Power

Datacenters Line Up For 750MW of Oklo's Nuclear-Waste-Powered Small Reactors (theregister.com) 62

Datacenter operators are increasingly turning to small modular reactors (SMRs) like those developed by Oklo to meet growing energy demands. According to The Register, Oklo has secured commitments from two major datacenter providers for 750 MW of power, pending regulatory approvals. It brings the firm's planned nuclear build-out to 2.1 gigawatts. From the report: Oklo's designs are, from what we understand, inspired by the Experimental Breeder Reactor II (EBR-II) and utilize liquid-metal cooling. They are capable of producing between 15MW and 50MW of power, depending on the configuration. That means Oklo's datacenter customers plan to deploy somewhere between 15 and 50 of the reactors to satisfy their thirst for electricity. However, they may be waiting a while.

According to Oklo's website, the nuclear startup hopes to bring its first plant online before the end of the decade. Before that can happen, though, Oklo will need to obtain approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission -- something for which it says it's already submitted applications. In 2022, the watchdog rejected an Oklo plan to build a small atomic reactor in Idaho, citing "significant information gaps" on safety-related measures.

That said, Oklo has lately received support from US government agencies including the Department of Energy (DoE), which has awarded a site use permit, while Idaho National Laboratory -- home of EBR-II -- has provided fuel material to support the efforts. Speaking of fuel, Oklo's designs may not suffer from the challenges other SMR startups, like Terrapower, have encountered. Oklo's designs are intended to run on recycled nuclear waste products from traditional reactors. In fact, the startup is currently working with DoE national labs to develop new fuel recycling technologies. Oklo hopes to bring a commercial-scale recycling plan online by the early 2030s.

Crime

Teen Pleads Guilty To Making 375 'Swatting' Calls Across US (cnn.com) 166

quonset shares a report from CNN: Between August 2022 and January 2024, hundreds of swatting calls were made across the country targeting religious institutions, government offices, schools, and random people. Authorities were finally able to track down the criminal, Alan Fillon, who entered the plea to four counts of making interstate threats to injure the person of another, the US Attorney's Office for the Middle District of Florida said in a news release. He faces up to five years in prison on each count. A sentencing date has not yet been set.

The US Attorney's Office said Filion made more than 375 swatting and threat calls from August 2022 to January 2024. Those calls included ones in which he claimed to have planted bombs in targeted locations or threatened to detonate bombs and/or conduct mass shootings at those locations, prosecutors said. He targeted religious institutions, high schools, colleges and universities, government officials and people across the United States. Filion was 16 at the time he placed the majority of the calls.

Sci-Fi

Experts Testify US Is Running Secret UAP Programs (npr.org) 177

During a public joint hearing today titled "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth," four experts testified that the U.S. is running secret UAP programs, including crash retrieval and reverse-engineering programs for advanced nonhuman technology. Although the Pentagon maintains there's no evidence of alien spacecraft, witnesses like Luis Elizondo and Michael Gold argue that UAPs represent an intelligence enigma and call for open, stigma-free study to address potential security concerns and unknown scientific possibilities. NPR reports: Tim Gallaudet, retired rear admiral, U.S. Navy; CEO of Ocean STL Consulting, LLC
"Confirmation that UAPs are interacting with humanity came for me in January 2015," Gallaudet said in his written testimony (PDF). He describes being part of a pre-deployment naval exercise off the U.S. East Coast that culminated in the famous "Go Fast" video, in which a Navy F/A-18 jet's sensors recorded "an unidentified object exhibiting flight and structural characteristics unlike anything in our arsenal." He was among a group of commanders involved in the exercise who received an email containing the video, which was sent by the operations officer of Fleet Forces Command, Gallaudet said. "The very next day, the email disappeared from my account and those of the other recipients without explanation," he said.

