Keith Gill, the investor known as "Roaring Kitty" online, is being used by GameStop investors for helping spur the meme stock mania of 2021. The plaintiffs said they lost money through his "pump-and-dump" scheme, which led to a "short squeeze" that caused losses for hedge funds betting stock prices would fall. Reuters reports: A proposed class action accusing Gill of securities fraud was filed on Friday in the Brooklyn, New York federal court. Investors led by Martin Radev, who lives in the Las Vegas area, said Gill manipulated GameStop securities between May 13 and June 13 by quietly accumulating large quantities of stock and call options, and then dumping some holdings after emerging from a three-year social media hiatus. They said Gill's activities caused GameStop's share price to gyrate wildly, generating "millions of dollars" in profit for him at their expense. "Defendant still enjoys celebrity status and commands a following of millions through his social media accounts," the complaint said. "Accordingly, Defendant was well aware of his ability to manipulate the market for GameStop securities, as well as the benefits he could reap."

He had on May 12 posted a cryptic meme on the social media platform X that was widely seen as a bullish signal for GameStop, whose stock he cheerleaded in 2021. GameStop's share price more than tripled over the next two days, but gave back nearly all the gains by May 24. On June 2, Gill revealed that he owned 5 million GameStop shares and 120,000 call options, and on June 13 revealed he had shed the call options but owned 9 million GameStop shares. Investors said the truth about Gill's investing became known on June 3 when the Wall Street Journal wrote about the timing of his options trades and said the online brokerage E*Trade considered kicking him off its platform.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon built a $2 trillion company through years of aggressive spending on its retail and logistics businesses. Its future gains will likely be determined by the billions designated to fund its artificial-intelligence push. Amazon is planning to spend more than $100 billion over the next decade on data centers, an impressive level of investment even for a company known for its spending ways. The Seattle company is now devoting more investment money to its cloud computing and AI infrastructure than to its sprawling network of e-commerce warehouses.

Amazon Web Services, the arm that manages Amazon's cloud business, has opened data centers for years, but executives said there is a surge in investment now to meet demand triggered by the excitement around AI. "We have to dive in. We have to figure it out," said John Felton, who took over as AWS's chief financial officer this year after spending most of his career in Amazon's retail fulfillment operations. The company's financial commitment reflects the importance and high costs of AI. Felton said building for AI today feels like building that massive delivery network in years past. "It's a little uncertain," he said. AWS is expanding in Virginia, Ohio and elsewhere.

Bloomberg and The Washington Post "claim AI power usage is dire," writes Slashdot reader NoWayNoShapeNoForm. But Ars Technica "begs to disagree with those speculations."

From Ars Technica's article: The high-profile pieces lean heavily on recent projections from Goldman Sachs and the International Energy Agency (IEA) to cast AI's "insatiable" demand for energy as an almost apocalyptic threat to our power infrastructure. The Post piece even cites anonymous "some [people]" in reporting that "some worry whether there will be enough electricity to meet [the power demands] from any source." Digging into the best available numbers and projections available, though, it's hard to see AI's current and near-future environmental impact in such a dire light... While the headline focus of both Bloomberg and The Washington Post's recent pieces is on artificial intelligence, the actual numbers and projections cited in both pieces overwhelmingly focus on the energy used by Internet "data centers" as a whole...

Bloomberg asks one source directly "why data centers were suddenly sucking up so much power" and gets back a blunt answer: "It's AI... It's 10 to 15 times the amount of electricity." Unfortunately for Bloomberg, that quote is followed almost immediately by a chart that heavily undercuts the AI alarmism. That chart shows worldwide data center energy usage growing at a remarkably steady pace from about 100 TWh in 2012 to around 350 TWh in 2024. The vast majority of that energy usage growth came before 2022, when the launch of tools like Dall-E and ChatGPT largely set off the industry's current mania for generative AI. If you squint at Bloomberg's graph, you can almost see the growth in energy usage slowing down a bit since that momentous year for generative AI.
Ars Technica first cites Dutch researcher Alex de Vries's estimate that in a few years the AI sector could use between 85 and 134 TWh of power. But another study estimated in 2018 that PC gaming already accounted for 75 TWh of electricity use per year, while "the IEA estimates crypto mining ate up 110 TWh of electricity in 2022." More to the point, de Vries' AI energy estimates are only a small fraction of the 620 to 1,050 TWh that data centers as a whole are projected to use by 2026, according to the IEA's recent report. The vast majority of all that data center power will still be going to more mundane Internet infrastructure that we all take for granted (and which is not nearly as sexy of a headline bogeyman as "AI").
The future is also hard to predict, the article concludes. "If customers don't respond to the hype by actually spending significant money on generative AI at some point, the tech-marketing machine will largely move on, as it did very recently with the metaverse and NFTs..."

