à en dégoter juste sous la barre des 200 € avec un peu de patience lors d'offres ponctuelles mais l...

Semaine chargée une nouvelle fois avec des tests assez variés, même si la mémoire et les alimentation sont en double bonus, plus un retour sur notre visite des bureaux MSI à Taiwan. On se pose, et on fait le point ! […]

Lire la suite

Linux's Turbostat utility that is developed by Intel for reporting idle/power state statistics, temperatures, and other useful data on modern Intel/AMD processors has seen its changes submitted for the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel...

La marque Thermalright, qui était la référence mondiale en matière de ventirad CPU au début des années 2000, commence à de nouveau avoir le vent en poupe alors que le monde du hardware se rend progressivement compte qu'elle propose parmi les meilleurs refroidisseurs CPU du marché, alors que ses tari...

The Washington Post reports that America took "one of its biggest steps yet to keep fossil fuels in the ground," announcing Thursday that it will end new coal leasing in the Powder River Basin, "which produces nearly half the coal in the United States... "It could prevent billions of tons of coal from being extracted from more than 13 million acres across Montana and Wyoming, with major implications for U.S. climate goals." A significant share of the nation's fossil fuels come from federal lands and waters. The extraction and combustion of these fuels accounted for nearly a quarter of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions between 2005 and 2014, according to a study by the U.S. Geological Survey. In a final environmental impact statement released Thursday, Interior's Bureau of Land Management found that continued coal leasing in the Powder River Basin would harm the climate and public health. The bureau determined that no future coal leasing should happen in the basin, and it estimated that coal mining in the Wyoming portion of the region would end by 2041. Last year, the Powder River Basin generated 251.9 million tons of coal, accounting for nearly 44 percent of all coal produced in the United States. Under the bureau's determination, the 14 active coal mines in the Powder River Basin can continue operating on lands they have leased, but they cannot expand onto other public lands in the region... "This means that billions of tons of coal won't be burned, compared to business as usual," said Shiloh Hernandez, a senior attorney at the environmental law firm Earthjustice. "It's good news, and it's really the only defensible decision the BLM could have made, given the current climate crisis...." The United States is moving away from coal, which has struggled to compete economically with cheaper gas and renewable energy. U.S. coal output tumbled 36 percent from 2015 to 2023, according to the Energy Information Administration. The Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign estimates that 382 coal-fired power plants have closed down or proposed to retire, with 148 remaining. In addition, the Environmental Protection Agency finalized an ambitious set of rules in April aimed at slashing air pollution, water pollution and planet-warming emissions spewing from the nation's power plants. One of the most significant rules will push all existing coal plants by 2039 to either close or capture 90 percent of their carbon dioxide emissions at the smokestack. "The nation's electricity generation needs are being met increasingly by wind, solar and natural gas," said Tom Sanzillo, director of financial analysis at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, an energy think tank. "The nation doesn't need any increase in the amount of coal under lease out of the Powder River Basin."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike shared this report from Ars Technica: The United States Marine Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC) is currently evaluating a new generation of robotic "dogs" developed by Ghost Robotics, with the potential to be equipped with gun systems from defense tech company Onyx Industries, reports The War Zone. While MARSOC is testing Ghost Robotics' quadrupedal unmanned ground vehicles (called "Q-UGVs" for short) for various applications, including reconnaissance and surveillance, it's the possibility of arming them with weapons for remote engagement that may draw the most attention. But it's not unprecedented: The US Marine Corps has also tested robotic dogs armed with rocket launchers in the past. MARSOC is currently in possession of two armed Q-UGVs undergoing testing, as confirmed by Onyx Industries staff, and their gun systems are based on Onyx's SENTRY remote weapon system (RWS), which features an AI-enabled digital imaging system and can automatically detect and track people, drones, or vehicles, reporting potential targets to a remote human operator that could be located anywhere in the world. The system maintains a human-in-the-loop control for fire decisions, and it cannot decide to fire autonomously. On LinkedIn, Onyx Industries shared a video of a similar system in action. In a statement to The War Zone, MARSOC states that weaponized payloads are just one of many use cases being evaluated. MARSOC also clarifies that comments made by Onyx Industries to The War Zone regarding the capabilities and deployment of these armed robot dogs "should not be construed as a capability or a singular interest in one of many use cases during an evaluation."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jeremy Allison — Sam (Slashdot reader #8,157) is a Distinguished Engineer at Rocky Linux creator CIQ. This week he published a blog post responding to promises of Linux distros "carefully selecting only the most polished and pristine open source patches from the raw upstream open source Linux kernel in order to create the secure distribution kernel you depend on in your business." But do carefully curated software patches (applied to a known "frozen" Linux kernel) really bring greater security? "After a lot of hard work and data analysis by my CIQ kernel engineering colleagues Ronnie Sahlberg and Jonathan Maple, we finally have an answer to this question. It's no." The data shows that "frozen" vendor Linux kernels, created by branching off a release point and then using a team of engineers to select specific patches to back-port to that branch, are buggier than the upstream "stable" Linux kernel created by Greg Kroah-Hartman. How