The Biden administration is poised to lend $1.5 billion for what what would be the first restart of a shuttered US nuclear reactor, the latest sign of strengthening federal government support for the atomic industry. Bloomberg: The funding, which is set to get conditional backing from the US Energy Department, will be offered as soon as next month to closely held Holtec International to restart its Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan, according to people familiar with the matter. Holtec has said a restart of the reactor is contingent on a federal loan. Without such support, the company has said it would decommission the site.

The financing comes as the Biden administration prioritizes maintaining the nation's fleet of nuclear plants to help meet its ambitious climate goals -- including a plan to decarbonize the electricity grid by 2035. More than a dozen reactors have closed since 2013 amid competition from cheaper power from natural gas and renewables, and the Energy Department has warned that as many of half of the nation's nuclear reactors are at risk of closing due to economic factors.

The Los Angeles Times reports that after more than 10 years of planning, "Barring weather delays, the space shuttle Endeavour will undergo its final, historic lift starting Monday night, a maneuver no other retired orbiter has undergone..." First, a pair of cranes will hoist the shuttle from a horizontal position to a vertical one; the spacecraft will be attached to a sling, a large metal frame that'll support it during the move. An 11-story crane will lift the tail of Endeavour, while a 40-story crawler crane — about the height of [Los Angeles'] City Hall — will lift the nose. Once the shuttle is pointed toward the stars, the shorter crane will be disconnected, leaving the taller crane to gently swing the orbiter to its final position and lowering it to be affixed with the giant orange external tank. The external tank is attached to twin solid rocket boosters, which are connected to the exhibit's foundation...

Once the shuttle full stack is in place, the rest of the museum will be built around it. It could be a few years before it is open to the public, given the construction schedule and additional time needed to install exhibits.
"Los Angeles will be home to the only retired space shuttle displayed in a full-stack arrangement as if ready for launch," the article points out.

Officials hope to livestream the historic lift on Monday night at 9:30 p.m. PST.

"According to one study, homeowners are three times more likely than renters to own an electric vehicle," writes the Washington Post. But others still have options: Drivers who park on the street have found novel ways to charge their vehicles, using extension cords running over the sidewalk or even into the branches of a nearby tree... [S]ome municipalities explicitly allow over-the-sidewalk charging as part of a broader strategy to cut transportation emissions... In some areas, homeowners can also hire an electrician to run power under the sidewalk to a curbside charging port. But homeowners should check local rules and permitting requirements for curbside charging. In some highly EV-friendly cities, local governments will cover the costs. In Seattle, a pilot program is installing faster curbside charging to residents who opt in to the program...

If home charging simply isn't an option, some drivers rely on public charging — either using workplace chargers or charging occasionally on DC fast chargers, which can bring an EV battery from 0 to 80 percent in around 20 minutes. The problem is that public charging is more expensive than charging at home — although in most places, still less expensive than gas... For drivers who have access to Tesla superchargers, public charging might still be a solid option — but for non-Tesla drivers, it's still a challenge. Many fast chargers can be broken for days or weeks on end, or can be crowded with other drivers. The popular charging app PlugShare can help EV owners find available charging ports, but relying on public fast charging can quickly become a pain for drivers used to quickly filling up on gas. In those situations, a plug-in hybrid or regular hybrid car might be a better option.
And beyond that, "experts say that there are a key few steps that renters or condo owners can take to access charging," according to the article: The first is looking up local "right-to-charge" laws — regulations that require homeowners' associations or landlords to allow residents to install Level 1 or Level 2 charging. Ten states have "right-to-charge" laws on the books. In California and Colorado, for example, renters or homeowners have the right to install charging at their private parking space or, in some cases, in a public area at their apartment building. Other states, including Florida, Hawaii and New Jersey, have similar but limited laws. Residents can also reach out to landlords or property owners directly and make the case for installing charging infrastructure. All of this "puts a fair amount of onus on the driver," said Ben Prochazka, the executive director of the Electrification Coalition. But, he added, many EV advocacy groups are working on changing building codes in cities and states so that all multifamily homes with parking have to be "EV-ready."
Ingrid Malmgren, policy director at the EV advocacy group Plug In America, tells the newspaper that "communities all over the country are coming up with creative solutions. And it's just going to get easier and easier."

