An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Tesla has officially launched its new 'Charge on Solar' feature to let its electric car owners charge their vehicles with sunshine. Tesla describes the feature: "With Charge on Solar, your Tesla vehicle can charge using only excess solar energy produced by your Tesla solar system. Using excess energy to charge your electric vehicle maximizes the value of your home's solar system. Use the Tesla app to set Charge on Solar limits and have your vehicle charge using extra solar energy."

If you have all the required hardware and software, you can go to your Tesla app, and under "Charge on Solar," you will be able to set your charge limit using excess solar energy. Tesla writes about the charge limit: "Your vehicle will charge from solar and the grid when your current charge level is below the left sun slider. After your vehicle's charge level passes the sun slider, your vehicle automatically switches to only charge on excess solar up to your charge limit. Solar power and home loads are variables so if you ever want to charge faster, you can simply increase the lower charge limit to a desired range." There's also a scheduling feature that stops charging with solar after a specific time if you know that your energy consumption will increase at a specific time.

Dale Vince, the green energy tycoon and founder of Ecotricity, is planning to launch Britain's first electric airline called Ecojet. The Guardian reports: Ecojet, styled as a "flag carrier for green Britain," will launch early next year with a 19-seater plane traveling on a route between Edinburgh and Southampton. The planes will run initially on kerosene-based fuel for the first year, before being retrofitted with engines that convert green hydrogen into electricity. The airline will launch with several green-striped 19-seater planes capable of traveling for 300 miles. Vince hopes to expand the number of routes out to cover all of Britain's big cities. Staff will wear environmentally friendly uniforms, and serve plant-based meals.

A second phase, 18 months later, will result in 70-seater planes capable of flying to Europe being introduced. The company is in the process of applying for a license from the Civil Aviation Authority and securing takeoff and landing slots at airports. However, the process of launching an airline is regarded as slow, and Ecojet will not launch as an electric plane operator, starting by using kerosene-based fuel instead. [...] Vince said Ecojet would "price match" existing airlines on air fares and was intended to attract a mass market, beyond environment-conscious consumers. He said he would invest one million pounds initially but plans to raise further funds next year.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A phone-recorded video posted to Reddit shows a wooden desk strewn with various office supplies. On a monitor on the desk, a video begins to play: an Amazon delivery driver, being recorded by a driver-facing camera in their van, leans out of their window to talk to a customer. Though the video is cute, the setup is not: The camera's AI tracks their movements, surrounding them with a bright green box. Below them on the monitor's screen, a yellow line marks the length of the clip sent to the driver's dispatcher. Above them sits a timecode and a speed marker of "0 MPH." The driver opens their door, and moments later, a small French bulldog leaps into the van, tail wagging. The driver is delighted. The person behind the camera laughs a little. [...] The desk set-up looks consistent with that of an Amazon delivery service partner (DSP), the small-business contractors responsible for Amazon's door-to-door deliveries. The DSPs usually operate out of Amazon delivery warehouses, where they are given a desk like the one in the video, in a small area of the warehouse, out of which they select routes, dispatch drivers, and monitor their actions on the road with the help of the cameras.

The video is one of a slew of in-van surveillance videos recently posted to Reddit, a phenomenon which hasn't frequently been seen on the site before. Over the past two weeks, many users in the Amazon delivery service partner drivers subreddit (r/AmazonDSPDrivers) have shared video footage from the cameras, either directly or by recording it on their phone from a monitor within the warehouse. It is clear that many of the videos are not being posted by the subject of the video themselves, and highlights the fact that Amazon drivers, who already have incredibly difficult jobs, are being monitored at all times.

When Motherboard first wrote about the "Biometric Consent" form drivers had to sign that allows them to be monitored while on the job, Amazon insisted that the program was about safety only, and that workers shouldn't be worried about their privacy: "Don't believe the self-interested critics who claim these cameras are intended for anything other than safety," a spokesperson told us at the time. But this video, and a rash of others that have recently become public, shows that access to the camera feeds is being abused. [...] It's not clear why there has been a sudden spate of videos being posted publicly. One current Amazon delivery driver said that the drivers themselves did not have access to the videos -- only Amazon, Netradyne, and the relevant DSPs did.