can this be? If you want the full details the link to the white paper is here. But the results of the analysis couldn't be clearer. - A "frozen" vendor kernel is an insecure kernel. A vendor kernel released later in the release schedule is doubly so. - The number of known bugs in a "frozen" vendor kernel grows over time. The growth in the number of bugs even accelerates over time. - There are too many open bugs in these kernels for it to be feasible to analyze or even classify them.... [T]hinking that you're making a more secure choice by using a "frozen" vendor kernel isn't a luxury we can still afford to believe. As Greg Kroah-Hartman explicitly said in his talk "Demystifying the Linux Kernel Security Process": "If you are not using the latest stable / longterm kernel, your system is insecure." CIQ describes its report as "a count of all the known bugs from an upstream kernel that were introduced, but never fixed in RHEL 8." For the most recent RHEL 8 kernels, at the time of writing, these counts are: RHEL 8.6 : 5034 RHEL 8.7 : 4767 RHEL 8.8 : 4594 In RHEL 8.8 we have a total of 4594 known bugs with fixes that exist upstream, but for which known fixes have not been back-ported to RHEL 8.8. The situation is worse for RHEL 8.6 and RHEL 8.7 as they cut off back-porting earlier than RHEL 8.8 but of course that did not prevent new bugs from being discovered and fixed upstream.... This whitepaper is not meant as a criticism of the engineers working at any Linux vendors who are dedicated to producing high quality work in their products on behalf of their customers. This problem is extremely difficult to solve. We know this is an open secret amongst many in the industry and would like to put concrete numbers describing the problem to encourage discussion. Our hope is for Linux vendors and the community as a whole to rally behind the kernel.org stable kernels as the best long term supported solution. As engineers, we would prefer this to allow us to spend more time fixing customer specific bugs and submitting feature improvements upstream, rather than the endless grind of backporting upstream changes into vendor kernels, a practice which can introduce more bugs than it fixes. ZDNet calls it "an open secret in the Linux community." It's not enough to use a long-term support release. You must use the most up-to-date release to be as secure as possible. Unfortunately, almost no one does that. Nevertheless, as Google Linux kernel engineer Kees Cook explained, "So what is a vendor to do? The answer is simple: if painful: Continuously update to the latest kernel release, either major or stable." Why? As Kroah-Hartman explained, "Any bug has the potential of being a security issue at the kernel level...." Although [CIQ's] programmers examined RHEL 8.8 specifically, this is a general problem. They would have found the same results if they had examined SUSE, Ubuntu, or Debian Linux. Rolling-release Linux distros such as Arch, Gentoo, and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed constantly release the latest updates, but they're not used in businesses. Jeremy Allison's post points out that "the Linux kernel used by Android devices is based on the upstream kernel and also has a stable internal kernel ABI, so this isn't an insurmountable problem..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Starting this week millions will see AI-generated answers in Google's search results by default. But the announcement Tuesday at Google's annual developer conference suggests a future that's "not without its risks, both to users and to Google itself," argues the Washington Post: For years, Google has been shielded for liability for linking users to bad, harmful or illegal information by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. But legal experts say that shield probably won't apply when its AI answers search questions directly. "As we all know, generative AIs hallucinate," said James Grimmelmann, professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School and Cornell Tech. "So when Google uses a generative AI to summarize what webpages say, and the AI gets it wrong, Google is now the source of the harmful information," rather than just the distributor of it... Adam Thierer, senior fellow at the nonprofit free-market think tank R Street, worries that innovation could be throttled if Congress doesn't extend Section 230 to cover AI tools. "As AI is integrated into more consumer-facing products, the ambiguity about liability will haunt developers and investors," he predicted. "It is particularly problematic for small AI firms and open-source AI developers, who could be decimated as frivolous legal claims accumulate." But John Bergmayer, legal director for the digital rights nonprofit Public Knowledge, said there are real concerns that AI answers could spell doom for many of the publishers and creators that rely on search traffic to survive — and which AI, in turn, relies on for credible information. From that standpoint, he said, a liability regime that incentivizes search engines to continue sending users to third-party websites might be "a really good outcome." Meanwhile, some lawmakers are looking to ditch Section 230 altogether. [Last] Sunday, the top Democrat and Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee released a draft of a bill that would sunset the statute within 18 months, giving Congress time to craft a new liability framework in its place. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Reps. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) and Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) argued that the law, which helped pave the way for social media and the modern internet, has "outlived its usefulness." The tech industry trade group NetChoice [which includes Google, Meta, X, and Amazon] fired back on Monday that scrapping Section 230 would "decimate small tech" and "discourage free speech online." The digital law professor points out Google has traditionally escaped legal liability by attributing its answers to specific sources — but it's not just Google that has to worry about the issue. The article notes that Microsoft's Bing search engine also supplies AI-generated answers (from Microsoft's Copilot). "And Meta recently replaced the search bar in Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp with its own AI chatbot." The article also note sthat several U.S. Congressional committees are considering "a bevy" of AI bills...