Luis Elizondo, author and former Department of Defense official
Elizondo's written testimony (PDF) was brief and alleged that a secretive arms race is playing out on the global stage. "Let me be clear: UAP are real," he wrote. "Advanced technologies not made by our Government -- or any other government -- are monitoring sensitive military installations around the globe. Furthermore, the U.S. is in possession of UAP technologies, as are some of our adversaries." Elizondo is a former intelligence officer who later "managed a highly sensitive Special Access Program on behalf of the White House and the National Security Council," according to his official bio (PDF). "By 2012, [Elizondo] was the senior ranking person of the DOD's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, a secretive Pentagon unit that studied unidentified anomalous phenomena," his bio states, adding that he resigned in 2017.

Michael Gold, former NASA associate administrator of space policy and partnerships; member of NASA UAP Independent Study Team
Gold's written testimony (PDF) stressed the need for government agencies and academics to "overcome the pernicious stigma that continues to impede scientific dialogue and open discussions" about unexplained phenomena. "As the saying goes, the truth is out there," Gold said, "we just need to be bold enough and brave enough to face it."

Michael Shellenberger, founder of Public, a news outlet on the Substack platform
Shellenberger's testimony (PDF) ran to some 214 pages, including a lengthy timeline of UAP reports from 1947 to 2023. Shellenberger pressed the White House and Congress to act, calling for the adoption of UAP transparency legislation and cutting funds for any related programs that aren't disclosed to lawmakers. "UAP transparency is bi-partisan and critical to our national security," his written testimony stated.
You can watch the proceeding here.
Sci-Fi

Congress To Hold Another UFO/UAP Hearing (space.com) 137

Longtime Slashdot reader thephydes writes: The hearing will go ahead on November 13 at 11:30 ET (16:30 GMT). Apparently, it will "further pull back the curtain on secret UAP research programs conducted by the U.S. government, and undisclosed findings they have yielded," according to a House statement. It's driven by two republicans, Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) and Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.), who say: "Americans deserve to understand what the government has learned about UAP sightings, and the nature of any potential threats these phenomena pose. We can only ensure that understanding by providing consistent, systemic transparency. We look forward to hearing from expert witnesses on ways to shed more light and bring greater accountability to this issue." "Expert witnesses in the hearing will include Luis Elizondo, a decorated former counterintelligence officer who has claimed for years that the U.S. government is hiding knowledge of UAP, including materials recovered from crashed flying saucers," reports Space.com. "The House hearing will also include Tim Gallaudet, a retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral who observed unidentified submersible objects, arguing that 'these underwater anomalies jeopardize US maritime security.'"

"Other speakers at the hearing include journalist Michael Shellenberger, who has also claimed the U.S. government is hiding UFO crash retrieval programs, and former NASA Associate Administrator of Space Policy and Partnerships Michael Gold, who is a member of NASA's independent UAP study team."
Music

Spotify's Car Thing, Due For Bricking, Is Getting an Open Source Second Life (arstechnica.com) 15

If you have Spotify's soon-to-be-bricked Car Thing, there are a few ways you can give it a new lease on life. YouTuber Dammit Jeff has showcased modifications to Car Thing that makes the device useful as a desktop music controller, customizable shortcut tool, or a simple digital clock. Ars Technica's Kevin Purdy reports: Spotify had previously posted the code for its uboot and kernel to GitHub, under the very unassuming name "spsgsb" and with no announcement (as discovered by Josh Hendrickson). Jeff has one idea why the streaming giant might not have made much noise about it: "The truth is, this thing isn't really great at running anything." It has half a gigabyte of memory, 4GB of internal storage, and a "really crappy processor" (Amlogic S905D2 SoC) and is mostly good for controlling music.

How do you get in? The SoC has a built-in USB "burning mode," allowing for a connected computer, running the right toolkit, to open up root access and overwrite its firmware. Jeff has quite a few issues getting connected (check his video description for some guidance), but it's "drag and drop" once you're in. Jeff runs through a few of the most popular options for a repurposed Car Thing:

- DeskThing, which largely makes Spotify desk-friendly, but adds a tiny app store for weather (including Jeff's own WeatherWave), clocks, and alternate music controls
- GlanceThing, which keeps the music controls but also provides some Stream-Deck-like app-launching shortcuts for your main computer.
- Nocturne, currently invite-only, is a wholly redesigned Spotify interface that restores all its Spotify functionality.