Despite being the fastest-growing online platform in history, Meta's Threads is struggling to retain regular customer engagement. According to SimilarWeb, the Twitter rival saw daily active users decline from 49 million on July 7th to 23.6 million on July 14th. Furthermore, usage in the United States declined from 21 minutes per day to just over six minutes in the same time period. Here's are the key takeaways from the report: - On its best day, July 7, Threads had more than 49 million daily active users on Android, worldwide, according to SimilarWeb estimates. That's about 45% of the usage of Twitter, which had more than 109 million active Android users that day.
- By Friday, July 14, Threads was down to 23.6 million active users, or about 22% of Twitter's audience.
- Usage in the US, which saw the most activity, peaked at about 21 minutes of engagement with the app on July 7. By July 14, that was down to a little over 6 minutes.
- In the first two full days that Threads was generally available, Thursday and Friday, web traffic to twitter.com was down 5% compared with the same days of the previous week. Although traffic bounced back, for the most recent 7 days of data it's still down 11% year-over-year.
- On the days of peak interest in Threads, Twitter's Daily active users on Android, worldwide, were virtually unchanged, but time spent was down 4.3% -- perhaps because some users were off trying Threads. Even with that drop, however, the average total time spent on Twitter was about 25 minutes.

To a large extent, Threads solves the "empty party problem" that makes it tough to start a new online community by allowing Instagram users to instantly create a Threads account, bringing their existing contacts with them. Our daily usage numbers make Meta's claim of having achieved more than 100 million total account signups in a matter of days seem reasonable. However, Threads is missing many basic features and still needs to offer a compelling reason to switch from Twitter or start a new social media habit with Threads.

Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind, believes that for the UK to become an AI superpower, it needs to foster a culture of risk-taking and encourage large-scale investments. The BBC reports: Mustafa Suleyman added that he does not regret selling DeepMind to the US giant in 2014. "The US market is not only huge, but also more predisposed to taking big shots," he told the BBC. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak wants the UK to be a global hub for AI. He has pledged 1 billion pounds in funding over the next 10 years, and founded a UK taskforce with a remit of maximising the benefits of the tech while keeping it safe. This week BBC News is focusing on AI, how the technology affects our lives and what impacts it may have in the near future.

Mr Suleyman said the UK had "every chance" of becoming an AI superpower and praised its research facilities, but added there were not the same opportunities for businesses to grow as there are in the US. "I think the culture shift that it needs to make is to be more encouraging of large scale investments, more encouraging of risk taking, and more tolerant and more celebratory of failures," he said. "The truth is, the US market is not only huge, but also more predisposed to big risk taking, taking big shots and having big funding rounds." Mr Suleyman has chosen to base his new company, Inflection AI, in Palo Alto, California, which is also home to the headquarters of Google, Facebook and Tesla.

Mustafa Suleyman's views represent one of the challenges facing Ian Hogarth, a British entrepreneur and investor who has been appointed to lead the UK's AI taskforce. He took up the position five weeks ago. In his first interview since getting the job, Mr Hogarth told the BBC that while the UK was a good place for start-ups, it should also be easier for them to grow. "We've had some great [tech] companies and some of them got bought early, you know - Skype got bought by eBay, DeepMind got bought by Google. I think really our ecosystem needs to rise to the next level of the challenge."

Norway's data protection regulator has accused Meta of violating user privacy by tracking their activities, threatening to fine the company $100,000 per day if it fails to take corrective action. "It is so clear that this is illegal that we need to intervene now and immediately," said Tobias Judin, head of Norway's privacy commission, Datatilsynet. Engadget reports: The move follows a European court ruling banning Meta from harvesting user data like location, behavior and more for advertising. Datatilsynet has referred its actions to Europe's Data Protection Board, which could widen the fine across Europe. The aim is to put "additional pressure" on Meta, Judin said. (Norway is a member of the European single market, but not technically an EU member.)

Meta told Reuters that it's reviewing Datatilsynet's decision and that the decision wouldn't immediately impact its services. "We continue to constructively engage with the Irish DPC, our lead regulator in the EU, regarding our compliance with its decision," a spokesperson said. "The debate around legal bases has been ongoing for some time and businesses continue to face a lack of regulatory certainty in this area."

