"TikTok has lost its bid to strike down a law that could result in the platform being banned in the United States," reports CNN.

A U.S. federal appeals court just unanimously ruled in favor of the new U.S. law requiring TikTok's China-based owners to either sell the app next month or face an effective ban in the United States. Denying TikTok's argument that the law was unconstitutional, the judges found that the law does not "contravene the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States," nor does it "violate the Fifth Amendment guarantee of equal protection of the laws"... After the [January 25] deadline, U.S. app stores and internet services could face hefty fines for hosting TikTok if it is not sold. (Under the legislation, President Biden may issue a one-time extension of the deadline.)

In a statement, TikTok indicated it would appeal the decision. "The Supreme Court has an established historical record of protecting Americans' right to free speech, and we expect they will do just that on this important constitutional issue," said company spokesperson Michael Hughes. "Unfortunately, the TikTok ban was conceived and pushed through based upon inaccurate, flawed and hypothetical information, resulting in outright censorship of the American people. The TikTok ban, unless stopped, will silence the voices of over 170 million Americans here in the US and around the world on January 19th, 2025"....

"People in the United States would remain free to read and share as much PRC propaganda (or any other content) as they desire on TikTok or any other platform of their choosing," the judges said. "What the Act targets is the PRC's ability to manipulate the content covertly. Understood in that way, the Government's justification is wholly consonant with the First Amendment."
The judges also wrote that "in part precisely because of the platform's expansive reach, Congress and multiple Presidents determined that divesting it from the PRC's control is essential to protect our national security... Congress judged it necessary to assume that risk given the grave national-security threats it perceived."

CNN notes that ByteDance "has previously indicated it will not sell TikTok."

An anonymous reader shared this report from Defense News: Following a pattern of undersea cable damage across European waters in the last year, with the most recent disruptions happening just weeks ago, top NATO officials have begun envisioning a capability that would allow the alliance to have permanent eyes above and under the waterline. In an interview with Defense News, Admiral Pierre Vandier, the alliance's Norfolk, Virginia-based commander for concepts and transformation, likened the idea to police CCTV cameras installed on street lights in urban trouble spots for recording evidence of crimes. "The technology is there to make this street-lighting with USVs," he said, using the military's shorthand for unmanned surface vessel. Vandier said his team is in the early stages of developing an unmanned surface vessel fleet so that "NATO can see and monitor daily its environment."

The first step would be to achieve this at a surface level, and then later under water... According to Vandier, the goal is to launch the drone surveillance fleet before the next NATO Summit, which will be held in the Netherlands next June.
The article notes the U.S. Navy's Task Force 59 (launched in 2021) is already "dedicated to integrating unmanned systems and AI in the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet area of operations." This prompted Admiral Vandier to say the technology for an unmanned cable-watching fleet "already exists... everything is known and sold, so it is much more a matter of adoption than technology."

Thursday OpenAI released a "smarter, faster" ChatGPT. But there's still competition, notes the tech site Tom's Guide (which is liveblogging December's AI news). "Not to be outdone by OpenAI, this week has seen several big announcements by other AI companies." Google Deepmind unveiled Genie 2, a tool capable of creating limitless 3D environments. It could create playable games based on a single text input.

ElevenLabs announced a new Conversational AI system. It's a voice bot meant to feel like you're making a phone call. Tom's Guide AI editor Ryan Morrison used it to clone his voice to act as technical support for his dad.

OpenAI will probably announce an upgraded Sora video model in the coming days, but we were impressed by the new Hunyuan Video model that released a demo this week. Sora has some serious competition and we're interested in seeing how it competes.

Mozilla's developer blog is announcing "JavaScriptmas". [F]rom December 1st to December 24th, we will release a fun, daily coding challenge for you to solve on [code-learning platform] Scrimba. Each challenge comes with an introductory screencast called "scrim", some starter code, and then it's your turn to fill in the gaps.