"Parched conditions have crippled a waterway that handles $270 billion a year in global trade," reports Bloomberg. "And there are no easy solutions.

"The Panama Canal Authority is weighing potential fixes that include an artificial lake to pump water into the canal and cloud seeding to boost rainfall, but both options would take years to implement, if they're even feasible. " With water levels languishing at six feet (1.8 meters) below normal, the canal authority capped the number of vessels that can cross. The limits imposed late last year were the strictest since 1989... Some shippers are paying millions of dollars to jump the growing queue, while others are taking longer, costlier routes around Africa or South America. The constraints have since eased slightly due to a rainier-than-expected November, but at 24 ships a day, the maximum is still well below the pre-drought daily capacity of about 38. As the dry season takes hold, the bottleneck is poised to worsen again...

The canal's travails reflect how climate change is altering global trade flows. Drought created chokepoints last year on the Mississippi River in the US and the Rhine in Europe. In the UK, rising sea levels are elevating the risk of flooding along the Thames. Melting ice is creating new shipping routes in the Arctic. Under normal circumstances, the Panama Canal handles about 3% of global maritime trade volumes and 46% of containers moving from Northeast Asia to the US East Coast...

In the long term, the primary solution to chronic water shortages will be to dam up the Indio River and then drill a tunnel through a mountain to pipe fresh water 8 kilometers (5 miles) into Lake Gatún, the canal's main reservoir. The project, along with additional conservation measures, will cost about $2 billion, Erick Córdoba, the manager of the water division at the canal authority estimates. He says it will take at least six years to dam up and fill the site. The US Army Corps of Engineers is conducting a feasibility study. The Indio River reservoir would increase vessel traffic by 11 to 15 a day, enough to keep Panama's top moneymaker working at capacity while guaranteeing fresh water for Panama City...

The country will need to dam even more rivers to guarantee water through the end of the century.

theodp writes: OpenAI has banned the developer of a bot that mimicked Democratic White House hopeful Rep. Dean Phillips, the first known instance where the maker of ChatGPT has restricted the use of AI in political campaigns. OpenAI suspended the account of the start-up Delphi, which had been contracted to build Dean.Bot, which could talk to voters in real-time via a website.

"Anyone who builds with our tools must follow our usage policies," a spokesperson for OpenAI said in a statement shared with Axios on Sunday. "We recently removed a developer account that was knowingly violating our API usage policies which disallow political campaigning, or impersonating an individual without consent." OpenAI apparently is not a fan of Richard Stallman's 'freedom 0' tenet, which argues software users should have the freedom to run programs as they wish, in order to do what they wish (Stallman is careful to note this freedom doesn't make one exempt from laws).

The suspension and subsequent bot removal occurred ahead of Tuesday's New Hampshire primary, where Phillips continues his long-shot presidential bid against President Biden.

The Washington Post looks at "a small but growing group of commercial medium-to-heavy-duty truck drivers who use electric trucks."

"These drivers — many of whom operate local or regional routes that don't require hundreds of miles on the road in a day — generally welcome the transition to electric, praising their new trucks' handling, acceleration, smoothness and quiet operation. "Everyone who has had an EV has no aspirations to go back to diesel at this point," said Khari Burton, who drives an electric Volvo VNR in the Los Angeles area for transport company IMC. "We talk about it and it's all positivity. I really enjoy the smoothness ... and just the quietness as well." Mike Roeth, the executive director of the North American Council for Freight Efficiency, said many drivers have reported that the new vehicles are easier on their bodies — thanks to both less rocking off the cab, assisted steering and the quiet motor. "Part of my hypothesis is that it will help truck driver retention," he said. "We're seeing people who would retire driving a diesel truck now working more years with an electric truck."

Most of the electric trucks on the road today are doing local or regional routes, which are easier to manage with a truck that gets only up to 250 miles of range... Trucking advocates say electric has a long way to go before it can take on longer routes. "If you're running very local, very short mileage, there may be a vehicle that can do that type of route," said Mike Tunnell, the executive director of environmental affairs for the American Trucking Association. "But for the average haul of 400 miles, there's just nothing that's really practical today."
There's other concerns, according to the article. "[S]ome companies and trucking associations worry this shift, spurred in part by a California law mandating a switch to electric or emissions-free trucks by 2042, is happening too fast. While electric trucks might work well in some cases, they argue, the upfront costs of the vehicles and their charging infrastructure are often too heavy a lift."