Today the Wall Street Journal reported that restoring net neutrality to America is "on shakier legal footing after a Supreme Court decision on Friday shifted power away from federal agencies." "It's hard to overstate the impact that this ruling could have on the regulatory landscape in the United States going forward," said Leah Malone, a lawyer at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. "This could really bind U.S. agencies in their efforts to write new rules." Now that [the "Chevron deference"] is gone, the Federal Communications Commission is expected to have a harder time reviving net neutrality — a set of policies barring internet-service providers from assigning priority to certain web traffic...

The Federal Communications Commission reclassified internet providers as public utilities under the Communications Act. There are pending court cases challenging the FCC's reinterpretation of that 1934 law, and the demise of Chevron deference heightens the odds of the agency losing in court, some legal experts said. "Chevron's thumb on the scale in favor of the agencies was crucial to their chances of success," said Geoffrey Manne, president of the International Center for Law and Economics. "Now that that's gone, their claims are significantly weaker."
Other federal agencies could also be affected, according to the article. The ruling could also make it harder for America's Environmental Protection Agency to crack down on power-plant pollution. And the Federal Trade Commission face more trouble in court defending its recent ban on noncompete agreements. Lawyer Daniel Jarcho tells the Journal that the Court's decision "will unquestionably lead to more litigation challenging federal agency actions, and more losses for federal agencies."

Friday a White House press secretary issued a statement calling the court's decision "deeply troubling," and arguing that the court had "decided in the favor of special interests".

Founded in 1846, the not-for-profit Associated Press distributes its news stories to other news outlets. But are free online sites putting those outlets at risk?

This week the Associated Press wrote that a "crisis" in local and state news reporting "shows little signs of abating" — and that it's now setting up "a sister organization that will seek to raise money" for those outlets. The organization, which will have a board of directors independent of the AP, will solicit philanthropic spending to boost this news coverage, both within the AP and through outside organizations, the news outlet said Tuesday. "We feel we have to lean in at this point, not pull back," said Daisy Veerasingham, the AP's president and CEO. "But the supporting mechanism — the local newspaper market that used to support this — can't afford to do that anymore." Veerasingham said she's been encouraged by preliminary talks with some funders who have expressed concern about the state of local journalism...

The local news industry has collapsed over the past two decades, with the number of journalists working in newspapers dropping from 75,000 to 31,000 in 2022, according to Northwestern University. More than half of the nation's counties have no local news outlets or only one.
The AP's CEO offered this succinct summary of their goal. "We want to add new products and services to help the industry."

"The outdoor-apparel brand Patagonia has given 90 U.S. employees a choice," reports Business Insider: "tell the company by Friday that you're willing to relocate or leave your job." [Alternate URL here.] The employees all work in customer services, known at Patagonia as the customer-experience, or CX, team, and have been allowed to work remotely to field calls and inquiries. These workers received a text and email Tuesday morning about an "important" meeting... Two company executives, Amy Velligan and Bruce Old, told staff in a 15-minute video meeting that the team would be moving to a new "hub" model. CX employees are now expected to live within 60 miles of one of seven "hubs" — Atlanta; Salt Lake City; Reno, Nevada; Dallas; Austin; Chicago; or Pittsburgh. Workers were offered $4,000 toward relocation costs and extra paid time off. Those willing to relocate were told to do so by September 30.

If CX staff are not willing to live near a hub city, they must leave the company. They were given 72 hours, until Friday, to confirm their decision... Access to company laptops and phones was shut off later that day until employees either agreed to relocate or said they wanted the severance, one affected CX worker said...