Thousands of writers including Nora Roberts, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Michael Chabon and Margaret Atwood have signed a letter asking artificial intelligence companies like OpenAI and Meta to stop using their work without permission or compensation. From a report: It's the latest in a volley of counter-offensives the literary world has launched in recent weeks against AI. But protecting writers from the negative impacts of these technologies is not an easy proposition. According to a forthcoming report from The Authors Guild, the median income for a full-time writer last year was $23,000. And writers' incomes declined by 42% between 2009 and 2019. The advent of text-based generative AI applications like GPT-4 and Bard, that scrape the Web for authors' content without permission or compensation and then use it to produce new content in response to users' prompts, is giving writers across the country even more cause for worry.

"There's no urgent need for AI to write a novel," said Alexander Chee, the bestselling author of novels like Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night. "The only people who might need that are the people who object to paying writers what they're worth." Chee is among the nearly 8,000 authors who just signed a letter addressed to the leaders of six AI companies including OpenAI, Alphabet and Meta. "It says it's not fair to use our stuff in your AI without permission or payment," said Mary Rasenberger, CEO of The Author's Guild. The non-profit writers' advocacy organization created the letter, and sent it out to the AI companies on Monday. "So please start compensating us and talking to us."

Passengers have flooded the FAA with complaints about narrow seats and scant legroom. From a report: Passengers have been sounding off for years about airline seating -- no legroom, thin cushions, too narrow. Now politicians are listening. A bill introduced in Congress last month to update aircraft evacuation standards would compel federal regulators to study seat sizes and spacing. Tito Echeverria, who used to travel frequently as a plant manager for a manufacturing company, has had too many awkward interactions with other squished travelers. "You end up having to consistently rub legs with someone, even though you're not really trying to," said Echeverria, 32, from Ontario, Calif. "You're just freaking there next to them."

U.S. regulations cover aisle width and the number of seats allowed on planes, but not minimum seat sizes. The Federal Aviation Administration has said in court it isn't required to set seat standards unless it finds they are necessary to protect passenger safety. In late 2019 and early 2020, it simulated emergency evacuations and found seat size and spacing didn't adversely affect the process. Last year, the FAA sought public feedback on whether seat sizes posed safety issues, and it got an earful. More than 26,000 public comments poured in over a three-month stretch. "Airplane seat sizes are appalling," one commenter wrote. "They are built for people from the '40s and '50s. They cannot remotely accommodate a person over 6 feet or 200 pounds. It's literally painful to fly today."

Millions of US military emails have been misdirected to Mali through a "typo leak" that has exposed highly sensitive information, including diplomatic documents, tax returns, passwords and the travel details of top officers. Financial Times: Despite repeated warnings over a decade, a steady flow of email traffic continues to the .ML domain, the country identifier for Mali, as a result of people mistyping .MIL, the suffix to all US military email addresses. The problem was first identified almost a decade ago by Johannes Zuurbier, a Dutch internet entrepreneur who has a contract to manage Mali's country domain.

Zuurbier has been collecting misdirected emails since January in an effort to persuade the US to take the issue seriously. He holds close to 117,000 misdirected messages -- almost 1,000 arrived on Wednesday alone. In a letter he sent to the US in early July, Zuurbier wrote: "This risk is real and could be exploited by adversaries of the US."

The Register shares its collection of "signs that Wayland is becoming the favored way to get a GUI on Linux." - The team developing Linux for Apple Silicon Macs said they didn't have the manpower to work on X.org support.

- A year ago, the developers of the Gtk toolkit used by many Linux apps and desktops said that the next version may drop support for X11...

- One of the developers of the Budgie desktop, Campbell Jones, recently published a blog post with a wildly controversial title that made The Reg FOSS desk smile: "Wayland is pretty good, actually." He lays out various benefits that Wayland brings to developers, and concludes: "Primarily, what I've learned is that Wayland is actually really well-designed. The writing is on the wall for X, and Wayland really is the future." Partly as a result of this, it looks likely that the next version of the Budgie desktop, Budgie 11, will only support Wayland, completely dropping support for X11. The team point out that this is not such a radical proposition: there was a proposal to make KDE 6 sessions default to Wayland as long ago as last October...