But this is probably the key sentence in the article: For the United States to meet its climate goals, virtually all trucks must be zero-emissions by 2050. While trucks are only 4 percent of the vehicles on the road, they make up almost a quarter of the country's transportation emissions.
The article cites estimates that right now there's 12.2 million trucks on America's highways — and barely more than 1% (13,000) are electric. "Around 10,000 of those trucks were just put on the road in 2023, up from 2,000 the year before." (And they add that Amazon alone has thousands of Rivian's electric delivery vans, operating in 1,800 cities.)

But the article's overall message seems to be that when it comes to the trucks, "the drivers operating them say they love driving electric." And it includes comments from actual truckers:

• 49-year-old Frito-Lay trucker Gary LaBush: "I was like, 'What's going on?' There was no noise — and no fumes... it's just night and day."

• 66-year-old Marty Boots: Diesel was like a college wrestler. And the electric is like a ballet dancer... You get back into diesel and it's like, 'What's wrong with this thing?' Why is it making so much noise? Why is it so hard to steer?"

According to StatCounter, Bing's market share grew less than 1% since launching Bing Chat (now known as Copilot) roughly a year ago. From a report: Bloomberg reported (paywalled) on the StatCounter data, saying, "But Microsoft's search engine ended 2023 with just 3.4% of the global search market, according to data analytics firm StatCounter, up less than 1 percentage point since the ChatGPT announcement." Google still dominates the global search market with a 91.6% market share, followed by Bing's 3.4%, Yandex's 1.6% and Yahoo's 1.1%. "Other" search engines accounted for a total of just 2.2% of the global search market.

You can view the raw chart and data from StatCounter here.

Apple has updated its long-standing App Store guidelines, giving developers the option to let users make in-app purchases for iOS apps outside of its App Store. But the changes still haven't won over one of the company's longtime critics. From a report: Under the new rules, app developers can provide customers with links to third-party purchase options for their apps, but they must still pay Apple fees of either 12% or 27%. Spotify, one of Apple's biggest critics, isn't a fan of the changes. In a statement, the music streaming service slammed the new rules. "Once again, Apple has demonstrated that they will stop at nothing to protect the profits they exact on the backs of developers and consumers under their app store monopoly," the company said in a statement. "Their latest move in the US -- imposing a 27% fee for transactions made outside of an app on a developer's website -- is outrageous and flies in the face of the court's efforts to enable greater competition and user choice." Tech columnist John Gruber, writing at DaringFireball: Maybe the cynics are right! Let's just concede that they are, and that Apple will only make decisions here that benefit its bottom line. My argument remains that Apple should not be pursuing this plan for complying with the anti-steering injunction by collecting commissions from web sales that initiate in-app. Whatever revenue Apple would lose to non-commissioned web sales (for non-games) is not worth the hit they are taking to the company's brand and reputationâ--âthis move reeks of greed and avariceâ--ânor the increased ire and scrutiny of regulators and legislators on the "anti-Big-Tech" hunt.

Apple should have been looking for ways to lessen regulatory and legislative pressure over the past few years, and in today's climate that's more true than ever. But instead, their stance has seemingly been "Bring it on." Confrontational, not conciliatory, conceding not an inch. Rather than take a sure win with most of what they could want, Apple is seemingly hell-bent on trying to keep everything. To win in chess all you need is to capture your opponent's king. Apple seemingly wants to capture every last piece on the boardâ--âeven while playing in a tournament where the referees (regulators) are known to look askance at blatant poor sportsmanship (greed).

Apple's calculus should be to balance its natural desire to book large amounts of revenue from the App Store with policies that to some degree placate, rather than antagonize, regulators and legislators. No matter what the sport, no matter what the letter of the rulebook says, it's never a good idea to piss off the refs.

Last year Marc Andreessen's firm "argued that AI companies would go broke if they had to pay copyright royalties or licensing fees," notes a Los Angeles Times technology columnist.