Both employees who spoke to Business Insider believed this was because Patagonia didn't want to handle the increased demands of employees in states with higher costs of living. "We've been asking for raises for a long time, and they keep telling us that your wage is based on a Reno cost of living and where you choose to live is on you."
According to the article, "The company hopes to bring staff together at the hubs at least once every six weeks for in-person training, company gatherings, or 'Activism Hours'." A company spokesperson described the changes as "crucial for us to build a vibrant team culture," and said there were workers who had been complaining about feeling disconnected. Though there may be another motive: "The reality is that our CX team has been running at 200% to 300% overstaffed for much of this year," she added. "While we hoped to reach the needed staffing levels through attrition, those numbers were very low, and retention remained high."
One affected worker told Business Insider that the company's proposal "was very factual. If you don't live in these seven metro areas, you either need to move there or give us your stuff and hit the brick. If we don't respond by Friday, they will assume that we have chosen the severance package and we'll start that process."

One worker added that the severance package they received was generous...

Thanks to Slashdot reader NoWayNoShapeNoForm for sharing the article.

Lego teamed up with the European Space Agency to make Lego pieces from actual meteorite dust, writes Engadget.

"It's a proof of concept to show how astronauts could use moondust to build lunar structures." Consider the sheer amount of energy and money required to haul up building materials from Earth to the Moon. It would be a game changer to, instead, build everything from pre-existing lunar materials. There's a layer of rock and mineral deposits at the surface of the Moon, which is called lunar regolith...

However, there isn't too much lunar regolith here on Earth for folks to experiment with. ESA scientists made their own regolith by grinding up a really old meteorite. [4.5 billion years, according to Lego's site, discovered in Africa in 2000.] The dust from this meteorite was turned into a mixture that was used to 3D print the Lego pieces. Voila. Moon bricks. They click together just like regular Lego bricks, though they only come in one color (space gray obviously.)
"The result is amazing," says ESA Science Officer Aidan Cowley on the Lego site (though "the bricks may look a little rougher than usual. Importantly the clutch power still works, enabling us to play and test our designs.")

"Nobody has built a structure on the Moon," Cowley said in an ESA statement. "So it was great to have the flexibility to try out all kinds of designs and building techniques with our space bricks." And the bricks will also be "helping to inspire the next generation of space engineers," according to the ESA's announcement — since they'll be on display in select Lego stores in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Spain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Australia through September 20th.

In November of 2022, "More than 800 people were selected to participate in the Denver Basic Income Project," reports the Colorado Sun, "while they were living on the streets, in shelters, on friends' couches or in vehicles.

One group received $1,000 a month, according to the article, while a second group received $6,500 in the first month, and then $500 for the next 11 months. (And a "control" group received $50 a month.) Amazingly, about 45% of participants in all three groups "were living in a house or apartment that they rented or owned by the study's 10-month check-in point, according to the research." The number of nights spent in shelters among participants in the first and second groups decreased by half. And participants in those two groups reported an increase in full-time work, while the control group reported decreased full-time employment. The project also saved tax dollars, according to the report. Researchers tallied an estimated $589,214 in savings on public services, including ambulance rides, visits to hospital emergency departments, jail stays and shelter nights...

The study, which began in November 2022 with payments to the first group of participants, has been extended for an additional eight months, until September, and organizers are attempting to raise money to extend it further.

According to Interpol, nearly 4,000 people around the world have been arrested for a variety of online crimes, with $257 million in assets seized. The Record reports: The operation, dubbed First Light, was conducted by police officers from 61 countries and targeted phishing, investment fraud, fake online shopping sites, romance scams, and impersonation scams, according to a statement by Interpol. In addition to arresting thousands of potential cybercriminals, the police also identified over 14,600 other possible suspects across all continents.

During the searches, law enforcement seized suspects' real estate, high-end vehicles, expensive jewelry, and many other high-value items and collections. They also froze 6,745 bank accounts used for transferring money obtained through illegal operations. In one case, the police intercepted $331,000 gleaned from a business email compromise fraud involving a Spanish victim who unknowingly transferred money to someone in Hong Kong. In another case, authorities in Australia successfully recovered $3.7 million on behalf of an impersonation scam victim after the funds were fraudulently transferred to bank accounts in Malaysia and Hong Kong.