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Le voilà, le temps attendu 666e !

Comme tous les dimanches (après une petite pause ces dernières semaines), voici notre sélection des liens les plus intéressants de ces derniers jours. Ils proviennent des commentaires les plus intéressants, utiles et/ou originaux de la semaine, mais aussi de nos recherches.

Le floutage de demain passe dès aujourd’hui par l’IA

Dans sa revue des médias, l’INA propose un article très intéressant sur la nécessité d’inventer « le floutage de demain » : « Pendant longtemps, la télé a flouté les personnes qui souhaitaient témoigner de façon anonyme. Ces floutages sont désormais contournables grâce à l’intelligence artificielle. Pour trouver des solutions qui permettent de continuer à assurer la protection de ces témoins, une course contre la montre s’est engagée à France Télévisions ».

Nos confrères se sont posés la question de savoir si les méthodes d’anonymisation des visages étaient suffisantes, d’autant que cela soulève des questions déontologiques sur la nécessaire et obligatoire protection des sources. Résultat des courses : « le floutage tel qu’il existe aujourd’hui risque d’être compromis ». Une trentaine de sujets ont déjà été dépubliés.

Et si la solution venait de l’intelligence artificielle qui placerait un nouveau visage à la place de l’ancien, avec un autre intérêt que l’anonymisation : « L’IA permet d’envisager l’émotion qu’on nous partage, mais sans révéler le témoin. Le visage, c’est souvent la part d’humanité qui reste dans les zones du monde où il y a des conflits ou de la répression ».

• Urgence à France Télévisions : inventer le floutage de demain (article)

Il y a déjà une utilisation concrète avec le documentaire Nous, jeunesse(s) d’Iran, cité par la Revue des médias. Il a été diffusé sur France 5 : « six récits de jeunes de moins de 25 ans donnent vie aux transformations en cours dans la société iranienne ».

Pour ce film, les réalisateurs ont « fait le choix de générer des visages via intelligence artificielle pour anonymiser ses témoins (au centre). Créer une simple mosaïque présente dorénavant trop de risques. Quant au carré noir, difficile de l’utiliser durant tout un film », explique l’INA.

Neurone et IA : la bonne connexion ?

France Culture propose un podcast sur l’histoire de l’IA : « Aux origines de l’intelligence artificielle, il y a la volonté de plusieurs chercheurs de décrypter les mécanismes de la pensée humaine. Quel rôle ont joué les premiers réseaux de neurones artificiels dans cette histoire à rebondissements ? ». L’invité du jour est Alban Leveau-Vallier, docteur en philosophie à Sciences Po Paris.

• Neurone et IA : la bonne connexion ? (podcast)

C’est quoi être « identifiable » au sens du RGPD ?