But are these powerful companies doing even more to ensure they're not billed for their training data? Just this week, British media outlets reported that OpenAI has made the same case, seeking an exemption from copyright rules in England, claiming that the company simply couldn't operate without ingesting copyrighted materials.... The AI companies also argue what they're doing falls under the legal doctrine of fair use — probably the strongest argument they've got — because it's transformative. This argument helped Google win in court against the big book publishers when it was copying books into its massive Google Books database, and defeat claims that YouTube was profiting by allowing users to host and promulgate unlicensed material. Next, the AI companies argue that copyright-violating outputs like those uncovered by AI expert Gary Marcus, film industry veteran Reid Southern and the New York Times are rare or are bugs that are going to be patched.
But finally, William Fitzgerald, a partner at the Worker Agency and former member of the public policy team at Google, predicts Google will try to line up supportive groups to tell lawmakers artists support AI: Fitzgerald also sees Google's fingerprints on Creative Commons' embrace of the argument that AI art is fair use, as Google is a major funder of the organization. "It's worrisome to see Google deploy the same lobbying tactics they've developed over the years to ensure workers don't get paid fairly for their labor," Fitzgerald said. And OpenAI is close behind. It is not only taking a similar approach to heading off copyright complaints as Google, but it's also hiring the same people: It hired Fred Von Lohmann, Google's former director of copyright policy, as its top copyright lawyer....

[Marcus says] "There's an obvious alternative here — OpenAI's saying that we need all this or we can't build AI — but they could pay for it!" We want a world with artists and with writers, after all, he adds, one that rewards artistic work — not one where all the money goes to the top because a handful of tech companies won a digital land grab. "It's up to workers everywhere to see this for what it is, get organized, educate lawmakers and fight to get paid fairly for their labor," Fitzgerald says.

"Because if they don't, Google and OpenAI will continue to profit from other people's labor and content for a long time to come."

America's Environmental Protection Agency "has signed off on a California oil company's plans to permanently store carbon emissions deep underground to combat global warming," reports the Los Angeles Times: California Resources Corp., the state's largest oil and gas company, applied for permission to send 1.46 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year into the Elk Hills oil field, a depleted oil reservoir about 25 miles outside of downtown Bakersfield. The emissions would be collected from several industrial sources nearby, compressed into a liquid-like state and injected into porous rock more than one mile underground.

Although this technique has never been performed on a large scale in California, the state's climate plan calls for these operations to be widely deployed across the Central Valley to reduce carbon emissions from industrial facilities. The EPA issued a draft permit for the California Resources Corp. project, which is poised to be finalized in March following public comments. As California transitions away from oil production, a new business model for fossil fuel companies has emerged: carbon management. Oil companies have heavily invested in transforming their vast network of exhausted oil reservoirs into a long-term storage sites for planet-warming gases, including California Resources Corp., the largest nongovernmental owner of mineral rights in California...

[Environmentalists] say that the transportation and injection of CO2 — an asphyxiating gas that displaces oxygen — could lead to dangerous leaks. Nationwide, there have been at least 25 carbon dioxide pipeline leaks between 2002 and 2021, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. Perhaps the most notable incident occurred in Satartia, Miss., in 2020 when a CO2 pipeline ruptured following heavy rains. The leak led to the hospitalization of 45 people and the evacuation of 200 residents... Under the EPA draft permit, California Resources Corp. must take a number of steps to mitigate these risks. The company must plug 157 wells to ensure the CO2 remains underground, monitor the injection site for leaks and obtain a $33-million insurance policy.
Canadian-based Brookfield Corporation also invested $500 million, according to the article, with California Resources Corp. seeking permits for five projects — more than any company in the nation. "It's kind of reversing the role, if you will," says their chief sustainability officer. "Instead of taking oil and gas out, we're putting carbon in."

Meanwhile, there's applications for "about a dozen" more projects in California's Central Valley that could store millions of tons of carbon emissions in old oil and gas fields — and California Resources Corp says greater Los Angeles is also "being evaluated" as a potential storage site.

A new analysis suggests that wind turbines have little impact on bird populations, according to the Economist — and that oil-and-gas extraction may be worse: Erik Katovich [an economist at the University of Geneva] combined bird population and species maps with the locations and construction dates of all wind turbines in the United States, with the exceptions of Alaska and Hawaii, between 2000 and 2020. He found that building turbines had no discernible effect on bird populations. That reassuring finding held even when he looked specifically at large birds like hawks, vultures and eagles that many people believe are particularly vulnerable to being struck.