The criminal networks identified during the operation were spread around the globe. In Namibia, for example, the police rescued 88 local youths who were forced into conducting scams as part of a sophisticated international crime network, according to Interpol. Law enforcement from Singapore, Hong Kong, and China prevented an attempted tech support scam, saving a 70-year-old victim from losing $281,200 worth of savings.

Fujifilm's X100 digital camera, once a niche product, has become an unexpected cash cow, driven by surging demand from young social media users. The retro-styled $1,599 camera has boosted Fujifilm's imaging division to its biggest profit contributor, accounting for 37% of operating profit in fiscal 2023, up from 27% the previous year.

Despite doubling production in China for the latest model, Fujifilm struggles to meet demand. The camera's popularity on platforms like TikTok has transformed it into a coveted accessory. The surge marks an unexpected reversal for Fujifilm, which had pivoted towards healthcare after the decline of traditional film photography.

A super PAC called Fairshake, funded primarily by top cryptocurrency companies, achieved several wins in congressional primaries and plans to spend over $100 million to support pro-crypto candidates in the general elections. CNBC reports: Fairshake and its two affiliated political action committees, one for Republicans, one for Democrats, quietly racked up half a dozen other wins Tuesday as the candidates they backed glided to victory, although none of the races were competitive. They included Rep. John Curtis, who won the Republican nomination for Utah's open Senate seat. Created last year as part of a joint effort between more than a dozen crypto firms, Fairshake PAC has emerged as one of the top-spending PACs in the 2024 election cycle. Fairshake and its two affiliated PACs have put more than $37 million so far into advertisements in primary races, according to AdImpact. Despite a broad mission to defend the entire $2.2 trillion crypto market, Fairshake is funded by a very small set of donors.

Of the $160 million in total contributions Fairshake has raised since it was founded, around $155 million -- or 94% -- can be traced back to just four companies: Ripple, Andreesen Horowitz, Coinbase and Jump Crypto. But it's not just money that the crypto industry plans to deploy this fall. The nonprofit Stand With Crypto says it has collected more than 1.1 million email addresses of crypto "advocates" it hopes to engage all the way to the ballot box. The strength of the crypto groups is getting noticed on Capitol Hill, especially among lawmakers who are facing tough elections in 2025, where a few thousand voters, or a hefty donation, could make a difference in not only a race but in which party controls each chamber. [...]

In the coming months, the group doesn't plan to spend on the presidential race, but rather the House and Senate, according to a Fairshake spokesperson. Both of those chambers are in play for 2025. Fairshake has yet to start spending in the general election cycle, but several officials in the industry said they are keeping an eye on states such as Ohio and Montana, where Democratic incumbents who are bearish on crypto face challengers who have embraced the technology. [...] Ads funded by Fairshake deliver messages that are typically less about a candidates' support for or opposition to crypto, and more about broader issues that resound with voters, such as fairness and integrity.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: In recent weeks, as so-called cheap fake video clips suggesting President Joe Biden is unfit for office have gone viral on social media, a Kremlin-affiliated disinformation network has been promoting a parody music video featuring Biden wearing a diaper and being pushed around in a wheelchair. The video is called "Bye, Bye Biden" and has been viewed more than 5 million times on X since it was first promoted in the middle of May. It depicts Biden as senile, wearing a hearing aid, and taking a lot of medication. It also shows him giving money to a character who seems to represent illegal migrants while denying money to US citizens until they change their costume to mimic the Ukrainian flag. Another scene shows Biden opening the front door of a family home that features a Confederate flag on the wall and allowing migrants to come in and take over. Finally, the video contains references to stolen election conspiracies pushed by former president Donald Trump.