JavaScriptmas is about coding, learning, and the chance to win exciting prizes. Two lucky coders will be chosen as winners at the end of JavaScriptmas, and each will win a MacBook Air M3, swag from MDN and Scrimba, and a lifetime Scrimba Pro membership (worth ~$200 per year). The Scrimba membership will give you access to all courses, including the Frontend Developer Career Path based on the MDN curriculum.

Most of the challenges will evolve around JavaScript algorithms. You will also practice subjects like DOM manipulation, UI design, CSS, accessibility, and even a bit of cyber security. The challenges are a collaborative effort from Scrimba teachers, mentors, and MDN content writers, all with the goal of turning you into a more well-rounded web developer.

Winners will be chosen randomly from everyone who submits correct solutions. We want JavaScriptmas to be accessible for both beginners and experienced developers alike. That said, the more challenges you solve, the better your chances of winning! To maximize your chances, try to solve all 24 challenges and submit them as both regular entries and social entries. You don't have to submit your solutions on the same day they're published — the deadline for any submission is midnight UTC on Christmas Eve.

The Verge is applauding Hyundai's electric SUV, the IONIQ 5 for "Fake shifting, real fun." And others agree. "The Ioniq 5 N is also special for how it simulates the 'feel' of gear shifting," writes the blog Inside EVs, "including the jolt and brief interruption in power that happens and the mechanical resistance that's normal upon downshifting.

"The Ioniq 5 N also simulates engine sounds through the speakers, will let you rev the 'engine' while parked and has a 'redline' you'll hit before you need to shift again. It's all great fun." [E]very single person who drives the Hyundai Ioniq 5 N, whether they're a die-hard EV person or the most hardcore electro-skeptic, absolutely loves it. And they love the fake shifting most of all... Shut up and embrace the fake EV shifting, you nerds. Find some joy in your life for once.

And joy will definitely be on order with the new 2025 Kia EV6 GT. The U.S.-spec version of Kia's updated crossover made its debut [November 21] at the L.A. Auto Show. And while there's still a lot we don't know about it, we have power specs and one key detail: the EV6 GT now gets a simulated gear shift feature. "The GT's new Virtual Gear Shift feature enhances driving immersion by simulating gear shifts with visuals, engine sound effects, and a tactile sensation through motor torque adjustments," Kia officials said in a news release.
The Verge points out that Hyundai's Ioniq 5 N even uses speakers — both inside the car and outside — to broadcast the sounds of ignition, a boosted EV sound, and a third sound which "sounds like a robotic version of a fighter jet." Paired with the seemingly endless power and torque offered by the electric motors, I couldn't stop grinning. It's just like a little kid making car noises as they push a Hot Wheels car around a track, but combined with the driving experience in the Ioniq 5 N, it just taps into a pure enthusiast joy. Even kids around my neighborhood stopped and looked when I started the Ioniq 5 N up with the sound management turned on. They'd pull out their phones to take photos and videos as I drove off, happily faking the internal combustion engine experience and knowing I wasn't adding a drop of carbon to the atmosphere.

The Ioniq 5 N just might be the performance EV that will change self-described "auto enthusiast" minds about the electric transition. It's that good.

The Carnegie Endowment for Peace, a nonpartisan international affairs think tank, points out that when subsea internet cables were cut in November, Europe was more prepared: Where in the past there were no contingency plans for sabotage, there are now more maritime patrols, an attempt to forge deeper intelligence connections, and the beginnings of a new relationship with the private sector...