- The GNOME spin of Fedora has defaulted to Wayland since version 25 in 2017, and the GNOME flavor of Ubuntu since 21.04.

- [T]here's now an experimental effort to get Wayland working on OpenBSD. The effort happened at the recent OpenBSD hackathon in Tallinn, Estonia, and the developer's comments are encouraging. It's already available as part of FreeBSD.

"Logan Parson's first flight by himself ended with airport officials taking the teenager into custody and whisking him away into an interrogation room," reports the Independent. The teen was "denied boarding to an American Airlines flight," reports the Washington Post. "He hadn't committed a crime, nor was he accused of being unruly.

"His offense? Attempting to make use of a money-saving hack that gutsy fliers use every year." Direct flights to major cities are so expensive, it can actually be cheaper to book a flight with stops in two cities — and then skip the flight to that second city. The Post points out that while passengers can save money with this so-called "hidden-city ticket" trick — or skiplagging — "most carriers regard it as a form of fraud."

From North Carolina TV station WJZY: In a statement to WJZY, American Airlines said, "Purchasing a ticket without intending to fly all flights to gain lower fares (hidden city ticketing) is a violation of American Airlines terms and conditions and is outlined in our Conditions of Carriage online...." Other major airlines, like Delta and United, also prohibit hidden city ticketing. Even [skip-lagging resource] Skip Lagged warns there may be consequences of hidden city ticketing, like your checked luggage moving on to the final destination instead of where you stop or losing frequent flyer miles you've accrued.
The Arizona Republic adds: According to American and Southwest's contracts of carriage, they can cancel any unused part of a ticket, refuse to let the passenger and their bags fly, not issue a refund and charge the customer for what the ticket would have cost for the full route. Airlines may ban a passenger from flying with them in the future.

Some airlines have challenged the practice in court but without success. In November 2014, United Airlines sued Skiplagged.com and its founder in court, claiming trademark infringement, according to court documents. A judge dismissed the suit the following year.
The Washington Post shares another warning: Chris Dong, a Los Angeles-based travel writer and points expert who used to skiplag, says you especially can't do this on a round-trip flight. "Airlines will cancel your return flight if you're a 'no show' for any segment of a booked itinerary," Dong said in an email.
While the teen's father told WJZY that his son was "interrogated a little bit" before being "taken to a security room," American Airline says their records don't show that the teen was taken to a security room. Instead, they've told the Post that "Our records indicate the customer was questioned only at the ticket counter about their travel, while attempting to check-in for their flight." The fact that the teen was denied boarding underscores how serious airlines take skiplagging. It makes sense, since the practice saps revenue from them on two fronts: Not only do passengers underpay — potentially by hundreds of dollars per ticket — but the seat on the tossed leg could have been sold to someone else. Most contracts of carriage from major airlines expressly forbid skiplagging as a result.
The Post also got this quote from Clint Henderson, an industry expert and managing editor for the Points Guy. "The airlines are getting increasingly sophisticated and smart about it. I expect that will get even more prevalent as technology improves further."

Here's how long-time Slashdot reader Baron_Yam summarizes a radically new tiny-but-powerful "opposed-piston engine" created by INNengine of Granada, Spain. "500cc, 120 horsepower, under 40 kilograms (85 pounds). No cylinder head in the motor, no camshaft, no crankshaft, no valves, and no oil mixed in with the fuel."

The company calls it "a single-stroke combustion cycle," though the engine itself still has a compression stroke and an exhaust stroke, reports The Drive: Despite having four cylinder banks, the INNengine (depending on its configuration) actually has eight pistons. This is because the engine is an opposed-piston motor, meaning that each piston's compression stroke is performed against a second piston placed in the same cylinder bank rather than a static cylinder head. It still only has four combustion chambers, though, which means it sounds similar to a four-cylinder engine... The mechanical configuration also allows for better engine balance. That means typical drawbacks of an internal combustion motor (often referred to as noise, vibration, and harshness) are minimalized. Once combustion happens, the piston is pushed back against the plate and forces the plate to rotate. This motion is synced between each half of the motor via a shared shaft — meaning, no extra timing components...

Is it likely that we'll see INNengine's combustion tech powering the wheels of a car? Probably not, at least not directly hooked up to a gearbox. The Mazda featured in INNengine's demo video was a great concept, but the company seems to be instead targeting the EV market as a range extender, especially since that's the way the industry is ultimately headed.