The video was created by Little Bug, a group that mimics the style of Little Big, a real Russian band that fled the country in 2022 following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The video features several Moscow-based actors -- who spoke with Russian media outlet Agency.Media -- but also appears to use artificial intelligence technology to make the actors resemble Biden and Trump, as well as Ilya Prusikin, the lead singer of Little Big. "Biden and Trump appear to be the same actor, with deepfake video-editing changing his facial features until he resembles Biden in one case and Trump in the other case," says Alex Fink, an AI and machine-vision expert who analyzed the video for WIRED. "The editing is inconsistent, so you can see that in some cases he resembles Biden more and in others less. The facial features keep changing." An analysis by True Media, a nonprofit that was founded to tackle the spread of election-related deepfakes, found with 100 percent confidence that there was AI-generated audio used in the video. It also assessed with 78 percent confidence that some AI technology was used to manipulate the faces of the actors.

Fink says the obvious nature of the deepfake technology on display here suggests that the video was created in a rush, using a small number of iterations of a generative adversarial network in order to create the characters of Biden and Trump. It is unclear who is behind the video, but "Bye, Bye Biden" has been promoted by the Kremlin-aligned network known as Doppelganger. The campaign posted tens of thousands of times on X and was uncovered by Antibot4Navalny, an anonymous collective of Russian researchers who have been tracking Doppelganger's activity for the past six months. The campaign first began on May 21, and there have been almost 4,000 posts on X promoting the video in 13 languages that were promoted by a network of almost 25,000 accounts. The Antibot4Navalny researchers concluded that the posts were written with the help of generative AI technology. The video has been shared 6.5 million times on X and has been viewed almost 5 million times.

National Australia Bank seems to think that monitoring the angle customers hold their phones will offer extra protection against scammers. "Speaking during the Australian Banking Association Conference in Melbourne Wednesday (June 26), CEO Andrew Irvine said the lender introduced more 'friction' to payments processes and new predictive protection tools to spot scammers," reports PYMNTS.com, citing a (paywalled) Bloomberg report. From the report: "We've added tooling that looks at biometrics and the way you actually interact with your devices and how you think about keystrokes," said Irvine, per the report. "If these things are different to how you've used your phone in the past, our intelligence will kick in." Irvine, who called fraudsters the "scourge of our times," also noted that Australia is one of the few countries where bank fraud has declined, the report said.

Still, he said that as scammers have embraced new technology like artificial intelligence, banks have had to shift from making payments fast and simple to adding more steps to protect against fraudulent transactions, per the report. "These threat actors go where the money is," Irvine said, according to the report. "You want to be the best alarm system in the street and right now Australia's leading the way."

The U.S. government last week announced an unprecedented ban on selling Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky's software, citing national security concerns. The move, effective July 20, has left American resellers confused and worried about its impact. Kaspersky can provide updates to existing customers until September 29, after which the software's effectiveness will diminish. From a report: Avi Fleischer, the founder of Technical Difficulties, told TechCrunch that not only does he sell Kaspersky to his customers, he also uses its products on his phone and personal computer. He added that the ban is "annoying, to say the least," because he will now have to find another antivirus company and migrate all his customers to the new product, which will cost him time and money. "It's just a lot of time lost for nothing. And I don't see how I can even really charge end users for this," Fleischer said in a phone call. "It was my suggestion that they use Kaspersky and now Kaspersky is being banned by the United States government. What am I supposed to do?"

Thomas Claburn reports via The Register: Mozilla Corporation was sued this month in the US, along with three of its executives, for alleged disability discrimination and retaliation against Chief Product Officer Steve Teixeira. Teixeira, according to a complaint filed in King County Superior Court in the State of Washington, had been tapped to become CEO when he was diagnosed with ocular melanoma on October 3, 2023. Teixeira then took medical leave for cancer treatment from October 30, 2023, through February 1, 2024. "Immediately, upon his return, Mozilla campaigned to demote or terminate Mr Teixeira citing groundless concerns and assumptions about his capabilities as an individual living with cancer," the complaint [PDF] says. "Interim Chief Executive Officer Laura Chambers and Chief People Officer Dani Chehak were clear with Mr Teixeira: He could not continue as Chief Product Officer -- and could not continue as a Mozilla employee in any capacity beyond 2024 -- because of his diagnosis."