Even before the October 2023 incident, NATO, the EU, and certain European governments began to increase their efforts to boost subsea cable resilience and security. In February 2023, NATO stood up a new Critical Undersea Infrastructure Coordination Cell in Brussels to convene stakeholders and enhance coordination between the public and private sectors. In July 2023, NATO allies at the Vilnius Summit established a Maritime Center for the Security of Critical Undersea Infrastructure as part of the alliance's Maritime Command in Northwood, UK. In October 2023, after the first incident, NATO defense ministers endorsed a new Digital Ocean Vision, an initiative aimed at improving undersea surveillance. And in February 2024, the European Commission released its first "Recommendation on Secure and Resilient Submarine Cable Infrastructures," encouraging member states to conduct regular stress tests, improve information sharing amongst themselves, and improve cable maintenance and repair capabilities.
The article points out that the Chinese ship suspected in the 2023 cable cutting "ignored requests from Finnish and Estonian authorities to halt" and returned to China. But the Chinese ship suspected in November's cable-cutting "remains in international waters in the Kattegat, with naval and coast guard vessels from Denmark, Germany, and Sweden circling close by." Yet "Under international maritime law, these countries' authorities are not allowed to board..." Current provisions of international law are neither formulated to adequately protect subsea data cables from sabotage nor hold perpetrators accountable. This reality should lead the EU, as a body inherently focused on the resilience of international legal regimes, to push for updates that are better suited for the current geopolitical reality... Lawmakers should also explore ways to increase penalties for subsea cable damage, in part to deter acts of sabotage in the first place....

A forthcoming Carnegie Endowment report will detail more in-depth recommendations on how Europe can both protect itself against future subsea cable damage and help expand trusted networks around the world.
The article also notes that "Of the hundreds of disruptions to cables that occur each year, the vast majority are caused by accidental human activity, like fishing, or natural events, like earthquakes."

Hyundai "just had its best sales month ever in the U.S.," reports Electrek Hyundai's impressive EV lineup is charging up demand, with its best-selling Hyundai IONIQ 5 SUV also setting a new U.S. record after sales more than doubled in November. With 76,008 vehicles sold in November, Hyundai's record-breaking U.S. sales streak is not slowing down. Hyundai Motor America CEO Randy Parker credited the growing demand for EVs and hybrid vehicles to the growth.

Hyundai's EV sales rose 77% from last year, while hybrid sales surged 104%. Electrified retail sales (EV, PHEV, and hybrid models) climbed 92% in total last month. Several vehicles, including the Santa Fe HEV, Tucson PHEV, Tucson HEV, and IONIQ 5, had their best-ever sales month.
The article also notes increasing sales for Hyundai's electric SUV, the IONIQ 5. Starting at $43,975 — and recently upgraded to a range of 245 miles (or 318 miles for the $46,550 extended-range model) — it features an NACS port for accessing Tesla's Supercharger network.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Meta is mistakenly removing too much content across its apps, according to a top executive. Nick Clegg, Meta's president of global affairs, told reporters on Monday that the company's moderation "error rates are still too high" and pledged to "improve the precision and accuracy with which we act on our rules."

"We know that when enforcing our policies, our error rates are still too high, which gets in the way of the free expression that we set out to enable," Clegg said during a press call I attended. "Too often, harmless content gets taken down, or restricted, and too many people get penalized unfairly." He said the company regrets aggressively removing posts about the covid-19 pandemic. CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently told the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee the decision was influenced by pressure from the Biden administration.

"We had very stringent rules removing very large volumes of content through the pandemic," Clegg said. "No one during the pandemic knew how the pandemic was going to unfold, so this really is wisdom in hindsight. But with that hindsight, we feel that we overdid it a bit. We're acutely aware because users quite rightly raised their voice and complained that we sometimes over-enforce and we make mistakes and we remove or restrict innocuous or innocent content."

India, the world's fifth-largest economy, is offering the heftiest electric vehicle subsidies globally -- yet has achieved just 2% market penetration so far. From a report: India's total EV subsidies amount to 40-50% of vehicle prices when accounting for GST (goods and services tax), road tax benefits, state subsidies and production-linked incentives. For larger vehicles like the Grand Vitara, the effective subsidy reaches 61%.

This dwarfs incentives in other major markets. China's subsidies represent about 10% of EV prices, while South Korea and Germany offer around 16-20%. The US provides roughly 26% through various federal and state programs.

Yet India's EV penetration significantly lags these markets. China has reached 24% penetration, South Korea 18%, Germany 20%, and the US 8%. India's 2% looks particularly stark in comparison.