Ars Technica looks at what happened after Google's answer to Amazon's cloud service "accidentally deleted a giant customer account for no reason..." "[A]ccording to UniSuper's incident log, downtime started May 2, and a full restoration of services didn't happen until May 15." UniSuper, an Australian pension fund that manages $135 billion worth of funds and has 647,000 members, had its entire account wiped out at Google Cloud, including all its backups that were stored on the service... UniSuper's website is now full of must-read admin nightmare fuel about how this all happened. First is a wild page posted on May 8 titled "A joint statement from UniSuper CEO Peter Chun, and Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian...." Google Cloud is supposed to have safeguards that don't allow account deletion, but none of them worked apparently, and the only option was a restore from a separate cloud provider (shoutout to the hero at UniSuper who chose a multi-cloud solution)... The many stakeholders in the service meant service restoration wasn't just about restoring backups but also processing all the requests and payments that still needed to happen during the two weeks of downtime. The second must-read document in this whole saga is the outage update page, which contains 12 statements as the cloud devs worked through this catastrophe. The first update is May 2 with the ominous statement, "You may be aware of a service disruption affecting UniSuper's systems...." Seven days after the outage, on May 9, we saw the first signs of life again for UniSuper. Logins started working for "online UniSuper accounts" (I think that only means the website), but the outage page noted that "account balances shown may not reflect transactions which have not yet been processed due to the outage...." May 13 is the first mention of the mobile app beginning to work again. This update noted that balances still weren't up to date and that "We are processing transactions as quickly as we can." The last update, on May 15, states, "UniSuper can confirm that all member-facing services have been fully restored, with our retirement calculators now available again." The joint statement and the outage updates are still not a technical post-mortem of what happened, and it's unclear if we'll get one. Google PR confirmed in multiple places it signed off on the statement, but a great breakdown from software developer Daniel Compton points out that the statement is not just vague, it's also full of terminology that doesn't align with Google Cloud products. The imprecise language makes it seem like the statement was written entirely by UniSuper. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader swm for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Automotive News: Automotive News recently reported that eight automakers sent vehicle location data to police without a court order or warrant. The eight companies told senators that they provide police with data when subpoenaed, getting a rise from several officials. BMW, Kia, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Subaru, Toyota, and Volkswagen presented their responses to lawmakers. Senators Ron Wyden from Oregon and Ed Markey from Massachusetts penned a letter to the Federal Trade Commission, urging investigative action. "Automakers have not only kept consumers in the dark regarding their actual practices, but multiple companies misled consumers for over a decade by failing to honor the industry's own voluntary privacy principles," they wrote. Ten years ago, all of those companies agreed to the Consumer Privacy Protection Principles, a voluntary code that said automakers would only provide data with a warrant or order issued by a court. Subpoenas, on the other hand, only require approval from law enforcement. Though it wasn't part of the eight automakers' response, General Motors has a class-action suit on its hands, claiming that it shared data with LexisNexis Risk Solutions, a company that provides insurers with information to set rates. The article notes that the lawmakers praised Honda, Ford, GM, Tesla, and Stellantis for requiring warrants, "except in the case of emergencies or with customer consent."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Albert Einstein was right," reports CNN. "There is an area at the edge of black holes where matter can no longer stay in orbit and instead falls in, as predicted by his theory of gravity." The proof came by combining NASA's earth-orbiting NuSTAR telescope with the NICER telescope on the International Space Station to detect X-rays: A team of astronomers has for the first time observed this area — called the "plunging region" — in a black hole about 10,000 light-years from Earth. "We've been ignoring this region, because we didn't have the data," said research scientist Andrew Mummery, lead author of the study published Thursday in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. "But now that we do, we couldn't explain it any other way." Mummery — also a Fellow in Oxford's physics department — told CNN, "We went out searching for this one specifically — that was always the plan. We've argued about whether we'd ever be able to find it for a really long time. People said it would be impossible, so confirming it's there is really exciting." Mummery described the plunging region as "like the edge of a waterfall." Unlike the event horizon, which is closer to the center of the black hole and doesn't let anything escape, including light and radiation, in the "plunging region" light can still escape, but matter is doomed by the powerful gravitational pull, Mummery explained. The study's findings could help astronomers better understand the formation and evolution of black holes. "We can really learn about them by studying this region, because it's right at the edge, so it gives us the most information," Mummery said... According to Christopher Reynolds, a professor of astronomy at the University of Maryland, College Park, finding actual evidence for the "plunging region" is an important step that will let scientists significantly refine models for how matter behaves around a black hole. "For example, it can be used to measure the rotation rate of the black hole," said Reynolds, who was not involved in the study.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SUSE/openSUSE has been busy crafting a next-gen Linux installer that is a web-based installer and originally known as D-Installer but now going by the name Agama...

"We're migrating domains in batches..." announced web-hosting company Squarespace earlier this month. "Squarespace has entered into an agreement to become the new home for Google Domains customers. When your domain transitions from Google to Squarespace, you'll become a Squarespace customer and manage your domain through an account with us." Slashdot reader shortyadamk shares an email sent today to a Google Domains customer: "Today your domain, xyz.com, migrated from Google Domains to Squarespace Domains. "Your WHOIS contact details and billing information (if applicable) were migrated to Squarespace. Your DNS configuration remains unchanged. "Your migrated domain will continue to work with Google Services such as Google Search Console. To support this, your account now has a domain verification record — one corresponding to each Google account that currently has access to the domain."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.