Chambers and Chehak are both named in the complaint, along with Mitchell Baker, the former CEO of Mozilla who stepped down in February and announced Chambers as her successor. "Mr Teixeira was enthusiastic to resume his critical role after treatment, but Mozilla would not tolerate an executive with cancer," said Amy Kangas Alexander, an attorney with law firm Stokes Lawrence who is representing the plaintiff, in an email to The Register. "When Mr Teixeira refused to be marginalized because of his disability, Mozilla retaliated and placed him on leave against his will. Mozilla has sidelined Mr Teixeira at the very moment he needs to be preparing his family for the possibility of a future without him."

The complaint claims that Teixeira, appointed in August 2022, helped reverse the decade-long decline of Firefox, which generates about 90 percent of Mozilla's revenue and is the company's only profitable product. He's further credited with growing Mozilla's advertising business, and AI capabilities, and with reducing investment in the money-losing Pocket service. These and other successes, it's alleged, led to conversation in September 2023 when Baker outlined a plan for Teixeira to become CEO. Then he took medical leave and before he could return, the complaint says, Chambers was appointed interim CEO and Baker was removed, becoming Executive Chair of the Board of Directors. [...] A Mozilla spokesperson said in a statement: "We are aware of the lawsuit filed against Mozilla. We deny the allegations and intend to vigorously defend against this lawsuit. Mozilla has a 25-plus-year track record of maintaining the highest standards of integrity and compliance with all applicable laws. We look forward to presenting our defense in court and are confident that the facts will demonstrate that we have acted appropriately. As this is an ongoing legal matter, we will not be providing further comments at this time."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A new law coming into effect in Colorado in July is banning everyday products that intentionally contain toxic "forever chemicals," including clothes, cookware, menstruation products, dental floss and ski wax -- unless they can be made safer. Under the legislation, which takes effect on 1 July, many products using per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances -- or PFAS chemicals linked to cancer risk, lower fertility and developmental delays -- will be prohibited starting in 2026. By 2028, Colorado will also ban the sale of all PFAS-treated clothes, backpacks and waterproof outdoor apparel. The law will also require companies selling PFAS-coated clothing to attach disclosure labels.

The initial draft of state senate bill 81, introduced in 2022, included a full ban on PFAS beginning in 2032. But that measure was written out after facing opposition. Colorado has already passed a measure requiring companies to phase out PFAS in carpets, furniture, cosmetics, juvenile products, some food packaging and those used in oil and gas production. The incoming law's diluted version illustrates the challenges lawmakers have in regulating chemicals that are used to make products waterproof, nonstick or resistant to staining. Manufacturers say the products, at best, will take time to make with a safer replacement -- or at worst, are not yet possible to get made in such fashion. [...]

In Colorado, state senator Lisa Cutter, one of the sponsors of the new law there, has said she still wants a complete ban on PFAS but acknowledges the problems. "As much as I want PFAS to go away forever and forever, there are going to be some difficult pivots," she told the outlet. They include balancing the potential cost to consumers in making products PFAS-free. Cutter told CBS News that it was "really hard" challenging lobbying groups that "spent a lot of money ensuring that these chemicals can continue being put into our products and make profits." Cutter had been accused of stifling innovation and industry. She said she believed companies could be successful while also looking out for the communities they serve. "Certainly, there are cases where it's not plausible right away to gravitate away from them, but we need to be moving in that direction," Cutter said. "Our community shouldn't have to pay the price for their health."

Two prominent unions are teaming up to challenge Amazon, reports the New York Times — "after years of organizing Amazon workers and pressuring the company to bargain over wages and working conditions."

Members of the Amazon Labor Union "overwhelmingly chose to affiliate with the 1.3-million-member International Brotherhood of Teamsters" in a vote last Monday. While the Amazon Labor Union (or ALU) is the only union formally representing Amazon warehouse workers anywhere in America after an election in 2022, "it has yet to begin bargaining with Amazon, which continues to contest the election outcome." Leaders of both unions said the affiliation agreement would put them in a better position to challenge Amazon and would provide the Amazon Labor Union with more money and staff support...

The Teamsters are ramping up their efforts to organize Amazon workers nationwide. The union voted to create an Amazon division in 2021, and O'Brien was elected that year partly on a platform of making inroads at the company. The Teamsters told the ALU that they had allocated $8 million to support organizing at Amazon, according to ALU President Christian Smalls, and that the larger union was prepared to tap its more than $300 million strike and defense fund to aid in the effort...