A new lawsuit filed by a current Apple employee accuses the company of spying on its workers via their personal iCloud accounts and non-work devices. From a report: The suit, filed Sunday evening in California state court, alleges Apple employees are required to give up the right to personal privacy, and that the company says it can "engage in physical, video and electronic surveillance of them" even when they are at home and after they stop working for Apple.

Those requirements are part of a long list of Apple employment policies that the suit contends violate California law. The plaintiff in the case, Amar Bhakta, has worked in advertising technology for Apple since 2020. According to the suit, Apple used its privacy policies to harm his employment prospects. For instance, it forbade Bhakta from participating in public speaking about digital advertising and forced him to remove information from his LinkedIn page about his job at Apple.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has stepped down amid the company's continued struggles against rivals, with shares losing over half their value this year. The chipmaker announced Monday that Chief Financial Officer David Zinsner and Executive Vice President Michelle Johnston Holthaus will serve as interim co-CEOs while the board searches for a permanent replacement.

Gelsinger, 63, was hired in 2021 to lead an ambitious turnaround aimed at reclaiming Intel's technological edge from competitors like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. His strategy included expanding Intel's factory network with new facilities in Ohio and transforming the company into a contract manufacturer for other firms. The plan faced significant headwinds as Nvidia dominated the AI chip market, with cloud computing companies increasingly favoring Nvidia's processors for AI development over Intel's Gaudi line.

Intel's challenges culminated in an August earnings report showing a surprise loss, leading to dividend suspension and plans to cut over 15% of its 110,000-person workforce. Board Chairman Frank Yeary, now serving as interim executive chair, emphasized the need to prioritize Intel's product group to meet customer demands. The leadership change also impacts the Biden administration's semiconductor industry initiatives, as Intel was set to receive the largest grant under the $39 billion Chips Act program.

Multiple news outlets including Bloomberg and Reuters report that Gelsinger was forced out by the board because "directors felt Gelsinger's costly and ambitious plan to turn Intel around was not working and the progress of change was not fast enough."

Bluesky says it will never train generative AI on its users' data. But despite that, "one million public Bluesky posts — complete with identifying user information — were crawled and then uploaded to AI company Hugging Face," reports Mashable (citing an article by 404 Media).

"Shortly after the article's publication, the dataset was removed from Hugging Face," the article notes, with the scraper at Hugging Face posting an apology. "While I wanted to support tool development for the platform, I recognize this approach violated principles of transparency and consent in data collection. I apologize for this mistake." But TechCrunch noted the incident's real lesson. "Bluesky's open API means anyone can scrape your data for AI training," calling it a timely reminder that everything you post on Bluesky is public. Bluesky might not be training AI systems on user content as other social networks are doing, but there's little stopping third parties from doing so...

Bluesky said that it's looking at ways to enable users to communicate their consent preferences externally, [but] the company posted: "Bluesky won't be able to enforce this consent outside of our systems. It will be up to outside developers to respect these settings. We're having ongoing conversations with engineers & lawyers and we hope to have more updates to share on this shortly!"
Mashable notes Bluesky's response to 404Media — that Bluesky is like a website, and "Just as robots.txt files don't always prevent outside companies from crawling those sites, the same applies here."

So "While many commentators said that data collection should be opt in, others argued that Bluesky data is publicly available anyway and so the dataset is fair use," according to SiliconRepublic.com.

"Are you spending hours scrolling mindlessly on Instagram reels and TikTok?" asks the BBC. "If so, you might be suffering from brain rot, which has become the Oxford word of the year." It is a term that captures concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media. The word's usage saw an increase of 230% in its frequency from 2023 to 2024. Psychologist and Oxford University Professor, Andrew Przybylski says the popularity of the word is a "symptom of the time we're living in". Brain rot beat five other shortlisted words including demure, Romantasy and dynamic pricing... [And "slop".]