Space

SpaceX To Attempt Daring Orbital Refueling Test of Starship (gizmodo.com) 98

SpaceX plans an ambitious in-orbit refueling test between two Starships in March 2025. "The orbital demonstration is a major step for Starship, and a crucial part of SpaceX's capability of delivering NASA's Artemis mission to the Moon," reports Gizmodo. The plans were unveiled during Spaceflight Now's recent interview (source: YouTube) with Kent Chojnacki, the deputy manager for NASA's Human Landing System program. Gizmodo reports: SpaceX is under a $53.2 million contract with NASA, signed in 2020, to use Starship tankers for in-orbit propellant transfer. During its third test flight, SpaceX transferred around 10 metric tons of liquid oxygen from Starship's header tank to its main tank while it was in space. The upcoming demonstration, however, requires a lot more of the launch vehicle. Two Starships will launch to low Earth orbit around three to four weeks apart, the spacecraft will meet and dock in orbit, and one will transfer propellant to another. After the demonstration, the two Starships will undock from one another and deorbit.

"Once you've done that, you've really cracked open the opportunity to move massive amounts of payload and cargo outside of the Earth's sphere," Chojnacki said during the interview. The in-flight propellant transfer tests are set to conclude in the summer. With in-flight refueling, NASA is aiming to develop technologies to "enable long-term cryogenic fluid management, which is essential for establishing a sustainable presence on the Moon and enabling crewed missions to Mars," the space agency stated when the contract was signed.

SpaceX is developing a version of Starship to land humans on the Moon in September 2026 as part of NASA's Artemis 3 mission. To prepare for the Moon mission, SpaceX is expected to launch between eight and 16 propellant tanker Starships into low Earth orbit in rapid succession. Each of the tankers will carry around 100 to 150 tons of liquid oxygen and liquid methane and will dock with a larger fuel depot. The orbiting depot will then connect with the Human Landing System Starship, filling its massive 1,200-ton fuel tanks. Once refueled, the Starship lander will continue its journey toward the Moon.

Firefox

20 Years Ago Today: 'Firefox Browser Takes on Microsoft' (archive.org) 50

A 2002 Slashdot post informed the world that "Recently Blake Ross, a developer of the Phoenix web browser, has made a post on the Mozillazine forums looking for a new name for the project. Apparently the people over at Phoenix Technologies decided that the name interferes with their trademark since they make an 'internet access device'..."

And then, on November 9 of 2004, the BBC reported that "Microsoft's Internet Explorer has a serious rival in the long-awaited Firefox 1.0 web browser, which has just been released." Their headline? "Firefox Browser Takes on Microsoft." Fans of the software have banded together to raise cash to pay for an advert in the New York Times announcing that version 1.0 of the browser is available. ["Are you fed up with your browser? You're not alone...."] The release of Firefox 1.0 on 9 November might even cause a few heads to turn at Microsoft because the program is steadily winning people away from the software giant's Internet Explorer browser.

Firefox has been created by the Mozilla Foundation which was started by former browser maker Netscape back in 1998... Earlier incarnations, but which had the same core technology, were called Phoenix and Firebird. Since then the software has been gaining praise and converts, not least because of the large number of security problems that have come to light in Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Rivals to IE got a boost in late June when two US computer security organisations warned people to avoid the Microsoft program to avoid falling victim to a serious vulnerability.

Internet monitoring firm WebSideStory has charted the growing population of people using the Firefox browser and says it is responsible for slowly eroding the stranglehold of IE. Before July this year, according to WebSideStory, Internet Explorer was used by about 95% of web surfers. That figure had remained static for years. In July the IE using population dropped to 94.7% and by the end of October stood at 92.9%. The Mozilla Foundation claims that Firefox has been downloaded almost eight million times and has publicly said it would be happy to garner 10% of the Windows- using, net-browsing population.