The Teamsters also recently reached an affiliation agreement with workers organizing at Amazon's largest airplane hub in the United States, a Kentucky facility known as KCVG. Experts have said unionizing KCVG could give workers substantial leverage because Amazon relies heavily on the hub to meet its one- and two-day shipping goals.
Their agreement with the Teamsters says the Amazon Labor Union will also "lend its expertise to assist in organizing other Amazon facilities" across America, according to the article.

The artificial intelligence revolution will demand more electricity, warns the Washington Post. "Much more..."

They warn that the "voracious" electricity consumption of AI is driving an expansion of fossil fuel use in America — "including delaying the retirement of some coal-fired plants." As the tech giants compete in a global AI arms race, a frenzy of data center construction is sweeping the country. Some computing campuses require as much energy as a modest-sized city, turning tech firms that promised to lead the way into a clean energy future into some of the world's most insatiable guzzlers of power. Their projected energy needs are so huge, some worry whether there will be enough electricity to meet them from any source... A ChatGPT-powered search, according to the International Energy Agency, consumes almost 10 times the amount of electricity as a search on Google. One large data center complex in Iowa owned by Meta burns the annual equivalent amount of power as 7 million laptops running eight hours every day, based on data shared publicly by the company...

[Tech companies] argue advancing AI now could prove more beneficial to the environment than curbing electricity consumption. They say AI is already being harnessed to make the power grid smarter, speed up innovation of new nuclear technologies and track emissions.... "If we work together, we can unlock AI's game-changing abilities to help create the net zero, climate resilient and nature positive works that we so urgently need," Microsoft said in a statement.

The tech giants say they buy enough wind, solar or geothermal power every time a big data center comes online to cancel out its emissions. But critics see a shell game with these contracts: The companies are operating off the same power grid as everyone else, while claiming for themselves much of the finite amount of green energy. Utilities are then backfilling those purchases with fossil fuel expansions, regulatory filings show... heavily polluting fossil fuel plants that become necessary to stabilize the power grid overall because of these purchases, making sure everyone has enough electricity.
The article quotes a project director at the nonprofit Data & Society, which tracks the effect of AI and accuses the tech industry of using "fuzzy math" in its climate claims. "Coal plants are being reinvigorated because of the AI boom," they tell the Washington Post. "This should be alarming to anyone who cares about the environment."

The article also summarzies a recent Goldman Sachs analysis, which predicted data centers would use 8% of America's total electricity by 2030, with 60% of that usage coming "from a vast expansion in the burning of natural gas. The new emissions created would be comparable to that of putting 15.7 million additional gas-powered cars on the road." "We all want to be cleaner," Brian Bird, president of NorthWestern Energy, a utility serving Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska, told a recent gathering of data center executives in Washington, D.C. "But you guys aren't going to wait 10 years ... My only choice today, other than keeping coal plants open longer than all of us want, is natural gas. And so you're going see a lot of natural gas build out in this country."
Big Tech responded by "going all in on experimental clean-energy projects that have long odds of success anytime soon," the article concludes. "In addition to fusion, they are hoping to generate power through such futuristic schemes as small nuclear reactors hooked to individual computing centers and machinery that taps geothermal energy by boring 10,000 feet into the Earth's crust..." Some experts point to these developments in arguing the electricity needs of the tech companies will speed up the energy transition away from fossil fuels rather than undermine it. "Companies like this that make aggressive climate commitments have historically accelerated deployment of clean electricity," said Melissa Lott, a professor at the Climate School at Columbia University.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Cord Cutters News: Earlier this week, Chicken Soup For The Soul, the parent company behind Redbox, Crackel, and the streaming service by the same name, announced that the entire board of directors and board of managers of each subsidiary of the Company other than William J. Rouhana, Jr., have been fired. This comes as a holder of more than 75% of the voting power of the company used his stock holdings to lay off the Company's board of directors. Now, it has come out that the company missed a $4 million payment to NBCUniversal as a part of its settlement over unpaid royalties. Now it faces a possible order to pay all of $16.7 million it owes NBCUniversal as questions about the future of the company grows. This comes after NBCUniversal sued saying Redbox had not been paying royalties. It agreed to a payment plan but now has missed the first payment of the plan.