The first recorded use of brain rot dates much before the creation of the internet — it was written down in 1854 by Henry David Thoreau in his book Walden. He criticises society's tendency to devalue complex ideas and how this is part of a general decline in mental and intellectual effort. It leads him to ask: "While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot — which prevails so much more widely and fatally?" The word initially gained traction on social media among Gen Z and Gen Alpha communities, but it's now being used in the mainstream as a way to describe low-quality, low-value content found on social media.

Prof Przybylski says "there's no evidence of brain rot actually being a thing. Instead it describes our dissatisfaction with the online world and it's a word that we can use to bundle our anxieties that we have around social media."
The New York Times points out that Oxford's past "word of the year" selections included "podcast" and "selfie" [Casper Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Languages, the company's dictionary division] noted the finalists were heavy on old-fashioned words that young people had repurposed in semi-ironic ways — the linguistic equivalent, he said, of "bell-bottoms coming back into fashion...."

"Slop" has undergone a similar update. There was a spike of more than 300 percent over the past year in references not to pig feed, but to "art, writing or other content generated using artificial intelligence, shared and distributed online in an indiscriminate or intrusive way, and characterized as being of low quality, inauthentic or inaccurate," according to Oxford. Like "brain rot," it "represents the underbelly of today's linguistic churn," Grathwohl said. "There's a sense that we are drowning in mediocre experiences as digital lives get clogged."

Bluesky (Slashdot is on Bluesky here and Threads here) now has more active website users than Threads in the U.S., according to a graph from the Financial Times. And though Threads still leads in app usage, "Prior to November 5 Threads had five times more daily active users in the U.S. than Bluesky... Now, Threads is only 1.5 times larger than its rival, Similarweb said."

But "the influx of new users has opened up new opportunities for scammers and impersonators," Engadget reported this week: A recent analysis by Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security Trust and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech found that 44 percent of the top 100 most-followed accounts on Bluesky had at least one "doppelganger," with most looking like "cheap knock-offs of the bigger account, down to the same bio and profile picture," Mantzarlis wrote in his newsletter Faked Up.
The article highlighted issues with Bluesky's loose account verification policies. And then, Bluesky announced a new change-of-policy Friday. Engadget reports: The Bluesky Safety account said that the social media service is removing accounts that are impersonating other people and those squatting on handles... Bluesky now requires parody, satire or fan accounts to label themselves as such in both their handles and their bio. If they don't, or if they only indicate the nature of their account in one of those elements, then they'll be treated as an impersonator and will be removed from the platform. Bluesky now explicitly prohibits identity churning, as well. Accounts that start as impersonators with the purpose of gaining new users, and who then switch to a different identity in an attempt to circumvent the ban, will still get booted off the app. Finally, it says it's exploring "additional options to enhance account verification," though they're not quite ready for rollout.
Bluesky says they've "quadrupled the size of our moderation team, in part to action impersonation reports more quickly. We still have a large backlog of moderation reports due to the influx of new users as we shared previously, though we are making progress." And in addition, "We are working behind the scenes to help many organizations and high-profile individuals set up their verified domain handles."

And there's another problem. "The EU's executive arm on Monday said Bluesky didn't provide information it was required to share under the bloc's Digital Services Act," reports Bloomberg. Bluesky responded that it's working to comply, " consulting with its lawyer to follow the EU's information disclosure rules, a Bluesky spokesperson wrote on Tuesday in an email." "All platforms in the EU have to have a dedicated page on their websites where it says how many user numbers they have in the EU and where they are legally established," Thomas Regnier, the commission's spokesperson on digital matters, told reporters. "This is not the case with Bluesky, so this is not followed...."

Under the DSA, platforms with more than 45 million users in the bloc qualify as "very large online platforms" and need to follow stricter content moderation rules under the commission's supervision. Breaches can result in fines of up to 6% of their global annual sales... Smaller platforms are still required to comply with the law, but are regulated by the EU country where they have a legal presence. That's so far unclear in the case of Bluesky, which was created expressly to avoid a centralized ownership structure.