If the tech had debuted a few decades ago or more, perhaps there would have been a chance of adoption in the main market (cue Felix Wankel's notorious rotary). But messing with perfection in this day and age, especially as combustion tech could be on the way out, seems a bit unlikely to take off. That's why a range extender would appear to be the most logical path forward for this tech, especially if we want more lightweight, cost-effective EVs.

An anonymous reader shared Thursday's report from eSecurity Planet: After Microsoft warned earlier this week that some drivers certified by the Windows Hardware Developer Program (MWHDP) are being leveraged maliciously, a Cisco Talos security researcher said the number of malicious drivers could number in the thousands.

Talos researcher Chris Neal discussed how the security problem evolved in a blog post. "Starting in Windows Vista 64-bit, to combat the threat of malicious drivers, Microsoft began to require kernel-mode drivers to be digitally signed with a certificate from a verified certificate authority," Neal wrote. "Without signature enforcement, malicious drivers would be extremely difficult to defend against as they can easily evade anti-malware software and endpoint detection." Beginning with Windows 10 version 1607, Neal said, Microsoft has required kernel-mode drivers to be signed by its Developer Portal. "This process is intended to ensure that drivers meet Microsoft's requirements and security standards," he wrote.

Still, there are exceptions — most notably, one for drivers signed with certificates that expired or were issued prior to July 29, 2015. If a newly compiled driver is signed with non-revoked certificates that were issued before that date, it won't be blocked. "As a result, multiple open source tools have been developed to exploit this loophole," Neal wrote. And while Sophos reported that it had uncovered more than 100 malicious drivers, Neal said Cisco Talos "has observed multiple threat actors taking advantage of the aforementioned Windows policy loophole to deploy thousands of malicious, signed drivers without submitting them to Microsoft for verification...."

"Microsoft, in response to our notification, has blocked all certificates discussed in this blog post," he noted.

After a severe rainstorm, two Cruise robotaxis drove past several downed trees and power lines, and then through caution tape, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. And then one of the Cruise vehicles caught on a low-hanging power wire for the city's bus system, "dragging it upward the rest of the block."

The article notes that the transit agency "had already de-energized the lines by the time the Cruise taxi hit them." But the cars only stopped "after driving through another set of caution tape and sandwich boards." Cruise personnel who retrieved the entangled car had to manually back it up a half block "to release the tension on the wire," according to a San Francisco Fire Department report. No one was inside the cars at the time, and no one was hurt...

But for city officials who oppose the rapid expansion of driverless taxi companies Cruise and Waymo, the episode reflects a recent and troubling trend. As driverless taxis ramp up operations in San Francisco, their disruption and close calls have increased in frequency and severity as well, officials say. "It really, really concerns me that something is going to go horribly wrong," Fire Chief Jeanine Nicholson said.

Cruise and Waymo say city officials have mischaracterized their safety track records. Their driverless taxis, the companies say, have lower collision rates than human drivers and public transit. Their self-driving cars, they argue, help improve traffic safety in San Francisco because their cars are programmed to follow posted speed limits.

The Fire Department has tallied 44 incidents so far this year in which robotaxis entered active fire scenes, ran over fire hoses or blocked fire trucks from responding to emergency calls. That count is double the figure from last year's informal count, which Nicholson said does not include all incidents.
Meanwhile the city's transit agency tallied 96 incidents just in March "where driverless cars disrupt traffic, transit and emergency responders," according to the article — and then another 91 in April.

But the issue is drawing more attention now because next month California's state regulatory agency and DMV "will vote on whether to allow Cruise and Waymo to charge for rides at all hours with no restrictions."

The Internet Archive has taken the rather unusual step of sending a DMCA notice to protect the copyrights of book publishers and authors. The non-profit organization asked GitHub to remove a tool that can strip DRM from books in its library. The protective move is likely motivated by the ongoing legal troubles between the Archive and book publishers. TorrentFreak reports: The Internet Archive sent a takedown request to GitHub, requesting the developer platform to remove a tool that circumvents industry-standard technical protection mechanisms for digital libraries. This "DeGouRou" software effectively allows patrons to save DRM-free copies of the books they borrow. "This DMCA complaint is about a tool made available on github which purports to circumvent technical protections in violation of the copyright act section 1201," the notice reads. "I am reporting a Git which provides a tool specifically used to circumvent industry standard library TPMs which are used by Internet Archive, and other libraries, to permit patrons to borrow an encrypted book, read the encrypted book, and return an encrypted book."