But Dr. Katovich did not confine his analysis to wind power alone. He also examined oil-and-gas extraction. Like wind power, this has boomed in America over the past couple of decades, with the rise of shale gas produced by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, of rocks. Production has risen from 37m cubic metres in 2007 to 740m cubic metres in 2020. Comparing bird populations to the locations of new gas wells revealed an average 15% drop in bird numbers when new wells were drilled, probably due to a combination of noise, air pollution and the disturbance of rivers and ponds that many birds rely upon. When drilling happens in places designated by the National Audubon Society as "important bird areas", bird numbers instead dropped by 25%. Such places are typically migration hubs, feeding grounds or breeding locations.

Wind power, in other words, not only produces far less planet-heating carbon dioxide and methane than do fossil fuels. It appears to be significantly less damaging to wildlife, too.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader SpzToid for sharing the article.

Restrictive US policies limiting advanced chip exports to China have done little to dampen Qualcomm's enthusiasm for the world's second-largest economy. From a report: In an interview at CES 2024 in Las Vegas, CEO Cristiano Amon expressed confidence about Qualcomm's business in the country, its largest market by revenue. "If you have a leading technology, you're going to have a big business in China," he said. The San Diego-based firm finds itself in a difficult situation, as the White House and Congress ramp up a pressure campaign to curb the sale of US chips and chipmaking tools to China, citing national security concerns. The Biden administration has argued that China's access to advanced semiconductors could aid military advancements.

Meanwhile, in China, government agencies and state-owned firms have widened their ban on Apple's iPhones for employees. Qualcomm is one of Apple's biggest suppliers. China remains the largest semiconductor market in the world, with sales in the country accounting for one-third of the global market, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association.

SonicSpike shares a report from Forbes: X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, announced it would begin rolling out a peer-to-peer payment service similar to Venmo or PayPal this year -- a feature the social media site's billionaire owner Elon Musk has long pushed as part of his plan to develop an "everything app." X officially announced the new feature in a blog post, touting the new service designed to enhance "user utility and new opportunities for commerce." The company did not give a timeframe on when the new service would be available, but Musk previously told Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood it could launch as early as "mid-2024."

According to the company, the new payment service will "showcas[e] the power of living more of your life in one place," as owner Elon Musk continues to promote X as a future "everything app" capable of handling social media, video and other original content on the same site. X Payments has registered to do business in at least 32 states, according to public records, and has acquired a money transmitter license needed to process payments in 10, TechCrunch reported in December.

According to Bloomberg, Amazon's livestreaming site Twitch is expected to cut 35% of its staff, or about 500 workers. "The cuts, which could be announced as soon as Wednesday, come amid concerns over losses at Twitch and after several top executives left the company in the span of a few months," notes Bloomberg. Slashdot reader quonset shares the report: Running a large-scale website supporting 1.8 billion hours of live video content a month is enormously expensive, despite Twitch's reliance on Amazon's infrastructure, company executives have said. In December, Twitch Chief Executive Officer Dan Clancy said the company would cease operations in South Korea, where the costs are "prohibitively expensive," according to a blog post he wrote. Twitch has increased its focus on advertising in recent years. Nine years after Amazon's acquisition of the company, the business remains unprofitable, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information.

In the final months of 2023, several top executives announced their departures, including Twitch's chief product officer, chief customer officer and chief content officer. Twitch also lost its chief revenue officer, who worked on Twitch from within Amazon's Ads unit. "It's always bittersweet when talented leaders move on to pursue new opportunities,'" a Twitch spokesperson said at the time. "We are incredibly grateful for their contributions to Twitch and our community, and wish them all the best."

"Since the 1960s engineers around the world have been fiddling with a novel type of jet called a rotating detonation engine (RDE), but it has never got beyond the experimental stage," reports the Economist.

"That could be about to change." GE Aerospace, one of the world's biggest producers of jet engines, recently announced it was developing a working version. Earlier this year America's Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency awarded a $29m contract to Raytheon, part of RTX, another big aerospace group, to develop an RDE called Gambit.