The commission asked EU member countries' national authorities to investigate "and see if they can find any trace of Bluesky" in their jurisdictions, Regnier said

Friday the Software Freedom Conservancy announced the production release of the new OpenWrt One network router — designed specifically for running the Linux-based router OS OpenWrt (a member project of the SFC). "This is the first wireless Internet router designed and built with your software freedom and right to repair in mind.

"The OpenWrt One will never be locked down and is forever unbrickable." This device services your needs as its owner and user. Everyone deserves control of their computing. The OpenWrt One takes a great first step toward bringing software rights to your home: you can control your own network with the software of your choice, and ensure your right to change, modify, and repair it as you like.

The OpenWrt One demonstrates what's possible when hardware designers and manufacturers prioritize your software right to repair; OpenWrt One exuberantly follows these requirements of the copyleft licenses of Linux and other GPL'd programs. This device provides the fully copyleft-compliant source code release from the start. Device owners have all the rights as intended on Day 1; device owners are encouraged to take full advantage of these rights to improve and repair the software on their OpenWrt One. Priced at US$89 for a complete OpenWrt One with case (or US$68.42 for a caseless One's logic board), it's ready for a wide variety of use cases...

This new product has completed full FCC compliance tests; it's confirmed that OpenWrt met all of the FCC compliance requirements. Industry "conventional wisdom" often argues that FCC requirements somehow conflict with the software right to repair. SFC has long argued that's pure FUD. We at SFC and OpenWrt have now proved copyleft compliance, the software right to repair, and FCC requirements are all attainable in one product!

You can order an OpenWrt One now! Since today is the traditional day in the USA when folks buy gifts for love ones, we urge you to invest in a wireless router that can last! We do expect that for orders placed today, sellers will deliver by December 22 in most countries... Regardless of where you buy from, for every purchase of a new OpenWrt One, a US$10 donation will go to the OpenWrt earmarked fund at Software Freedom Conservancy. Your purchase not only improves your software right to repair, but also helps OpenWrt and SFC continue to improve the important software and software freedom on which we all rely!
LWN.net points out that OpenWrt has also "served as the base on which a lot of network-oriented development (including the bufferbloat-reduction work) has been done." The OpenWrt One was designed to be a functional network router that would serve as a useful tool for the development of OpenWrt itself. To that end, the hope was to create a device that was entirely supported by upstream free software, and which was as unbrickable as it could be... The OpenWrt One comes with a two-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor, 1GB of RAM, and 256MB of NAND flash memory. There is also a separate, read-only 16MB NOR flash array in the device. Normally, the OpenWrt One will boot and run from the NAND flash, but there is a small switch in the back that will cause it to boot from the NOR instead. This is a bricking-resistance feature; should a software load break the device, it can be recovered by booting from NOR and flashing a new image into the NAND array. ..

After booting into the new image, the One behaved like any other OpenWrt router... What could be more interesting is seeing this router get into the hands of developers and enthusiasts who will use it to make OpenWrt (and other small-system distributions) better.
Long-time Slashdot reader dumfrac writes: The intent to build the device was announced on the OpenWRT forums earlier this year. It is based on MediaTek MT7981B (Filogic 820) SoC and MediaTek MT7976C dual-band WiFi 6 chipset and the board is made by Banana Pi. A poll to select the logo was run in April on the OpenWRT forums, and now the hardware is available for purchase. .

At the start of November Threads had 275 million members. But in 30 days it's apparently increased another 12%, reports The Verge: Threads has accrued over 35 million signups so far in November and is "going on three months with more than a million signups a day," Meta spokesperson Alec Booker told The Verge in an email today. 20 million of those signups have come since November 14th, as Axios notes...