Firefox is proving popular because, at the moment, it has far fewer security holes than Internet Explorer and has some innovations lacking in Microsoft's program. For instance, Firefox allows the pages of different websites to be arranged as tabs so users can switch easily between them. It blocks pop-ups, has a neat way of finding text on a page and lets you search through the pages you have browsed...

Firefox celebrated its 20th anniversary with a special video touting new and upcoming features like tab previews, marking up PDFs, and tab grouping.

And upgrading to the latest version of Firefox now displays this message on a "What's New" page. "Whether you just downloaded Firefox or have been with us since the beginning, you are a vital part of helping us make the internet a better place.

"We can't wait to show you what's coming next." ("Check out our special edition wallpapers — open a new tab and click the gear icon at the top right corner...")
America Online

Elwood Edwards, Voice of AOL's 'You've Got Mail,' Dies At 74 (wkyc.com) 16

Elwood Edwards, the voice of AOL's "You've Got Mail" greeting, has died at age 74 following a long illness, according to local Ohio news station WKYC. "He worked at 3News for many years as graphics guru, camera operator, and general jack-of-all-trades, yet it was a somewhat random opportunity in 1989 that earned him international fame." From the report: That year, Elwood received $200 from the then-unknown America Online, merely because his wife worked at a predecessor company. He was asked to simply record four voiceover lines:

- "Welcome"
- "You've Got Mail"
- "Files done"
- "Goodbye"

Of course, the company better known as AOL blew up, and millions around the world would hear Elwood's voice telling them "You've Got Mail" every time they logged on to the internet. Despite his face not being visible, Elwood still achieved minor celebrity status. In 2015, he even appeared on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" to utter the famous greeting as well as other audience-suggested phrases.

Media

Interview with Programmer Steve Yegge On the Future of AI Coding (sourceforge.net) 73

I had the opportunity to interview esteemed programmer Steve Yegge for the SourceForge Podcast to ask him all about AI-powered coding assistants and the future of programming. "We're moving from where you have to write the code to where the LLM will write the code and you're just having a conversation with it about the code," said Yegge. "That is much more accessible to people who are just getting into the industry."

Steve has nearly 30 years of programming experience working at Geoworks, Amazon, Google, Grab and now SourceGraph, working to build out the Cody AI assistant platform. Here's his Wikipedia page. He's not shy about sharing his opinions or predictions for the industry, no matter how difficult it may be for some to hear. "I'm going to make the claim that ... line-oriented programming, which we've done for the last 40, 50 years, ... is going away. It is dying just like assembly language did, and it will be completely dead within five years."

You can watch the episode on YouTube and stream on all major podcast platforms. A transcription of the podcast is available here.
Australia

Australia Proposes Ban On Social Media For Those Under 16 (reuters.com) 112

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Australia Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Thursday the government would legislate for a ban on social media for children under 16, a policy the government says is world-leading. "Social media is doing harm to our kids and I'm calling time on it," Albanese told a news conference. Legislation will be introduced into parliament this year, with the laws coming into effect 12 months after it is ratified by lawmakers, he added. There will be no exemptions for users who have parental consent.

"The onus will be on social media platforms to demonstrate they are taking reasonable steps to prevent access," Albanese said. "The onus won't be on parents or young people." Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said platforms impacted would include Meta Platforms' Instagram and Facebook, as well as Bytedance's TikTok and Elon Musk's X. Alphabet's YouTube would likely also fall within the scope of the legislation, she added.

Republicans

Trump Wins US Presidency For Second Time (decisiondeskhq.com) 1605

Major media outlets are beginning to declare former President Trump the winner of the 2024 presidential election, having secured 270 electoral votes. "He becomes the first president in more than 120 years to lose the White House, and then to come back and win it again, after President Grover Cleveland in 1892," notes The Hill. As with previous election announcements on Slashdot, this is your chance to talk about it and what it means for the future of our nation.