Recently the company has been hit hard by the decline in ad revenue on its free streaming services and the drop in DVD rentals at its Redbox locations. This has led to the company seeing its revenues drop 75% in the 1st quarter of 2024 compared to the same period of 2023, according to a SEC filing first spotted by NextTV. Chicken Soup For The Soul is in a tough situation after acquiring Redbox in 2022 for $50 million in stock and an assumption of $325 million in debt. Add on top of that a shaky media environment with cratering ad revenue and quarterly losses, and the company's future is very much in the air. In August, CEO William J. Rouhana said that the company was holding a strategic review to evaluate its opportunities, which is business speak for putting itself up for sale. Chicken Soup for The Soul last year announced that it was in active discussions for a potential sale back in October of this year but so far nothing has come from these talks.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: Ellen Bagley was delighted when she made her first sale on a popular second-hand clothing app, but just a few minutes later, the thrill turned to shock as the 20-year-old from Linkoping in Sweden discovered she'd been robbed. Everything seemed normal when Bagley received a direct message on the platform, which asked her to verify personal details to complete the deal. She clicked the link, which fired up BankID -- the ubiquitous digital authorization system used by nearly all Swedish adults.After receiving a couple of error messages, she started thinking something was wrong, but it was already too late. Over 10,000 Swedish kronor ($1,000) had been siphoned from her account and the thieves disappeared into the digital shadows. "The fraudsters are so skilled at making things look legitimate," said Bagley, who was born after BankID was created. "It's not easy" to identify scams. Although financial crime has garnered fewer headlines than a surge in gang-related gun violence, it's become a growing risk for the country. Beyond its borders, Sweden is an important test case on fighting cashless crime because it's gone further on ditching paper money than almost any other country in Europe.

Online fraud and digital crime in Sweden have surged, with criminals taking 1.2 billion kronor in 2023 through scams like the one Bagley fell for, doubling from 2021. Law-enforcement agencies estimate that the size of Sweden's criminal economy could amount to as high as 2.5% of the country's gross domestic product. To counter the digital crime spree, Swedish authorities have put pressure on banks to tighten security measures and make it harder on tech-savvy criminals, but it's a delicate balancing act. Going too far could slow down the economy, while doing too little erodes trust and damages legitimate businesses in the process.Using complex webs of fake companies and forging documents to gain access to Sweden's welfare system, sophisticated fraudsters have made Sweden a "Silicon Valley for criminal entrepreneurship," said Daniel Larson, a senior economic crime prosecutor. While the shock of armed violence has grabbed public attention -- the nation's gun-homicide rate tripled between 2012 and 2022 -- economic crime underlies gang activity and needs to be tackled as aggressively, he added. "That has been a strategic mistake," Larson said. "This profit-generating crime is what's fueling organized crime and, in some cases, leads to these conflicts."

Sweden's switch to electronic cash started after a surge of armed robberies in the 1990s, and by 2022, only 8% of Swedes said they had used cash for their latest purchase, according to a central bank survey. Along with neighboring Norway, Sweden has Europe's lowest number of ATMs per capita, according to the IMF. The prevalence of BankID play a role in Sweden's vulnerability. The system works like an online signature. If used, it's considered a done deal and the transaction gets executed immediately. It was designed by Sweden's banks to make electronic payments even quicker and easier than handing over a stack of bills. Since it's original rollout in 2001, it's become part of the everyday Swedish life. On average, the service -- which requires a six-digit code, a fingerprint or a face scan for authentication -- is used more than twice a day by every adult Swede and is involved in everything from filing tax returns to paying for bus tickets.Originally intended as a product by banks for their customers, its use exploded in 2005 after Sweden's tax agency adopted the technology as an identification for tax returns, giving it the government's official seal of approval. The launch of BankID on mobile phones in 2010 increased usage even further, along with public perception that associated cash with criminality.The country's central bank has acknowledged that some of those connotations may have gone too far. "We have to be very clear that there are still honest people using cash," Riksbank Governor Erik Thedeen told Bloomberg.