Both engines would be used to propel missiles, overcoming the range and speed limitations of current propulsion systems, including rockets and existing types of jet engines. However, if the companies are successful in getting them to work, RDEs might have a much broader role in aviation — including the possibility of helping revive supersonic air travel.

In a nutshell, an RDE "replaces fire with a controlled explosion", explains Kareem Ahmed, an expert in advanced aerospace engines at the University of Central Florida. In technical terms, this is because a jet engine relies on the combustion of oxygen and fuel, which is a subsonic reaction that scientists call deflagration. Detonation, by comparison, is a high-energy explosion that takes place at supersonic speeds. As a result it is a more powerful and potentially a more efficient way of producing thrust, the force that drives an aircraft forward...

By modifying an aircraft's fuselage and wings, engineers believe they can reduce the boom's impact on the ground below. Such work will help to determine whether or not future supersonic passenger planes will, like Concorde, be restricted to flying beyond the speed of sound only over oceans.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader SpzToid for sharing the article.

LG just announced its latest 4K projector, the CineBeam Qube. It'll officially unveil the projector at CES 2024 in early January, but the company's giving curious consumers an early look. From a report: The CineBeam Qube has plenty of high-tech bells and whistles, but with a stylish design that LG calls "minimalist." There's also a handle that resembles a crank. Yeah this thing has an actual handle. The CineBeam Qube is built for portability. It's lightweight, at around three pounds, and the square form factor makes it easy to place just about anywhere. The 360-degree rotatable handle also helps with placement. LG's calling it "one of the smallest projectors available."

Of course, the most important part of any projector is, well, the projection. The Qube projects 4K UHD (3,840 x 2,160) resolution images that measure up to 120 inches. There's an RGB laser light source, a 450,000:1 contrast ratio and 154 percent coverage of the DCI-P3 color gamut. With these specs, that episode of Reacher will really pop. Speaking of streaming content, the projector runs on LG webOS 6.0 and offers access to all of the big streaming services, including Prime Video, Disney+, Netflix and YouTube.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers has written to U.S. President Joe Biden, warning European technology regulation are unfairly targeting U.S. companies and not including many Chinese or EU firms, according to a letter seen by Reuters on Monday. From the report: Under the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA), five major U.S. tech companies -- Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft -- were designated "gatekeeper" service providers. From March 2024, these companies -- as well as TikTok's Chinese owner ByteDance -- will be required to make their messaging apps work with rivals and let users choose which ones they want pre-installed on their devices.

In a letter seen by Reuters, 21 members of the U.S. House of Representatives warned the new rules could damage American economic and security interests and called on Biden to secure commitments from the EU the rules will be enforced fairly. "Securing our leadership in this sector is imperative for our economy and American workers," the letter said. "The designation of leading U.S. companies as 'gatekeepers' threatens to upend the U.S. economy, diminish our global leadership in the digital sphere, and jeopardize the security of consumers."

The letter questioned why Chinese companies Alibaba, Huawei, and Tencent had avoided designation and why European companies had avoided any scrutiny. "The EU inexplicably failed to designate any European retailers, content-sharing platforms, payment firms, and telcos," it said. Signatories of the letter -- including Representative Lou Correa, a Democrat, and Thomas Massie, a Republican, -- called on Biden to seek assurances from EU lawmakers the DMA will not be unfairly used to target U.S. companies.

In 1999 Los Angeles Times reporter Michael Hiltzik co-authored a Pulitzer Prize-winning story. Now a business columnist for the Times, he writes that a Southern California maker of pornographic films named Strike 3 Holdings is also "a copyright troll," according to U.S. Judge Royce C. Lamberth: Lamberth cwrote in 2018, "Armed with hundreds of cut-and-pasted complaints and boilerplate discovery motions, Strike 3 floods this courthouse (and others around the country) with lawsuits smacking of extortion. It treats this Court not as a citadel of justice, but as an ATM." He likened its litigation strategy to a "high-tech shakedown." Lamberth was not speaking off the cuff. Since September 2017, Strike 3 has filed more than 12,440 lawsuits in federal courts alleging that defendants infringed its copyrights by downloading its movies via BitTorrent, an online service on which unauthorized content can be accessed by almost anyone with a computer and internet connection.