In a victory speech, Trump said that he was the leader of "the greatest political movement of all time." He said: "We overcame obstacles that nobody thought possible," adding that he would take office with an "unprecedented and powerful mandate." President Trump has vowed a radical reshaping of American government, tasking SpaceX and Tesla chief executive Elon Musk "with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government and making recommendations for drastic reforms."

UPDATE 12:30 PM PST: Vice President Kamala Harris has officially conceded the 2024 presidential election, calling former President Trump to offer her congratulations. She's expected to make a concession speech at Howard University at 4:00 PM EST. You can stream the speech here.
Space

World's First Wood-Paneled Satellite Launched Into Space (bbc.com) 47

SpaceX has launched the world's first wood-paneled satellite into space "to test the suitability of timber as a renewable building material in future exploration of destinations like the Moon and Mars," reports the BBC. From the report: Made by researchers in Japan, the tiny satellite weighing just 900g is heading for the International Space Station on a SpaceX mission. It will then be released into orbit above the Earth. Named LignoSat, after the Latin word for wood, its panels have been built from a type of magnolia tree, using a traditional technique without screws or glue. Researchers at Kyoto University who developed it hope it may be possible in the future to replace some metals used in space exploration with wood.

"Wood is more durable in space than on Earth because there's no water or oxygen that would rot or inflame it," Kyoto University forest science professor Koji Murata told Reuters news agency. "Early 1900s airplanes were made of wood," Prof Murata said. "A wooden satellite should be feasible, too." If trees could one day be planted on the Moon or Mars, wood might also provide material for colonies in space in the future, the researchers hope. Along with its wood panels, LignoSat also incorporates traditional aluminium structures and electronic components. It has sensors on board to monitor how its wood reacts to the extreme environment of space during the six months it will orbit the Earth.
You can watch the launch on YouTube.
Nintendo

Newest Device To Run Doom: Nintendo's Alarm Clock 9

A hardware hacker has successfully modified Nintendo's $100 Alarmo device to run the classic video game Doom, marking another milestone in the gaming community's tradition of porting the 1993 shooter to unconventional devices.

YouTuber GaryOderNichts demonstrated the 2.8-inch circular alarm clock running Chocolate Doom natively, using the device's wheel for movement and side buttons for weapons. The hack requires no hardware modifications and works on the current 2.0 software version. The hack came after researchers discovered vulnerabilities in the Alarmo's STM32H7 microcontroller, enabling custom firmware installation through its USB-C port. The trick omits audio due to memory restrictions, GaryOderNichts notes, but it allows for custom animations and displays.
Google

Google, Apple Drive 'Black Box' IP Policing with App Store Rules (bloomberglaw.com) 15

App developers Musi and Sarafan Mobile have sued Apple and Google in California federal court over app removals they claim were unjustified, highlighting tensions over the tech giants' intellectual property enforcement policies. Musi's music-streaming app was removed after YouTube complained about interface infringement, while Sarafan's "Reely" app was taken down following Instagram's claims about logo similarity.

Both developers say the platforms breached their agreements by removing apps without sufficient evidence. The lawsuits underscore broader concerns about Apple and Google's dominance in app distribution. Their private IP dispute systems operate outside traditional legal frameworks, with platforms making unilateral decisions that can effectively shut down businesses, according to University of New Hampshire law professor Peter Karol. [...]

"In a court proceeding, you can see here's a complaint with the allegations, and then we have the defendant respond, and then we have a judge come out with an opinion saying, 'Is the mark valid? Is the mark infringed?'" said Lisa Ramsey, law professor at University of San Diego. Google and Apple's systems, meanwhile, are "a black box."
Movies

ASWF: the Open Source Foundation Run By the Folks Who Give Out Oscars (theregister.com) 18

This week's Ubuntu Summit 2024 was attended by Lproven (Slashdot reader #6,030). He's also a FOSS correspondent for the Register, where he's filed this report: One of the first full-length sessions was presented by David Morin, executive director of the Academy Software Foundation, introducing his organization in a talk about Open Source Software for Motion Pictures. Morin linked to the Visual Effects Society's VFX/Animation Studio Workstation Linux Report, highlighting the market share pie-chart, showing Rocky Linux 9 with at some 58 percent and the RHELatives in general at 90 percent of the market. Ubuntu 22 and 24 — the report's nomenclature, not this vulture's — got just 10.5 percent. We certainly didn't expect to see that at an Ubuntu event, with the latest two versions of Rocky Linux taking 80 percent of the studio workstation market...