At the same time, Bluesky has seen a surge of interest. The platform grew to 15 million users earlier this month and continued to add about a million signups per day for several days. It now sits at over 22 million users.
Dave Earley, audience editor at Guardian Australia, says that traffic to TheGuardian.com from BlueSky "is already 2x that of Threads." [T]hat's on a straight threads.net vs bsky.app referral comparison. BUT! 75-80% of tracked referral from owned Bluesky account posts is NOT being attributed to bsky.app, so I'm certain organic traffic would be undercounting by that much as well. By which I mean, I'm pretty sure traffic from bsky.app to theguardian.com is *significantly* higher than the very obvious 2x that of Threads.
That post was in response to one by a platform VP for the Boston Globe newspaper, who'd reported that traffic from Bluesky to bostonglobe.com "is already 3x that of Threads, and we are seeing 4.5x the conversions to paying digital subscribers."

And Axios notes that Bluesky's growth "has spurred inbound interest for a new investment round, just weeks after raising $15 million in Series A funding, per Axios' Dan Primack."

In response, Threads "rolled out a series of changes over the past week in what was seen as an attempt to keep an edge over Bluesky," reports The Hill: The changes included a new custom feed feature, which gives users the ability to build their feeds around the topics and people they are most interested in. Bluesky lets users make their own lists and feeds and set their own content moderation preferences. The platform also rolled out a few "long-overdue improvements" to its search and trending now features and its algorithm.

Transport for London (TfL) has dropped its investigation into how it could introduce driverless trains on the London Underground. From a report: One of the many conditions imposed on TfL during the pandemic to keep services running when most of us were stuck at home was that it would investigate how it could introduce driverless trains on the Underground. TfL was required to produce a business case for converting the Waterloo & City line and Piccadilly line to a DLR-style operation, and in September 2021, it advertised for consultancy work on the project.

It's now been confirmed that the study reached the same conclusion that every other study into the issue has already reported -- it'll cost an awful lot of money for very little benefit. Despite the claims that it would prevent strikes on the tube, the reality is that it wouldn't, as driverless trains would still have staff on board, just as the DLR does, and the DLR still has strikes.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google Cloud dangled hundreds of million of euros worth of financial incentives to ally itself with an association of European cloud providers that had lodged a complaint against Microsoft, according to confidential documents seen by The Register.

Amit Zavery, the former Vice President of Google Cloud Platform, presented to a selection of members of the Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE) trade body, then to the board and finally to the entire organization, according to sources that asked to remain anonymous.

In the presentation, seen by us, Zavery offered to provide a Members Innovation Fund of $4.2 million, which Google described as $105,000 per member to be used as "immediate funding for projects and license fees of CISPE members to support innovation in open cloud ecosystems." CISPE actually has 36 members now, including Oxya, Leaseweb, UpCloud and AWS -- the latter being the only non-European participant. The number has grown from 27 in July. Google also offered to contribute an additional $10.6 million to the trade association, described in the presentation as "participating and membership resources."

SpzToid writes: A Chinese commercial vessel that has been surrounded by European warships in international waters for a week is central to an investigation of suspected sabotage that threatens to test the limits of maritime law -- and heighten tensions between Beijing and European capitals.

Investigators suspect that the crew of the Yi Peng 3 bulk carrier -- 225 meters long, 32 meters wide and loaded with Russian fertilizer -- deliberately severed two critical data cables last week as its anchor was dragged along the Baltic seabed for over 100 miles.

Their probe now centers on whether the captain of the Chinese-owned ship, which departed the Russian Baltic port of Ust-Luga on Nov. 15, was induced by Russian intelligence to carry out the sabotage. It would be the latest in a series of attacks on Europe's critical infrastructure that law-enforcement and intelligence officials say have been orchestrated by Russia.

king*jojo writes: KDE and GNOME have decided that because they're not big and complicated enough already, they might work better if they have their own custom distributions underneath. What's the worst that could happen?

A talk from this year's KDE conference, Akademy 2024, looks like it's going to become real. The talk, by KDE developer Harald Sitter, was entitled An Operating System of Our Own, and the idea sounds simple enough: Sitter proposed an official KDE Linux distribution. Now the proposal is gathering steam and a plan is coming together for an official KDE Linux -- codenamed "Project Banana."