Interestingly, an IA representative states that they are "not authorized by the copyright owners" to submit this takedown notice. Instead, IA is acting on its duty to prevent the unauthorized downloading of copyright-protected books. It's quite unusual to see a party sending takedown notices without permission from the actual rightsholders. However, given the copyright liabilities IA faces, it makes sense that the organization is doing what it can to prevent more legal trouble. Permission or not, GitHub honored the takedown request. It removed all the DeGourou repositories that were flagged and took the code offline. [...] After GitHub removed the code, it soon popped up elsewhere.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Meta, formerly known as Facebook, is set to release a commercial version of LLaMA, its open-source large language model (LLM) that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to generate text, images, and code. LLaMA, which stands for Large Language Model Meta AI, was publicly announced in February as a small foundational model, and made available to researchers and academics. Now, the Financial Times is reporting that Meta is prepared to release the commercial version of the model, which would enable developers and businesses to build applications using the foundational model.

Since it's an open-source AI technology, commercial access to LLaMA gives businesses of all sizes the opportunity to adapt and improve the AI, accelerating technological innovation across various sectors and potentially leading to more robust models. Meta's LLaMA is available in 7, 13, 33, and 65 billion parameters, compared to ChatGPT's LLM, GPT-3.5, which has been confirmed to have 175 billion parameters. OpenAI hasn't said how many parameters GPT-4 has, but it's estimated to have over 1 trillion parameters -- the more parameters, the better the model can understand input and generate appropriate output.

Though open-source AI models already exist, launching Meta's LLaMA commercially is still a significant step, due to it being larger than many of the available open-source LLMs on the market, and the fact that it is from one of the biggest tech companies in the world. The launch means Meta is directly competing with Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Google, and that competition could mean significant advancements in the AI field. Closed or proprietary software, like that used in OpenAI's ChatGPT, has drawn criticism over transparency and security.

Long-time Slashdot reader Amiga Trombone shares a report from Phoronix: With Red Hat now restricting access to the RHEL source repositories, AlmaLinux and other downstreams that have long provided "community" rebuilds of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with 1:1 compatibility to upstream RHEL have been left sorting out what to do. Benny Vasquez, Chair of the Board for the AlmaLinux OS Foundation, wrote in a blog post yesterday: After much discussion, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation board today has decided to drop the aim to be 1:1 with RHEL. AlmaLinux OS will instead aim to be Application Binary Interface (ABI) compatible*.

We will continue to aim to produce an enterprise-grade, long-term distribution of Linux that is aligned and ABI compatible with RHEL in response to our community's needs, to the extent it is possible to do, and such that software that runs on RHEL will run the same on AlmaLinux.

For a typical user, this will mean very little change in your use of AlmaLinux. Red Hat-compatible applications will still be able to run on AlmaLinux OS, and your installs of AlmaLinux will continue to receive timely security updates. The most remarkable potential impact of the change is that we will no longer be held to the line of "bug-for-bug compatibility" with Red Hat, and that means that we can now accept bug fixes outside of Red Hat's release cycle. While that means some AlmaLinux OS users may encounter bugs that are not in Red Hat, we may also accept patches for bugs that have not yet been accepted upstream, or shipped downstream."

r/malefashionadvice, one of the biggest Reddit communities that's still private as part of the Reddit protest, is encouraging its users to move to Discord and Substack. The subreddit has more than 5 million subscribers. The Verge reports: Specifically, the Discord lets members of the community chat amongst themselves and post about things like fits and inspiration, while the Substack hosts a lot of guides. "One of the other mods writes "I will never go back, it's way better on Discord,' and that sentiment is pretty shared," the mod, who asked to go by Zach, says in an email to The Verge. "The community does a lot better job of self-moderating, owing largely to the fact that the ratio of existing regulars to new people is currently extremely high."