What also struck us over the next three quarters of an hour is that Linux and open source in general seem to be huge components of the movie special effects industry — to an extent that we had not previously realized.

There's a "sizzle reel" showing examples of how major motion pictures used OpenColorIO, an open-source production tool for syncing color representations originally developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks. That tool is hosted by a collaboration between the Linux Foundation with the Science and Technology Council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the "Academy" of the Academy Awards). The collaboration — which goes by the name of the Academy Software Foundation — hosts 14 different projects The ASWF hasn't been around all that long — it was only founded in 2018. Despite the impact of the COVID pandemic, by 2022 it had achieved enough to fill a 45-page history called Open Source in Entertainment [PDF]. Morin told the crowd that it runs events, provides project marketing and infrastructure, as well as funding, training and education, and legal assistance. It tries to facilitate industry standards and does open source evangelism in the industry. An impressive list of members — with 17 Premier companies, 16 General ones, and another half a dozen Associate members — shows where some of the money comes from. It's a big list of big names. [Adobe, AMD, AWS, Autodesk...]
The presentation started with OpenVBD, a C++ library developed and donated by Dreamworks for working with three-dimensional voxel-based shapes. (In 2020 they created this sizzle reel, but this year they've unveiled a theme song.) Also featured was OpenEXR, originally developed at Industrial Light and Magic and sourced in 1999. (The article calls it "a specification and reference implementation of the EXR file format — a losslessly compressed image storage format for moving images at the highest possible dynamic range.")

"For an organization that is not one of the better-known ones in the FOSS space, we came away with the impression that the ASWF is busy," the article concludes. (Besides running Open Source Days and ASWF Dev Days, it also hosts several working groups like the Language Interop Project works on Rust bindings and the Continuous Integration Working Group on CI tools, There's generally very little of the old razzle-dazzle in the Linux world, but with the demise of SGI as the primary maker of graphics workstations — its brand now absorbed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise — the visual effects industry moved to Linux and it's doing amazing things with it. And Kubernetes wasn't even mentioned once.
Earth

Inventory Counts Air Pollution Cost of Space Launches and Re-Entries 66

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A new global inventory has catalogued air pollution from space activities from 2020 to 2022. The inventory includes time, position and pollution from 446 launchers as they ascended and the tracks of re-entries as objects are heated to extreme temperatures and break up or burn up in the upper atmosphere. It catalogues the pollution from 63,000 tons of rocket propellants used in 2022 and from 3,622 objects, including rocket parts and satellites, that re-entered the atmosphere between 2020 and 2023, amounting to about 12,000 tons. [...]

Types of launch pollutants depend on the propellent but can include particles of soot and aluminum oxides as well as nitrogen oxides, chlorine and water vapour and carbon dioxide. Extreme heat on re-entry causes atmospheric oxygen and nitrogen to combine to form more nitrogen oxides and also produces tiny metal-oxide particles as the objects break and burn up. Soot emitted high in the atmosphere can persist for several years, with a resulting climate warming impact that is up to 500 times greater than the same amount of soot from aviation or ground-level sources. Aluminum oxide particles, nitrogen oxides and chloride can consume the ozone in the stratosphere that protects us from the sun's ultraviolet radiation. These can remain in the atmosphere for decades.
Dr Connor Barker, of the UCL team, said: "Many rocket manufacturers and space agencies keep this information tightly controlled. We had to be creative about the different sources we consulted, from launch live streams on YouTube to online databases maintained by space enthusiasts in their spare time."
News