That includes 3,311 cases the firm filed this year, more than 550 in federal courts in California. On some days, scores of filings reach federal courthouses — on Nov. 17, to select a date at random, the firm filed 60 lawsuits nationwide... Typically, they are settled for what lawyers say are cash payments in the four or five figures or are dismissed outright...

It's impossible to pinpoint the profits that can be made from this courthouse strategy. J. Curtis Edmondson, a Portland, Oregon, lawyer who is among the few who pushed back against a Strike 3 case and won, estimates that Strike 3 "pulls in about $15 million to $20 million a year from its lawsuits." That would make the cases "way more profitable than selling their product...." If only one-third of its more than 12,000 lawsuits produced settlements averaging as little as $5,000 each, the yield would come to $20 million... The volume of Strike 3 cases has increased every year — from 1,932 in 2021 to 2,879 last year and 3,311 this year.

What's really needed is a change in copyright law to bring the statutory damages down to a level that truly reflects the value of a film lost because of unauthorized downloading — not $750 or $150,000 but perhaps a few hundred dollars.
Anone of the lawsuits go to trial. Instead ISPs get a subpoena demanding the real-world address and name behind IP addresses "ostensibly used to download content from BitTorrent..." according to the article. Strike 3 will then "proceed by sending a letter implicitly threatening the subscriber with public exposure as a pornography viewer and explicitly with the statutory penalties for infringement written into federal copyright law — up to $150,000 for each example of willful infringement and from $750 to $30,0000 otherwise."

A federal judge in Connecticut wrote last year that "Given the nature of the films at issue, defendants may feel coerced to settle these suits merely to prevent public disclosure of their identifying information, even if they believe they have been misidentified."

Thanks to Slashdot reader Beerismydad for sharing the article.

An anonymous reader quotes this report from Bloomberg: The U.S. doubts whether Huawei Technologies Co. can produce the advanced chip in its new smartphone at the scale or performance threshold necessary to meet market demand, a senior Commerce Department official told lawmakers Tuesday. "Neither the performance nor yields may match the market of the device," Thea Kendler, assistant secretary for export administration, said during testimony before a House Foreign Affairs Committee oversight panel.

"Moreover, the semiconductor chip that is inside that phone is a poorer performance than what they had years ago," Kendler said. "So our export controls are meaningful in slowing China's advanced technology acquisition...."

The [U.S. Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security] is under pressure from Republicans to be tougher on Huawei and its chipmaking partner Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp [or SMIC]. Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul and others have called for the Bureau of Industry and Security to fully cut off both firms from their American suppliers. U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told Bloomberg News in a Monday interview that the U.S. will take the "strongest possible" action to protect its national security following the breakthrough, while declining to confirm the existence of an investigation into Huawei or SMIC.

Earlier this week Google Maps stopped storing user location histories in the cloud. But why did Google make this move? Bloomberg reports that it was "so that the company no longer has access to users' individual location histories, cutting off its ability to respond to law enforcement warrants that ask for data on everyone who was in the vicinity of a crime." The company said Thursday that for users who have it enabled, location data will soon be saved directly on users' devices, blocking Google from being able to see it, and, by extension, blocking law enforcement from being able to demand that information from Google. "Your location information is personal," said Marlo McGriff, director of product for Google Maps, in the blog post. "We're committed to keeping it safe, private and in your control."

The change comes three months after a Bloomberg Businessweek investigation that found police across the US were increasingly using warrants to obtain location and search data from Google, even for nonviolent cases, and even for people who had nothing to do with the crime. "It's well past time," said Jennifer Lynch, the general counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that defends digital civil liberties. "We've been calling on Google to make these changes for years, and I think it's fantastic for Google users, because it means that they can take advantage of features like location history without having to fear that the police will get access to all of that data."

Google said it would roll out the changes gradually through the next year on its own Android and Apple Inc.'s iOS mobile operating systems, and that users will receive a notification when the update comes to their account. The company won't be able to respond to new geofence warrants once the update is complete, including for people who choose to save encrypted backups of their location data to the cloud.
The EFF general counsel also pointed out to Bloomberg that "nobody else has been storing and collecting data in the same way as Google." (Apple, for example, is technically unable to provide the same data to police.)