The Substack isn't intended to "be a subscription-based thing"; instead, it was a good place to bring over the subreddit's guides and maintain formatting, Zach says. The biggest guide, Building a Basic Wardrobe, is at more than 2,000 views that came "almost entirely from Discord." That said, both the Discord and Substack are far smaller than r/malefashionadvice's subscriber base: the Discord has north of 2,000 users, while the Substack has nearly 560 subscribers.

Reddit seemingly isn't happy that r/malefashionadvice is still private. On Thursday, the subreddit's moderators received the following message from a Reddit admin (employee) telling the team they would be replaced if they don't reopen the community [...]. Despite the message, the moderation team plans to stick around until they are removed. "We expect that we will be removed from [r/malefashionadvice] as a mod team relatively soon based on communications from the admins," Walker wrote in a message on the Discord. "We'd like to take this time to thank everyone who has contributed so much time and effort over almost 14 years of the sub's history."

If Reddit installs new mods that reopen the community, Zach believes that while many people will go back, "most of the regulars probably won't return," he says. "Dozens of bots (and human bad actors) plague [r/malefashionadvice] on the daily, and without proper mod tools, it'll get even harder to keep them out." More than 2,000 subreddits are still dark in protest, according to the Reddark tracker.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Newly raised concerns about lead-covered telephone cables installed across the US many decades ago are putting pressure on companies like AT&T and Verizon to identify the locations of all the cables and account for any health problems potentially caused by the toxic metal. US Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) wrote a letter to the USTelecom industry trade group this week after a Wall Street Journal investigative report titled, "America Is Wrapped in Miles of Toxic Lead Cables." The WSJ said it found evidence of more than 2,000 lead-covered cables and that there "are likely far more throughout the country."

WSJ reporters had researchers collect samples as part of their investigation. They "found that where lead contamination was present, the amount measured in the soil was highest directly under or next to the cables, and dropped within a few feet -- a sign the lead was coming from the cable," the article said. Markey wrote to USTelecom, "According to the Wall Street Journal's investigation, 'AT&T, Verizon and other telecom giants have left behind a sprawling network of cables covered in toxic lead that stretches across the US, under the water, in the soil and on poles overhead... As the lead degrades, it is ending up in places where Americans live, work and play.'"

Markey wants answers to a series of questions by July 25: "Do the companies know the locations and mileage of lead-sheathed cables that they own or for which they are responsible -- whether aerial, underwater, or underground? Are there maps of the locations and installations? If not, what plans do the companies have to identify the cables? Why have the companies that knew about the cables -- and the potential exposure risks they pose -- failed to monitor them or act?" Markey also asked what plans telcos have to address environmental and public health problems that could arise from lead cables. He asked the companies to commit to "testing for soil, water, and other contamination caused by the cables," to remediate any contamination, and warn communities of the potential hazards. Markey also asked USTelecom if the phone companies will guarantee "medical treatment and compensation to anyone harmed by lead poisoning caused by the cables." "There is no safe level of lead exposure -- none -- which is why I'm so disturbed by these reports of lead cable lines throughout the country," added US Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-NJ). "It is imperative that these cables be properly scrutinized and addressed."

Another Congressman, Rep. Patrick Ryan (D-NY), said he is considering legislation on remediating contamination from the cables and that telecom companies should "do the right thing and clean up their mess." The Wall Street Journal said its testing in a playground in Ryan's district "registered high levels of lead underneath an aerial cable running along the perimeter of the park."

A luxury horse barn in Florida is primed to be the world's largest 3D-printed building. From a report: Once it's complete, the 3D-printed luxury equestrian barn in Wellington, Florida will overtake a building in Oman as the world's largest 3D-printed structure. According to Printed Farms, the Florida-based startup developing the project, the building will have a total floor area of 10,678 square feet. While the team finished the 3D-printing portion of the site build Wednesday, the installation of doors, windows, electrical fittings and other structural components is still needed.

Printed Farms founder Jim Ritter told Axios construction is expected to be finished by the end of August -- refuting other reports that the build was already completed. What they're saying: The climate case for 3D-printing buildings, according to Ritter, lies in waste reduction. "America is a very wasteful society. We have to start keeping things longer. Our clothing, our cars, everything. That's the whole point of a greener, more sustainable building system," said Ritter.