Kremlin Says It Hopes $20.6 Decillion Fine Got Google's Attention (yahoo.com) 85

An enormous fine levied by a Russian court on Google caught the attention of the Kremlin -- which hopes Google will notice in turn. From a report: President Vladimir Putin's spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, commented on the sum on Thursday. It came after a court demanded payment equivalent of $20.6 decillion -- an almost incomprehensible figure that exceeds the world's GDP. The sum came from a penalty for suspending the YouTube accounts of various Russian outlets. It has been regularly doubling for years, with no limit, leading it into realms of the absurd, which Peskov seemed to acknowledge. "Although it is a specific amount, I cannot even pronounce this number, it is rather filled with symbolism," said Peskov in response to a question from NBC News.
Robotics

Boston Dynamics' Atlas Robot Executes Autonomous Automotive Parts Picking (techcrunch.com) 67

In a new video published today, Boston Dynamics' humanoid robot Atlas is shown moving engine parts between bins without any human assistance. TechCrunch reports: Boston Dynamics is quick to note that the actions are being performed autonomously, without "prescribed or teleoperated movements." [...] Boston Dynamics notes, "The robot is able to detect and react to changes in the environment (e.g., moving fixtures) and action failures (e.g., failure to insert the cover, tripping, environment collision) using a combination of vision, force, and proprioceptive sensors."

In addition to the autonomously executed tasks, the video showcases impressive adaptive -- and strong -- actuators, as the robot pivots at its waist. The action minimizes movements, saving precious seconds in the process.

The Courts

Russian Court Fines Google $20 Decillion For Blocking Media Content (theregister.com) 263

A Russian court has fined Google an astronomical sum of around $20 decillion for YouTube's blocking of Russian media channels tied to sanctioned entities. The amount compounds weekly as Google continues to disregard the ruling. The Register reports: To put that into perspective, the World Bank estimates global GDP as around $100 trillion, which is peanuts compared to the prospective fine. Google might be one of the most valuable businesses on the planet, but even if Sundar Pichai rummages around the back of the sofa he won't be able to raise the funds to pay the penalty. The bizarre amount has been calculated after a four-year court case that started after YouTube banned the ultra-nationalist Russian channel Tsargrad in 2020 in response to the US sanctions imposed against its owner. Following Putin's illegal invasion of Ukraine in 2022 more channels were added to the banned list and 17 stations are now suing the Chocolate Factory, including Zvezda (a TV channel owned by Putin's Ministry of Defence), according to local media.

"Google was called by a Russian court to administrative liability under Art. 13.41 of the Administrative Offenses Code for removing channels on the YouTube platform. The court ordered the company to restore these channels," lawyer Ivan Morozov told state media outlet TASS. The court imposed a fine of 100 thousand rubles ($1,025) per day, with the total fine doubling every week. Owing to compound interest (Einstein's eighth wonder of the world), Google is now on the hook for an insane amount of money, or what the judge on Monday called "a case in which there are many, many zeros."

Programming

More Than a Quarter of New Code At Google Is Generated By AI 92

Google has integrated AI deeply across its operations, with over 25% of its new code generated by AI. CEO Sundar Pichai announced the milestone during the company's third quarter 2024 earnings call. The Verge reports: AI is helping Google make money as well. Alphabet reported $88.3 billion in revenue for the quarter, with Google Services (which includes Search) revenue of $76.5 billion, up 13 percent year-over-year, and Google Cloud (which includes its AI infrastructure products for other companies) revenue of $11.4 billion, up 35 percent year-over-year. Operating incomes were also strong. Google Services hit $30.9 billion, up from $23.9 billion last year, and Google Cloud hit $1.95 billion, significantly up from last year's $270 million. "In Search, our new AI features are expanding what people can search for and how they search for it," CEO Sundar Pichai says in a statement. "In Cloud, our AI solutions are helping drive deeper product adoption with existing customers, attract new customers and win larger deals. And YouTube's total ads and subscription revenues surpassed $50 billion over the past four quarters for the first time."

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